How to Communicate the Office 365 Transition to Your Organization

Zerto today announced that 33 leading Cloud Service Providers (CSP) from around the globe have joined the Zerto Cloud Disaster Recovery Ecosystem (ZCE). Providers in the ecosystem are now able to offer cloud disaster recovery (DR) services in a way that was not possible before, enabling businesses of all sizes to cost-effectively protect production applications both to the cloud and in the cloud.

Businesses are looking to the cloud to provide cost-effective data protection for their production applications. With cloud DR, companies can now replace their primary or secondary data centers and benefit from cloud automation and flexibility while having a solid DR assurance. Until now, cloud-based DR for production applications had been ineffective, complex and cost-prohibitive. Due to limitations with legacy array-based replication, CSPs were required to have exactly the same storage type as their customers, increasing their overall costs. Further driving up costs was the complexity of managing these cloud-based DR offerings, which were inflexible, labor-intensive and difficult to scale. By resolving these problems for CSPs, Zerto makes the cloud itself more resilient, so CSPs can provide enterprise customers with tight SLAs and assurance when placing their most critical business applications in the cloud.

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Stephanie Overby.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recent storm-related outage, which left Web sites including Netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram inaccessible, is just the latest in a string of costly cloud failures. Since 2007, a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 major cloud services providers had an economic impact of $71.7 million dollars, according to the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR). Average down time has been 7.5 hours per year, according to IWGCR, an availability rate of 99.9 percent well below the required reliability for mission critical systems. "Cheap cloud services can be expensive," says Kevin C. Taylor, partner in the business services department of law firm Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis.

While the typical cloud contract contains uptime clauses and credits for missed service levels, it often fails to adequately protect the enterprise customer. Service-level agreement (SLA) credits, typically capped at a proportion of monthly service fees "do not compensate for business losses associated with the downtime of a production application," explains Taylor. "Even in an extreme case of sustained and severe outages the credit amounts will be derisory–[say,] $20,000–in comparison to the business impact to the customer, which could potentially be in the millions."…

Grazed from GovWin. Author: Deniece Peterson.

As the federal information technology market transitions, contractors are finding that some of the key opportunities available now could mean less work in the future.

Initiatives to share services and move more computing to the cloud will likely mean that spending will contract or flatten over the next five years. Deltek anticipates that nearly every agency will experience a decline and total federal IT spending could fall from $121 billion in 2012 to $113 billion by 2017.

Spending on technology equipment and professional services is particularly expected to decline as the government makes fundamental changes to the way it purchases and manages its technology. Reductions in the number of federal workers and a transition to cheaper mobile devices will drive down equipment spending while shared services, consolidation and cloud computing will reduce services spending…

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Stuart Lauchlan.

China has long been regarded as a potentially major growth market for US technology firms – unfortunate human rights and freedom of speech considerations set aside for the moment – and it’s the same story for Cloud vendors now.

At the moment, China probably accounts for less than 3% of total global Cloud Computing market share, but research firm Gartner confidently predicts a 40% annual growth rate coming up. Rival research firm IDC backs up this claim with an estimate that the size of China’s ICT sector will nearly double between 2010 and 2015, going from $221 billion to $389 billion.

According to the country’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15), Cloud Computing will be a chief driver of the IT industry and the development of e-government in China. To that end China already has five pilot Cloud Computing cities – Beijing,Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Wuxi, China has also approved the National Financial Support Programme for Cloud Computing Demonstration Project to fund 12 key projects from those first five Cloud Computing cities…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Brandon Hoff.

IT networks have reached a juncture where they must transition from static, host-centric, vLAN centric infrastructures, to modern, efficient programmable network fabrics that allow enterprises to leverage capacity on demand. They must also have the ability to move virtual machine (VM) workloads within the data center, between data centers, and into the external cloud. However, this VM mobility places new requirements on data center networks to efficiently support multi-tenant environments.

As organizations make the shift from a virtualization-driven data center toward an infrastructure designed for cloud computing, they must shift their focus to application consolidation at scale for multiple customers in multi-tenant data centers. While virtualization has reduced the cost and time required to deploy a new application from weeks to minutes, driving costs down from thousands of dollars to a few hundred, reconfiguring the network for a new or migrated virtual workload still takes approximately a week and can cost thousands of dollars…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: George Crump.

Moving to the cloud? Don’t take chances with data availability. An onramping solution can help keep your customers–and your IT staff–happy.

Every time there is an outage at one of the major cloud providers, it raises new concerns about the cloud and cloud storage. If you’re planning to move some or all of your data to the cloud, how can you avoid losing access to that data when an outage occurs?

Understand Your Provider. There are hundreds of different cloud providers to choose from today. Each one has different skills and abilities. Some provide only the very basics of infrastructure and expect you to navigate their service and create your own redundancy to protect your data if part of their cloud suffers an outage. While these providers may be less expensive, they put the burden of managing data availability on you…