How can accountancy adapt to the cloud?

The Journal of Accountancy reports that doing business in the cloud should cost less than doing business on-premise.   A survey of 1,000 accounting firms found that 70% of respondents increased their use of web-based applications in the cloud between 2010 and 2012, and that cloud accounting is becoming more popular.


The article suggests doing a three-year amortisation of upfront costs for an on-premise application including servers, software licenses and installation plus estimated maintenance for 3 years and comparing that to the cost of subscribing to the cloud version of the product for three years.

“This can be applied to partial versus full cloud conversions and should be done on an application-by-application basis to determine whether there is cost savings by moving each application to the cloud,” said the Journal of Accountancy.

  • In most instances, by moving accounting functions to the cloud, an SME could expect to reduce support costs …

Clouducation 101: Consumers, Web Developers & Businesses

Let’s recap: In the past two weeks we have covered the following material: Who I am What my background is Why I love everything IT What the Cloud is What the Public … Last week I ended with a question: How does the Cloud affect me as a consumer, as a business owner and as someone working for a business – ex. a mobile app developer? Let’s jump right in.

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Enterprise Without Limits: A Blueprint for Organizational Agility

We are a part of a dynamically connected world where consumers are rapidly adopting new technology and dismantling business models in their wake. Disruption, unpredictability and variability happen without warning. The challenge for any organization is to evolve, to adopt new architectures and processes that increase business agility, scalability and governance/compliance and decrease risk. While cloud is complex, the consideration and adoption process can be simplified.
In his General Session, Kevin Hanes, Executive Director, Dell Service & Solutions, talks about a pragmatic approach to realizing the potential of cloud today while building a strong foundation for the future.

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Architecting Your Cloud: Lessons Learned from 100 CloudStack Deployments

CloudStack has been the platform of choice for more than a hundred public and private production clouds. In his General Session at Cloud New York, Citrix VP Shannon Williams provides an insider view as one of the co-founders of Cloud.com talks about experiences in designing the right architecture for your cloud.
Shannon Williams is VP of Market Development, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix, where he oversees the team responsible for working with enterprise and service provider customers to understand the capabilities of Citrix cloud infrastructure solutions, as well as architect and deploy them. Williams joined Citrix in 2011 when the company acquired Cloud.com, where he served as vice president of worldwide sales. He has more than 10 years of experience in sales and marketing and has held management positions at technology companies such as Solidcore Systems, SeeCommerce and Teros. Williams has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science.

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Hyper-V vs. vSphere: Understanding the Differences

For years, there has been a feature battle between VMware® vSphere™ and Microsoft® Hyper-V®. In general, vSphere has won the feature battle, although Hyper-V is certainly no slouch.Ultimately, the feature gap will shrink and Hyper-V will become a “good enough” solution for more and more organizations.
In order to help vSphere administrators make the knowledge leap between the two platforms, this whitepaper will introduce you to:
Feature deltas that may exist
Key features in both products
VM mobility and availability
Differences in hypervisor management

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Convirture Brings Open Source-Based VM & Cloud Management to VMware

The beta of the new version of ConVirt Enterprise Cloud provides a single tool to manage all current and future virtual and cloud infrastructures, including those based on KVM, Xen, OpenStack, Amazon EC2 and now VMware.
ConVirt is used by IT professionals worldwide to manage virtual data centers and cloud infrastructures. This new version adds VMware to the list of supported technologies. It is based on open source and provides sophisticated management capabilities to operators of heterogeneous data centers that employ multiple technologies and platforms, including major public and private clouds.

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