A new study has found that IT complexity already existing within an organization is one barrier to implementing a cloud system.
NTT Europe recently completed a study that found 56 percent of CIOs and senior IT leaders see complexity of their own Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems as the biggest barrier to their organization’s enterprise wide adoption of the cloud, according to an article on Forbes.com.
The survey contends that cloud adoption continues to be tactical in nature as a result of the inordinate complexity of existing and legacy ICT platforms. Completed in April and May of this year in the United Kingdom, the study “Growing Pains In The Cloud, 300 CIOs Express Their Views About Barriers To Cloud Adoption” was completed by Vanson Bourne and included 300 interviews of CIOs and senior IT leaders from public and private organizations with 250+ employees.
While the study was completed in the UK, the findings are applicable to enterprises globally looking to use cloud computing to better align business and IT strategies. Fifty-nine percent of CIOs and IT leaders surveyed say that enabling alignment of business and IT strategies using cloud infrastructure is their No. 1 priority.

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“There is a real shift that’s going on in the data center and it’s accelerating, moving away from these big iron, legacy architectures toward something that looks much more like Amazon, Google and Facebook,” stated Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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We’ve certainly come a long way. Over the last couple of years, we’ve witnessed the trials and tribulations of the early-adopters of managed cloud services, and we’ve observed how the offerings have matured to attain broad-based market acceptance.

Cloud computing has become pervasive within today’s forward thinking companies. It’s already a transformative force throughout the global networked economy. Every enterprise that uses Business Technology is either considering or implementing cloud solutions — to create a strategic advantage over their late-adopter industry peer group in the marketplace.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), about 77 percent of North American companies were already using at least one public cloud service in 2012. IDC believes the companies that are spending on cloud-based capability have reached a deployment pace that’s unmatched by any previous business technology transformation.

Moreover, they say that those leaders who have adopted services are exploring cloud computing from two primary perspectives: either to move their existing internal IT capabilities to the cloud or to respond to a pressing internal business need — thereby enabling a new capability quickly and effectively.

Put simply, cloud-based solutions empower IT organizations to offer a more complete set of capabilities to their internal constituency — without the hardware, software, support, and maintenance headaches that are typically inherent with an in-house IT solution.

The Apparent Shift to Public Cloud Solutions

IDC research demonstrates that IT buyers are rapidly shifting their spending patterns from private cloud to hybrid or public cloud. The public cloud and virtual private cloud models are both built and delivered from a service provider’s site.

IDC expects IT buyer patterns to shift as follows:

• 31 percent of companies will source greater than half of their IT spend from public cloud by 2016.
• U.S. businesses will spend $43 billion on cloud-delivered IT in 2016.
• During 2012–2016, SaaS spending will increase by 123 percent, PaaS spending will increase by 48.5 percent, and IaaS spending will reach $31 billion.
• In 2016, a majority (80 percent) of Global 2000 businesses will have 30 percent of their IT capability residing offsite.

Remaining Barriers to Increased Cloud Service Adoption

IDC’s latest research has uncovered that security is still the single-largest IT buyer concern of public cloud services — as it has been for the past six years. However, IDC believes that concerns about security will dissipate over the next two years — as potential new cloud users better understand the technical and business process implications of moving their applications to the cloud.

IDC believes that by 2015, the three most important aspects of IT buying decisions will be the overall cost, internal management of cloud services, and identifying which applications to run on the cloud.

Moreover, network latency of service delivery can lead to poor performance for users. Therefore, broader distribution of 1GbE-capable networks and development on new browser protocols – such as HTML5 — are believed to be significant issues confronting cloud service providers and enterprise users.

IDC says that those same issues will likely continue to have an impact on performance, and thus the ongoing adoption, of managed cloud services.

What are the key demands of these prospective cloud service adopters? Customers say that they want to be able to access all their external services across a consistent performance platform, and the Web browser is the most common denominator to achieve that objective.

Future Outlook for Managed Cloud Service Buyers

So, what’s next for the cloud services marketplace? According to IDC’s assessment, the CIO and IT manager focus is increasingly being directed toward a greater cloud adoption model.

In summary, the typical cloud applications buyer is becoming an IT broker of physical or virtual application services. They’re seeking new choices for integrating and managing across public, private, and hybrid cloud scenarios — plus incorporating any preexisting legacy environments.

Meanwhile, IDC analysts expect that cloud service developers will evolve towards the major growth opportunities – such as enterprise mobility, big data, and social commerce applications.

To learn more about their available IT buyer guidance, visit the IDC website.

read more

We’ve certainly come a long way. Over the last couple of years, we’ve witnessed the trials and tribulations of the early-adopters of managed cloud services, and we’ve observed how the offerings have matured to attain broad-based market acceptance.

Cloud computing has become pervasive within today’s forward thinking companies. It’s already a transformative force throughout the global networked economy. Every enterprise that uses Business Technology is either considering or implementing cloud solutions — to create a strategic advantage over their late-adopter industry peer group in the marketplace.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), about 77 percent of North American companies were already using at least one public cloud service in 2012. IDC believes the companies that are spending on cloud-based capability have reached a deployment pace that’s unmatched by any previous business technology transformation.

Moreover, they say that those leaders who have adopted services are exploring cloud computing from two primary perspectives: either to move their existing internal IT capabilities to the cloud or to respond to a pressing internal business need — thereby enabling a new capability quickly and effectively.

Put simply, cloud-based solutions empower IT organizations to offer a more complete set of capabilities to their internal constituency — without the hardware, software, support, and maintenance headaches that are typically inherent with an in-house IT solution.

The Apparent Shift to Public Cloud Solutions

IDC research demonstrates that IT buyers are rapidly shifting their spending patterns from private cloud to hybrid or public cloud. The public cloud and virtual private cloud models are both built and delivered from a service provider’s site.

IDC expects IT buyer patterns to shift as follows:

• 31 percent of companies will source greater than half of their IT spend from public cloud by 2016.
• U.S. businesses will spend $43 billion on cloud-delivered IT in 2016.
• During 2012–2016, SaaS spending will increase by 123 percent, PaaS spending will increase by 48.5 percent, and IaaS spending will reach $31 billion.
• In 2016, a majority (80 percent) of Global 2000 businesses will have 30 percent of their IT capability residing offsite.

Remaining Barriers to Increased Cloud Service Adoption

IDC’s latest research has uncovered that security is still the single-largest IT buyer concern of public cloud services — as it has been for the past six years. However, IDC believes that concerns about security will dissipate over the next two years — as potential new cloud users better understand the technical and business process implications of moving their applications to the cloud.

IDC believes that by 2015, the three most important aspects of IT buying decisions will be the overall cost, internal management of cloud services, and identifying which applications to run on the cloud.

Moreover, network latency of service delivery can lead to poor performance for users. Therefore, broader distribution of 1GbE-capable networks and development on new browser protocols – such as HTML5 — are believed to be significant issues confronting cloud service providers and enterprise users.

IDC says that those same issues will likely continue to have an impact on performance, and thus the ongoing adoption, of managed cloud services.

What are the key demands of these prospective cloud service adopters? Customers say that they want to be able to access all their external services across a consistent performance platform, and the Web browser is the most common denominator to achieve that objective.

Future Outlook for Managed Cloud Service Buyers

So, what’s next for the cloud services marketplace? According to IDC’s assessment, the CIO and IT manager focus is increasingly being directed toward a greater cloud adoption model.

In summary, the typical cloud applications buyer is becoming an IT broker of physical or virtual application services. They’re seeking new choices for integrating and managing across public, private, and hybrid cloud scenarios — plus incorporating any preexisting legacy environments.

Meanwhile, IDC analysts expect that cloud service developers will evolve towards the major growth opportunities – such as enterprise mobility, big data, and social commerce applications.

To learn more about their available IT buyer guidance, visit the IDC website.

read more

“Appcore delivers a product called Appcore AMP and it’s the industry’s only complete automated cloud management platform. Most of our customers are service providers – we had designed a product specifically for service providers,” explained Jeff Tegethoff, President of Appcore, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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“We have moved on from hosting to managed hosting to managed cloud hosting. We build and operate high performance clouds for business-critical applications,” explained Mike Donaldson, CMO of HOSTING, stated, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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“Quantum is transitioning its business from being a predominantly hardware-based, on-premise data protection provider into a cloud-based managed service provider,” explained Henrik Rosendahl, Senior Vice President of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, stated, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

read more

On Wednesday Amazon Web Services cut prices on its EC2 Dedicated Instances pushing back the effective date to July 1.
By its count it’s the 37th price reduction on AWS services since the infrastructure cloud’s initial launch in 2006.
Dedicated Instances have only been around since 2011 and run on hardware dedicated to a single customer account touted as good for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations dictate physical isolation from instances run by other customers at the host hardware level.
The price reduction applies to both the dedicated per-region fee and the per-instance On-Demand and Reserved Instance fees across all supported instance types and all AWS Regions.

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For many companies with whom I talk, there isn’t a lack of IT talent when it comes to security–just a lack of hours in the day, computing resources and necessary headcount with specific expertise to change the culture from reactive to proactive and strategic risk management. Executives simply expect IT security to do more with less.
But the ability to recruit and retain security experts is an issue in itself. At the MSPAlliance meeting this week in Orlando, it was reported that the unemployment rate for such professionals is less than 1%. The salary for these specialists has doubled in the past three years. No wonder there is a critical shortage to feed this growing monster. And executives are still wary to spend budget on security line items-including staffing. It is still regarded (mistakenly, I might add) as a cost center.

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