By Kirstan Pepler, head of propositions, media sector, Easynet

Many of us are not ashamed to admit an obsession with storage solutions, probably the most visited area of a particular Swedish retailer’s website. After all, a tidy house is a tidy mind, as we are told.

For the CTO, storage is fast becoming the latest obsession – this time without a flat pack in site.

The world’s information is doubling every two years. We’re producing and sharing content at an alarming, explosive rate, in a variety of different formats, across a myriad of different devices. Every minute, YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video, Google receives 2,000,000 search queries and Instagram users share 3,600 new photos.

The corporate world is no exception, as organisations strive to source opportunities arising from this surge of content. Businesses scurry to manage Big Data, and new businesses emerge …

Cloud giant Salesforce has unveiled its new shiny cloud platform Salesforce1 at Dreamforce in San Francisco, with CEO Marc Benioff stressing the ‘internet of customers’ – the importance of the consumer in a cloud, social and mobile world.

“I’ve never been more excited to be part of Salesforce.com,” Benioff bellowed to the audience of customers, partners and non-profits.

“In the world of the Internet of Things, it’s really a world of Internet of Customers.

“We need to reassess how we connect with customers in a whole new way,” he added.

In many ways, this wasn’t a speech, more of a performance – none more so than the homage to Back to the Future when explaining the benefits of Salesforce1. The hook of ‘this is what will happen in the future…but wait, it’s available now!’ wins no points for originality, but it nailed the five target areas …

CenturyLink has acquired Tier 3, an innovative provider of public cloud services based in the Seattle area. Tier 3’s cloud platform is immediately available as «CenturyLink Cloud.» In addition, Tier 3’s products, roadmap and vision are now the foundation of CenturyLink’s cloud strategy and anchor the new Seattle-based CenturyLink Cloud Development Center.
Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink’s Savvis organization, stated, «Our mission is to provide world-class managed services to global businesses on virtual, dedicated and colocation infrastructures. Tier 3’s innovative automation and self-service platform are game-changing for our global enterprise clients.»

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CenturyLink has acquired Tier 3, an innovative provider of public cloud services based in the Seattle area. Tier 3’s cloud platform is immediately available as «CenturyLink Cloud.» In addition, Tier 3’s products, roadmap and vision are now the foundation of CenturyLink’s cloud strategy and anchor the new Seattle-based CenturyLink Cloud Development Center.
Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink’s Savvis organization, stated, «Our mission is to provide world-class managed services to global businesses on virtual, dedicated and colocation infrastructures. Tier 3’s innovative automation and self-service platform are game-changing for our global enterprise clients.»

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Which tablet will work best for an enterprise BYOD strategy? It turns out that, if you’ve done your back-end homework, any of the top three or four will do just fine.
Now that server hardware decisions are no-brainers (thanks to virtualization and the ubiquity of multi-core 64-bit x86), deciding on the enterprise-wide purchase of a tablet computer types will be the biggest hardware choice many IT leaders will make.
So what guides these tablet decisions? Do the attributes of the mobile device and platform (the nature of the thing) count most? Or is it more important that it conforms to the fast-changing needs of the back-end services and cloud ecosystem? Can the tablet be flexible and adaptive, to act really as many client types in one (the nurture)?

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If you want to implement an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, then you will undoubtedly have to answer a lot of questions before you can be sure that the system will run smoothly. But before anything, you should ask a simple question about deployment. Will you need to host your ERP system on-premise using your own servers or will you be using a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provider? It will be a major decision, since you will need to choose who handles the hardware and software.
Big companies usually tend to want to deploy on-premises. This could be a because of paranoia, but big companies want total control over their data. But many smaller companies will opt to choose the SaaS method so they can save on upfront capital expenditures. Since they won’t have to buy their own hardware, the SaaS option will be cheaper (at least in the short-term).
But between the largest and smallest companies, there are businesses in the middle that have to make a tough choice. To make the best decision, they will need to weight three variables: total cost of ownership, customization options, and integration.

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Start-ups have been formed by leveraging cloud resources but enterprises are taking note and adoption rates are increasing.
While attending the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference last week, I spoke to enterprise customers who described how they benefited from AWS cloud services. One customer converted a $70K bid from a systems integrator for a hosted website and implemented it on AWS for less than $7K. Another customer estimated the cost of acquiring an on-premises business intelligence solution for $200K plus maintenance compared to under $10K a year on AWS. Savings like this will prompt enterprises to assess and migrate applications to the public cloud while addressing privacy and security concerns.

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Add another fill-in-the-blank-as-a-service that’s making waves in the cloud.
Verizon, which just recently launched a major overhaul to its cloud platform, announced plans to integrate the VMware/EMC-backed Cloud Foundry open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) initiative into its offering, according to an article on Networkworld.com.
Here’s why that news is important: the PaaS market is getting awfully crowded, awfully fast. Seen by many as a secondary player in the cloud compared to the much larger and more robust IaaS and SaaS markets, the PaaS industry has in recent months become a focus for many of the leading cloud computing vendors. PaaS could be an important initiative in the cloud because of what it enables.
Most PaaS are a cloud-based application development platform used to build apps that are hosted in the cloud. Others view the PaaS market, especially open source PaaS tools like Cloud Foundry and others, as being an intermediary that acts as a portal to access infrastructure from Amazon, OpenStack or other IaaS. More vendors are getting in on the PaaS action.

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Data in the cloud is increasingly viewed as the reality of IT infrastructure management.

With such ubiquitous data storage on cloud-based, cloud-based is at odds with the naysayers who continue to cite security concerns as a reason not to move data to the cloud.

So we have a discrepancy – cloud data storage is widely used, yet there are concerns about the security (compliance and privacy also) of the data itself.

What gives?

The rapid rate of cloud adoption has given rise to the natural necessity to have some data generated live on cloud-based platforms. For other data driven processes, i.e. big data analytics, cloud is the natural storage platform of choice, given the scope and scale of data and the costs of storing it in anything beyond the cloud.

This shifting reality, however, has not mitigated the need for organizations to ensure the security of their data. The difference …

When the NSA PRISM revelations hit back in June, it initially spelled bad news for many cloud industry players, especially in the US. With analysts speculating that the damage to the US cloud computing industry could go as high as $35bn, it was a fractured period of time.

For San Jose-based cloud information protector CipherCloud, however, it was a different story.

CEO and founder Pravin Kothari and senior vice president Paige Leidig were both at a Gartner summit in Washington DC when the news broke, and Leidig told CloudTech that the benefits to the company were instant.

“Because of that news, our local sales team on the East Coast brought us in to basically half a dozen different opportunities, directly related to that news,” Leidig said, adding: “Ever since then it’s been a significant driver to generate awareness and importance of protecting data in the cloud.

“It’s helped …