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 …

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 …

Open cloud hosting provider Rackspace has announced it has given cloud support to the tune of almost £250,000 in order to aid UK-based startups get a foothold in the cloud.

The scheme falls under the Rackspace Startups Programme, which has been operating in the UK for six months and has already signed up more than 300 members.

The money comes from Rackspace alongside 50 partners and investors, with the CSP adding that startups who sign up with the scheme get “mentoring, expert technical advice and access to networking events”, alongside the money.

According to Jeff Cotten, managing director of Rackspace International, the UK is simply the first stop for the startup roadshow as the company expands its scheme into 2014.

“It’s been incredibly satisfying to watch the UK Startup Programme ramp up as more and more entrepreneurs take advantage of the cloud computing resources and other benefits on …

Too often companies are faced with a choice: elasticity or security.

On the upside, the benefits of cloud computing are achieved through elasticity as much as anything else. As Craig Sheridan notes:

“More specifically then, elasticity in the cloud is the ability of an application to automatically adjust the infrastructure resources it uses to accommodate varied workloads and priorities, while maintaining availability and performance in a context-aware environment.”

Elasticity, then, enables businesses to tap into what can be understood as the cost saving mechanisms of cloud. The ability to scale up and down resources as you need them enables businesses to pay for what they actually use rather than provisioning a guestimate for what they will need and accepting the potential money lost.

However, for many enterprises, elasticity of cloud is at odds with their current abilities. These enterprise architectures are not designed to take advantage of elasticity benefits for …

Bill Gates once said: “Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other.”

In many ways this quote could also be used to nicely summarise the biggest change in the business world over the last 10 years – the evolution of information.

Information management and analysis has always been vital to businesses, that much is obvious. But while information has always been there, it’s the way in which people use that information which has evolved considerably over the last decade or so.

Information is such an important commodity and one that holds great value to any businesses. It’s because of this that the person in charge of managing information is the most important person for any company.

If information is the sceptre, CIOs are king

There’s a well-used quip that CIOs are now ‘chief …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has today launched Amazon WorkSpaces, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution with data all stored in the cloud, at its AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas.

In the morning keynote Andy Jassy, AWS senior vice president, announced the launch alongside giving a few soundbites about how far ahead of the pack Amazon is – as well as an obligatory pot shot at cloud competitor IBM.

Amazon WorkSpaces, as Jassy explained, aims to go where previous VDI technology has failed, because the sector hasn’t taken off in the way it should have done. 

“You get to live that dream of centrally managing your desktops, but with no hardware, no software, no infrastructure, and no long term commitments,” Jassy said.

WorkSpaces has a flexible structure, with customers able to consume licences from Amazon, or use licences bought already. Importantly, as all the data resides in the cloud …

Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software

PaaS is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has been evolving very rapidly in the past five years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Enterprises should get ready to anticipate and take advantage of new PaaS developments. To do so, they should ask vendors some hard questions about strategy plans and product roadmaps. For more information, see the Ovum report PaaS: Two More Years of Confusion Ahead.

PaaS has quickly evolved in the past few years

Today’s PaaS is quite different from that of yesterday, and this can cause confusion. Its rapid evolution has so far partly reflected the evolution of the overall cloud computing market. PaaS has, for example, evolved from a focus on public clouds to private and hybrid clouds, from green-field to legacy applications, and from being packaged with its own infrastructure services to supporting third-party (mostly IaaS …

Using analytics to better understand customer satisfaction, profitability, retention and churn while increasing cross-sell and up-sell are the most dominant uses of cloud-based analytics today.

Jim Ericson and James Taylor presented the results of Decision Management Solutions’ cloud predictive analytics survey this week in the webinar Predictive Analytics in the Cloud 2013 – Opportunities, Trends and the Impact of Big Data. 

The research methodology included 350 survey responses, with a Web-based survey used for data collection.  The survey centered on the areas of pre-packaged cloud-based solutions, cloud-based predictive modeling, and cloud deployment of predictive analytics.  You can see a replay of the webinar at this link.

Key takeaways of the study results released during the webinar include the following:

• Customer Analytics (72%), followed by supply chain, business optimization, marketing optimization (57%), risk and fraud (52%), and marketing (58%) are the areas in which respondents reported the strongest interest.
• When the customer …