By Eoin Jennings, General Manager Hosting Services, Easynet

As St Jude raged around the UK last month felling trees and bringing commuter trains to a standstill, a collective sigh could be heard: cloud naysayers finally admitting defeat.  

Whether or not businesses had a mobility or cloud strategy, those tech-savvy employees across the country armed with BlackBerries, tablets and Dropbox accounts were comfortably and productively working away, and their organisations were thankful. For many businesses, it will take these 90mph winds to blow in the seeds of change.

Businesses are adopting cloud services, albeit more cautiously than anticipated. Much has been written about vendors hyping cloud services, and adoption rates not living up to the propaganda.  Indeed TechTarget’s Cloud Pulse Survey found that public and private clouds have reached the same level of market penetration at around 25%.  

Adoption is moving in the right direction, though, and research from ISG …

IBM has patented a solution which the tech giant claims is a “green button” that distributes a cloud service to lower power systems to help save environmental costs.

According to the Armonk firm, patent 8,549,125 took its inspiration from energy firms offering consumers alternate, environmentally-friendly energy streams.

“We have invented a way for cloud service providers to more efficiently manage their data centres and, as a result, significantly reduce their environmental impact,” said Keith Walker, IBM master inventor.

In a supporting blog, Walker goes into more detail about the idea behind the patent, stating that there would be an ‘environmentally friendly option’ on the CSP’s setup wizard.

“It’s like purchasing a computer – you have the choice of buying a high speed hard drive, but do you need it for what you actually plan to do with the computer?” Walker wrote.

“Would something less powerful, but more …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

Teradata’s data warehousing and analytics strategy continues to be heavily influenced by Big Data, which took center stage at its annual Partners user conference in Dallas, Texas, last week. While Teradata didn’t make any major new product announcements at the event, it did spotlight four areas: enterprise data warehousing (EDW), Aster Data Discovery, unified data architecture, and analytically-driven marketing optimization. For the first time, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) figures heavily in Teradata’s future, reflecting the increased amount of semi- and unstructured data that organizations are looking to push into Teradata databases.

A three-pronged strategy driven by Big Data, unification, and JSON

There are three main elements to Teradata’s overall strategy: core EDW, Big Data analytics, and integrated marketing management, three of the fastest growing segments of its business. Teradata is well positioned in each. Big Data is clearly forcing …

A new report from sourcing providers Alsbridge has revealed that, in the UK, cloud computing accounts for only one fifth of the IT budget.

This puts doubt in the thinking that cloud adoption in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market is accelerating – or, more particularly, that executives see cloud as the cornerstone of a bright, shiny IT future.

Last month research from Robert Half Technology revealed how cloud computing is the most lucrative skill to have in the IT job market.

Yet this survey, of 50 UK senior IT decision makers, indicates a relatively slow uptake. IaaS is the smallest cloud market in terms of investment, with 20% of respondents using compute and only 14% using storage-based adoption.

That’s not to say companies aren’t in the cloud full stop; 92% of companies are using cloud, with software as a service (SaaS) at 70% uptake and platform as …

Given the differences in market maturity, cultural acceptance and local IT infrastructures, considerable regional differences exist in the deployment rates of cloud-based security systems. They all play a part in the level of spending dedicated to this delivery model — when compared with on-premises business technology deployments.

Moreover, privacy remains an inhibitor in the deployment of all forms of cloud-based services by the late adopter market segment. In particular, it’s a big issue in those regions and countries with strong regulatory requirements — such as Europe, with its data protection legislation.

Regardless, the cloud-based security services market will be worth $2.1 billion in 2013 — growing to $3.1 billion in 2015, according to the latest market study by Gartner.

«The cloud-based security market remains a viable one, offering providers many opportunities for expansion,» said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner. «Encryption will be a new area of growth, but it …

It is over five years since the term ‘cloud’ was first adopted into the mainstream to describe a fundamental change in how – and where – information technology is deployed.

Cloud’s building blocks had been developing for several years prior: the rise of the Internet as a backbone for service delivery; hardware platforms so powerful that they could run multiple web scale workloads; and the opening of standards for application and infrastructure architecture; all contributed to the cloud phenomenon, which went beyond simple hosting or application service provision.

The ability for providers to create massively scalable, homogeneous computing platforms enabled new delivery models which, it was clear, would reach beyond what had previously been possible in terms of processing capability, at the same time as making costs more affordable. No wonder, then, that industry players were so excited. 

Cloud – the current state of play

In principle, there is plenty to like …

Open cloud provider Rackspace has rolled out a complete revamp of its public cloud with Performance Cloud Servers – and according to Nigel Beighton, international VP technology and product, it represents a serious shift in how companies use their servers.

The architectural redesign of the Rackspace Performance Cloud Server comes with four times the total RAM, double the CPU performance and 132 times the I/O of its competitors, according to benchmark tests.

But Beighton argues that simply drooling over the figures is the short-sighted approach.

“The more interesting sub-context here is that this is responding to the changing nature of applications on cloud,” Beighton told CloudTech.

“When I look back over six months worth of data, we’ve had an increase of 200% over that six months of people taking what we call ‘fat slices’, which fundamentally takes the whole machine.

“What you are seeing here is a shift, a …

For some time, cloud computing has been moving from beyond a purely IT-owned paradigm to a more readily accepted part of how different business units achieve their end goals. Application development is no exception.

Product managers and application architects have been at the forefront of this mass adoption, utilizing cloud infrastructure resources to dramatically improve the way applications are developed, tested, and launched.

But for agile development methodologies, cloud presents an opportunity for businesses to maximize software testing.

Firewall considerations

Cloud’s direct benefit to programmers depends greatly on the type of methodology they are employing. One of the key components to agile development is getting instant feedback from customers. If a customer is outside your firewall, you have to enable them to access the application in your environment through an outside server or allowing them a connection into your private network. In traditional IT organizations, this set up process …

The Switzerland-based telco Swisscom is in the process of building a national “Swiss Cloud” – but denies claims that the primary motivation is around acquiring customers spooked by the NSA scandal.

The story first broke on Reuters, with the news agency reporting that the move is “driven more by a desire to cut costs and make its systems more dynamic”, according to Swisscom head of IT services Andreas Koenig.

Yet there’s a link to perceived security threats – given Switzerland’s stricter privacy laws, Koenig argues it would make sense for companies to store data there.  

Swisscom would need a formal request from a prosecutor before giving access to stored data, and as Nick Farrell, writing for Fudzilla, notes, the system as it stands would be “useless to the spooks”.

A small clue to this news came in the form of a whitepaper Swisscom published last month, which revealed that, in …

One of the advantages ZapThink brings to the discussion of Enterprise IT is our global perspective. As we travel the world, we hear the opinions of many people across many countries and industries. From this context we can confirm that most of the planet believes the US government is the laughing stock of the developed world.

First, we allow a fanatical right wing minority to shut down our entire government because they didn’t want American citizens to get affordable healthcare – even though most other developed countries consider healthcare a right rather than a privilege. We finally resolve the shutdown (at least temporarily) only to find that the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rollout – the Healthcare.gov Web site – suffered from severe flaws. Seriously, can’t we get anything right?

The embarrassing failure of the ACA Web site is even more ironic considering the federal government’s long …