One of the most common questions I get from students is where they can find free cloud computing and enterprise software research.

Few if any of my students work for companies who have subscriptions with top analyst firms however.

A small group of students are working on a start-up on the side and want to absorb as much market data as they can.

Many of my former students are also in IT management roles, and when they become interested in a specific cloud computing or enterprise topic over time, they write me and ask if I have any data on their subject of interest.  I keep the following list updated from them too.   To serve all these students I’ve been adding to the list shown below for a number of years. None of these companies are current or past clients and I hold no equity positions in any of …

A hybrid cloud offers both affordability and security by splitting business requirements so that each process demand goes into the right cloud

As we witness high adoption rates for the public cloud and the private cloud, businesses are turning towards a hybrid cloud computing solution. The reason is obvious; in the initial days of cloud computing technology, enterprises used public clouds extensively for VDI, RDP and BYOD requirements. However, over the last few years security issues, operational challenges and data compliance issues have become a growing concern. This is why businesses started shifting to the private cloud. While the private cloud offered more control and visibility over business processes, huge investments and infrastructure management still remained a concern.

With shrinking IT budgets and rising business demands, companies are looking for an intermediate model of cloud computing technology. The hybrid cloud computing solution rightly fits into this space. Certain applications require …

When you think of cloud computing in the healthcare vertical, you also have to think of security and governance.  Indeed, the need to control and secure healthcare data in the cloud is a big issue, and thus cloud governance is critical.

On the whole, cloud computing needs governance to succeed.  If you think about it, at the end state of the cloud computing implementation, we’ll have thousands of services and data elements under management.  To control how they are accessed, added, deleted, and altered, we need a solid approach, processes, procedures, and technology.  That is why we call it ‘governance,’ or, more specifically, ‘service governance.’

Service governance is important in the world of healthcare in the cloud for a few key reasons:  

Laws and regulations within the healthcare vertical make it necessary to control access to data, services, and processes in very fined-grained and configurable ways.

• Cloud services that …

The choice to move to cloud is becoming clearer every day. But the choices within that decision are becoming more fraught as the marketplace develops and a wider selection of delivery models and platforms.

The onus is also increasingly falling on CIOs to be the chief decision makers with regards to how cloud should fit within the organization.

Here are a few measures for how to best determine what cloud will be best for your business.

The technology

The component pieces of the cloud provider’s technology need to sync with what you are already working with, as well as what you will be looking to integrate going forward.

One of the great things about cloud platforms (generally) is that there is a degree of interchangeability since the technology is treated as a commodity. However, depending on whom you choose to go with, this is going to be easier or …

According to a report from Verizon, enterprises are increasing their average monthly cloud spend by 45% with cloud environments becoming “more mainstream”.

The overall sense from the Verizon report, which was conducted between January 2012 and June 2013, was that the enterprise cloud was becoming more and more critical to business strategy.

Cloud-based storage capability went up by 90% during this time, with cloud-based memory usage increasing 100%.

The report examined the current state of the enterprise cloud, quoting a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit whereby almost half of professionals evaluate cloud models over traditional software when it came to investments.

Verizon puts this down to six primary reasons: cost; provisioning speed; compliance; focus; performance and accessibility.

Despite this however, the report notes the majority of enterprises are in “phase one” of cloud adoption, only risking low commodity items. Yet the future, as one would expect, is hybrid.

“Hybrid …

One of the notable presenters at this week’s Cloud World Forum in Brazil was from telco giant Telefónica.

This Spain-based powerhouse has extensive interests across Latin America as well as North America and Europe, and owns everything from undersea cables up to managed services. And as with every other telco on this planet, they’re heavily into Cloud Computing.

Nothing unusual so far. But toward the end of this fellow’s talk, someone asked whether Telefónica was going to either partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS) or compete with them. Seeing as the larger company was all-in with their Cloud bet, I expected the answer would be to compete with the IaaS leader.

After all, telcos from Verizon to Alcatel are in the trenches battling Bezos and Company. But to my surprise, he answered that they would prefer to run their SaaS apps on Amazon, while at …

Increasingly business complexity, broader technology adoption and changing expectations have forced a shift in the role of the IT department and how it delivers services.

Part of this change has been driven by the advent of cloud computing, which has allowed CIOs to decrease operational budgets and focus more on designing and building applications as well as innovation.

The benefits of cloud computing are well established, but although it helps ‘do more with less’ it has drawbacks of its own. As such, what many companies are starting to realise is that a lack of integration between disparate applications and services is a major factor in the failure of organisations to achieve their larger strategic goals.

Rampant cloud adoption can lead to ‘cloud sprawl’ and IT managers can find themselves squandering the savings made when moving to cloud on managing, governing and controlling cloud adoption or dealing with confusion.

The best …

Public Cloud Security Issues

– Brought to you by the 2X Cloud Computing Team –

The obvious benefits offered by cloud computing technology have not only made it inevitable, but also irresistible for business to embrace this ever-innovating technology. While scalability and agility improve business productivity levels, optimization of resources decreases Capex and Opex. However, choosing the right cloud model for your business requirements is a tough task. Businesses have the option to choose a Public, Private or a Hybrid cloud.

With the public cloud offering a cost-effective model, small and medium businesses are turning to this option. However, price is not the only criteria to be concerned with; data integrity and security are also major areas for consideration. Below are certain security issues businesses should address when determining which cloud model is best for their business.

Multi-tenancy issues

A public cloud is offered at an affordable price because resources are shared …

More than two in five (45%) of respondents to a Spiceworks survey admit they are using cloud networking tools in their business, or are going to push forward with it within 12 months.

The survey results, of 500 IT professionals, were collected in a report entitled “The Cloudification of the Network”, produced in association with cloudy networking solutions provider Pertino.

Of course, the more cynical and world-weary CloudTech readers will have worked out the message in this survey given Spiceworks and Pertino both deal in cloud networking technology. Yet on the flip side, more than half of companies aren’t interested in cloud networking software until at least 2015.

Networking, however, has arguably been the most important topic of conversation at this year’s VMworld conference, according to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. This comes amidst the virtualisation experts launching NSX, its latest network virtualisation tool, moving forward from server virtualisation …

It’s been well over a year that Forrester’s James Staten (@staten7) has been gently orating from the rooftops that «you are already hybrid.» 

In his foresight, he was referring to the broad existence of so-called shadow-IT, the tendency of competent non-IT folk to pull out their credit cards and purchase public cloud services and SaaS services, thereby solving their own problems.

This week, a spate of articles from Forbes, WSJ (requires login) and elsewhere are telling the tale of a far more intentional approach to hybrid cloud.

This acceptance that certain workloads, for logistical, financial, or pragmatic reasons, are best housed locally – and that others, due to spikiness (technical term) or proximity to endpoint or resource profile, are best deployed to a service provider.

Infact, the Forbes article cites different tiers of an application potentially residing at different places.

There are a few implications of this current discussion …