According to a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the repercussions of PRISM means that, over the next three years, the US cloud computing industry can lose from $22bn to $35bn due to reneged market share.

Anyone hoping this is a brand new piece of research may be slightly disappointed, although they’re not entirely wrong either.

Last month, CloudTech reported on a survey from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) which revealed how, for one in 10 companies, they had gone so far as to cancel business with a US CSP because of the PRISM allegations.

And the ITIF report admits partially guesstimating these figures from the CSA research. “We might reasonably conclude,” the report author, Daniel Castro writes, “that given current conditions, US cloud service providers stand to lose somewhere between 10 and 20% of the foreign market in the next few years.”

The report gives …

I recently tuned in to a GigaOM webinar on the future of the cloud a few weeks back. Key topics discussed were what’s driving cloud adoption in Europe and whether Europe can truly build a vibrant cloud ecosystem.

It was an interesting debate, which got me thinking: We listen to the likes of Gartner and other analysts on what the future will bring for cloud, but what do you as a cloud user or vendor really think about this?

GigaOM predicted that EMEA would account for 20 per cent of the global cloud market at about $40bn in 2014 and that’s ALL cloud technology. Even though that’s a more conservative number than Gartner, its still a big number, and I am sure it is one that has a lot of vendors salivating. Given that is a bucket that includes ALL Cloud technologies, it would be interesting to …

Barry Rabkin, Principal Analyst, Insurance Technology

Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) capabilities are becoming increasingly important for insurers and companies in other industries in the rapidly emerging digital marketplace. To determine how enterprises around the globe are using or planning to use UCC, Ovum interviewed over 1,320 enterprise ICT decision-makers in 18 countries in 4Q12 and 1Q13.

Ovum’s recently published report The Future of Unified Communications and Collaboration: Insurance presents an indicative view of current and planned use of voice and UCC tools in the insurance marketplace, based on interviews with 24 insurance respondents. Specifically, we discuss insurers’ ongoing use of telephony (IP-PBX), the gap between insurers’ views of employee demands and the reality of what employees want or are familiar with, and the fact that insurers realize that smartphones and tablets will have the largest impact on their operations in the next three years.

Telephony (IP-PBX) remains …

NASA’s roadmap towards utilising cloud computing needs a serious rethink, according to an official report from the space agency’s Office of Audits (OA).

In a 38-page report, the OA criticises NASA’s cloud strategy in terms of governance, risk management and security, concluding that “weaknesses…impeded the agency from fully realising the benefits of cloud computing and potentially placed at risk its information stored in the cloud.”

Currently, NASA spends about $10m of its annual IT budget on cloud services – a meagre sum given its overall budget is $1.5bn.

The agency appears to be reticent about going all-in for cloud however, predicting that with a legacy technology overhaul, “up to 40%” of its software could move to the cloud, adding that within five years, up to three quarters of new IT projects could be born in the cloud.

Regardless of the future, the report still damns the …

Many technical experts believe that cloud computing is capable of reshaping the entire ICT industry in a revolutionary manner. With the introduction and development of cloud computing, the two business entities that emerged include – Cloud Service Providers and Cloud consumers.

Although the consumers of cloud services do not possess much control over the primary computing resources, but it is quite essential for the cloud consumers to obtain necessary guarantees in terms of service delivery standards.

These guarantees are usually provided through SLA (Service Level Agreement) which is negotiated between service provider and cloud service consumer. One of the major requirement of a well defined SLA is its standardization.

It must possess apposite level of granularity, namely the trade offs between complicatedness and expressiveness, so that most of the consumer expectations are covered. An SLA must also be relatively straightforward to be verified, weighted, evaluated.

You cannot rush in the process …

Saurabh Sharma, Senior Analyst, IT Solutions

The ever-increasing significance and adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in enterprise IT has concealed the issues inherent to the shift from a traditional model for software delivery to an “as-a-service” model. Despite the emergence of similar delivery models (i.e. integration-as-a-service), integration remains a barrier to SaaS adoption.

The situation has not improved much over the last couple of years, as IT still does not consider integration as a criterion for evaluating a shift to SaaS. SaaS vendors have not done enough to educate and guide potential customers on how to achieve SaaS integration in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

Integration is key to realising the true business value of enterprise and SaaS applications

The various surveys conducted by different SaaS vendors, integration vendors, and professional service providers show that the position of integration on the list of barriers to SaaS adoption has not changed …

What sets apart the fastest-growing small businesses is their an innate strength at turning data and information into results.

It’s becoming easy to spot a smaller business who is going to break out and grow quickly.  They often have these qualities:  they highly value knowledge, expertise and speed over seniority or cronyism; they have successfully managed a geographically distributed supply chain, production and service operations early in their history; and long before they reach $20M in sales they have learned how to balance domestic and international customer demands.  In short, they learned fast how to compete and win business globally.

Over the last several months research firms and enterprise software vendors have released studies on cloud computing adoption in small & medium businesses (SMBs).

The following are the key take-aways from these studies:

• Forrester forecasts that channel partners will increase their reliance on cloud software and services from 22% to …

Cloud hosting can bring many benefits to both small and large businesses, but before you fly into the software sky, it’s always worth looking at the business case before any such move.

Application vendors will no doubt be shortly banging on your door with their options and proposals for hosting your current services in the cloud. Let’s stop to consider a few things before you sign away on any new hosting contacts.

The benefits

There are plenty of benefits for moving to cloud hosting for both your company and the software provider. These will help ease some of the management headache of running, maintaining and upgrading of applications. However, it’s always worth looking at what’s currently going on, how much it costs and what the anticipated savings may be.

Existing contracts

IT costs for the majority of businesses are significant; according to Gartner, IT cost reduction …

For offshore service providers, analyst house Gartner has provided a warning shot: ensure you’ve got a strategy to the cloud mapped out, otherwise your long term future will be at risk.

With public cloud services gradually gaining acceptance in the marketplace – the analyst house predicts the public cloud market will hit $180bn by 2015 – this represents something of an upswing.

This is all powered by Gartner’s influential ‘nexus of forces’ template, with cloud, mobile, social and information expected to drive business and IT for years to come.

Yet whilst Gartner advocates adopting cloud to keep up in the services industry, it’s not ‘make or break’.

“Cloud-based services will not replace offshore services, but will complement them,” Ian Marriott, Gartner research VP said.

“There will always be a need for ‘pure-play’ providers that operate a labour-intensive delivery approach. But for broad-based offshore providers that operate in multiple geographies …