Software defined networking (SDN), as well as moving “beyond the cloud”, are two of the seven technology trends which will change the game for enterprise, according to the latest industry report.

For companies looking to take the next step and move ahead of the competition, establishing a sophisticated digital strategy is paramount. This much we already know of course, but IT consultancy firm Accenture has gone a step further and noted the trends underpinning it – with SDN featuring heavily.

This could be the start of a real paradigm shift. Companies are certainly noticing that simply migrating to the cloud isn’t enough to be a business game changer – it’s what you do with it that counts.

And this is reflected in the Accenture paper. “The value lies in putting the cloud to work,” the report notes, adding: “No vision would be complete without commenting on the cloud.

“The technology …

Google Cloud Platform allows the end users to build their website and applications, analyze and store data on the infrastructure powered by Google. 

Google Cloud Platform provides various resources that can be used for specialized purposes. One such resource offered by Google Cloud Platform is Google Compute Engine (GCE) which is an IaaS product. GCE was announced at Google IO by Google in June, 2012.

Google Compute Engine enables any developer or business to use the infrastructure of Google for their applications. GCE possesses several capabilities which make it more economical and easier to use for a wider set of applications. It provides flexible and scalable virtual machine computing capabilities in cloud.  GCE provide you the capability of solving large scale analytic and processing problems on Google’s networking, storage or computing platform. It certainly is a powerful yet cost effective solution focused on workload processing on cloud.

With GCE …

IBM’s partnership with Cloud Foundry will certainly go down as one of the bigger announcements in the cloud computing space this year. But what will it mean on a wider scale?

IBM and Pivotal have announced collaboration on the open platform as a service (PaaS) Cloud Foundry, pushing forward to establish open governance in the PaaS community – in other words, allowing companies total freedom to write software applications running in the cloud.

“Cloud Foundry’s potential to transform business is vast, and steps like the one taken today help open the ecosystem for greater client innovation,” Daniel Sabbah, IBM general manager of next generation platforms said in a statement.

This is the latest big bet IBM has taken in mapping out its cloud computing strategy in recent months. And as a result, you can be fairly sure the Cloud Foundry technology is going to integrate tightly with IBM’s …

The after-effects of PRISM means that companies are much less likely to use US-based cloud service providers (CSPs), according to a survey from the Cloud Security Alliance.

56% were less likely to use US-based providers, with one in 10 going as far to say that they’d cancelled a project which used US CSPs as a result. Only 3%, interestingly, said their confidence in US vendors had increased.

It’s noticeable that, from the vendors’ perspective, their confidence had not been diminished. 64% said the incident had not hindered their prospects of conducting business outside the US.

Yet in terms of general security policy, respondents did not feel at ease about governmental transparency and legitimacy. Almost half (47%) of those polled said that their country’s processes in obtaining criminal information were “poor…there is no transparency in the process and I have no idea how often the government accesses …

Eliminating Single Points of Failure From Your Private Cloud

– Brought to you by 2X Cloud Computing guest blogger Brien M. Posey –

When an organisation deploys a private cloud, that private cloud quickly becomes an indispensable, mission critical infrastructure component. That being the case, it is important to construct the private cloud in a way that avoids the potential for a single point of failure.

Although it is impossible to delve into a comprehensive discussion of fault tolerance within the confines of a blog post, I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss some strategies for eliminating single points of failure within your private cloud.

Eliminating single points of failure means implementing redundancy for critical system components. In the case of a private cloud the redundant components that you will need and your overall fault-tolerant strategy will depend on what the private cloud is designed to and on the ways in …

As all eyes were on Australia in the Asia Pacific cloud computing space, New Zealand has taken a similar leap through the Institute of IT Professionals NZ (IITP) and published an updated cloud policy, called the Cloud Code.

The v2.0, released today, has two key agreements for all potential signatories: no cloud washing, and upfront disclosure of cloud products and services.

New Zealand’s cloudy code of practice was first developed in 2011, in partnership with the major CSPs, so it could be argued that this release is a long time coming. Yet it certainly appears timely, with Australia pushing forward its National Cloud Computing Strategy back in May.

And with 86% of Australian enterprises currently in the cloud, according to figures recently published by IDC, the growth potential is clear – as CloudTech examined in its editorial earlier this month.

But what will this latest development mean for New …

Of the concerns people have about cloud security today, data control and data loss rank high—just second behind BYOD according to Infonetic’s April 2013 report. No wonder the market for cloud-based security services is growing at 69%.

Despite the popularity of texting and social networking, email remains the preferred method of communication in the enterprise, transporting not only the data within the messages themselves but via the attachments they carry with them.

While most large enterprises have had the management and security of email mostly under control for sometime, the migration of email to the cloud requires proper planning and new methods of management to keep sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands—whether its unlawfully transferred or stolen, or simply accidentally sent where it shouldn’t have been.

For enterprises that are moving email to the cloud, here are some points to keep in mind:

• Consider …

By Quinton Wall, Director of Technical Platform Marketing, Salesforce.com – @quintonwall

The cloud has sped up and simplified many aspects of IT. Enterprises and end-users alike have incredibly swift and affordable access to more applications and IT resources than ever before.

This access helps cut or keep costs low and enables businesses to innovate and respond to evolving market demands. However, in other ways, this explosion of apps and devices brings considerable new challenges to IT management.

Today there is no let up of business departments that are building their own applications, or turning to the web for cloud services, and as a result it is next to impossible for IT teams to maintain insight into where data is going or what applications employees are accessing. Additionally, an explosion of devices and cloud applications have hit enterprises in recent years—with most large organisations having hundreds of applications in use …

Over the next five years, cloud computing is still the highest priority for investment, according to the latest piece of research from Compuware, alongside Research in Action.

16.5% of companies cite cloud as the most important area of their IT portfolio to strengthen, ahead of mobile IT (13.5%), business analytics, big data and in-memory (11.3%).

It’s not a surprise that cloud is pretty big news this year too. Cloud infrastructure (12.5%) is the top area of investment for IT in 2013. Renegotiation of outsourcing contracts (9.6%) and investing in big data and analytics (9.2%) rounded off the top three.

In terms of key tenets within the cloud computing sphere, investing in cloud for test and backup purposes is the top priority this year according to 24.1% of respondents, with private cloud implementation (17.1%) and public/hybrid investment (15%) trailing behind. Full …

It’s important to examine the current ‘state of play’ for cloud delivered solutions based on a couple of key dimensions; what is being deployed in the cloud and who is providing the IT service from the cloud.

The image conjured up by the term “cloud” is that of companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft delivering large-scale computing infrastructure that eliminate the need for on-premises IT equipment and software. Since these cloud providers build their own infrastructure rather than buying from product manufacturers, it could be argued they are shrinking the market share.

The Opportunity is Larger than the Threat

However, there are other categories of service providers that balance, more than offset the reduced spend and create an opportunity:

Consumer SaaS providers aggregate consumer-spend into centralised shared enterprise infrastructure. Consumer applications that traditionally consumed end user equipment are moving to the cloud triggering a need for enterprise infrastructure. While …