Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology

The New South Wales state government in Australia is taking visionary but practical steps towards cloud services adoption via a program of pilot projects. The projects recognize the need to treat cloud services as an emerging trend to be investigated and evaluated hands-on. It is a practical organizational learning exercise, not an ideological quest or a whole-of-government “grand plan”.

Cloud services adoption is best driven at an agency-by-agency level with a focus on the promotion of early adoption, the realisation of business benefits, and the rapid propagation of lessons learned and successful solutions across agencies as confidence is gained.

Governments need to get hands-on with cloud services

Government adoption of cloud services is nascent but growing. Cloud services require a change in mindset about how to approach the sourcing and management of ICT capabilities and how to apply them to drive business transformation …

Andrew Kellett, Principal Analyst, Software – IT Solutions

In a recent report on the impact of cloud computing and identity-as-a-service (IaaS) on the identity and access management (IAM) sector (Cloud: Transforming the IAM Industry,July 2013), Ovum highlights the issues that traditional IAM vendors are being forced to address. The report demonstrates why the cloud will be a game changer for IAM over the next two years.

The report also shows that traditional platform vendors are coming under pressure from a new generation of cloud-based specialists that are changing the way that IAM services are and will be consumed in the future. They are also being pressured to extend their own offerings into the cloud to stay competitive. The report helps organizations to understand the changing dynamics of the IAM market and addresses the challenges of selecting an IAM solution that can deal with current and future identity management requirements.

The …

Michael Azoff, Principal Analyst, Ovum, Software Solutions Group

Oracle Cloud Application Foundation (CAF) is an out-of-the-box, pre-integrated cloud infrastructure solution built around Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS). Release 12c of Oracle CAF is now generally available and is designed for building cloud-based, dynamic enterprise applications.

In addition to WLS 12c, the release comprises Oracle Coherence 12c, Oracle Tuxedo 12c, Oracle Traffic Director/Web Tier 12c, and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, along with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, and Oracle Development Tools 12c. The solution is available for both private and public cloud deployments, but Oracle Coherence 12c availability in Oracle Cloud (Oracle’s public cloud offering) is expected to be released later in 2013.

There are a host of new features in Oracle CAF, but of particular interest are features that address two essential aspects of dynamic cloud applications: the effects of disrupted connectivity, and the need for managing back-end enterprise data …

With software defined networking (SDN), the network as we know it, along with the way businesses use computing processes, could be changed beyond all recognition.

And Brocade is at the very heart of that shift, being founder members of OpenFlow and OpenStack and pushing ahead with technologies that ensure its customers are SDN-ready.

Separating the data and control planes, SDN, as the name suggests, puts a layer of software between the components a network runs on and the network admin running them, leading in theory to a higher performance, more efficient networking process.

Yet there have been criticisms of SDN, ranging from accusations of overhype and lack of implementation, to lack of interoperability, to not being in the interest of larger vendors.

But as Simon Pamplin, Brocade enterprise pre-sales manager explains in a call to CloudTech, SDN is in an evolving, almost embryonic stage, meaning not everything’s going to …

Handle the hybrid cloud with care, but get to grips with it quickly to make sure you don’t miss out.

That’s according to a survey from SAP of 52 CIOs in conjunction with Wakefield Research, which comes to the conclusion that hybrid has various advantages, which even non-hybrid users can appreciate.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that SAP would be advocating this line; when CloudTech was present at its UK & Ireland Forum earlier this month, this was the underlying takeaway. Indeed, VP cloud systems Sven Denecken told CloudTech that “the right mix of cloud solutions…private cloud and on-premise” were the way forward, although he admitted he preferred the term ‘interoperable’.

Yet the research statistics were certainly of intrigue:

• Three quarters of hybrid cloud users feel that their IT processes are less complex having moved to hybrid
• Half of non-hybrid cloud users admit that cloud and hybrid …

Ian Brown, Senior Analyst, IT Services

Like many of its peers in the telecoms industry, European network provider Colt is building up its IT services portfolio, of which cloud is an integral part. Network operators such as Colt own two key assets for the delivery of cloud computing: networks and data centers. They also have a key motivation for turning to the cloud: declining revenues in their legacy communications businesses.

Colt’s differentiator as a cloud provider is its expertise in cloud orchestration – more specifically, the automation behind its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud and portal. However, this will not be enough to convince enterprises to integrate Colt’s cloud into their hybrid IT environments. Colt needs to partner with SIs and ISVs and develop a solutions focus if it is to deliver real business value to its target enterprise customers and provide more than just another standalone cloud.

Colt has used …

The International Data Center (IDC) researchers have this week put into writing what many will already suspect: cloud computing continues to grow in Australia. But does this all fit in with recent coverage?

86% of Australian enterprises currently use cloud computing in some aspect, up from 71% this time last year, according to the latest report from IDC, “Australia Cloud Services 2013-2017 Forecast and Analysis”.

Not surprisingly, there’s still a fair amount of future gazing in the report, with IDC predicting that the Australian public cloud services market will grow to a whopping A$2,671.9 million (£1,631m) in 2017, meaning a compound annual growth rate of 24.7% for that five year period.

Aside from the pinch of salt which generally needs to be taken with such statistics, these are still impressive numbers.

In a statement, IDC Australia cloud services senior analyst Raj Mudaliar said cloud …

We’ve certainly come a long way. Over the last couple of years, we’ve witnessed the trials and tribulations of the early-adopters of managed cloud services, and we’ve observed how the offerings have matured to attain broad-based market acceptance.

Cloud computing has become pervasive within today’s forward thinking companies. It’s already a transformative force throughout the global networked economy. Every enterprise that uses Business Technology is either considering or implementing cloud solutions — to create a strategic advantage over their late-adopter industry peer group in the marketplace.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), about 77 percent of North American companies were already using at least one public cloud service in 2012. IDC believes the companies that are spending on cloud-based capability have reached a deployment pace that’s unmatched by any previous business technology transformation.

Moreover, they say that those leaders who …

The key responsibility of the CIO is to ensure an organisation has the technology it needs to function cost effectively, while at the same time remain a competitive force.

Nowhere is this more relevant than in the contact centre industry. If a contact centre does not have technologies, such as interactive voice recognition (IVR), multimedia queuing or real-time speech analytics, then it risks not being able to meet customer expectations of service.

However, buying-in all of these solutions can be an large capital outlay for an organisation. This can be a major drawback to a company that prefers the agility and flexibility of OpEx over CapEx. The alternative is to look at moving some or all operations to the cloud.

It’s not all or nothing

The first consideration for the CIO is: how much IT infrastructure should be transferred to the cloud?

Some might think that moving all telephony …

Should Your Private Cloud Use a Single or a Dual Firewall?

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

Many private clouds are constructed in a way that allows clients to connect either locally or from the Internet. In the case of Internet connectivity, the Web Portal and Secure Client Gateway components that are used to facilitate the connection are almost always located behind a perimeter firewall. While the need for an Internet firewall is more or less undisputed, it is important to consider as to whether there might be advantages to implementing other firewalls within the private cloud infrastructure.

In order to answer this question, it is important to consider the nature of the inbound traffic. The Internet has been described as the most hostile environment on earth. The perimeter firewall’s job (at least in this case) is to block every TCP and UDP …