A report from CA Technologies, entitled ‘Cloud Succeeds. Now What?’ has revealed that, for many companies polled, their cloud solutions have been more successful than they were expecting.

The train of thought here, of course, has to wonder what those expectations were, especially in a week where service level agreements (SLAs) are at the forefront following 100% SLA provider Mimecast’s outage.

Yet for companies experienced with cloud, the report notes that more sophisticated systems are being demanded, such as end-to-end automation, more flexible service-level management and – the big one – the ability to flip between CSPs.

The report defines ‘experience’ pretty highly, as should be expected for ushering in cloud’s maturation: four years and a minimum of three platforms utilised.

Unsurprisingly, software as a service (SaaS) is still the most popular platform, utilised by 68% in EMEA and 94% in the US. However, across the EMEA region, platform as …

Enterprises see a lot of promise in mobile devices. Their users should be more productive now that they can craft presentations on the go. Their employees should have more opportunities to collaborate now that they can share documents anytime via their smartphones. Right?

Well, not really. For too many businesses, the promise of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend has been swallowed up by mobile workflow challenges and insecure, consumer-grade cloud sharing solutions.

It would be easy to predict the break-up of mobility and the cloud, but this is a relationship worth saving. Doing so, however, will take a new approach.

A mobile workflow reliant on the Pandora’s Box of file sharing

Left to fend for themselves, business users have cobbled together their own clunky workarounds to mobility-cloud problems. For example, in order to share, annotate, edit and collaborate over Microsoft Office files from their mobile devices, enterprise users have had …

Over and over again we are pummeled with statistics on how risk is growing in disproportion to security readiness.

-91% of companies have experienced at least one IT security event from an external source.

-90% of all cyber crime costs are those caused by web attacks, malicious code and malicious insiders.

-40% reported rogue cloud issues (shadow IT) experienced the exposure of confidential information as a result

-34% share passwords with their co-workers for applications like FedEx, Twitter, Staples, LinkedIn.

These are real stats from studies by like Gartner, Forrester, Ponemon, Kaspersky, Eschelon and others. But there’s one stat that really curls my hair (what little of it is left):

• Due to complexity, over 70% of organizations still not adequately securing critical systems.

Wow. It’s a staggering number. But it got me to thinking why. What is causing this universal security paralysis? Now I’m not proclaiming securipocolypse …

Saurabh Sharma, Senior Analyst, IT Solutions

Ovum’s Integration Middleware Global Market Forecast Model estimates that the spend on cloud-based integration platforms will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31% between 2012 and 2018, reaching $3.7bn by the end of 2018. Over the same period, spending on cloud-based integration platforms in the Americas and Asia-Pacific regions will grow at CAGRs of 27% and 44% respectively. The Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) cloud-based integration platforms market is expected to grow from $274m in 2013 to $905m by the end of 2018. The forecast figures exclude any spending on outsourcing services delivered on top of cloud-based integration platforms.

iPaaS is emerging as a suitable option for a wide range of integration needs

The emergence of integration-as-a-service (IaaS), the first truly cloud-based integration approach, marked the start of the “middleware-as-a-service” era. These solutions focused on enabling SaaS integration …

CIOs, engaged in cloud initiatives, have identified one of their top goals – a need for a cloud strategy.

The reason; cloud initiatives not only directly impact technology but the effect extends significantly to business processes and organisational resources. A strategy that aligns process, technology and business service delivery is critical to the future returns on the initiative.

During the course of IT’s mere fifty years of evolving operational models nothing has accelerated, and to varying degrees disrupted the norms of a CIO’s domain, like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS etc.

Cloud computing changes the IT planning approach, impacts staff, changes costing models, simplifies delivery and visibility of SLAs, and adds new dimensions to operational accountability and governance.

In my CIO days, the move to client server appeared to be technically evolutionary.  Cloud, within the context of its potential impact on business is deserving of “business change agent.”

BMC CLM gives …

The future of customer relationships depends more on context than transactions.   

And this trend is accelerating, driven by the integration of social media into customer relationship management (CRM), rapid gains in usability of CRM and integration applications, and the global growth of the API economy.

Gaining a clear, contextually-based view of customers isn’t easy.

Fine-tuning system integration to understand the nuances of customers, gain greater insights and infusing customer intelligence through a company requires more than APIs and cloud platform integration. 

It requires a precise strategy of integration to align customer data to ongoing strategies.

The bottom line is that customer-driven integration is reshaping CRM and will accelerate as cloud platforms, combined with APIs, reorder the customer relationship landscape.

To gain greater insights into what’s going on in the area of cloud-based CRM integration and the impact of the API economy, I recently spoke with Lou Guercia, President …

The Cabinet Office’s third iteration of the G-Cloud framework not only added an extra 368 suppliers to its CloudStore, but it raised a few eyebrows over the exclusion of one notable bidder – Amazon!

The company made no secret of its desire for inclusion during the G-Cloud’s second iteration, touting that it was looking to get involved with the G-Cloud in the future.  And, the reasoning for its previous exclusion was widely attributed to its lack of a UK-based data centre, along with an absence of assurances over whether data would be backed up across the Atlantic.

So, while the cloud is set to change everything, some things will probably always remain the same.  Our protective nature over our own data and who can touch it might just be one of those things that will never change. 

Governments and public sector bodies fall into a rather unique category of …

LogMeIn’s Xively is ready to connect “The Internet of Things” as a brand new PaaS (platform as a service) offering APIs for interacting with real world objects, along with real-time messaging thrown into the mix for good measure.

The cloud-based service originates from Cosm, the IoT (Internet of Things) platform by Pachube, which LogMeIn purchased back in July 2011.

LogMeIn secured another huge partner for this venture, ARM, whose technology forms the basis of many popular devices including the iPhone. Offering the first development kit for Xively, known as the “Xively Jumpstart Kit,” this will get any budding developer on the platform going.

Included in the kit is a Cortex-M3 processor, USB connector, Ethernet port, flash storage, and application board. Interest from ARM is quite a clear sign of the potential Xively has, and the future of the “Internet of Things” it provisions.

The Internet of Things is an …

Online collaboration has evolved during the last decade, delivering even greater value – thanks to a new generation of business technology applications.

Forbes Insights released «Collaborating in the Cloud,» a Cisco-sponsored study examining the ways business leaders increasingly look at cloud collaboration as a way to increase productivity, accelerate business results and enhance innovation across borders and functions.

The research combines a global survey of more than 500 executives with 15 executive interviews.

«The ability to collaborate in the cloud is becoming a key driver of competitive advantage,» says Bruce Rogers, Chief Insights Officer of Forbes Media. «Leading companies are doing more to foster cloud-based collaboration – not only internally, but also with an ever-wider swath of external groups including customers, suppliers, partners, and even regulators.»

The benefits of cloud-based collaboration, Rogers continues, include «greater efficiency, organizational dexterity, and innovation,» to name only a few.

Key findings from the market study include …

Among the hive of activity at Google I/O, one of the search giant’s more interesting announcements has come in the form of a general release of Google Compute Engine (GCE), giving developers increased access to Google infrastructure.

Google’s latest push is a further move into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, and culminates in the Silicon Valley company finding itself jockeying for position in a three horse race alongside Amazon and Microsoft.

Last month Microsoft ramped up its IaaS portfolio with the release of Infrastructure Services, enabling Windows Azure customers to migrate apps into the cloud, pricing it in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon, in comparison, announced later that week that its S3 cloud had broken the two trillion object mark – in other words, 20 objects for every person ever born on planet Earth.

So Google’s announcement was hotly anticipated. Yet anyone …