The use of cloud technology by corporations has mushroomed in recent years. As the concept of cloud has gained greater acceptance at a consumer level, companies have increasingly recognised the benefits that cloud-based systems can bring to their businesses.

As a result, many have moved away from technology which is installed in-house and instead have adopted systems like Salesforce.com for customer relationship management and NetSuite for ERP.

Yet while the use of cloud technology has become mainstream elsewhere in the corporate environment, the areas of finance and treasury have tended to lag behind. All too often the CFO is the last person in the organisation to take their technology into the cloud.

Barriers to adoption

With cloud technology becoming a mainstream option for other corporate functions, why are CFOs holding back?

For one thing, they tend to be more risk averse than their peers across the organisation. The CFO …

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, IT, Asia-Pacific

We believe it is time for governments to elevate their policy thinking about cloud services to confront their ICT strategy conundrum. They must address increasing fiscal constraints and disappointment with existing approaches to boosting ICT productivity with an approach that enables cross-agency sharing.

Mature enterprise cloud services are “capitalist economy” shared services that work. Cloud services break the cycle of agency investment in dedicated ICT solutions that are difficult or impossible to share. In contrast, each procurement of cloud services incrementally develops the capacity of the vendor to offer the same service to other agencies.

A policy position of “cloud services first” is a strategic commitment by government to the development of the next generation of shared services.

Let’s get realistic about government’s ICT strategy conundrum

Ovum believes it is time for government policy executives to start considering a more visionary …

Many broadcast experts believe that live sports and news programming have driven much of the broadcast production innovation we see today. The demand for high-quality, low latency video delivered at maximum speed, accelerated ongoing advancements in digital workflows enjoyed by many broadcast sectors.

Now the sheer volume of content – thanks to the wide array of newer digital outlets – in new and more complex formats, is increasing requirements and straining broadcasters’ network capacities and resources. In short, data has never been so large, complex and challenging to transport, store and manage effectively. 

For the past several years, cloud computing has been like a carrot dangling just beyond reach: promising to dramatically improve the transport and management of large amounts of data while streamlining workflows and increasing collaboration but not quite delivering.

The virtually unlimited, on-demand increases in transfer, storage, compute and bandwidth that the cloud could enable, plus the clear cost …

Enterprise security can be a labyrinthine, complex beast with many moving parts, dozen upon dozen of requirements, needs, implications, options and alternatives.

But when we get down to the nitty gritty (the brass tacks if you will), security can be simplified by six simple questions:

WHO is logging in?

WHAT are they accessing/viewing?

WHERE is the device from which that person logs in?

WHEN was any asset changed/modified/moved

HOW are they authorised/credentialed?

WHAT is the impact of the event?

Now determining the answers to those questions might require a bit of coordination, but in terms of initiative and priority, it is the answers to the above questions that must drive any enterprise security initiative.

The concept of enterprise security is simple. Allow those who you want to see and access data in, and everyone else out. Of course the addendum to that is those that are …

Andrew Kellett, Principal Analyst, Infrastructure and Security

Maintaining security that meets the risk and compliance requirements of the enterprise is a constant challenge. Systems and networks are becoming more open and accessible, but at the same time, threats have become more advanced, persistent, and complex. This is a particularly important issue in highly regulated markets such as financial services, where failure to protect sensitive information will have a negative effect on the business and how it is regarded by customers, trading partners, and regulators.

Keeping business organizations safe is harder than it used to be for several reasons. These mostly relate to the well-worn arguments that malware is becoming more difficult to detect, attack volumes and their intensity are growing, and the effectiveness of traditional security products is in decline. There is a predominant requirement to more actively prepare organizations to deal with security threats, to provide proactive approaches to …

The International Data Center (IDC) has released a report which reveals that Microsoft remains the largest software vendor globally through 2012 revenues and overall market share.

Figures from the Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker put the Washington-based tech giant at a 17.1% market share, lower than its 2011 figure of 17.4% but still nearly twice as far ahead as its nearest competitors, IBM and Oracle.

IBM has an 8.5% market share, compared to Oracle’s 8.1%, with SAP and Symantec comprising the top five.

Elsewhere, the report provided further evidence that cloud computing is at the epicentre of enterprise growth.

For many cloud-based segments, including data access, CRM applications and security software, their growth rate was double the rate for enterprise software overall.

Yet the overall growth in the software market for 2012 was at 3.6%, less than half the overall growth of 2010 and 2011 …

What’s the best way to put the kibosh on your competitor’s latest key cloud release?

Make a statement loaded with braggadocio yourself, as Amazon has done by announcing that two trillion (2 x 10¹²) objects are now stored on its S3 cloud – a turnaround of 1.1m requests per second.

Microsoft, of course, launched Windows Azure Infrastructure Services earlier this week, and knocked off the price of compute, storage and bandwidth between 21% and 33% in a bid for direct competition with Amazon Web Services.

As a result this latest update, in a blog post from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr, becomes even more interesting.

Amazon hit one trillion objects in S3 back in June last year, with each object in the cloud ranging from zero to 5 TB in size.

“It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year …

An open cloud must have freely accessible, open application programming interfaces (APIs), the freedom to move data between providers at will and no on-site hardware requirement, according to Alex Williams writing at TechCrunch. 

And an open cloud is federated, meaning that your organization can move data, images and files across multiple cloud environments at will.

These factors make the cloud a perfect platform for storage solutions, especially open-source storage solutions. The cost savings of open-source software and the cost efficiencies of cloud storage software create a «perfect storm» for organizations, bringing greater cost savings, better security, higher quality software and the ability for businesses to avoid vendor «lock-in,» according to Williams.

Whether you’re a corporation, a service provider, a research lab, a university, a major enterprise, a midsized business or an SMB, adopting an open source storage solution and leveraging the support of a global open source community is …

A survey of over 800 US-based IT decision makers from Virtustream in conjunction with independent cloud research firm Neovise has revealed that over half of US enterprise are using cloud computing in one form or another.

54% of those surveyed said they were in the cloud, which certainly indicates an uptake in US adoption. Of that number, three quarters said they used public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds, with 70% using private on-premise IaaS and 65% using private off-premise IaaS clouds.

The main takeaway from the research however centred on the increasing use of hybrid clouds, combining both private and public functionality.

Most notably, larger organisations are more likely to use hybrid clouds. 86% of those surveyed with more than 1000 employees used hybrid clouds, compared to the 59% with fewer than 1000 workers.

In terms of hybrid cloud preferences, there were three scenarios that respondents wanted to see …

Brian Riggs, Principal Analyst, Enterprise

Through 2013 Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALU-E) will roll out a set of solutions on which its partners can offer a range of hosted unified communications (UC) services. The company’s strategy is different to those of its competitors in that it will deliver separate solutions for enterprises and SMBs, as well as a set of application services.

These will be offered to operators, and also sold to value-added resellers and distributors that want to compete not only against telcos’ managed services but hosted services as well.

ALU-E’s hosted UC platform for enterprise-grade services became available earlier this year, with a handful of partners offering services based on it. The SMB platform and application service are in a less mature state; both are still in development, and no service provider partners are associated with them as yet. ALU-E is in a similar position to Avaya, which …