Microsoft has stepped up its cloud push by releasing Windows Azure Infrastructure Services this week, and pricing it in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Infrastructure Services is designed to help Windows Azure customers migrate their applications into the cloud, and, as the title suggests, it is primarily an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution – although it encompasses both platform as a service (PaaS) and hybrid scenarios.

“Our announcement today is a significant step in our cloud computing strategy, which has been influenced directly by our discussions with customers and partners around the world,” Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Azure, wrote in an Azure blog.

Microsoft’s cloud agenda has been evident for some time, with CloudTech previously reporting on the tech giant’s set at Convergence 2013, whereby hotly anticipated releases such as Exchange Server, Lync and Dynamics CRM continue to emphasise the roadmap for a cloud …

The promise of cloud computing as a way to reduce costs, manage expansion and make the creation of new services easier is very real, but we’re still in the early days of adoption.

Organisations and governments are still largely digesting what they’ve heard, sifting through the benefits, and weighing up the “fear, uncertainty and doubt” concerning its impact on businesses and services.

What is true and very real is the impact it’s having on how services are being created and how seriously corporate IT is taking it.

For those wanting to build the next Facebook it’s a no-brainer. Pinterest, the fanatically followed online pin board is the fastest growing site in history, (17m users in just 9 months), and to date it’s pure cloud.

However, for the corporate IT manager there’s the issue of trust to be addressed. The goal is alluring; moving infrastructure …

A whitepaper from Melbourne’s Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) has cast doubt on traditional thinking regarding the energy consumption of cloud computing.

“Previous analysis and industry focus has missed the point,” blistered the Power of Wireless Cloud report to open its executive summary. “Access networks, not data centres, are the biggest threat to the sustainability of cloud services.”

As straight to the point as this is, what are the underlying reasons behind this summation?

According to the researchers, the wireless infrastructure is a more fundamental part of the cloudy ecosystem, with data centres just a part of a larger space. “Wireless cloud is a surging sector with implications that cannot be ignored,” the report notes.

This certainly raises an interesting point, and the statistics provided by CEET unsurprisingly bear this out.

Wireless access network technologies account for 90% of total wireless cloud energy consumption, with data centres only …

Excel is not a CRM!

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a major player in helping manage a company’s interactions with current and prospective customers.

Using technology to organise, automate, and synchronise sales, marketing, customer service and technical support can seem daunting, which leads to many professionals using excel as a CRM system. 

However daunting it may seem, the CRM software market is healthy and growing, which means your competitors are likely using a CRM system.

Analyst firm Forrester predicts the CRM software market will reach more than $15 billion by 2014, nearly double what it was in 2007. The CRM market totaled about $11 billion in 2012.

The reason for the growth? Companies are placing an emphasis on driving growth by attracting new customers and selling more to existing customers. Is your business keeping pace?

If your sales representatives are creating Excel spreadsheets that contain customer contacts and …

By Ian Moyse – Sales Director, www.workbooks.com 

Eurocloud UK Board Member & Cloud Industry Forum Governance Board Member

“We change our behaviour when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change”. – Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

The need for change and acceptance of the fact that your status quo for business may be no longer has never been truer.  I have been speaking on the effect of the cloud (internet based service and supply) for the past eight years and in the past two have provided much comment on the visible effects we had and are seeing.

Before commenting on why IT supply chains have to adapt and why now is the time to take action I would like to draw context from other sectors and the customer experience they deliver that is causing …

Looking beyond HIPAA, SOX or PCI-DSS compliance claims

The scary part about shopping for a cloud solution is that even if the managed services provider claims compliance, this doesn’t mean that they actually are compliant.

In fact, the provider may not even realise they are being misleading. Because regulatory compliance is too often left open to interpretation, your definition of HIPAA, SOX or PCI-DSS compliance might be different than your cloud provider’s.   

This gap becomes even more critical as today’s information technology environments are being asked to house an expanding library of personal, private and sensitive data.

Whether you are aware of it or not, new regulations and industry standards are seemingly being created every day, meaning that your cloud provider may play a critical role in your regulatory auditing process. 

The trick then becomes finding a provider who does more than offer the mere promise of …

By Andi Mann, Vice President, Strategic Solutions at CA

Cloud computing, mobility, and the Internet of Things are leading us towards a more technology-driven world. In my last blog, I wrote about how the Internet of Things will change our everyday lives, but with these new technologies comes new risks to the organization.

To understand how recent trends are shifting security, let’s revisit the golden age of hacking movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s. A recent post by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic sums up this era of Hollywood hackers by saying that “the mainframe was unhackable unless [the hackers] were in the room, in which case, it was simple.”

That’s not far off from how IT security was structured in those years. Enterprises secured data by keeping everything inside a corporate firewall and only granting accessed to employees within the perimeter. Typically, the perimeter extended as far …

Relying on cloud computing strategies to free up dollars and time that can quickly be re-invested in product and service innovation emerged as the highest priority for respondents in a recent Rackspace survey.

While cost reductions were significant, the greatest contributions were seen in investments in innovation (48%), new product & service development (45%), and boosting sale efforts (38%).

Rackspace recently commissioned a study with market research firm Vanson Bourne, who surveyed 1,300 organizations in the UK and the U.S., including 1,000 Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) and 300 enterprises with 1,000 employees or more.  The methodology included coverage of Financial Services, Retail, IT/Technology, Manufacturing, Business and Professional Services, Media, Logistics, and Mobile Telecommunications sectors, with a further small representative group from other sectors. 

Rackspace also partners often with the Manchester Business School to complete qualitative research, which they also did on this project.  You can find …

By Adrian Thirkill, Easynet UK MD

Dust off the bunting and hang the flags out: global IT spending is forecast to increase by 4.1% in 2013  according to Gartner’s latest worldwide IT spending forecast published in March.

This is great news, but when considered within the still-quaking economy it also comes with a caution: it’s more important than ever to make carefully-planned IT investments which add value to a business and create a Return on Investment in a defined time period. Now is not the time for IT Supermarket Sweeps, or for keeping up with the Jones’. 

Unified Communications (UC) is one particular investment which brings about an improved way of working with immediate, tangible business benefits. When securing board buy-in, a commitment to how quickly companies can see a Return on Investment (ROI) from its rollout is often one of the deciding factors.  

To make the …

Half of those polled in the latest cloudy survey have said they will “definitely” look to expand their data centres in the coming year, with the vast majority of remaining respondents claiming they will expand in 2014.

The survey, commissioned by data bods Digital Realty Trust and conducted by Campos Research and Analysis, spoke to 300 IT execs and concluded that this explosion in data centre usage was primarily down to the proliferation of private clouds.

Three in five (61%) cited an internal cloud as an “extremely important reason” for expansion, with the main data centre driver being security (67%).

Other interesting drivers noted in the top 10 were disaster recovery (62%), new apps and services (61%) and virtualisation (57%).

The most popular place to build a new data centre is New York, according to the research, with 65% of those surveyed citing the most interest in the Big Apple …