The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has published an opinion piece detailing opposition to the well documented European Union (EU) computing initiative.

The EU’s cloud strategy, ‘Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe’, announced in September featured two main takeaways; a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2010, and a net gain of 2.5m jobs.

Sounds good on first glance, but the EESC’s opinion – carried by 158 votes to two in a plenary held on January 16 and 17 – disagrees.

It’s not that the EESC is opposed to cloud computing in general – the committee agrees that it is “an opportunity for European growth and competitiveness” – more it suggests an alternative complementary vision to the European Commission’s original plan.

Nor is it that EESC is at odds with everything EU digital agenda VP Neelie Kroes lined out. The committee …

Cloud computing has touched many industries and is increasingly being adopted in many ways, from easily accessible data storage to business application solutions and reduction in hardware investment. The healthcare industry is no exception: here we outline some of the ways in which cloud computing can be of benefit in the future.

1. The secure storage of patient records

Doctors and medical staff are bound by oaths, especially with regards to patient confidentiality. Having secure cloud storage is therefore paramount.

The first generation of cloud computing had security issues, however now that these have been ironed out, the cloud is more secure than ever. In the US, hospitals must adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

2. Reducing the cost of data storage

Utilising the cloud can save the healthcare service a lot of money. Subscriptions can equate to approximately a 90% saving on hardware investments, especially when …

Guest blog by Dave King
Editor for Information Technology Advisor

The phenomenon that is “Big Data” is already having a huge impact on your organisation – only you might not have noticed it yet.

Big data is the accumulated data your organisation has collected and usually stored – structured and unstructured data such as text, sensor data, audio, video, click streams, log files, and more. Many companies are finding enormous value through analysing these various data sets against and with each other.

The evolution of the Internet and the influence of mobile devices, wireless networking, sensors, and social networks have changed operations and how businesses compete. But all these tech trends are bit players compared with Big Data.

While Big Data is the engine that’s driving companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, it’s relevant for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) too. Big Data has already had a significant impact …

Action for Children, one of Britain’s foremost charities has used a cloud hosting provider to create a hybrid cloud with which to support its website as well as applications, especially during peak surges in visitor numbers.

Action for Children’s Data Scientist, Darren Robertson explained how their data cloud arrangement worked.

Less sensitive data is kept with the cloud provider, whilst sensitive information (accounting for around 60% of total data) is kept separately on hard drives at the Action for Children HQ. The provider’s public cloud is used to host the website itself. This hybrid cloud arrangement also means that migrating the website is made much easier, should the need arise.

Robertson said that before using the cloud arrangement, hosting was done with their “web development agency, which was a shared environment of other charities.” This was problematic as it was expensive to change to a different agency …

A new research report from Symantec has warned against the use of ‘rogue’ clouds for best practice.

The survey, entitled ‘Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud’, spoke to IT execs at 3,236 organisations across nearly 30 countries worldwide and found that there was a link between using rogue clouds and losing confidential information, resulting in hidden costs.

A rogue cloud is one which is unauthorised, or as Symantec put it, “business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company’s IT infrastructure.”

In a related blog post, Symantec came up with four tips to ensure avoiding these cost traps:

• Focus cloud policies on information and people rather than technologies and platforms
• Educate, monitor and enforce policies
• Embrace platform-agnostic tools
• Remove all duplicate data in the cloud

The results of the survey showed that rogue clouds were an issue in three quarters of …

In 2013, IT buyers will be looking for increased stability and better ways to prepare for the next five years in their business cycle, according the the latest market study by Ovum.

«The fact that we live in very uncertain times makes investment decision-making even more difficult. With continuing instability across the global markets and even in locations with historically robust growth – such as China and India – the outlook for IT services in 2013 is unpredictable,» said Jens Butler, principal analyst, IT Services at Ovum.

Ovum believes that business leaders will be looking for greater reliability in their IT usage and – as a consequence – seeking stability, capability and accessibility among their external service providers.

Growing trend towards cloud applications

Moreover, Ovum has published three «Trends to Watch» reports on cloud computing – which reveals that 2013 will see managed cloud services continue to grow rapidly.

Their Private and Public Clouds report …

For many companies, getting their mobility strategies off the ground and successful is the highest priority project they have in 2013.  The urgency to get their sales and consulting teams equipped with smart phone and tablet-based applications is accelerating.

Pilot projects have shown mobility applications can shorten sales cycles and serve as a better sales training and management platform.

Serving the sales force with these technologies is paying off across a wide spectrum of industries.  It’s also changing corporate cultures, making them more responsive as well.

With these rapid advances going on and the prediction in December, 2012 by Mary Meeker that the installed base of smartphones and tablets will exceed the total PC installed base by the 2nd quarter of this year, market researchers are releasing forecasts more frequently than ever.  I’ve summarized the key forecasts below:

• Google’s Android operating system is dominating mobile operating systems …

By Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Information Management, Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Solutions, Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Information Management

The big data phenomenon presents a challenge for data management, a complex IT discipline that many organizations still struggle to deal with effectively today, even with their “small” data sets.

As data grows, so too does data uncertainty – and with it lowered quality and trust. IBM is in the process of extending its InfoSphere family of data integration and governance tooling, with a sharp focus on targeting the Hadoop framework.

However, technology is only part of the equation. While the end goal for managing and governing big data should be the same as that for traditional enterprise data – i.e. to provide the business with reliable data – the exact methods vary and continue to gel. IBM (and its customers) is still only a short way along the path of creating best practices …

The importance of cloud computing in the overall tech sphere has again been emphasised in a Gartner report surveying over 2,000 CIOs on their technology priorities for 2013.

Cloudy areas featured heavily in the top 10 priorities for CIOs, with cloud computing itself – alongside software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) ranked at number three.

Elsewhere, legacy modernisation – a big element of companies moving into cloud-hosted solutions – was ranked at five, with customer resource management (seven), virtualisation (eight) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) apps (10) also make the top 10.

Yet the two priorities ahead of cloud computing in the pecking order, analytics and BI (business intelligence) and mobile technologies, make for interesting reading as of course the areas are all inextricably linked.

Back in 2011, Louis Columbus wrote of how analytics and BI was accelerating cloud adoption, citing the …

By Kai Gray, VP of Operations at Carbonite

I feel like tectonic plates are shifting beneath the IT world. I’ve been struggling to put my finger on what it is that is making me feel this way, but slowly things have started to come into focus. These are my thoughts on how cloud computing has forever changed the economics of IT by shifting the balance of power.

The cloud has fundamentally changed business models; it has shifted time-to-market, entry points and who can do what. These byproducts of massive elasticity are wrapped up in an even greater evolutionary change that is occurring right now: The cloud is having a pronounced impact on the supply chain, which will amount to a tidal wave of changes in the near-term that will cause huge pain for some and spawn incredible innovation and wealth for others. As I see it, the cloud has …