By Adrian Thirkill, managing director, Easynet Global Services UK

Five years ago, you couldn’t move for ‘green’ claims from businesses. In a rush to become the first businesses to go carbon neutral, hoards of companies offset air miles, replanted forests, and invested in wind farms. “We turn our lights off at night!” they whooped. “We put monitors on automatic standby!” they gushed.  

All admirable and well-intentioned.  But there’s a worrying hint of tumbleweed as environmental policies move to the archives, and environmental commitments fall from the board agenda.  

The impact of climate change upon our lives isn’t lessening.  It would be glib for me to refer to the recent winter of floods as proof, but the IPCC detailed the likely impact of average temperature increases of 2 degrees or more, and it makes sobering reading.  Already, it says, climate change is negatively affecting food supplies, marine ecosystems …

If you work within IT and your resume is missing the word “cloud”, you are mostly likely lagging behind your competition in the job market. When openings for seasoned IT professionals come about, you should expect the other applicants to be aggressive, educated and ready to talk about cloud. It is the one specific word could set your resume apart from others applying for the position you desire.

Since IT services seemingly are becoming more cloud oriented, it is becoming imperative to become a cloud guru in some specific discipline in order to be taken seriously as a candidate for an IT position.

In a job interview, the first thing someone will do is print out your resume, begin highlighting it, circling and asking you about specific tasks you have performed in the past. Since cloud is becoming an integral part in today’s technological world, you can expect the …

An independent study from analyst house IDC has revealed that IBM is the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendor of choice for US enterprise buyers, well ahead of rivals Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services.

Of the three competitors, only Google made the top five vendors, with Cisco, HP and AT&T all ahead. IBM was one of ‘the top three vendors that [respondents] believe can provide infrastructure as a service for private and/or public, most effectively’ according to 35% of respondents. Cisco came in at just under 30%, while the remaining vendors had less than one fifth of the vote – Microsoft and Google scored approximately 16% while Amazon languished at 13%.

The overall market share, according to the more than 400 respondents at US enterprises with over 1000 employees, can be seen below:

David Tapper, VP at IDC and author of the report, said he wanted to understand …

Open cloud provider Rackspace has announced healthy first quarter results, with CEO Graham Weston telling investors that his company will continue to differentiate from the price slashing of AWS, Google and Microsoft.

For the quarter ending March 31, Rackspace posted a net revenue figure of $421m, up from $408m at the end of Q413 and representing a 16% year on year increase.

Income fell year on year from $27.2m to $25.4m, but Q114 figures represented a boost from the fourth quarter trough of $20.8m income – a percentage increase of 22% per quarter. Adjusted EBIDTA also went up from Q413, $140m representing a 5.8% spike.

Looking at the nuts and bolts, Rackspace added 2343 servers in the first quarter of 2014, and gained 92 new employees.

It was a pretty good showing, with Reuters reporting that Rackspace shares rose by up to 12% after the bell trading …

One third of cloud services was vulnerable to the debilitating Heartbleed virus, it has been revealed.

The findings were posted in a research paper from cloud security provider Skyhigh Networks’ Cloud Adoption & Risk report, and found that 1,173 cloud services from the 3,571 in use had left data exposed by Heartbleed when the bug first broke.

Skyhigh reports that the number of vulnerable services was less than 1% a week later following cloud providers stepping in to address the breach. However there was still plenty of scaremongering in the report, with only 7% of services rated with enterprise-grade security. 16% provided multi-factor authentication, whilst only 11% encrypt data at rest. Interestingly, the number of enterprise-ready services went down from last quarter’s 11%.

Despite this, the use of cloud services is growing at a rapid rate. The current number of 3,571 is significantly up on 2,675 …

Around 300,000 General Electric employees are going to be using Box as a standard for content sharing and collaboration, the cloud storage provider has announced.

Following the rumours that Box was to delay its much-vaunted IPO, this client win comes as timely news for Aaron Levie and company.

Levie wrote in a blog post that he was “incredibly excited” to be partnering with “one of the most tech-centric companies of the Fortune 500.”

“While GE has a long history of technology-driven innovation, few enterprises of its scale have reinvented themselves by putting information technology at the centre of their competitive strategy,” he wrote.

He added: “Under [CEO] Jeff Immelt, we’ve seen this manifest in GE’s corporate strategy with the industrial internet, bringing intelligent data to industrial machines and processes; GE is applying that same creativity to empowering its global workforce with better access to information and tools …

By David Linthicum

Governance is a loaded term.  In the old days of enterprise architecture, it meant the ability to yell at staffers who used the wrong operating systems and databases, thus enterprise architecture was more of a management concept.  These days, with the emergence of cloud computing, enterprise architecture is how we control, manage, and secure cloud resources and services.

Public clouds typically don’t exist on their own.  They have to work and play well with existing or even new systems that reside on other compute models, such as co-location or managed services providers (MSPs).  As a consultant, I find that larger organizations have several brands of public and private clouds, as well as an existing MSP, or, the enterprise will use an MSP in the near future.

This is called multi-cloud, and it drives the need for better governance approaches and technology.  A recent CompTIA survey reveals …

By David Linthicum

Governance is a loaded term.  In the old days of enterprise architecture, it meant the ability to yell at staffers who used the wrong operating systems and databases, thus enterprise architecture was more of a management concept.  These days, with the emergence of cloud computing, enterprise architecture is how we control, manage, and secure cloud resources and services.

Public clouds typically don’t exist on their own.  They have to work and play well with existing or even new systems that reside on other compute models, such as co-location or managed services providers (MSPs).  As a consultant, I find that larger organizations have several brands of public and private clouds, as well as an existing MSP, or, the enterprise will use an MSP in the near future.

This is called multi-cloud, and it drives the need for better governance approaches and technology.  A recent CompTIA survey reveals …

When Box filed its long-awaited paperwork to become a public company, it set off discussions about the financial health of the company, and the long-term viability of its business model.

At issue was how much money Box spends- particularly on sales and marketing – compared to its revenue. People began to wonder whether the founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, was a quack or a modern-day genius.

Let me be clear: he’s a genius, and he’s not the only one.

It’s crazy to me that 10 years after the IPO of Salesforce.com as the first public software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, Wall Street still doesn’t seem to understand the subscription – or recurring revenue – business model. The software industry has been on an inevitable path to subscriptions since 1999, when Salesforce was founded.

Yet the recent decline in demand for cloud software technology stocks, causing Box to potentially delay its …

When Box filed its long-awaited paperwork to become a public company, it set off discussions about the financial health of the company, and the long-term viability of its business model.

At issue was how much money Box spends- particularly on sales and marketing – compared to its revenue. People began to wonder whether the founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, was a quack or a modern-day genius.

Let me be clear: he’s a genius, and he’s not the only one.

It’s crazy to me that 10 years after the IPO of Salesforce.com as the first public software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, Wall Street still doesn’t seem to understand the subscription – or recurring revenue – business model. The software industry has been on an inevitable path to subscriptions since 1999, when Salesforce was founded.

Yet the recent decline in demand for cloud software technology stocks, causing Box to potentially delay its …