“We have moved on from hosting to managed hosting to managed cloud hosting. We build and operate high performance clouds for business-critical applications,” explained Mike Donaldson, CMO of HOSTING, stated, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
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SYS-CON.tv Interview: Riding the Cloud Wave
“Quantum is transitioning its business from being a predominantly hardware-based, on-premise data protection provider into a cloud-based managed service provider,” explained Henrik Rosendahl, Senior Vice President of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, stated, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
AWS Cuts Prices on Dedicated Instances
On Wednesday Amazon Web Services cut prices on its EC2 Dedicated Instances pushing back the effective date to July 1.
By its count it’s the 37th price reduction on AWS services since the infrastructure cloud’s initial launch in 2006.
Dedicated Instances have only been around since 2011 and run on hardware dedicated to a single customer account touted as good for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations dictate physical isolation from instances run by other customers at the host hardware level.
The price reduction applies to both the dedicated per-region fee and the per-instance On-Demand and Reserved Instance fees across all supported instance types and all AWS Regions.
How Cloud-Based SIEM Frees That One Hand Tied Behind Your Back
For many companies with whom I talk, there isn’t a lack of IT talent when it comes to security–just a lack of hours in the day, computing resources and necessary headcount with specific expertise to change the culture from reactive to proactive and strategic risk management. Executives simply expect IT security to do more with less.
But the ability to recruit and retain security experts is an issue in itself. At the MSPAlliance meeting this week in Orlando, it was reported that the unemployment rate for such professionals is less than 1%. The salary for these specialists has doubled in the past three years. No wonder there is a critical shortage to feed this growing monster. And executives are still wary to spend budget on security line items-including staffing. It is still regarded (mistakenly, I might add) as a cost center.
The “Invisible Hand” Accelerating Cloud Adoption
With the C-suite, innovators, developers and IT all pushing for the cloud, albeit for different reasons, there is no doubt that cloud computing is the next or fifth wave.
As the cloud computing market continues to mature, explaining the platform shift gets easier and more succinct. There are a wide variety of benefits to this next wave of computing, each resonating in shape, tone and strength depending on the listener’s role in an organization.
C-level and financial people like the economic drivers of the cloud. Limiting capital investment by converting CAPEX to OPEX; paying for what the business needs with scalable, success-based pricing; and enabling efficient use of limited internal resources. These are a few of the benefits that strike a chord with this part of the organization.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Cloud Computing and Healthcare
“Health care has so much on its plate, whether it’s regulatory or technology. We really believe that health care will jump the other industries in its adoption,” stated Frank Nydam, Director of Healthcare Solutions, Office of the CTO, at VMware, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Will Outsourcing Cloud Impact Your Bottom Line?
Making it rain for your organization with the cloud can be achieved a few different ways.
Cloud computing has many benefits, one of which can be accessed through the model of delivery a business uses. Let us know what model works for your business and why on Twitter @CloudGathering.
There are good reasons to outsource your cloud computing needs, and there are good reasons to maintain a DIY cloud internally. One of the very first things a company needs to assess is whether IT is a cost of doing business or a profit center. This is an important distinction, and for 60%+ businesses, IT is still a cost of doing business.
Whether a cost or profit center, the IT dept. is going to have two kinds of expenses: operational and capital. With capital expenses, Finance depts. will depreciate IT assets, an accounting treatment that reduces the company’s tax burdens by creating a non-cash expense for the technology.
For this reason, clients looking at installing new systems may prefer to buy the technology in order to access depreciation benefits. However, with the advantages of depreciation come some notable downsides, including:
- Requiring capital budgeting, which could delay purchases and/or make purchasing approvals more difficult
- Restricting infrastructure flexibility (If you spec something incorrectly, need more capacity, need to change a setup, etc. you have to go buy more equipment….that requires more capital budget. It is easy to end up way over budget and in hot water.)
- Lifecycling equipment every 3-5 years
- Accurately forecasting costs for customer-owned equipment is notoriously difficult: Forecasts must include colo, power, cooling, the humans to manage the gear, software/license upgrades, add-on technologies required to achieve the use case.
One very good reason to move to an outsourced, managed cloud is the benefit of moving from a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure. Particularly if IT is a cost center, shifting to Opex can more closely tie costs of doing business in IT to your actual projected revenues. Some Opex advantages include:
- No requirement for capital budgeting approvals, making expenditure more easily managed internally
- Highly predictable- low likelihood of exceeding budget
- No equipment lifecycles required
- High infrastructure flexibility
There is another major consideration in the decision to outsource IT infrastructure and services: Some cloud hosting providers and managed service providers can structure service contracts like a capital lease, allowing you to enjoy the best of both worlds. In this scenario, your Finance Department treats the service contract as if it were a capital asset, allowing for depreciation of the IT infrastructure, so you can access the advantages of depreciation while retaining the managed services and the other benefits of the shift to an OpEx model.
As we’ve discussed previously, this shift to an outsourced model can also increase your organization’s ability to access new innovation and shift internal focuses away from IT upkeep. Ultimately it comes down to how the financial requirements of the organization impact how IT lays out its technology acquisition vs. vendor strategy.
Agree/disagree? Let us know on Twitter @CloudGathering.
—
By Jake Gardner
Will Outsourcing Cloud Impact Your Bottom Line?
Making it rain for your organization with the cloud can be achieved a few different ways.
Cloud computing has many benefits, one of which can be accessed through the model of delivery a business uses. Let us know what model works for your business and why on Twitter @CloudGathering.
There are good reasons to outsource your cloud computing needs, and there are good reasons to maintain a DIY cloud internally. One of the very first things a company needs to assess is whether IT is a cost of doing business or a profit center. This is an important distinction, and for 60%+ businesses, IT is still a cost of doing business.
Whether a cost or profit center, the IT dept. is going to have two kinds of expenses: operational and capital. With capital expenses, Finance depts. will depreciate IT assets, an accounting treatment that reduces the company’s tax burdens by creating a non-cash expense for the technology.
For this reason, clients looking at installing new systems may prefer to buy the technology in order to access depreciation benefits. However, with the advantages of depreciation come some notable downsides, including:
- Requiring capital budgeting, which could delay purchases and/or make purchasing approvals more difficult
- Restricting infrastructure flexibility (If you spec something incorrectly, need more capacity, need to change a setup, etc. you have to go buy more equipment….that requires more capital budget. It is easy to end up way over budget and in hot water.)
- Lifecycling equipment every 3-5 years
- Accurately forecasting costs for customer-owned equipment is notoriously difficult: Forecasts must include colo, power, cooling, the humans to manage the gear, software/license upgrades, add-on technologies required to achieve the use case.
One very good reason to move to an outsourced, managed cloud is the benefit of moving from a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure. Particularly if IT is a cost center, shifting to Opex can more closely tie costs of doing business in IT to your actual projected revenues. Some Opex advantages include:
- No requirement for capital budgeting approvals, making expenditure more easily managed internally
- Highly predictable- low likelihood of exceeding budget
- No equipment lifecycles required
- High infrastructure flexibility
There is another major consideration in the decision to outsource IT infrastructure and services: Some cloud hosting providers and managed service providers can structure service contracts like a capital lease, allowing you to enjoy the best of both worlds. In this scenario, your Finance Department treats the service contract as if it were a capital asset, allowing for depreciation of the IT infrastructure, so you can access the advantages of depreciation while retaining the managed services and the other benefits of the shift to an OpEx model.
As we’ve discussed previously, this shift to an outsourced model can also increase your organization’s ability to access new innovation and shift internal focuses away from IT upkeep. Ultimately it comes down to how the financial requirements of the organization impact how IT lays out its technology acquisition vs. vendor strategy.
Agree/disagree? Let us know on Twitter @CloudGathering.
—
By Jake Gardner
Rackspace To Build a Cloud for CERN
CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics famous for chasing after the so-called God Particle these days, has tapped Rackspace to help it build a hybrid cloud computing system so capacity can be brought to bear on big workloads as needed.
Rackspace To Build a Cloud for CERN
CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics famous for chasing after the so-called God Particle these days, has tapped Rackspace to help it build a hybrid cloud computing system so capacity can be brought to bear on big workloads as needed.