When it comes to issues of capacity planning, many IT groups find themselves playing a guessing game. You can look at what you have today and try to extrapolate where you’ll be in six months or a year, but the fact is you just don’t have all of the necessary data. You can’t predict what various business units will decide to do next, and how that will impact your resources.
Cloud computing solutions have mitigated the problem to some degree. They offer the kinds of flexibility and scalability your organization needs. Yet, you still need to be able to know how much you’re going to use in terms of cloud resources. You still need to do capacity management and planning.

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It has been reported that cloud computing is quickly emerging as one of China’s fastest growing industries. The annual rate of growth has been calculated at 40%.

The nation currently accounts for less than 3% of the global cloud computing market share as it was valued at $90 billion in 2011, however with such a rapid growth this is sure to increase.

It has been estimated that China’s cloud computing market is estimated to grow from about 16.7 billion CNY (£1.67 billion) in 2010 to 117.4 billion CNY (£11.7 billion) in 2013, with a compound annual rate of growth of 91.5%.

This represents a staggeringly fast rate of growth in just a few years. Furthermore, by 2015, the Internet Society of China predicts that the Chinese cloud computing market will be worth 1 trillion CNY.

The majority of this growth is to be …

According to a recent survey from CA, 55% percent of US businesses expect to increase usage of the cloud to meet business continuity objectives. According to the study, all of the 300 businesses surveyed experienced some type of data loss event in the past year and the vast majority admit their data was inadequately protected.
While backing up data regularly is a key part of mitigating data loss, many organizations choose to replicate their data in real-time to a secondary location to reduce the window for data loss beyond just daily backups. With real-time data replication, organizations can achieving lower recovery point objectives (RPOs) that with backup alone.

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Gladinet has been working on the Mac client project since the iPhone/iPad client release. It is a natural development extension to the iPhone/iPad project since they both require a Mac to develop and share a lot of the same Apple design patterns. It also shares a lot with the Gladinet Cloud Desktop PC client. Now the Gladinet Cloud Mac Client was released.
It adds a virtual drive to your Mac Finder under the DEVICES section. You can drag and drop files and folders to and from the virtual drive. You can also use local application to save and load files from the cloud directly.
Log in to your Gladinet Cloud Premium or Team Edition account, under the “Desktop Client” section, you will see the Gladinet Cloud Desktop (Mac OS X) entry. You can click to download the installer package.

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There are plenty of metrics to show how big cloud is today, yet this infographic from CloudLock previews how much cloud is going to grow in terms of documents and sites.

Research from Gartner goes through the reasons businesses and users migrate their services to the cloud.

While the cloud is more agile, creative and economical than on-site, the research shows that trust and risk is still an issue.

So, can we trust the cloud?

Edison is believed to have said “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”, and nine out of ten times “implementation trumps innovation” when it comes to achieving commercial success, but is it just me, or has the well of new ideas around cloud computing run a bit dry recently?

Big Data is rapidly gaining ground on cloud computing when it comes to search popularity on gartner.com. And SDN (Software Defined Networking) may be flavour of the month in cloud blogs, but although there is a succinct impact on cloud computing, this is really more a networking idea.

Now of course,  cloud computing is only one force – and mainly an enabling one – in the nexus of cloud, information, social and mobile, but when monitoring the various publicly available industry news feeds, I get a bit of a Groundhog Day (the movie) feeling.

You might even say we have taken a …

A popular application that you can source from your Cloud provider is Microsoft Sharepoint, which you can also of course obtain from Office 365.
The key way to approach these tools is with ‘Social Computing’ in mind, simply meaning the use of social media web sites, like those of Facebook or Linkedin, for your own corporate purposes.
These are faster and more popular than any other IT tool and so can greatly improve internal staff collaboration and productivity, that overall can be described as ‘Agile Cloud Working‘ best practices.

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Since Google, Motorola Mobility and Samsung have gone and put the spotlight back on unreasonable licensing demands, it’s at least timely that Europe’s second-highest court, the General Court, is going to decide on June 27 whether a Microsoft appeal has any merit.
Back in 2008, the European Commission fined Microsoft $1.14 billion (€899 million) ostensibly for not complying with a 2004 antitrust decision, the first time it ever did such a thing.
What it was really all about was Microsoft asking too much for patent licenses and interface documentation to connect Linux servers to Windows although the EC offered Microsoft no pricing guidelines even when asked.

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