The Society for Information Management (SIM) recently released findings from its annual CIO survey that indicate CIOs around the world plan to commit more of their budgets on IT outsourcing in 2013 to boost productivity and reduce costs. Not surprisingly, cloud computing was cited as a top application in 2012 and I expect that to be the case next year as well.
When I speak with CIOs and IT managers many are still surprised that Xerox has been a player in the business cloud for years. But as the world’s leading enterprise for business process and document management, we’ve always contended that the cloud is an integral piece of simplifying the way work gets done – offering on-demand technology that’s scalable, affordable and can be accessed anywhere, anytime.
Monthly Archives: November 2012
Cloud computing to remain high on the agenda in 2013
Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software
Cloud computing has emerged as a major disruptive force for both IT vendors and users. It is still very early days, and 2013 will see cloud computing continue to evolve rapidly as vendors and enterprises get to grips with the opportunities and challenges it represents. In the Ovum report, 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing, Ovum points out that cloud computing is an increasingly crucial IT and business enabler.
Enterprises are slowly coming to terms with it, and vendors are experiencing similar issues as those faced by enterprise users, only on a larger scale. In the meantime, apart from its roles as a user and regulator, the public sector is increasingly focusing on its economy-manager role, and many countries have ambitions to use cloud computing to boost the local economy as they continue to face economic difficulties.
A quick search on Google Trends reveals …
Cloud Migration Software Provides Easy On-Ramp to Rackspace Open Cloud
How are all those existing Rackspace cloud customers going to transition to the new Rackspace open cloud? Here is one answer.
Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, announced its cloud migration software now supports physical and virtual server migrations to Rackspace open cloud giving customers more flexibility and choices when it comes to migrating existing workloads to public cloud computing resources. This means it is no longer necessary to rebuild servers from scratch in the cloud, which translates to significant time and cost savings.
Both its Cloud Path software as a service and DynaCenter on-premises software can now migrate servers running supported operating systems to Rackspace open cloud server instances, based on OpenStack Compute.
Hurricane Sandy Uncovers Lack of Back-Up
Based on different reports of companies in New York still caught “off-guard” with their computer systems, it is hard to believe that corporate computer systems are down for some major companies – especially financial ones – and there are no redundant systems up-and-running.
What happened to adhering to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, where it clearly states you need to have both a back-up plan as well as redundant systems? Some IT executives should lose their jobs for poorly designed mission-critical information systems.
Did Your Cloud Get Blown Away?
It’s not Disaster Recovery 101, today it’s Business Continuity 101. There is a huge difference in how you design and configure your systems and network.
Note to all affected companies: If you experienced down-time in your systems, you have laid off the wrong people and kept the incompetents to manage your operations.
Disaster recovery is the old approach of “as the impending disaster looms, shut down all systems in an orderly fashion so that you can restore them in an orderly fashion when the disaster ends.” When the disaster is over, go back and restart all the systems to get the organization back up-and-running.
Cloudwashing the Cloud Brokerage
Since ZapThink wrote our ZapFlash on Cloud Brokerages in April 2011, the Cloud Brokerage marketplace has exploded. Or at the very least, the noise level involving such Brokerages has reached a fever pitch, which the vendors in the space want you to think is the sound of an exploding market anyway. Regardless of your level of cynicism, however, there’s no question that Cloud Brokerages are a hot topic. But as with so many new markets, confusion reigns—in large part because such Brokerages come in so many different flavors. That being said, this market also suffers from rampant Cloudwashing, which refers to vendors (and service providers) who stick the “Cloud” label on existing offerings to take advantage of the Cloud hype. Let’s see if we can separate the steak from the sizzle and delineate how Cloud Brokerages are actually supposed to work.
Open Call to VMware – Commercialize Cloud Foundry Software!
After spending time at VMware and Cloud Expo last week, I believe that VMware’s lack of full backing for Cloud Foundry software is holding back the entire PaaS market in the enterprise.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of momentum in PaaS despite how very immature the market is. But this momentum is in pockets and largely outside of the core of software development in the enterprise. CloudFoundry.com might be moving along, but most enterprises don’t want to run the bulk of their applications in a public cloud. Only through the Cloud Foundry software layer will enterprises really be able to invest. And invest they will.
PaaS-based applications running in the enterprise data center are going to replace (or envelope) traditional app server-based approaches. It is just a matter of time due to productivity and support for cloud models. Cloud Foundry has the opportunity to be one of the winners but it won’t happen if VMware fails to put their weight behind it.
Caringo Brings Object Storage to Apache CloudStack
Caringo, the object storage software folks, has announced the seamless integration of their CAStor core technology as an enterprise-ready object store for Apache CloudStack 4.0, the OpenStack-competitive project now in incubation with the Apache Software Foundation.
The integration means CAStor can provide secure multi-tenant storage that scales from terabytes to petabytes with a robust customizable level of some nines data durability without backup or RAID.
The integration has been submitted to Apache as part of the CloudStack 4.0 release and is available for immediate download.
Citrix’ CloudPlatform, powered by CloudStack, provides an open source platform for highly scalable and reliable cloud computing environments and is supposed to be deployed in some of the world’s largest enterprises.
Preventing data leakage: Proactive security from the cloud
In business, data is currency. It is the oil that keeps the commercial engine in motion and databases are the digital banks that store and retrieve this valuable information. And, according to IDC, data is doubling every two years. But as the overall amount of data grows, so does the amount of sensitive and regulated data. All this data stored by enterprises requires high levels of security. Presently (again, according to IDC) only about a quarter of that data is being properly protected now. Like all currency, data must be protected.
And herein lays a key issue. Too many executives see security as a cost center and are often reticent to invest beyond the bare minimum–whatever keeps the nasty viruses out; whatever is absolutely necessary for compliance. Their thought process is akin to “we haven’t been attacked before…or we don’t have a high enough profile for …
Chaotic Countries Have ICT Potential
A friend of mine is visiting Cairo, Egypt at the moment. As he descended into the chaos of the street in front of his hotel, he said he felt as if he was back in India, or Jamaica.
There are many chaotic, deafening streets in the world. I spent time on many of them during a recent three-year stay in Southeast Asia. Many streets in New York and London are also enough to drive one right back inside. Everyone who’s had the opportunity to travel extensively will have their own “favorites.”
At our Tau Institute, we’ve conducted research on many of the most chaotic places in the world. There are now 102 countries on our list, and we’ve found that chaos often echoes dynamism. Of course, other times, chaos is just chaos.
For example, among our Top 20 countries are a number of bustling Asian destinations – South Korea (actually ranked #1 in our research), Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. Among our Top 20 countries with the greatest potential are the chaotic countries of Eastern Africa, Morocco, Senegal, the Philippines, and yes, Egypt.
It’s easy enough to see that Asia and Africa are the most dynamic places on earth right now, when it comes to developing their ICT infrastructures. Eastern Europe is the other major region that tops our research – countries that may not appear as chaotic on the streets but may appear quite chaotic in how they conduct business. This list includes Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, and Serbia.
There are several calmer places in our global Top 20 – New Zealand, the Netherlands (the world’s best-organized beehive), Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and Canada. The often befudding UK is also on this list. But among the places with the greatest potential, there is no country that a person with American or Western European eyes would call calm.
I don’t mean to make light of or diminish the serious problems facing Egypt today. The potential for widespread violence seems to be just a spark away. Perhaps my friend really has no business being there right now.
Big problems and potential violence also face many of the other highly dynamic countries that top our rankings. That said, each of these places, including Egypt, has benefited from the presence of enough dedicated people throughout their societies to create viable ICT infrastructures that can form the foundation for their future growth and prosperity. In a way, I wish I was in Cairo right now, although I’d be just as happy to be back in Manila, or perhaps in Dar es Salaam.
Send me a message on Twitter if you’d like to know more about our research in the 102 countries now covered by the Tau Institute.
Adaptive Revs Moab Cloud Suite
Adaptive Computing, the folks that manage the world’s largest computing installations with their Moab self-optimizing cloud management and HPC workload management solutions, have revved their Moab Cloud Suite.
The widgetry now improves the time to cloud deployment by means of out-of-the-box integration with existing infrastructure. It also enables IT to provision different organizational groups more easily by streamlining the tasks required with a new dashboard portal and automated budget allocation.
The 7.2 update integrates with virtualization, management and other cloud platforms, such as VMware Center and HP Cloud Services, via connectors, which is supposed to extend the value of the customer’s existing investments and help them avoid vendor lock-in since the widgetry is extensible or will be.