Kirill Tatarinov’s keynote this morning at Microsoft’s Convergence 2013 marks a subtle, yet very significant shift in how this technology leader is marketing itself to partners and the outside world.  They are humanizing their marketing, messaging and products.

Gone is the Spock-like precision of presentations packed with roadmaps, mind-numbing metrics and intricate feature analysis.  The Nick Brophy Band made the keynote complete by delivering excellent sets.

Microsoft is learning that telling a good story trumps terabytes of metrics. They delivered a strong keynote today starting out showing how attendees reached out to the local community and helped Habitat for Humanity. 

Kirill then based the majority of his keynote on four customer success stories taken from the Microsoft Customer Excellence Award winners. Chobani, Shock Doctor, Revlon and Weight Watchers shared how they were able to better connect with customers and run more efficient businesses using Microsoft Dynamics.

The only …

The BSA has put together a report which ranks the top 20 countries worldwide in terms of cloud readiness, and it may not be a surprise as to which nation is at the summit…

Japan is the highest ranked cloud computing nation worldwide, according to research published by BSA: Software Alliance.

In its 2013 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, the Alliance aims to “provide a platform for discussion between policymakers and providers of cloud offerings, with a view toward developing an internationally harmonised regime of laws and regulations relevant to cloud computing.”

In other words, the raw figures perhaps are not the be all and end all. But the overall statistics, taking into account such areas as data privacy, security and ICT readiness among others, still make interesting reading.

Japan is the most cloud-oriented nation by some distance according to the study, scoring 84.1 overall. The rest of the …

Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Software – IT Solutions, Ovum

The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is growing up. Vendors are endeavoring not only to help enterprises define, configure, and deploy increasingly complex applications, but also to abstract these applications from the underlying IaaS infrastructure. It is shifting from a bottom-up infrastructure-centric view to a top-down application-centric view.

This is happening in a variety of ways, including Ravello Systems’ Cloud Application Hypervisor (CAH), whose open beta launched in February 2013, the same month Ravello raised an additional $15m. Under its “Develop in the cloud, Deploy anywhere” tagline, Ravello is initially targeting the public cloud-based development and testing (dev/test) market.

More specifically, it is focusing on enterprises that wish to move existing as well as new applications to public clouds for dev/test purposes without having to make any changes to the applications. In its report entitled “On the radar: Ravello Systems”, Ovum explains …

Earlier this week I attended a local cloud developers group, and I met a gentleman who consults with companies to engage in deep dive forensic examinations of their networks. He looks for the virtual fingerprints of misdeeds, fraud, and misdoings that can be used for e-discovery in legal cases. He essentially gets down to the bits and bytes of how much information flows to certain IP addresses to ascertain whether or not proprietary data has been tampered or stolen.

He confirmed something that I long believed to be true. One of the greatest threats to an organization comes from within. Not everyone who exits a company leaves with a handshake and a gold watch. Often time there are hard feelings; that the employer wronged the former employee and that employee will exact a matter of revenge or feel justified to extract some sort of perceived compensation. This includes everything from …

CloudTech speaks with Juan Carlos Soto, Informatica senior vice president, cloud evangelist and member of the TechAmerica Foundation’s US Deployment of the Cloud, about iPaaS, SLAs and keeping secure in the cloud.

The difficulties around cloud security may be improving, but users don’t help themselves if they’re not street smart about their IT usage.

That’s according to Informatica senior vice president Juan Carlos Soto, who said that cloud computing shouldn’t “absolve anyone from common sense IT”.

“Cloud has tremendous benefits around cost savings and agility, and typically it’s not the absolute short term cost – it’s all the other benefits that go along with it,” Soto told CloudTech, adding: “Despite all those benefits, cloud does not absolve anyone from common sense IT good practices.

“For example, even as an individual user, we should back up our data. As an individual user, we should put …

Across the globe, organisations in all industries are facing the increasingly complex job to control the security and privacy of their data – wherever, however and whenever it is accessed. In one way or another, this has always been a challenge for enterprises.

However, as big data, cloud services, mobile tech and social networks converge in the enterprise space, organisations today are under greater pressure than ever before to keep up with the impact this is having on security.

Staying on top of changing security needs

There has never been a more challenging time for business to stay on top of the security agenda. Meeting new information security challenges, whilst keeping employees happy and making the most of the latest tech innovation is a fine balance.

Gartner recently brought this into focus, predicting that by 2017, 40% of enterprise contact information will have leaked into Facebook via employees’ increasing use of …

By Sue Poremba

Sue Poremba is a freelance writer focusing primarily on security and technology issues and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.

The term “big data” may be a bit of a misnomer. For some companies, big data is actually huge data. Even small companies now find themselves immersed in massive amounts of data of all sorts, which leads to the problem of storing all of it.

Enter the big data cloud storage solutions, which allow companies to store and access media by the terabyte. Storage by the terabyte may have seemed unfathomable just a few years ago, but according to John Griffith of SolidFire, by today’s standards, terabytes of block storage really isn’t all that much.

“Many service providers look at opportunity in hundreds or thousands of terabytes.  Between storage hungry database applications and other mission critical systems, terabytes of data can be consumed rather quickly,” Griffith …

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, IT, Asia-Pacific

Cloud services policies are being developed and iterated in all jurisdictions. Having reviewed a number of draft policies in recent months, we believe policy-makers need to work harder to create a level playing field for cloud services adoption, mindful of the potential for a type I procurement error (buying a “bad” cloud service) or a type II procurement error (buying a “bad” in-house, shared, or outsourced service, when a cloud service would have been better).

Policies tend to be biased toward avoiding type I errors, so even in policies that are well-intended the playing field is tilted away from cloud services. Type II errors can, however, create worse outcomes, arising from missed or delayed opportunities for productivity improvement and innovation in policy and service delivery.

Innovation-minded governments need to level the playing field

The logic of government cloud computing policy usually starts with …

Seeing skeptical CIOs agree to cloud-based pilots of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other applications is evidence of how cloud computing is slowly winning the trust war.

Further evidence can be seen from how skeptical many of these CIOs initially were, and how successful pilots led to their gradual trust.

This trust hasn’t come cheap however.

Every one of these CIOs spoken with, across a range of manufacturing companies, learned that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) aren’t sufficient to manage the areas of security, privacy and confidentiality on their own.  Cloud computing vendors have used SLAs as a means to imply security standards are met; one CIO told me he had an audit done to see if the SLA targets promised were realistic. 

They weren’t and he moved on to another vendor.  That is the level of skepticism and lack of trust many CIOs …

Claudio Castelli, Senior Analyst, Enterprise

The highlight of Cisco’s recent C-Scape conference in Melbourne was the news of its collaboration portfolio, which is gaining momentum. The company is engaging with an increasing number of service providers to position its Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS).

HCS offers a clear path to help enterprises migrate their communications to the cloud, and positions uniquely in the market; its delivery model is expected to disrupt the current partner ecosystem. Traditional channel partners will need to rethink their role, while Cisco must evolve its partner program to support this transition.

A unique proposition for telcos

Cisco has a large market share in IP telephony, of which a significant portion is managed on-premise by a service provider. This gives service providers deploying HCS a large addressable market. Enterprises already using Cisco’s on-premise solution Communications Manager can now deploy the company’s collaboration technology with seamless …