Roy Illsley, Peter Hall & Mile Sapien, Principal Analysts, Ovum IT

At the recent Parallels Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, more than 1,300 attendees heard how the SMB market is driving new business for service providers and hosting companies alike. With headquarters in Seattle, Parallels is a private company that does not disclose its revenues. It has 900 employees worldwide and two-thirds of its business is focused on software solutions (including automation) that enable service providers to rapidly bring to market cloud-based services for the SMB market.

The remaining third of its business is a Mac consumer desktop virtualization business where it holds over 80% of US market share. At the event, Parallels made three new solutions announcements, the most significant of which was a cloud storage solution.

The SMB market is driving growth for the channel and attracting new major service providers

Parallels estimates the total global SMB IT …

Nearly nine in 10 companies agree that moving to the cloud has resulted in cost savings, according to a new survey from open cloud provider Rackspace.

The research looked at over 1300 US and UK-based companies, as well as conducting qualitative interviews with executives surveyed.

Of course, it’s not the biggest surprise that a cloud vendor is advocating companies moving to the cloud.

In a whitepaper illustrating the research, this was made abundantly clear in terms of what the survey had found. Cloud computing “saves money”, “helps increase competitiveness” and “offers exciting opportunities for businesses of all sizes”, according to the research.

Sounds good. But what statistics are in the report to back up this assertion?

88% of businesses using the cloud stated that they have saved money as a result, with three in five believing that cloud computing has improved infrastructure efficiency, enabling more time “to focus on …

Cutting through the hype of cloud vendors starts by evaluating how ready their cloud services, enabling technologies and professional services are to serve customers today.

That’s one of the key take-aways from a recent webinar I attended titled How Cloud Computing Changes the Vendor Landscape by David Mitchell Smith, VP and Gartner Fellow last week.  The slides are available for download here (Free for download after Gartner registration if you are not a Gartner client).

What made this webinar unique and worth mentioning is the framework that was presented for evaluating vendors.  Beginning with the well-known Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) structure, Gartner added in a Business and Information Systems layer that includes brokerages, management and security. 

This is the layer where Gartner says they are seeing enterprise clients most concentrate on emerging technologies.

The cloud vendor landscape is defined by cloud services, professional services for consumption …

This is the second part of a two-part article entitled Supporting CIO Strategies and Priorities from the Cloud. In case you have not done so, READ PART 1.

However, to briefly recap: in support of a recent Gartner study that basically states that the function of the modern CIO is in flux and that his or her future focus must incorporate digital assets (aka cloud-based data and applications) to remain relevant, I have taken their listed priorities and illustrated how they could securely work in a cloud-centric model.

In last week’s entry, I make the case that this means the CIO must evolve from overseeing physical resources and installation and refocus on becoming a  facilitator of strategic business goals through the means of digital acquisition and expansion. To this end I use cloud-based security as an example of how the technical and business priorities stated in the survey can …

As public cloud computing gains greater adoption across enterprises, there’s an increased level of spending occurring on infrastructure-related services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS).  Enterprises are prioritizing how to get cloud platforms integrated with legacy systems to make use of the years of data they have accumulated. 

From legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, integrating legacy systems of record to cloud-based platforms will accelerate through 2016.  I’ve seen this in conversations with resellers and enterprise customers, and this trend is also reflected in Gartner’s latest report on public cloud computing adoption, Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q12 Update Published: 8 February 2013.  Below are the key take-aways from the report:

• Global spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 18.6% in 2012 to $110.3B, achieving a CAGR of 17.7% from 2011 through 2016. The total market is expected …

Replacing mainframes with 21st century identity

By Paul Madsen, senior technical architect

The concept of single sign-on (SSO) is not a new one, and over the years it has successfully bridged the gap between security and productivity for organizations all over the globe.

Allowing users to authenticate once to gain access to enterprise applications improves access security and user productivity by reducing the need for passwords.

In the days of mainframes, SSO was used to help maintain productivity and security from inside the protection of firewalls. As organizations moved to custom-built authentication systems in the 1990’s, it became recognized as enterprise SSO (ESSO) and later evolved into browser-based plugin or web-proxy methods known as web access management (WAM). IT’s focus was on integrating applications exclusively within the network perimeter.

However, as enterprises shifted toward cloud-based services at the turn of the century and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications became more …

Jeremy Cox, Principal Analyst Enterprise Solutions

On February 15, Sage announced that it was selling off Sage ACT, Sage SalesLogix, and the Sage Nonprofit Solutions product suite (managed from the US), as well as four other non-CRM products in Europe. Ovum sees this as further evidence of Sage’s customer-focused transformation and desire to accelerate development of its core hybrid cloud and mobile applications portfolio.

At last year’s Sage Summit, the company’s definition of what constitutes core did not include Sage CRM. With these product divestments, we can expect Sage CRM to move into the limelight along with Sage ERP X3. Both are being developed on the same Microsoft Azure platform and will both benefit from further investments in mobility and social in 2013.

Sage divestments will accelerate its renaissance

How things have changed. In 2001 Sage continued to build through acquisition, buying ACT and SalesLogix in one …

CDW report looks at the health of cloud computing in terms of drivers, barriers and cost and says that ‘work imitates life’ with cloud adoption

It’s that time of the year again; companies have stopped predicting what the cloud is going to look like for 2013, with organisations instead concentrating on what the ecosystem is currently looking like.

CDW is a case in point. The IT product supplier has issued its ‘2013 State of the Cloud’ report, surveying 1,242 tech professionals, and concluded that ‘work imitates life’; a big driver of corporate cloud adoption is users’ experience of consumer services.

Nearly three quarters of respondents (73%) claimed that, in their company, employees’ use of personal cloud apps has “significantly influenced” the decision to move wholesale to the cloud. Similarly, just over three in five (61%) cloudy organisations agreed that employee personal devices have culminated in a faster move …

If you’ve been around the block a few times, you’re probably wondering why the title of this post isn’t, 50 Reasons VPNs Suck in the Cloud.

VPNs have long been the bane of both administrators and users (and lets not forget, support). They’re clunky, complex, and costly, and the same is true when they’re deployed to secure cloud access.

Today, VPNs are increasingly used to connect to cloud computing resources. Either by routing traffic back through the corporate network or direct to the cloud provider, VPNs offer authentication and transport-layer encryption to keep the bad guys out and sensitive information secure. But at what cost?

Both VPN configurations (corporate and provider) are complex to set up, require client agents with loads of support, and can be expensive to maintain. Arguably, there’s room for – and exists – a better approach to securing access to cloud servers …

Cloud security is once again on the agenda after a report from Lieberman Research showed that nearly half of IT professionals were wary of keeping sensitive data in the cloud due to government intervention.

The survey was conducted at November’s Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Congress and found that the majority of respondents prefer to keep their most sensitive data on private networks rather than on the cloud.

Other top-line findings were:

• Nearly nine in 10 (88%) of IT professionals believe some cloudy data could be lost, stolen or corrupted
• Less than half of respondents (46%) believe that moving to the cloud has increased their IT security
• Yet 56% think migrating to the cloud has saved money, and 86% think their move to the cloud has been successful overall

“There are a number of reasons why so many IT professionals are apprehensive about storing corporate data in the cloud,” writes …