By Sharon Florentine

You don’t have to be an IT expert to grasp that the cloud translates to cost savings and operational efficiencies. But knowing the key cloud attributes can make selling a migration to the cloud an easy business decision to make. 

Cohesive Flexible Technologies (CohesiveFT), an enterprise application-to-cloud migration services company, has a great blog post explaining the major benefits and features of the cloud. Knowing the basic features of cloud computing can help you, as an executive, explain to any skeptics how migrating to the cloud will translate to efficiencies outside of the IT department and have a positive impact on the entire business. 

Here are the top five cloud features you should know about as an executive: 

On-demand self-service: Your business can use the cloud to obtain, configure and deploy apps without any IT heavy lifting. Many cloud vendors provide templates to front-load most of …

China is the latest country to realise the full potential of cloud computing as they are now pushing a huge amount of money into it.

Chinese cloud computing now accounts for 3% of the global cloud computing market share, which in monetary terms equates to an awful lot – especially if you consider the fact that the market was said to be worth around $90 bn US dollars back in 2011 and it has continued to grow exponentially since.

Growth Plans

It is expected that the Chinese cloud computing market will grow to around 117.4 billion CNY, which is equal to $18.6bn US dollars, or £11.5bn, by 2013.

Furthermore, it has been reported that the Internet Society of China predicts that the country will have reached 1 trillion CNY by 2015 – a simply staggering amount of money!

The Chinese government is said to be encouraging the growth of …

CloudTech caught up with Matthew Finnie, the CTO of IaaS cloud providers Interoute, who is exhibiting at Apps World.

According to Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie, a 100% service level agreement (SLA) is ‘nonsense’, although a lot depends on the sector your cloud company is trying to reach and the shape of your business model.

Interoute, who is currently exhibiting at Apps World in London, has a virtual data centre (VDC) which offers a 99.99% uptime rate and, while it doesn’t reach the magical ‘five nines’ in availability, Finnie inferred that it’s worth looking beyond the statistics.

“99.99% is an actual availability,” he said. “We’re coming at it from a world where we have enterprise customers and carriers who are building businesses on the back of us, and they don’t want a commercial SLA.

“If we gave them three, five hours’ service credits, it doesn …

Buyer beware

You would consider it somewhat careless to take out a mortgage or buy a new car without fully understanding the extent of the contract – so why are so many companies choosing to outsource their entire IT estate without fully understanding the terms and conditions?

Business would dictate a buyer beware attitude when it comes to purchasing anything and this mentality needs to be adopted when it comes to the cloud.  

It is vital that a company looks at its business needs, ascertains what is considered mission critical, and signs a contract that has the SLAs in place to deliver upon those needs.

It is far too simple in the first instance to glance over a contract and assume it matches your criteria, but in reality, the first draft will usually fall in favour of the proposer.

Whilst you may resent the initial cost of employing a lawyer, in …

Part one can be found here. Part two examines the ‘safe harbour’ approach to cloud data, and answers the question: who’s ultimately responsible for data in the cloud?

In 2000, the US Department of Commerce created the Safe Harbour framework to ensure organisations put appropriate controls in place for the protection of data when handling European and UK companies’ data that may be stored in the USA (for example an American company who may have regional offices in the UK, France and Germany that keeps employee data such as employment, tax and personal details centrally in the USA).

The Safe Harbour directives consist of seven rules that have been established specifically for US companies to comply with EU data storage directives.

The ‘safe-harbour’ approach, which allows for data on EU subjects to be moved out of the EU, does not have the adoption you may think, even if you …

Neelie Kroes hopes to make the EU the ‘e-EU’ with new strategy

The EU has launched a new cloud strategy, entitled “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe”, designed to increase the use of and speed up cloud computing in Europe.

“Cloud computing could offer a huge lift to the European economy, but only if users can understand and trust it,” said EU digital agenda VP Neelie Kroes to open her speech yesterday.

The figures: a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020 – the equivalent of a few hundred euros per citizen – and a net gain of 2.5m jobs.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that Kroes called the cloud “a game-changer for our economy”.

According to the EU, one of the most important aspects of the strategy is to “cut through the jungle of technical standards”, with necessary standards to …

When considering cloud, the inevitable security questions arise: where are your data centres? What happens to my data? How can I ensure the decision I am making does not expose us to risk?

Blatantly ignoring cloud in today’s competitive environment is not a viable option and nor should it be. 

There are a multitude of security areas that encroach on cloud solutions, varying based on whether you adopt a public, private or hybrid cloud approach and whether you use SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

In this two-part article we shall focus on the most common public platform in use, Software as a Service (SaaS), expected to be worth 11bn Euros in the next year according to Gartner (compared to expectations of 4.7bn Euros for IaaS and 923m Euros for PaaS).

Security in the cloud should be approached …

By Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Solutions, Ovum

Splunk, which specializes in delivering a data platform for “machine data,” is approaching a turning point. The explosion of sensory data – part of the Big Data phenomenon – is pulling the company in different directions. With a base as the data platform for IT systems management and security programs, Splunk could expand to other forms of machine data such as smart public infrastructure.

Or, as implied by the recruitment of key product executives from SAP and Oracle, it could venture higher up the value chain, developing more business-focused solutions around this competency. Either way, Splunk must choose its targets carefully. As a $150–$200m company, it can’t be all things. Splunk is already promoting itself as an operational intelligence platform that provides quick visibility of trends from low-level data. However, Ovum believes that the company could get more mileage in the market …

“The future of the cloud is federated, and when you look at the broad categories of apps moving to the cloud, the truth of this statement begins to become clear.”  ~ Ditlev Bredhal, CEO, OnApp

And the federated cloud will be coming to a city near you, allowing your team to take advantage of a globally scattered array of datacentre infrastructure that will power the next generation of gaming apps, social media, e-commerce and online publishing applications.

While Virtual Internet continues to deploy new virtual datacenters in locations such as Singapore and Utah, there are considerable advantages to ‘sharing’ infrastructure from other Telcos, ISPs and providers who have built facilities in far-flung, remote areas, which do not include the VI footprint.

By the year 2015, it’s expected that over 15 billion devices will be connected to the Internet requiring massive bandwidth to satisfy the global demand.   No single hosting provider …

Research commissioned by Fujitsu and Microsoft and published by Connection Research has revealed that CIOs in Australia are “embracing the realities” of the cloud.

In the foreword to the report, entitled “Insights Quarterly: Cloud in Australia”, authors Craig Baty and Greg Stone describe cloud computing as “infectious” and add that “cloud has arrived, and will continue to grow in functionality and popularity”.

The key takeaways from the report, which polled 179 CIOs across Australia, were:

• Cost was the biggest driver in moving to the cloud – lower operational costs and lower capital expenditure was most important to approximately 21% of respondents
• Email and messaging was the service migrated to the cloud most frequently – 22.6% of respondents were on the way to utilising it
• Data security (48.5%) was the most important factor in choosing a cloud provider

Each question was ranked in degrees of importance, leading to a set of …