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 …
Throughout my career at GreenPages I’ve been lucky enough to work with some top-shelf IT leaders. These folks possess many qualities that make them successful – technical smarts, excellent communication skills, inspired leadership, and killer dance moves. Well, at least those first three.
But there’s one skill that’s increasingly critical as more IT shops move from cloud theory to cloud reality: partner management.
IT leaders who effectively and proactively leverage partners will give their organization a competitive advantage during the journey to the cloud. Why? Because smart solution providers accelerate the time needed to research, execute, and support a technology project.
Let’s use the example of building a house. You could learn how to do some drafting on your own, but most folks are more comfortable using the experienced services of an architect who can work with the homeowner on what options are feasible within a given …
Some people think that offshoring software development = outsourcing software development. That’s not the case. You have multiple options. Let’s talk about the main options and how they may or not make sense for you:
1) Outsourcing (Project Based) – If you may have peaks in valleys in your workload (e.g., you have a project that requires a boost in resources for a period of time) it doesn’t make sense to hire full-time staff to address a period of peak demand. In this model, you bid out your project to one or more software development outsourcing companies, and pick a winner.
This is what most people think you are talking about when it comes to doing software development offshore. It makes a lot of sense to outsource if you don’t feel that software development is a particular competence you need in house in your business. Or you …
Virtualisation experts VMware have acquired turnkey desktop cloud providers Wanova to further bolster their end-user portfolio.
VMware will hope to fully utilise Wanova’s Mirage system, which centralises image management of both physical and virtual desktops and splits the desktop image into logical layers, to entail seamless transition between endpoints.
The financial details of the deal remain undisclosed.
VMware currently has a product out which is similar to Mirage in the form of VMware View – however, as their blog notes, Mirage caches images locally as opposed to View images executing on servers in the data centre and using a remote graphics protocol.
This move continues the prevailing trend of consolidation between various companies; Facebook hiring the vast majority of Lightbox and Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility just being two recent examples.
According to Wanova’s blog, this move “dramatically accelerates the vision [they] have been driving …
2012. This is the year of the cloud. This is the year that business is realising it needs the cloud. But why?
Efficiencies is the answer.
If surviving the GFC taught us one thing, it’s how to be lean. If business, and especially small business is to survive and even thrive post-GFC, it must learn to operate on a strict diet.
To be lean and mean. This means not just micro-managing your managers and staff to greater productivity, but looking at your business systems and how they can serve you, not the other way around.
By choosing wisely with public cloud services, businesses can selectively tailor a cloud-based system to their needs (and budget) without the expensive implementation and overheads previously seen with proprietary systems.
For example, a small business (in a remote country location) we are currently co-consulting with was looking to decentralise their accounting work. They wanted …
Research from the International Data Corporation (IDC) suggests that adoption of cloud from retailers in the Asia Pacific region is currently slow but will progress substantially within five years.
According to the survey, only 19% of the 56 respondents were currently pushing through a cloud adoption strategy for their business, but 32% stated they were considering implementing cloud within the next two-to-five years.
IDC further noted in their research that the three main barriers to widespread Asia Pacific cloud adoption were data security, firewalls and integration to internal IT systems.
The report, entitled “Cloud Adoption in the Asia Pacific – Retail Industry”, was carried out between December 2011 and January 2012 among mid-to-large retail companies across the Asia Pacific region, covering Australia, China, Malaysia, New Zealand, India and Singapore.
Research manager Kumar Gs Das called the Asian retail industry “cautious” about cloud and added: “The majority of them recognises that the …
In recent years the world of gaming has seen a shift in the way in which games are played and therefore the way they need to be developed. In 2002 Xbox released the Xbox Live system, allowing gamers all around the world to connect via the internet and play games together. Since then all of the other consoles have caught up and now provide the same functionality.
With this revolution in gaming ability, the actual games themselves have become more geared towards being played online, with development companies working on improving the online multiplayer functionality over the solo gaming.
But now it seems this whole idea is going one step further with the increased presence of Cloud Gaming.
Using cloud hosting services, companies such as OnLive and Gaikai can host games on their network and allow users to login via an internet connection and play them …
Do you know your PUE?
PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness and it is rapidly becoming the number to know. In the past, datacenter managers were simply asked to provide enough space, power and cooling to support the IT equipment. Now, the same managers are being asked to do it efficiently. PUE can be a helpful benchmark.
Introduced by the Green Grid, PUE is a measure of efficiency. It is defined as: the total facility power consumed divided by the total IT equipment power consumed. The total facility power is measured at the utility meter for datacenters. (For mixed-use facilities like an office building that contains a datacenter, only the power needed for the server/datacenter room should be measured or even estimated.) The facility power includes everything that supports the IT equipment including power, cooling, lighting, etc.
The IT equipment power is the load associated with servers, storage, networking …
A report from VMware has revealed the adoption of G-Cloud is not progressing as expected with many senior public sector IT staff sceptical about the process.
VMware interviewed nearly 200 IT heavyweights about G-Cloud, the UK government’s cloud service which will attempt to reduce IT costs by £200m per year and have 50% of IT spending coming through public cloud services.
Yet there wasn’t universal agreement on whether these targets will be hit, with only 30% saying the £200m cost-saving was attainable and a whopping 63% saying the government would struggle to achieve their plan of half IT spending through the cloud.
Overall consensus was that people were split on G-Cloud, with 45% of respondents saying they were in some way positive about G-Cloud compared to 41% who were indifferent or negative.
The Cloud Store – an app store launched in February designed to make buying IT services more …