Netflix has long been known for being a leader and innovator in delivering its Netflix service by leveraging public cloud service provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Netflix’s IT team wasn’t quite there, and still had many legacy applications and infrastructure in place. One thing is to start a platform from the ground up solely leveraging cloud. It’s an entirely different process to do so from a legacy environment to more SaaS based and infrastructure as a service. The goal for Netflix is to achieve 100% of this by beginning of 2015. Mike Kail joined Netflix in 2011 as VP of IT Operations and is tasked with ensuring that this migration happens as smoothly as possible.

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Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

Informatica continues to see data disintermediation between cloud and on-premise IT systems as a lucrative opportunity. The latest release of its Informatica Cloud – marketed seasonally as Cloud Spring 2014 – advances this strategy, delivering new self-service tooling and user interface enhancements, aimed at business users, that are intended to remove much of the complexity and burden of cloud and on-premise data integration.

Informatica has leveraged its experience from on-premise data integration assets in the cloud to good effect, and its platform is technically enabled by its new Vibe technology, which ensures that reusable and self-adapting integration designs are fully portable across cloud and on-premise application environments.

Hybrid integration agility through self-service user empowerment

The main design theme for Cloud Spring 2014 is making business application users and administrators more self-sufficient in servicing their data integration needs. A brand new Cloud Designer tool enables IT …

Skyhigh Networks releases their second edition of the Cloud Adoption and Risk Report. As with the first edition of the report, the purpose of the report is to provide hard data on the actual use of cloud services within enterprises of all sizes. This report summarizes data from approximately 6 million users across 175 companies and 10 industries.

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A myriad of new methodologies and technologies from cloud computing to BYOD have changed the IT landscape demonstrably. In parallel, higher-value functions around data, customer engagement and revenue growth are pushing CIOs to consider alternative approaches. The nexus is moving IT to a zero footprint infrastructure model. Organizations including Healthcare, Financial Services, Insurance and Airlines are moving in this direction. Unfortunately, traditional IT paradigms present a challenge to adopting these new methodologies.

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Are your applications moving to an elastic cloud infrastructure? The question is no longer if, but when – whether that is a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid cloud.
Classic computing capacity models clearly indicate that over-provisioning is essential to keep up with peak loads of traffic while the over-provisioned capacity is largely left under-utilized during non-peak periods. Such over-provisioning and under-utilization can be avoided by moving to an elastic cloud-computing capacity model where just-in-time provisioning and deprovisioning can be achieved by automatically scaling up and down on-demand.

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And the race is on. The cloud industry is abuzz with recent M&A and product news pointing towards what appears to be the Holy Grail for helping large companies move to the cloud with confidence. Both private and public cloud vendors are vying for a spot in the relatively new and rapidly growing market segment of enterprise cloud. CenturyLink swooped up Tier 3 in an attempt to establish a stronger enterprise offering; Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its enterprise play at re:Invent; IBM acquired SoftLayer; and even the Google Compute Engine has been quick to follow in the footsteps of its competitors.
As each vendor makes a move to build a top-tier enterprise cloud, others will counter. With so much product and M&A activity going on, all that’s left to ask is: What’s next?

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In the Subscription Economy, purchase-to-use is winning, and purchase-to-own is on its way out. The key to success is that customers are actually using a product or service and in the Subscription Economy, the future is clear: delivering value drives revenue. Accessing this data to understand usage, and resulting customer value, is mandatory to survival.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Matthew Shanahan, SVP of Marketing and Strategy at Scout by Service Source, will discuss how businesses in industries such as telecom, SaaS, financial services, healthcare and education can, and are, leveraging data science methods to predict and avoid customer churn and increase revenue.

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A 2013 IBM survey shows that the cloud’s strategic importance to decision-makers, such as CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, HR directors, and procurement executives, is poised to double from 34 percent to 72 percent, vaulting over their IT counterparts at 58 percent.

The survey found that one out of five organizations is ahead of the curve on cloud adoption.  Moreover, they are achieving a competitive advantage by using cloud-based platforms, and not just cutting costs and driving efficiency through cloud computing.

The results of this survey are not surprising.  Business leadership drives much of the growth around cloud computing, demanding that IT both consider and implement this technology. They see the potential for this technology to be strategic, much like the growth of the Web many years ago that changed the face of many businesses. Remember, it was business units, not IT, that drove Web adoption and related functions like e-commerce …

IT decision makers are conservative by nature: “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

I frequently hear the question, “What does the cloud do for me that I can’t do in my own data centre?” The honest answer is nothing.

There is nothing that can be done in the cloud that couldn’t also be done in an in-house data centre or with collocated hardware in an external data centre.

However, almost everything a business may want to do with IT can be done more quickly, less expensively, and with intrinsically more scalability in the cloud. That’s the true value of cloud platforms.

A business could choose to buy and collocate new servers when updating its groupware application. It’s a simple process of getting approval for the capital expenditure, procuring the servers and the data centre space, paying for support and licensing, paying for server …