Synchronising new product development, supply chain, production and Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul (MRO) strategies across Aerospace and Defense (A&D) manufacturers while reducing costs continues to make cloud platforms a viable option in A&D.

With sequestration having an impact on these industries from both a budget and merger & acquisition (M&A) perspective, the economics of cloud computing are becoming even more attractive.

Teri Takai, CIO of the Department of Defense (DoD) published the DoD Cloud Computing Strategy in July of last year and many of its findings are reflected in the current state of cloud adoption in A&D.  She recently published the presentation DoD CIO’s 10-Point Plan for IT Modernization, which is available for download from the department’s website.  The following is a summary of key DoD IT Modernization initiatives.

It’s ironic that two industries who are highly reliant on collaboration often have the most siloed …

A new and innovative computing platform has arrived – the ARM Server, often referred to as a «Microserver».

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A new study commissioned by Cloud Expo Silicon Valley 2013 Platinum Plus sponsor Rackspace Hosting suggests that while the public cloud remains important to IT decision-makers at UK and US enterprises involved in the research, the limitations of using this type of platform as a one-size-fits-all solution are becoming more apparent.

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Today it is generally accepted that businesses large and small are actively embracing cloud computing. Speculation is over and today companies are getting down to the real business of incorporating cloud services and platforms into formal IT portfolios.

Cloud is no longer seen as just a nice to have; it’s considered an enabler of business transformation – with even Gartner predicting most enterprises will have adopted cloud by the end of 2013.

Tasked with looking beyond IT that will simply get the job done, the CIO is the person driving this transformation and making decisions with the wider business context in mind. In fact, by 2015, IDC estimates that 90% of IT investments will be evaluated based on the strategic goals of a business, which means that the role of the CIO is set to become not only very challenging but much more strategically important than it is already.

Today …

Company execs have long since worked out that the cloud can be beneficial for all manner of industries, from the faster moving technological sector to the more glacial banking and healthcare divisions.

The charity, or Third Sector, is no different, according to a report from exponential-e entitled “Third sector reaches for the cloud”.

Yet it needs to be pointed out that the revolution has still got a long way to go. Whilst 42% of respondents said their companies had used software as a service (SaaS) based applications over the past 12 months, 39% admitted they hadn’t considered cloud as a solution at all.

30% said they were using infrastructure as a service (IaaS), whilst 15% were using platform as a service (PaaS).

In the majority of cases, budgetary constraints were the reason behind lack of deployment. Given charities are traditionally not the most cash-rich of companies, this may not …

As the impact of cloud technology becomes better understood and really takes hold, organizations will need to restructure themselves to ensure they are able to take full advantage of the opportunities presented to them and as a result stay relevant and alive.

But to understand the impact of the future we need take a look back at some vital thinking that took place in the late 1980s.

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As the impact of cloud technology becomes better understood and really takes hold, organizations will need to restructure themselves to ensure they are able to take full advantage of the opportunities presented to them and as a result stay relevant and alive.

But to understand the impact of the future we need take a look back at some vital thinking that took place in the late 1980s.

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Reuven Cohen, who in 2004 founded Enomaly to bring to market his vision for an «Elastic Computing Platform» (ECP), has joined Citrix in a newly-formed role: Chief Cloud Advocate.

Cohen joins other household names in Cloud Computing who now work at Citrix such as Sheng Liang and Shannon Williams, founders of Cloud.com in 2008, and open source veteran Mark Hinkle. All four – Cohen, Liang, Williams, and Hinkle – were early, and remain popular, participants in the industry-leading international Cloud Expo® conference series.

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Reuven Cohen, who in 2004 founded Enomaly to bring to market his vision for an «Elastic Computing Platform» (ECP), has joined Citrix in a newly-formed role: Chief Cloud Advocate.

Cohen joins other household names in Cloud Computing who now work at Citrix such as Sheng Liang and Shannon Williams, founders of Cloud.com in 2008, and open source veteran Mark Hinkle. All four – Cohen, Liang, Williams, and Hinkle – were early, and remain popular, participants in the industry-leading international Cloud Expo® conference series.

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Part 2 of Cloud Monitoring Essentials presents 3 key actions to ensure that cloud users maintain a strong security posture.
The cloud offers users agility and flexibility at, potentially, a far lower cost than a traditional data center model. However, with these benefits come risks from cost sprawl, security holes, and availability management. Part 1 of Cloud Monitoring Essentials focused on cost concerns. This second part looks at security.
The dynamic nature of the cloud, with ever-changing security groups and rules, makes security difficult. New instances, auto scaling groups, and buckets are created and terminated daily. Resources that were ‘secure’ yesterday may be altered today and your security posture may be compromised.
The distributed and centralized nature of the cloud creates security headaches. Not only is the deployment regularly changing, but the people changing it are across groups and departments.

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