An IT services provider based in Asia is throwing up some big numbers when it comes to savings and cloud computing.
DataOne Asia, an independent provider of IT services in the Philippines, said businesses can significantly reduce expenses by putting in place cloud computing solutions, according to an article on PCAdvisor.co,uk.
«Businesses that migrate their IT systems to the cloud could save at least 50 percent of their expenses. This is because the cloud minimizes the cost of infrastructure, management and support,» said DataOne Asia President and CEO Cyril Rocke.
Rocke says that the cloud could help companies minimize expenses on procuring and maintaining their IT infrastructure.
«Most IT users tend to underestimate the cost of procuring infrastructure. Whenever a company wants to buy IT equipment like servers, they cannot do it in a snap. They need to follow a long procurement process where they have to justify the project, write cost-benefit analyses, and submit the necessary papers to different departments. Sometimes, there’s even a need to hire IT experts that will decide which equipment is best for a company.»
«In reality, companies can spend more than a year and thousands of [dollars] on the procurement process alone. This entire traditional procurement process severely damages businesses, and reduces their ability to react and roll out new ideas and solutions.»
Cloud Expo New York: Filling the Cloud Information Security Gap
Organizations of all sizes are challenged because of an industry-wide deficit of information security professionals. Compounding this problem is the steady adoption of cloud-based services, including software and infrastructure as a service, where information security is not always a core competency of the cloud provider.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Rob Aragao, VP, Services, at EiQ Networks, will discuss how other organizations have solved these challenges through hosted SecureVue security information and event management (SIEM) – a service-based offering that delivers advanced security expertise and managed security services to organizations that utilize cloud-based services. Attendees will walk away with an understanding how customers have greatly improved the security posture of their cloud-based deployments through hosted SIEM.
Has Cloud Changed IT for the Better? | CTO Power Panel at Cloud Expo NY
In this CTO Power Panel at the 12th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, topics discussed will be at a deliberately high level and will include:
How fast will the last remaining barriers to enterprise-wide cloud adoption melt away – are truly secure public clouds feasible, for example, or only private ones?
How exactly does a company or organization go about deciding whether to migrate only specific applications to the cloud – such as storage or security – or their overall IT infrastructure?
How much of an influence on cloud adoption is the US Government’s continuing support of Cloud strategies for all government agencies?
A guide for floating down the Amazon
With Amazon’s rapid success in the cloud market comes increased awareness of what it can, and even more importantly, cannot do.
The success is easy to explain, with Amazon’s attractive price point and ever-growing set of technical functionality. The roadblock to wider adoption is equally easy to explain:
«Businesses want a full dish to eat, while Amazon serves up ingredients and asks users to get cooking»
AWS works very well as a purely technical standalone platform, and so those were the enterprise early adopter’s use cases: test and dev environments, new standalone outwards-facing web apps, and other sandboxed examples.
The problem is that these are all use cases that remain in the lab, behind the curtain. Sometimes this technical approach can even mean that AWS is introduced surreptitiously, as part of so-called «shadow cloud».
When it comes to discussions about strategic enterprise cloud platforms, that sort of …
Cloud Encryption: How to Choose an IaaS Encryption Solution
During the past month or so, Rich Mogull, analyst and CEO of securosis has published multiple blogs on cloud encryption best practices, specifically in infrastructure clouds. The final blog IaaS Encryption: How to Choose, provides a good opportunity for us to touch and expand on some of the volume storage cloud security points highlighted on Rich’s article:
“Always use external key management. Instance-managed encryption is only acceptable for test/development systems you know will never go into production”
Instance managed encryption means the encryption keys are kept on the virtual disk. In other words, anyone with access to your cloud instance, has access to your encryption keys – hence to your data. In addition, specific cloud operations, such as disk snapshots, will snapshot the encryption keys with it.
Cloud Encryption: How to Choose an IaaS Encryption Solution
During the past month or so, Rich Mogull, analyst and CEO of securosis has published multiple blogs on cloud encryption best practices, specifically in infrastructure clouds. The final blog IaaS Encryption: How to Choose, provides a good opportunity for us to touch and expand on some of the volume storage cloud security points highlighted on Rich’s article:
“Always use external key management. Instance-managed encryption is only acceptable for test/development systems you know will never go into production”
Instance managed encryption means the encryption keys are kept on the virtual disk. In other words, anyone with access to your cloud instance, has access to your encryption keys – hence to your data. In addition, specific cloud operations, such as disk snapshots, will snapshot the encryption keys with it.
Cloud Expo New York: API Security, Does My Business Need an OAuth Server?
Many have heard of OAuth but are unsure of how it might apply to their business.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software, will describe how OAuth can be used to facilitate certain business models and simplify the sharing of private data.
Alistair Farquharson is a visionary industry veteran focused on using disruptive technologies to drive business growth and improve efficiency and agility within organizations. As the CTO of SOA Software Alistair is helping to shape and mature the enterprise API and SOA industry. Alistair is responsible for product strategy and development for this leading Enterprise API and SOA Governance company. He spends a great deal of time and energy shaping customer and industry direction with regular conference keynote appearances, discussions with customers, and even the occasional foray into writing code. Alistair has been at the forefront of many technology waves from enterprise web architecture, through web services and SOA, and now into APIs. His expertise spans a wide range of technologies and businesses, and he brings a unique global focus to everything he does.
The Cloud Advantage: Five Reasons Businesses Should Look Skyward
The technology infrastructure of today’s business landscape has undergone dramatic shifts in recent years. The consumerization of IT, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement, and of course the cloud have revolutionized the way corporations manage data, complete transactions and communicate with employees and customers.
Organizations of all sizes are moving their document and email management needs to the cloud, with increasing numbers opting for a private cloud solution, a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services behind an organization’s firewall.
Retailers Turn Cloud Computing into Sales
It turns out cloud computing could be the most useful sales associate on the floor, and you won’t have to worry about it stealing sales leads, ala “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
With the help of cloud computing, some brick-and-mortar stores are combating showrooming, a trend where consumers look at items in a store before buying them online, usually at lower prices, according to an article on Wired.com.
Clouds offer retailers a way to explore the potential of Big Data analytics to understand their customers better. In order to compete with e-tailers, retailers are tapping social networks to learn what customers are saying about them and about their competitors. Weather data is being used to influence product-purchasing decisions, and merchandise promotions are organized around social events.
In many cases, brick-and-mortar retailers are even finding new data sources. Some companies are tracking the movement of customers within stores and analyzing how many stop at displays to improve the effectiveness of merchandising. Others are considering installing license-plate cameras in parking lots to find out which customer is about to walk into the store.
CollabNet Out to Dominate Cloud Development
CollabNet, the enterprise cloud development concern, figures the new version of CloudForge it’s put together kicks butt, leapfrogging GitHub and BitBucket by offering the broadest, freest toolkit around, while romancing developers by taking the shackles off its use.
The multi-tenant development-Platform-as-a-Service (dPaaS) is now unrestricted even though it’s free. It can build web sites, mobile, cloud and web applications, and rapidly prototype and deploy business software.
CloudForge can now be used by an unlimited number of users for an unlimited number of private projects, and it comes with Subversion and Git, the version control fixtures, so these users won’t get lost in their own underwear. If you’ve got something better, bring it along.