Our prior post, A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure: Disaster Recovery and Data Protection, discussed both the benefits and limitations of a cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) strategy. As we highlighted last week, traditional disaster recovery options leave open a huge hole: At one extreme are high-cost, quick recovery time options using hosted or colocation sites and at the other extreme are low-cost, long recovery time options such as tape or disk backup.
As a result, organizations who cannot afford a cold or hot standby site have been left to either cobble together a complicated and risky DR strategy or rely solely on offsite data protection, which affords them limited business continuity.
Amazon Cloud Services Cleared for Government Use
Amazon.com Inc has been given a security clearance by the U.S. government that will make it easier for federal agencies to use its cloud computing services. Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, was certified to operate as a cloud service provider for three years under the government’s new FedRAMP program. The accreditation covers all AWS…
Effective cloud operations will make or break your initiative’s success
CIOs, engaged in cloud initiatives, have identified one of their top goals – a need for a cloud strategy.
The reason; cloud initiatives not only directly impact technology but the effect extends significantly to business processes and organisational resources. A strategy that aligns process, technology and business service delivery is critical to the future returns on the initiative.
During the course of IT’s mere fifty years of evolving operational models nothing has accelerated, and to varying degrees disrupted the norms of a CIO’s domain, like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS etc.
Cloud computing changes the IT planning approach, impacts staff, changes costing models, simplifies delivery and visibility of SLAs, and adds new dimensions to operational accountability and governance.
In my CIO days, the move to client server appeared to be technically evolutionary. Cloud, within the context of its potential impact on business is deserving of “business change agent.”
BMC CLM gives …
SolidFire Launches SSD Go-to-Market Program
SolidFire, the purely solid-state (SSD) storage house whose widgetry is designed for cloud infrastructure, has launched a go-to-market program for cloud providers suitably called “Fueled by SolidFire.”
It’s supposed to support third-parties’ development, positioning and growth of services built on its storage technology.
How cloud integration is defining the future of CRM
The future of customer relationships depends more on context than transactions.
And this trend is accelerating, driven by the integration of social media into customer relationship management (CRM), rapid gains in usability of CRM and integration applications, and the global growth of the API economy.
Gaining a clear, contextually-based view of customers isn’t easy.
Fine-tuning system integration to understand the nuances of customers, gain greater insights and infusing customer intelligence through a company requires more than APIs and cloud platform integration.
It requires a precise strategy of integration to align customer data to ongoing strategies.
The bottom line is that customer-driven integration is reshaping CRM and will accelerate as cloud platforms, combined with APIs, reorder the customer relationship landscape.
To gain greater insights into what’s going on in the area of cloud-based CRM integration and the impact of the API economy, I recently spoke with Lou Guercia, President …
G-Cloud iii drums home the need to keep data local
The Cabinet Office’s third iteration of the G-Cloud framework not only added an extra 368 suppliers to its CloudStore, but it raised a few eyebrows over the exclusion of one notable bidder – Amazon!
The company made no secret of its desire for inclusion during the G-Cloud’s second iteration, touting that it was looking to get involved with the G-Cloud in the future. And, the reasoning for its previous exclusion was widely attributed to its lack of a UK-based data centre, along with an absence of assurances over whether data would be backed up across the Atlantic.
So, while the cloud is set to change everything, some things will probably always remain the same. Our protective nature over our own data and who can touch it might just be one of those things that will never change.
Governments and public sector bodies fall into a rather unique category of …
Cloud-Friendly BPM: The Power of Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture
We must bring together the worlds of SOA, BPM, Cloud, REST, and HOA. The secret to getting all these architectural trends to work well together centers on how we deal with state information. We must first separate application state from resource state, and then subsequently take the conceptual leap to understanding that the best way to implement our business processes is by combining HOA processes with Composite RESTful Services. Once we make this leap, however, the pieces of this complicated puzzle finally fall into place.
What we need is a better way of dealing with state information that both allows our BPM engines to be Cloud friendly, and also frees us from the limitations of our ESBs. Or perhaps we must reinvent our ESBs to work in the Cloud. However you slice the problem, Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture (HOA) has the answer.
Wowrack to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. From headquarters in Seattle, WA, Wowrack services seven data centers globally for nearly 3000 customers around the world.
Big Data & Cloud Start-Ups Successfully IPO
Big Data and the cloud each contributed a start-up to the stock market last Friday.
Tableau Software, a profitable chart-making BI data visualization firm, IPO’d on the Big Board in New York sporting the highly desirable ticker symbol DATA and selling at the open for $31 a share. It rose to $50.75 by the end of the trading day, up nearly 64%.
It has subsequently inched up further and ran as high as $59.60 before falling back a few bucks. Its market cap was $1.9 billion at noon Tuesday.
nfina Technologies to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that nfina Technologies, a provider of highly reliable cloud server products, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
nfina Technologies develops, manufactures, and markets highly reliable cloud server products, designed to solve the most demanding data center requirements in mission-critical cloud applications. Nfina’s staff has decades of experience in computer design, network equipment design, manufacturing, data center design and financial management.