There’s consistent chatter about the new world of the cloud, and much of the discussion involves how a small business saves substantially and can then invest the savings elsewhere in its business.
For many small businesses that have used the cloud for a few years, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the experience has largely been positive.
Operating servers both on-site and in the cloud is «a very effective way of reducing risk,» said Michael Harries, chief technologist at Citrix Startup Accelerator, a Silicon Valley investment firm that works specifically with software startups, according to the Journal.
Business owners should make their cloud-deployment decisions based on the «support they have available,» he said.
Harpaul Sambhi, chief executive of social-media recruitment firm Careerify, said running his company solely in the cloud has allowed him to focus more on business growth. Careerify allows a company to connect to its employees’ social networks in order to find candidates for jobs at that company, be it through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Sambhi said because an average employee has about 300 social-media contacts, he didn’t want to burden his staff of 12 with trying to maintain servers that are mining the data of hundreds of thousands of users.
«It’s a lot of work for us,» he said.

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Big Data. Social. Mobile. These worldwide trends are sparking new cloud-based applications and driving innovation around the next generation of open, web-based services development. This tectonic shift is fueling the need for new cloud platforms that provide open services in a secure environment, powered by business grade capacity, and supported with quality service. Companies are looking to a hybrid delivery model to ensure the flexibility and scale that is required to capitalize on these trends.
Dan Baigent, Sr. Director Business Development, HP Cloud Services, shares the company’s vision and strategy behind the HP Converged Cloud and the implications for the enterprise. He discusses how some of HP’s customers today are taking advantage of the cloud including how simple it is to introduce a public cloud into a private cloud environment.

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Guest blog by Dave King
Editor for Information Technology Advisor

The phenomenon that is “Big Data” is already having a huge impact on your organisation – only you might not have noticed it yet.

Big data is the accumulated data your organisation has collected and usually stored – structured and unstructured data such as text, sensor data, audio, video, click streams, log files, and more. Many companies are finding enormous value through analysing these various data sets against and with each other.

The evolution of the Internet and the influence of mobile devices, wireless networking, sensors, and social networks have changed operations and how businesses compete. But all these tech trends are bit players compared with Big Data.

While Big Data is the engine that’s driving companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, it’s relevant for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) too. Big Data has already had a significant impact …

Despite the immense potential for efficiency offered by the proliferation of cloud and SaaS solutions, integration of these solutions into often disparate enterprise IT frameworks continues to be a challenge for many businesses. Even traditional B2B integration faces greater complexity with the growing adoption of cloud and SaaS applications. Building on this complexity are things such as changes to privacy regulations that have occurred over the past decade – particularly in relation to healthcare and financial data – as well as the speed of data demands from distributed supply chains.
Over the next year, I anticipate that businesses will increasingly look to managed services that offer industry expertise, proven processes and in-depth technology to streamline cloud integration and data management initiatives that have been implemented over the past several years. With data volume, variety, velocity and therefore complexity increasing, companies are beginning to realize that integration and data management must be at the core of their IT architecture.

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IT departments today are in a new position. No longer simply providers of technology to an organization, they’ve become true service providers. Today, the IT department or data center leverages advances in infrastructure and virtualization technology to change the way we do business for the better.
Yet, transitioning into a service provider who offers internal cloud solutions can be a challenge.
Start with your current quality of service and cost metrics. You need to understand where you stand. Do some benchmarking, and identify where you’re using your resources. Compare your output with third party cloud vendors and you’ll see opportunities for improvement.

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…scrolls across the small 16:9 LCD protruding from my chest cavity.

In case you missed it, I’m from the future, where we all have become our own personal cloud. Some clouds you can actually see, like auras, but look somewhat like the classic Peanuts character Pigpen. We’ve all become walking antennas, routers, hotspots and hubs for all the other personal clouds. If auto-discovery is enabled, once you are in range of a ‘friend’ that you ‘like,’ a few beeps go off and they appear as an icon right in our own retina. You remember those smart phones that allowed users to tap the phones to send a picture or file? Now, all we have to do is crank up some digital audio and do a move called ‘The Bump.’ It’s based on some ancient 1970′s fad dance where participants would lightly ‘bump’ hips to the beat of the music. Today we use it to exchange data. A bump or two and you’ve shared your music library. A hip-check, your movie collection. Passing gas is kinda like your old computer’s recycle bin that you need to empty every so often.

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I’ve been granted an incredible opportunity. Over the past three and a half months I have gotten to lead a real world large-scale delivery of a cloud solution. The final solution will be delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to the customer via an on-premise managed service. While I have developed SaaS/PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solutions in the past, I was fortunate enough to have been able to build those on public cloud infrastructures. This has been a rare glimpse into the “making of the sausage” having to orchestrate everything from delivery of the hardware into the data center in four countries to testing and integration with the customer environment.

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The lack of ability to achieve compliance in a cloud environment is one of the main factors slowing or stopping enterprises from migrating to the cloud. But cloud advantages, specifically the significant flexibility, push more and more organizations to open up to the cloud and demand cloud security assurances from their cloud and service providers. […]

The post Cloud Compliance Starts with Split Knowledge appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.

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