Friday, July 1, 2011

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, July 01, 2011

Cloud computing and collaboration are a match made in heaven, yet someone must have forgotten to pay the matchmaker because the union is taking its time getting consummated. Strong web-based collaborative tools, such as SharePoint, have been around for a decade or so, but many organizations still stick with what’s comfortable and rely solely on email. Email is the go-to collaboration tool for knowledge workers, despite the fact that it is only one piece of what can be a highly efficient overall cloud strategy. Why, then, is email still the primary means of collaboration? Here are four main reasons: 1) it’s convenient, 2) it’s easy, 3) everyone uses it – all the time – and 4) it still works.


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10 best cloud backup strategies for biz continuity
  1. Address specific business needs 
  2. Conduct TCO analysis 
  3. Test before provisioning 
  4. Encrypt backup data 
  5. Follow governance and compliance rules 
  6. Bulk data import process governance 
  7. Backup locally and remotely 
  8. Backup locally to ensure public accessibility 
  9. Engage multiple vendors 
  10. Ensure data interoperability 
Cost, scalability are primary drivers for cloud usage

Despite plenty of vendor hype, most enterprises use cloud computing services sparingly. However, Gartner analysts say crucial steps must be taken today to avoid serious cloud computing security problems when adoption rates rise in the near future. During a presentation at the 2011 Gartner Security & Risk Management summit, Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst John Pescatore told attendees that even though most industry observers believe enterprise cloud computing adoption is on the rise, Gartner’s research has found public cloud computing use is limited to Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Proving his point, Pescatore informally polled the audience of several hundred attendees, and roughly half acknowledged use of commercial cloud services, but only a few hands went up when asked whether their organizations used platform or infrastructure services, or other hybrid models.

Scalability and backup recovery key to virtualization

A significant majority (66%) of companies list performance degradation as a somewhat or extremely large factor in their hesitation over placing business-critical applications into a private cloud. That's among key findings from a survey by Symantec among 3,700 IT managers in 35 countries, entitled 'Virtualisation and Evolution to the Cloud'. Symantec's white paper argues that, while virtualisation and cloud computing can help streamline operations and save money, sacrificing performance is clearly not an option.

Resolving cloud application migration issues

A good deal of time and money in the IT industry has been spent on trying to make applications portable. Not surprising, the goal around migrating applications among clouds is to somehow make applications more cloud-portable. This can be done in at least three ways:
  1. Architect applications to increase cloud portability. 
  2. Develop open standards for clouds. 
  3. Find tools that move applications around clouds without requiring changes. 
Most of today's large, old monolithic applications are not portable and must be rebuilt in order to fit the target environment. There are other applications that require special hardware, reducing their portability, and even many of the newer applications being built today are not very portable, certainly not cloud portable.

We hope these short sum-ups on cloud computing are helping you to take a more knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming weeks.

Appreciate if you can add more to this list and help our readers to keep in touch with the Cloud...


Santanu Das
Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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