WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, March 29, 2013

It's no secret that the public cloud market has been growing like gangbusters. In fact, a recent  Gartner study found spending on public cloud services is growing at more than 28% per year and private cloud spending is three times that of public cloud. That projects total cloud spending in 2016 to hit $240 billion. Cloud computing (both public and private) will pave the way forward for how companies will deploy new IT services. Lower price points will help those organizations innovate faster, launch new services more quickly, be more responsive to market conditions and evolve their own business models.

Source: http://readwrite.com

Read More about DaaS, MaaS & DRaaS: The Next Phase Of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing: Challenge for Financial Firms?

Cloud computing is not as disruptive as many organizations feared. Using a cloud provider has come as naturally to most organizations as using webmail. But for the financial sector, international laws make life—shall we say—challenging. Here’s why. Behind the scenes, there are heavyweight struggles taking place that center around the “sovereignty” of data. If data are stored across international borders, how can your customers be sure that their sensitive personal information is safe? More importantly—at least from the lawyers’ perspective—who can be sued if it isn’t safe?

How to regulate cloud computing?

Who can fail to have noticed the emergence of cloud as the current technology buzzword? Recent commentary has explained how the cloud can transform business and yet sceptics have been falling over themselves to highlight the barriers to its realisation. However, cloud computing entails many of the same considerations and controls as outsourcing to an offshore vendor and, as such, the issues can be addressed and the advantages of cloud computing realised.

What it means to be a cloud pioneer?

The true pioneers of cloud computing are those who both defined and promoted the concept before it became popular to do so. Back in 1999, cloud computing was considered so much Internet-driven voodoo. Indeed, many of those who argued with me at the time about the viability of the concept are now selling and promoting cloud computing technology. (I won't name names!) I guess the pioneers get the arrows, while settlers get the farm.

A guide to cloud computing for SMEs

Focus on what it is you are trying to accomplish in business terms, and let that be your guide. Technology only matters in business if it delivers a measurable benefit, and technology isn't necessarily beneficial just because it's new and popular. You have to determine what it will do for your particular business need. You should hold any IT consultants you work with to that standard as well. They should be able to articulate to you, in clearly understandable terms, what tangible benefit they will deliver. If they recommend a technical solution to you, cloud or otherwise, they should be able to provide the same kind of measurable and predictable benefits. Never buy into a technology just because everyone is talking about it.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

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.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, March 22, 2013

It’s that time of year again. You know what I mean, the weather is starting to get warmer, people are starting to venture out and most importantly, the spring conference circuit is in full bloom. Yet underneath this façade is an unspeakable truth. That of the annual PR migration, where flocks of unoriginal, formulaic press releases hit bloggers inboxes.

In my ever so brief review of this years crop, I’ve come to a stark realization. Most cloud computing startups are doomed. They are doomed for a number of reasons, but never the less, they are doomed.

Here’s why…

Cloud computing: what exactly is on offer?

It’s easy to be bamboozled by the chatter about the benefits of cloud solutions for business and what’s available. Deciding on the right mix of cloud versus having your own dedicated infrastructure is even more daunting. So what exactly is on offer? At one end of the scale you have software-as-a-service, which allows businesses to use a provider’s cloud-based applications, such as web-based email systems. At the other end there is infrastructure-as-a-service, where companies outsource their entire operations, including servers and networks to a provider on a pay-per-usage basis.

Cloud Computing: 4 Ways To Overcome IT Resistance

Business and IT leaders are bombarded with cloud computing hype and promotion. Yet very little is said about how the cloud affects the evolution of the IT organization itself. Enterprise cloud adoption is a transformative shift where the greatest implementation challenges are often more about people and process than technology integration. Agents of change, especially in large enterprises, must overcome various forms of resistance. This includes organizational fiefdoms and the IT silos that evolved with them.

Google Drive hit by three outages this week

Google Drive, the cloud storage and applications suite used by millions at home and at work, has suffered three service interruptions this week, making it impossible at times for affected users to access their files and applications. As logged in the official Google Apps Status site, the first incident happened on Monday, and was an outage that lasted about three hours and affected 33 percent of Google Drive user requests. Affected users got error messages, long load times and timeouts, according to an incident report posted on Wednesday.

Amazon Is Building the CIA’s New Cloud Computing System

The CIA has reportedly signed a massive cloud computing deal with Amazon, worth up to $600 million over the next 10 years. FCW reports that its sources have told it Amazon will build a private cloud infrastructure for the CIA, to help it "keep up with emerging technologies like big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under the CIA's previous cloud efforts". Both Amazon and the CIA have declined to comment ion the matter, according to FCW. However, the CIA's Central Intelligence Agency Chief Information Officer, Jeanne Tisinger, recently told an audience at the Northern Virginia Technology Council that the agency was hoping to leverage the commercial sector's innovation cycle.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

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.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, March 15, 2013

For many companies, moving their web-application servers to the cloud is an attractive option, since cloud-computing services can offer economies of scale, extensive technical support and easy accommodation of demand fluctuations.

But for applications that depend heavily on database queries, cloud hosting can pose as many problems as it solves. Cloud services often partition their servers into “virtual machines,” each of which gets so many operations per second on a server’s central processing unit, so much space in memory, and the like. That makes cloud servers easier to manage, but for database-intensive applications, it can result in the allocation of about 20 times as much hardware as should be necessary. And the cost of that overprovisioning gets passed on to customers.

Source: MIT.edu

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Google Elbows into the Cloud

In a battle for dominance in cloud computing, Google is taking on Microsoft and Amazon in their own back yard. Google said Tuesday that it was doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, and stepping up the hiring of engineers and others who work on cloud technology. It is part of Google’s dive into a business known as cloud services — renting to other businesses access to its enormous data storage and computing power, accessible by the Internet.

Cloud computing's security pitfalls

The word cloud evokes images of all things soft and gentle; the kiss of a kitten or the soft touch of a lambswool mitten. While that might be true of clouds in the real world, those in cyberspace are turning out to be very different entities indeed, especially when it comes to security. Some of them are downright dangerous.

Why Cloud Computing Is Slowly Winning The Trust War

Seeing skeptical CIOs agree to cloud-based pilots of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other applications is evidence of how cloud computing is slowly winning the trust war. Further evidence can be seen from how skeptical many of these CIOs initially were, and how successful pilots led to their gradual trust. This trust hasn’t come cheap however.

Big Data Is the New Cloud Computing

Big data used to have a specific meaning. Meant to describe cast-offs such as log files, this information was "big" because of the amount of electronic refuse created when processing, say, an e-commerce transaction. Big data used to be an exercise in digital dumpster diving. Those days are gone. At the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference, "big data" became a proxy for social data compiled by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. A synonym for capturing sentiment, but on a grand scale. Every company had to become a "big data" company, panelists enthused.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

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.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, March 08, 2013

Google recently launched its high-end Chromebook Pixel, and like previous Chromebooks this notebook computer makes a distinctly 21st Century assumption: that users' data, work and play belong mostly online, not on their own computers. Google isn't alone in pushing this notion, but it's the most powerful evangelist for the shift to what tech people call the "cloud" and away from "local" storage.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk

The cloud evangelists have an alluring pitch. First, they say, we can now count on being connected as much of the time as necessary. Second, these computing and data services becoming a utility like electricity – easier and safer to run from remote servers than on our local systems.

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The 10 Best Countries for Cloud Computing

1. Japan
2. Australia
3. United States
4. Germany
5. Singapore
6. France
7. United Kingdom
8. South Korea
9. Canada
10. Italy

Business Professors Take on a Key Technology: Cloud Computing

In their new book, Cloud Computing Service and Deployment Models: Layers and Management, two professors from the University of Baltimore's Merrick School of Business present a cohesive, highly effective way for businesses large and small to find the answers. Co-authors Alberto M. Bento and Anil K. Aggarwal, both professors of information systems in the school's Department of Information Systems and Decision Science, have gathered experts from several disciplines to consider how business can best manage and take advantage of the opportunities stemming from this unprecedented growth in information resources. The relatively straightforward solution to the problem, they say, is cloud computing.

Cloud Computing: Maximizing the 80%

In the last MSP Mentor post, Does ‘cloud’ take the M out of MSP?, I outlined four strategies you could use as an MSP to counter the threat to your core business posed by global cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This time I’d like to take a closer look at the first of these – how to simplify the deployment of your cloud, and introduce the core features you and your customers will depend on, without unnecessary expenditure of time, energy and money. The foundation of your cloud isn’t necessarily where you add value. I think of it as an 80/20 rule. For the majority of cloud providers, about 80 percent of what you do is the same as everybody else – infrastructure as a service, based on pretty much the same hardware.

Cloud computing adopted by 57% of major councils

Published by web developers Eduserv, the poll of 139 unitary authorities revealed 57.5% have taken up cloud computing – which entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation.

The poll also revealed 37% of local authorities across the UK are currently using cloud applications. Cloud hosting was used by 17% of survey respondents and cloud storage by 12.5%.

Only 29% of councils have not deployed cloud computing, the survey found.

‘Councils are often written off as displaying a lack of innovation, but it is clear that many of them are leading the way with cloud,’ said Andrew Hawkins, business development director, Eduserv.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

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.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, March 01, 2013

Let’s take a look at how the cloud is affecting authors. Authors everywhere should be paying homage to Gutenberg, the man who created the printing press late in the mid 15th century. Without him and his invention, books would be non-existent and there would be no “authors” in the true sense of the word; no Stephen King, Ayn Rand or Isaac Aasimov churning out page upon page of stories.

Source: CloudTimes

Maybe this is putting a little bit too much emphasis on the author. While they do take care of the conception of the material, it is the publishers and the publishing companies that are tasked with manufacturing, reproducing and ultimately selling their works.

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What's driving corporate cloud use? Home cloud use

A new study sponsored by CDW shows what may seem obvious: Home users of cloud-based services are more likely to promote work use of cloud computing. The interesting part is that these self-motivated customers have done a better job of selling cloud computing than the marketing departments with their billions of dollars. CDW's "2013 State of the Cloud" report surveyed 1,242 tech professionals and concluded that the personal use of cloud services is a big factor in corporate cloud adoption. In the report, 73 percent of respondents claimed that, in their company, employees' use of personal cloud services has "significantly influenced" the decision to move aspects of enterprise IT to the public cloud. The survey included employees who worked within as well as outside of IT.

Where The Highest Paying Cloud Computing Jobs Are

Using analytics to better understand the cloud computing job market is fascinating. One of the most advanced companies in this area is Wanted Analytics, who aggregates job postings from over 500 job boards and maintains a database of over 600 million unique job listings.  They specialize in business intelligence for the talent marketplace, providing insights into how one company’s salary range compares to competitors for the same position, also calculating the difficulty to hire a given type of candidate.  They’ve developed a unique Hiring Scale to accomplish this.

Are you on the right cloud computing career path?

While the rise of cloud computing frightens some in IT, many see the technology as an opportunity to accelerate their careers and their bank accounts. And IT pros have good reason to be optimistic. In a 2012 survey conducted within a 90-day period by Wanted Analytics, more than 2,400 companies said they are seeking candidates with cloud computing skills. Moreover, hiring demand increased by 61% from 2011 to 2012 for IT people with cloud knowledge. Analyst firm IDC also released a report last year that indicated public and private spending in cloud computing will increase exponentially over the next few years, resulting in an available jobs boost of nearly 14 million positions worldwide.

How Cloud Computing Is Redefining the M&A Landscape

In 2013, expect to see the pace of mergers and acquisitions for cloud computing, mobile and analytics technologies accelerate as software vendors look to fill gaps in their product and service strategies. This and other key insights of how cloud computing is reshaping the merger and acquisition landscape can be found in the latest Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) report published today.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

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.