The cloud is one of those amorphous technologies that gets trotted out as the answer to all of our woes, usually by people who don’t think all that deeply about IT and its challenges. We hate to puncture anyone’s bubble with a dose of reality, but at a macro level, adoption of all public cloud services except software as a service is going pretty darned slow.

Depending on your expectations, doubling in five years the percentage of IT organizations that use cloud services, and reaching one-third of organizations, might be pretty good. But compare the adoption rate for cloud services to another game-changing technology, virtualization. For almost every IT organization, virtualization isn’t a matter of whether but how much. No one questions virtualization’s core value proposition; the only question is about the breadth of applicability. Read the rest of this entry

Rather than a new technology in itself, cloud computing is a new business model wrapped around new technologies – such as server virtualization – that take advantage of economies of scale to reduce the cost of using IT resources. It approaches computing as a service, rather than a product. Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the data centers that provide those services.

Most businesses pay a cloud service provider, rather than setting up their own clouds, to take advantage of those economies of scale. However, you can still choose the types of cloud services you want and how they are used. There are several types of cloud services, called “deployment models.” Here’s a brief guide to each, and some factors small and medium-sized businesses should consider before paying to use the cloud.

There are four ways businesses and government agencies can deploy cloud services:

Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise. Read the rest of this entry

Data integration and management practices are the growing trends in the new business market. This is as more and more businesses seek better ways to grow their enterprise. This is also a response to the irreversible challenges and demand for variety, storage, scalability and complexity in information handling. As a result of these trends, more companies are migrating to the cloud strengthening their backroom in data integration and data management and laying a secure and reliable information structure. Experts say that the cloud computing trends will move towards more reliable and secure cloud-based data integration and data management cloud solutions.

B2B Improved Agility
Most business-to-customer clamor is for companies to move to social networking, mobile cloud and cloud services. This trend enhances the agility on business-to-business applications. This also, pushes forward the consumer-as-a-service platform as more businesses place more focus on commerce APIs.

Business Activity Monitoring Demands
The result of the cloud trend requires businesses to integrate with cloud-based processes and on-premise infrastructure, which in turn demands for an efficient business activity monitoring. As visibility into the business processes, customer activity and cloud services become quick and easy it ensures that business operations are working efficiently. Read the rest of this entry

It feels a little blasphemous to type this while Cloud Connect, the cloud industry’s premier conference, takes place just 30 miles away.

But sometimes when you see a balloon rising from all of the hot air filling it, you gotta take aim with the BB gun and pop it.

As most of you know, multitenancy is the term describing when a single instance of software serves dozens or hundreds of users/customers at the same time. Anyone can see how much more efficient this is versus the old server hosting model, where the ratio of server:customer is 1:1. Even using today’s Red Hat-type virtualization, each server can cram fewer users/customers onto itself than a true multitenant service.

Besides their efficiency, multitenant services can scale easily. Both of these mean lower costs for the hosters/software vendors, and, potentially, lower prices for customers.

Outside of the application space, things are well, more stormy. Take the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) space.

For enterprises – who usually have much more rigorous requirements than consumers – multitenant cloud platforms have plenty of disadvantages. That goes double for the developers serving those enterprises. Read the rest of this entry

Everyone who uses the Internet today uses cloud computing in one way or another, even if they are not aware they are doing so. You’ve proabaly heard thousands of times this term, but what is cloud hosting all about?

Cloud computing is now a real time alternative to the traditional network server and hardware based IT infrastructure of the past. Cloud computing is information technology and applications that are stored in the ‘cloud’, This is really just another term used to refer to the Internet. The old method was to store all this info on your own network server hardware. With the advent of cloud computing it has proved to be a lot cheaper for businesses to use as they no longer need to purchase applications, hard drives or back up disks as well as the expensive software, which previously they needed to run their systems. Businesses can now rent all this through a cloud hosting provider who keeps their systems not only up and running but up-to-date as well.

Not only is this a very cost effective way of running a business but it also means that all business procedures using IT can be carried out a lot faster in a more flexible and very efficient environment. The best part about cloud computing is that no one needs to have any sort of know-how when it comes to using it, all a person needs to be able to do is know how to use either a computer or a laptop. Read the rest of this entry