The demand for cloud computing is an undeniable, unavoidable trend in business IT. Business managers are hearing all about the benefits of the extensible, flexible and scalable features that the cloud offers. This puts pressure on the IT team to pull together some sort of cloud solution for the organization. However, without a clear set of benchmarks, a defined scope and a thorough assessment of needs and resources, building a cloud quickly turns into a stormy nightmare. Chuck Hollis of EMC recounts the story of what he saw at a large financial institution in a recent post on his blog.
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How to Determine How Much Your Cloud Costs Because I am a long term supporter of cloud computing, and I try to spread the idea that moving to the cloud will help any company lower costs and better leverage resources, I am often asked, how much the cloud actually costs. People fear that the initial investment and their ongoing expenses will be difficult to be amortized in time and are wondering overall if the cloud investment is worth it. From my own experience, I would say it is a definite yes. I believe that in order to determine the costs
The Dao of Tau: Which Countries Have the Most IT Torque? — It’s been a year since I published my first Tau Index results here at Cloud Computing Journal. It has since been featured in Computerworld Philippines, as well as publications in Hong Kong, Canada, and Europe. I am now integrating more than 20 new parameters to the Index, to get an initial view of how aggressively countries are moving toward cloud computing. Its my view that cloud computing will be the great productivity engine of the next few decades. I’ll be presenting these results at Cloud Expo November 7-10
The Cloud Lock-In (Part 2): The Great Lock-In of PaaS As we climb up the cloud layers scale, the complexity increases hence the vendor lock-in. PaaS as well as SaaS layers present stronger vendor lock-in than the IaaS layer. Did you read the 1st part on IaaS Lock-In ? The Cloud Lock-In (Part 1): Public IaaS is Great ! The PaaS vendor releases the “cloud applications’ developers” from the need to maintain the script or the database environments. The PaaS vendor takes responsibility of aspects such as the application deployment, the big data, scalability and availability by enabling features such as multi-tenancy and cluster
How Small Businesses can gain a competitive advantage with Cloud Computing In our increasingly globalized world, small businesses need an effective communications network to span the geographically spread regions of the business. But the business applications required to achieve this are an expensive proposition in our current economic climate. This is making it more and more troublesome for smaller companies to compete with big corporations who hold seemingly infinite budgets. But we are now seeing the emergence of multi-tenanted business applications based upon a price-per-user model, or in other words, the Public Cloud. This is allowing smaller firms to enjoy
Private Cloud Interview with Mr. Joe Weinman As the founder of Cloudonomics.com, Joe Weinman is one of the most known cloud computing evangelists in the world. Weinman researches the economics of the cloud. Among other cloud aspects he examines, he also relates to the cloud financial operational costs together with its business benefits. Following I Am OnDemand last posts summarizing and discussing several Cloudonomics researches, we asked Mr. Weinman to meet for a brief discussion. Last week I had the honor to interview him for about an hour and hear his clouds’ perceptions and vision. What is a private cloud ? I
Changing Business with Cloud Computing In today’s business climate, instant adaptation and scalability is critical. Planning and preparing for increased web traffic, spikes in the use of computer resources, disaster recovery, and day-to-day business operations is key. Loss of business due to system overload or breakdown leads not only to loss of revenue and customer confidence, it can, in some cases, lead to a total business failure. In order to survive and thrive, established, start-up, and growing businesses must be built on a solid foundation that leaves little chance for vulnerability. Company infrastructure, computer resources, and software that are always
Driving Business Productivity through DevOps + Cloud Computing Software development and operations/systems administrators have been operating in a mutually opposing, yet beneficial, relationship. If software development teams are Ying, then system admins would be considered the Yang. X’s to O’s. In traditional IT departments, the development team aims to deliver new, innovative features to end-users quickly. IT Ops team place more emphasis on run time, service, software and reliability, thereby requiring a slow and deliberate process. In a perfect world, the goals of developers and IT Ops should be aligned to power both agility and reliability. Unfortunately, it’s not always
