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Comments Off New 2011 IBM study reveals that cloud computing is ready to take off
The 2011 IBM CIO study found that 60 percent of organizations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving a competitive advantage. The figure nearly doubles the number of CIOs who said they would utilize cloud in IBM’s 2009 CIO study, and is one of dozens of new insights and trends learned from CIOs worldwide in businesses of all sizes. The study’s findings also found that the role of the CIO is evolving; top priorities now align more with those of CEOs. Global IBM Study Confirms Cloud Computing Poised to Take Off
Four Steps to Compliance Management in the Public Cloud - Wed, 06 Jul 2011
Feeling nervous about the cloud? Many CIOs understandably hesitate to send services requiring regulatory compliance to the public cloud. Though not outsourcing such services may seem like a good idea, this approach limits your flexibility in offering the best combination of services to meet business demands. As public cloud services continue to grow in both diversity and quality, IT and the business can’t afford to bypass opportunities offered there and hope to remain competitive. The compliance issue must be addressed, but how? Is it possible to ensure compliance when sending services to the cloud? Fortunately, the answer is “yes.” By using a strategy based on Business Service Management (BSM), a comprehensive approach and unified platform for running IT, you can extend the BSM processes and solutions that you use to manage your internal infrastructure to the public cloud environment.
The Inevitability of an Open Cloud - Wed, 06 Jul 2011
The advantages of using the cloud are apparent, but the approaches to the cloud are still in a heated industry debate. Renting cloud space from a vendor, private clouds, open clouds – just what is the best choice and where is the industry heading? While renting cloud space from a vendor seems easy, it’s difficult to move off these clouds, and it’s especially problematic when you’d like to test another provider’s cloud. Private clouds tie you into a verticalized stack, limiting flexibility and choice, not to mention they are cost prohibitive. We are driving toward an open cloud, providing control and flexibility to users. An open cloud is the next reiteration of the web and what will power the web moving forward.
zCloud – A Better Business Cloud - Wed, 06 Jul 2011
The value of cloud computing is the availability of technological infrastructure support that is always available, comprehensively useful, highly scalable and attractively priced. By this modern definition of cloud computing, System z has been an internalized cloud for decades and has found to have all the features to make it a natural Cloud Platform. The power of mainframe’s software and hardware virtualization, its shared resources architecture, its real and virtual memory controls, its in-memory internal communications structure, its specialty engines, its energy efficiency and its accommodation of Linux and Java natively are all cloud-relevant, and enable IBM System z machine to be a natural zCloud. This article is a look at all the cloud relevant features of IBM System z machines in detail.
Cloud – Market Forces Working - Wed, 06 Jul 2011
Some time back I had complained that the price of cloud service offerings are not coming down fast enough compared to the drop in hardware price reduction. But then we see the following release from Amazon – AWS. “…we’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you…” (see this) Indeed, from July 1, they have eliminated the inbound data fee. It used to be US$ 0.10 per GB. Also they have reduced the outbound data fee between 20% (for lower end of usage) to almost 40% (at the higher end of usage).
War in the Clouds: Are You Ready? - Wed, 06 Jul 2011
As cloud application adoption becomes pervasive throughout the enterprise, concerns around cloud data privacy, residency, and security continue to grow. A number of enterprises are slowing, and even reversing, their cloud application adoption until they can address the concerns stemming from regulatory compliance requirements, industry standards, or internal policies surrounding sensitive data management. In his general session at Cloud Expo New York, Terry Woloszyn, Founder/CTO of PerspecSys Inc., explored the “war on your cloud data” and what the enterprise can do to defend against the attacks on sensitive data in the clouds. With these defenses in place, the enterprise can move forward with cloud application adoption more securely.
Cloud Computing: Compuware Acquires dynaTrace software - Wed, 06 Jul 2011
Compuware on Wednesday announced that it has acquired privately held dynaTrace software. The $256 million cash acquisition closed on July 1, 2011. “Organizations today depend on the rapid development and delivery of high-performing applications to drive revenues, customer satisfaction and brand,” said Compuware Chief Executive Officer Bob Paul. “To meet these demands effectively, IT organizations must have visibility into the performance of every transaction, from development, through test and in production. Together, Compuware and dynaTrace APM solutions allow IT to meet business demands for performance and agility through unbeatable insight into the user experience – whether in cloud, complex or traditional environments.”
Cloud Computing: Legal Quagmire - Wed, 06 Jul 2011
Even if you are willing to take on the risks of the Cloud, you must still do whatever you can to mitigate those risks. And unfortunately, risk means liability, and that means lawyers. To help make sure you and your lawyer are up to speed on all the legal ramifications of Cloud Computing, we’ve assembled the following list of concerns. Ignore the items on this list at your own peril.
STRATO Enters into Cloud Application Business with Open-Xchange - Wed, 06 Jul 2011
Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class email and groupware for cloud providers, announced an agreement with STRATO, a web host and services provider, bringing integrated online communication and teamwork to hosting customers in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, U.K., France and Italy. As of today, STRATO starts to provision Open-Xchange business-class webmail to all its shared-webhosting customers, which include more than 5 million email accounts. Existing and new STRATO customers will have access to the powerful AJAX-based email, contact and calendar management functionality as part of their hosting package. Users benefit from a single and central communication application, which integrates personal contacts from social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing, as well as email from external email accounts like Google Mail, GMX or Yahoo! Mail without any further interaction. The cloud-based application can be accessed with a standard Internet browser (without installing software) and via any PC, laptop, iPad or smartphone.
A Better Path Toward Legacy Integration with the Cloud - Tue, 05 Jul 2011
More organizations are facing user demand for cloud-based services. With its promise of greater agility and more media-rich services, the cloud has plenty to offer enterprises. Beneath that promise, however, is a problem that is plaguing IT teams. The issue of legacy system integration is persistent throughout nearly every industry. Few software or application vendors have written utilities to specifically link to their systems, leaving individual IT teams to create these interfaces. When dozens of applications are involved, this manual fix becomes complex, resource-intensive and time-consuming. Fortunately, there are better ways to achieve integration, and many compelling reasons to do so.
What Is the Business Impact of Avoiding Cloud Computing? - Tue, 05 Jul 2011
Financial services tend to be the early adopters of most technology and have forward-thinking developers on staff. However, only 30% of financial services data centers have been virtualized. Meanwhile, those prolific developers are either already using public cloud resources or are trying to. What will be the business impact of avoiding the cloud conversation? In his general session at Cloud Expo New York, Abiquo CEO Pete Malcolm discussed whether financial services organizations are risking security by avoiding cloud computing.
PHP Fog Platform as a Service Scales PHP, MySQL Apps - Fri, 01 Jul 2011
PHP Fog is one of crop of new services that expand Platform as a Service beyond Java, Ruby and Python to accomodate the popular PHP language. The service, which became publicly available in May, layers caching, load balancing, database scaling and code version control features atop the Amazon Web Services foundation that the service taps for its underlying infrastructure. PHP Fog provides for elasticity by enabling users to spin up multiple EC2 instances which to serve customer PHP applications from behind a load balancer. For a look at PHP Fog in action, check out the product gallery below, and be sure to read eWEEK Labsí full review. – …
PHP Fog Clears the Way for LAMP as a Service - Fri, 01 Jul 2011
The Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP-based service layers caching, load balancing, database scaling and code version control features atop an Amazon Web Services foundation. – PHP Fog is a platform-as-a-service offering that, as its name suggests, targets PHP-based applications. The PHP Fog service, alongside a handful of other new services, fills what has been a gap in the PaaS market, as the best-known PaaS offerings target other languages, chiefly Java, Ruby and Py…
Cloud Success Spurs Organizations to Embrace Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) - Thu, 30 Jun 2011
More organizations are investigating and investing in Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), the next wave of cloud-based services to take hold of corporations’ ongoing interest in saving money and improving efficiencies. In addition to horizontal applications such as payroll, technical support, and billing, BPaaS is gaining a foothold in several vertical markets including healthcare and insurance. In fact, half of new business process outsourcing (BPO) contracts will be soon be delivered as BPaaS. Some healthcare providers are already tapping a BPaaS solution delivered by IBM and partner ActiveHealth Management, which combines data-intensive health records and the cloud to deliver full patient records for more accuracy and elimination of redundant tests.
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Google Mulls Closing Google+ Reshare Privacy Hole - Thu, 30 Jun 2011
Google’s reshare button lets others in a circle broadcast content they like. Users may disable reshare, but only after a user posts something. Google is working on a solution. – Google has left a small privacy hole in its Google+ share button design that could put off some users who are trying to keep photos and other content close to the vest. Google+ is the search engine’s riff on a Facebook-like social network, albeit with more nuanced and granular controls for s…
DotCloud Goes GA With Multiple-Stack Cloud Development Platform - Tue, 28 Jun 2011
DotCloud is a second-generation PAAS provider whose secret sauce makes it simpler for developers to deploy and scale their applications while delivering the flexibility and robustness required by critical business software. – Platform-as-a-service startup DotCloud has graduated from private beta to general availability status and is now offering its services to developers and IT departments for deploying their applications worldwide. DotCloud is a second-generation PAAS provider whose secret sauce makes it simpler for d…
Google Health, PowerMeter Join Other Failed Web Service Initiatives - Tue, 28 Jun 2011
Google June 24 quietly announced it will close Google Health and Google PowerMeter, two Web services that failed to catch on among consumers. Health was an ambitious initiative that invited consumers to store their personal health records on Googles cloud system, a prospect that concerned some people who thought the company might leverage their health care status for targeted ads. PowerMeter was a much more environmentally friendly and seemingly innocuous application. It was a Google.org effort to help consumers gauge their daily power consumption in the home from an iGoogle gadget on their computers. Health and PowerMeter are the first two significant products to be killed off under the aegis of new CEO Larry Page, who took over for Eric Schmidt in April. The products are also just the latest of several once-prominent Web service initiatives and applications that Google had to sunset because of lack of interest. No interest means no money-making opportunities for Google, which relies on large-scale platforms to serve people ads. The biggest of these failures was arguably Google Wave, the real-time collaboration platform the search engine giant abandoned last August following a super-hyped launch in May 2009. Wave, which let users upload documents, photos, videos and other content and share them with colleagues on the fly, simply never caught on beyond its 1 million-plus users. This made it a niche product that Google’s management no longer saw fit to dedicate dozens of engineers to. Disillusioned after his baby was terminated early, Wave creator Lars Rasmussen took himself and his considerable real-time programming talents to Facebook. This eWEEK slide show reviews the major cloud services Google has shelved. – …
Microsoft Launches Office 365, a New Google Competitor - Tue, 28 Jun 2011
Microsoft launched Office 365 in New York City June 28, very conspicuously choosing the same venue it used for Windows 7s debut in October 2009. And as with Windows 7, Microsoft has a lot riding on this particular launch. If Office 365 succeeds with businesses and consumers, itll help validate the companys choice of an “all in” cloud strategy. If the platform fails, itll provide an opening for other cloud-software producers& most notably Google, which already offers a cloud-productivity platform with Google Apps& to establish themselves in the space. Office 365 is a rebranding of Microsofts BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), and binds Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online onto a common cloud platform that costs between $2 and $27 per user, per month. On top of that, Microsoft is offering an Office 365 Marketplace with productivity apps and professional services. In sum, Office 365 is meant to provide everything from conferencing to document editing to video editing in one convenient (and accessible) place. Theres also a focus on interoperability across multiple devices, including smartphones running Microsofts Windows Phone. For this release, Microsoft is particularly targeting SMBs, claiming Office 365 will give them a competitive edge without the burden of complex on-premises systems. The question is whether those businesses will find Office 365 durable enough, and feature-filled enough, to meet their needs. – …
ICANN’s Custom Domains May Make Cyber-Squatting More Expensive - Mon, 27 Jun 2011
For organizations already battling cyber-squatting, ICANN’s expansion of top-level domain suffixes may just mean more domains to register defensively. – Now that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has approved the proposal to allow new generic top-level domains, experts weighed in on the security implications. The ICANN plan would expand the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains) from 22, including .com, .net and .org,…
The Case for Cloud Printing - Mon, 27 Jun 2011
In an ideal world, “anywhere computing” wouldn’t just mean connecting your iPad or notebook to the Internet. It would include the ability to print what you need where you need it & anywhere. But in the rush to mobility and the development of the myriad of collaboration and presentation tools that go with it, we may have overlooked the productivity benefits associated with the printed page. In a recent study of mid-sized organizations, Ziff Davis Enterprise Research took a look at the need for, and possible solutions offered by, cloud-based printing services. Here’s what we found. – …
Microsoft, Citrix join VMware as virtualization top dogs - Tue, 05 Jul 2011
It’s getting harder for VMware to argue that it’s the only game in town for big-time virtualization projects.
Mac OS X Lion expected to further ease Apple’s virtualization restrictions - Tue, 05 Jul 2011
Thanks to virtualization, running Microsoft Windows applications on Apple hardware has become a popular way for consumers to dump their PCs in favor of using a Mac. Much to the chagrin of Microsoft hardware partners, this is yet another reason for Apple’s growing hardware success.
In contrast, Apple has only grudgingly allowed its own Mac OS X to run on a virtual machine, and even then they’ve been extremely restrictive with that policy.
Is host-based antivirus software losing luster? - Tue, 05 Jul 2011
Traditional host-based antimalware packages just aren’t that useful anymore, according to some companies that find it either doesn’t protect against the main dangers they face from the Web or it simply doesn’t run well in virtualized computer environments.
Former Citrix CTO says virtualization will solve security problems- Fri, 01 Jul 2011
While IT shops and vendors struggle to apply security practices to virtualized systems, a startup called Bromium claims it will turn the question on its head, using virtualization to secure all types of devices.
3 steps for better data center capacity planning - Wed, 29 Jun 2011
In the coming years, the flexibility and cost alternatives provided by new technologies such as virtualization, internal and external cloud computing, and different types of cloud-based solutions will offer IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals a choice of platforms for running an application or business service.
Startup aims to secure application clouds and virtual desktops - Mon, 27 Jun 2011
Last week at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco, Simon Crosby, the former CTO of Citrix Systems’ data center and cloud division, announced the eyebrow-lifting news of his departure fromCitrix, along with Ian Pratt, chairman of Xen.org and co-founder of XenSource. The two have decided to leave Citrix in order to form a new stealth company called Bromium.
How to buy hardware for virtualization - Mon, 27 Jun 2011
Virtualization is an easy sell: Who wouldn’t want to turn underutilized physical servers into a humming little farm of virtual servers you can spin up or down at the drop of a hat? The dirty little secret of virtualization, however, is that to maximize effectiveness, you’re usually best advised to deploy on new infrastructure specced for the purpose.
Whether you’re looking for a single host server or heading into a fully virtualized infrastructure, a few rough guidelines can help ensure you buy no more or less than you need.
Gartner: New security demands arising for virtualization, cloud computing - Fri, 24 Jun 2011
The rush toward virtualization of internal enterprise computing resources and cloud computing can have many advantages, such asserver consolidation, but it’s largely outracing traditional security and identity management practices.
Startup Bromium takes aim at cloud security - Thu, 23 Jun 2011
Simon Crosby, the former CTO of Citrix Systems’ data center and cloud business, has formed a startup called Bromium that will aim to solve security problems in a cloud environment.
Crosby founded Bromium along with Guarav Banga, former CTO and senior vice president at Phoenix Technologies, and Ian Pratt, chairman of Xen.org and co-founder of XenSource. Banga will be CEO while Crosby serves as CTO and Pratt will be senior vice president, products.
VMware’s Maritz sees ‘post-document’ era - Thu, 23 Jun 2011
The PC era is giving way to a world centered on data, where devices and infrastructure are shaped by the information that users want to get from them, VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz said on Wednesday.
Apple’s iPhone 5 likely to stress Foxconn - Wed, 06 Jul 201
Apple is prepping a third quarter launch for its iPhone 5, but that fact is likely to give Hon Hai Precision, which manufactures the iPhone via its Foxconn unit, a big headache.
HTC buys S3, gathers patents to fight Apple - Wed, 06 Jul 201
HTC has acquired graphics company S3 in a move that will secure patents designed to fend off Apple in an ongoing lawsuit.
Improve ZDNet.com, win another custom Timbuk2 laptop bag - Wed, 06 Jul 201
ZDNet’s 20th anniversary: It’s week four of our custom Timbuk2 laptop bag giveaway. Tell us how to improve ZDNet.com to enter to win.
Apple poised to benefit from falling component prices - Wed, 06 Jul 201
Apple is likely to post better profit margins in its June quarter due to lower-than-expected memory and display costs.
HP’s TouchPad: Mixed reviews about user interface, inevitable iPad comparisons - Wed, 06 Jul 201
Ever since the TouchPad was introduced back in February, Hewlett-Packard has insisted that this webOS-based tablet is not an iPad competitor but something else entirely. Nevertheless, the comparisons can’t be stopped.
Ready for smart, climate adjusting windows? - Wed, 06 Jul 201
The window glass lets more or less light into a building depending on the climate outside and on settings by an occupant or automated system.
Twitter being valued for as much as $7 billion - Tue, 05 Jul 201
Twitter hasn’t declared an IPO yet nor has it hinted that it will be going public anytime soon. Nevertheless, the micro-blogging giant is being valued for as much as $7 billion these days.
Samsung garners 60 percent of U.S. 3D TV market share - Tue, 05 Jul 201
Although 3D TVs don’t sell as quite as well as regular HDTVs just yet, Samsung has to be pleased as it accounts for more than 60 percent of the U.S. 3D TV market share, according to latest reports from The NPD Group.
Apple’s iOS zips past RIM as Blackberry product vacuum continues - Tue, 05 Jul 201
Apple’s iOS market share surged past RIM, which dropped 4.2 percentage points of market share between February and May, according to comScore data. And RIM’s slide can get worse.
Report: Google killing off Picasa, Blogger brands in favor of Google+ - Tue, 05 Jul 201
In an effort to streamline and strengthen the new Google+ brand, the Mountain View, Calif-based tech giant is dropping its Picasa and Blogger brand names.