3 More Cloud Computing Myths Dispelled

Reposted from InfoWorld.com

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By: David Linthicum

Speaking season will be over this month. So far this year, I’ve done more than 25 presentations at various conferences around the country and have spoken with hundreds of people who are building or using clouds. All of this traveling and interaction has provided more data points for me to share via this blog.

Although some of the conversations have been encouraging, many have been downright disturbing because of the misconceptions people have. There continues to be much mythology in the cloud computing space, as I’ve pointed out in the past. It’s time we dispel three more myths so that we can better understand the reality of the cloud.

Myth 1: Private clouds are, by default, secure
Many enterprises are implementing private clouds with the assumption that just because it’s private, it’s also secure. Not true.

Security is something you design and engineer into the cloud solution — it’s not automatic. Thus, private clouds are not secure by default, and public clouds are not insecure by default.

You have to design and implement the appropriate security solution into the cloud. Just because you can see your server in the data center doesn’t mean anything. After all, the data could be compromised as you watch it.

Myth 2: If I go OpenStack, I guarantee portability with other OpenStack providers
Although OpenStack is becoming a solid IaaS cloud standard, there is no portability guarantee among OpenStack distribution providers. Who knows what the future holds? If you think you can write an application on an OpenStack private cloud and move it to an OpenStack public cloud without any modifications, you’re dreaming. Those moving to OpenStack should be doing so because of the potential of this technology, not for portability.

Myth 3: The public cloud providers will access and analyze my data without my knowledge
Public cloud providers couldn’t care less about your data. They do care that you’re successful with your use of their cloud — and that you pay your cloud computing bills. The myth that they are selling your data to third parties is just not true, nor are they using it for their own market intelligence.

If you’re concerned about such use, then encrypt the information you place on the public cloud. That way, nobody can see it even if it’s seized by the government or accessed by a bored cloud data center admin. If you’re even more paranoid, don’t use a public cloud provider.

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by nuagecg on June 10, 2013  •  Permalink
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How Cloud Computing Democratizes Big Data

Reposted from ReadWrite.com

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By Seth Payne

Big Data, just like Cloud Computing, has become a popular phrase to describe technology and practices that have been in use for many years. Ever-increasing storage capacity and falling storage costs – along with vast improvements in data analysis, however, have made Big Data available to a variety of new firms and industries.

Scientific researchers, financial analysts and pharmaceutical firms have long used incredibly large datasets to answer incredibly complex questions. Large datasets, especially when analyzed in tandem with other information, can reveal patterns and relationships that would otherwise remain hidden.

How Cloud Computing Democratizes Big Data

Extracting Simplicity From The Complex

As a product manager within the Global Market Data group at NYSE Technologies, I was consistently impressed with the how customers and partners analyzed the vast sets of market trade, quote and order-book data produced each day.

On the sell side, clients analyzed data spanning many years in an attempt to find patterns and relationships that could help fund portfolio managers build long-term investment strategies. On the buy side, clients mined more-recent data regarding the trade/quote activities of disparate assets. University and college clients sought data spanning decades. Regardless of the specific use case, clients required technology to process and analyze substantial and unwieldy amounts of data.

Various technologies are employed to meet the needs of these various use cases. For historical analysis, high-powered data warehouses such as those offered by 1010 Data, ParAccel, EMC and others, are incredible tools. Unlike databases, which are designed for simple storage and retrieval, data warehouses are optimized for analysis. Complex event processors such as those from One Market Data, KDB and Sybase give high-frequency and other algorithmic traders the ability to analyze market activity across a wide array of financial instruments and markets at any given microsecond throughout the trading day.

These technologies are now being deployed within new industries. Business intelligence tools such as those offered by Tableau and Microstrategy can now deal with very large and complex datasets. To a lesser extent, even Microsoft Excel has been retooled to handle Big Data with newly architected pivot tables and support for billions of rows of data within a single spreadsheet.

But Big Data is useful only if analysts ask the right questions and have at least a general idea of the relationships and patterns Big Data analysis may illuminate.

Do You Need Big Data?

Is Big Data right for your company? The first question any firm must ask is if they will benefit from Big Data analysis. Begin by understanding the data sets available to you. Analysis of 20 years of stock closing prices, for example, would not likely require the power of Big Data systems. Given the relatively small size of this dataset, analysis can, and probably should, be performed using SQL or even simply Excel.

But large sets of unsorted and unordered data — such as financial transactions, production output records and weather data — do require Big Data analysis to bring order to the chaos and shed light on relationships, trends and patterns made visible only by structured and systematic analysis.

To start, formulate a relatively simple hypothesis and use Big Data analysis to test it. The results of this analysis should reveal information that will lead to further, more complex questions.

Big Data In The Cloud

It is no surprise that the rise of Big Data has coincided with the rapid adoption of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies. PaaS lets firms scale their capacity on demand and reduce costs while IaaS allows the rapid deployment of additional computing nodes. Together, additional compute and storage capacity can be added to almost instantaneously.

For example, a large hedge fund in New York used a cluster of computing nodes and storage to analyze the day’s trade/quote activity across all U.S. equity markets. The size of the datasets used in the analysis – typically 10GB to 12GB compressed – was growing steadily, allowing the market data manager to accurately plan his capacity needs. On occasion, however, trade/quote volumes explode, creating exponentially larger data sets. On these occasions, the market data manager can deploy additional virtual machine (VM) nodes in the cluster, ensuring that even unusually large datasets do significantly delay analysis withouh having to permanently add expensive computing resources.

The flexibility of cloud computing allows resources to be deployed as needed. As a result, firms avoid the tremendous expense of buying hardware capacity they’ll need only occasionally.

Big Data Isn’t Always Cloud-Appropriate

While the cloud grants tremendous flexibility and reduces overall operation costs, it is not appropriate for all Big Data use cases.

For example, firms analyzing low-latency real-time data — aggregating Twitter feeds, for example — may need to find other approaches. The cloud does not currently offer the performance necessary to process real-time data without introducing latency that would make the results too “stale” (by a millisecond or two) to be useful. Within a few years, virtualization technology should accommodate these ultra low-latency use cases, but we’re not there yet.

Cloud computing has given businesses flexible, affordable access to vast amounts of computing resources on demand – bringing Big Data analysis to the masses. As the technology continues to advance, the question for many businesses is how they can benefit from Big Data and how to use cloud computing to make it happen.

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by nuagecg on June 7, 2013  •  Permalink
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30 Years of Accumulation: A Timeline of Cloud Computing

Reposted from GCN.com

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Developments in bandwidth, processing and open-source networking over three decades have made cloud as ordinary as the weather.

1982
The first Ethernet adapter card for the IBM PC released, introducing fast, inexpensive connections that would enable cloud computing.

1989
Software Tool & Die founded, first public dialup Internet Service Provider and “still proud to be the best.”

1992
In a $500 million deal, FAA undertakes wholesale IT outsourcing to Electronic Data Systems Corp. under the Computer Resources Nucleus program.

1996
Navy launches IT-2 to build secure, global network to deliver fast Ethernet to 270,000 users worldwide, with browsers, continuous TCP/IP connections.

1997
The term “cloud computing” is coined by University of Texas professor Ramnath Chellappa in a talk on a “new computing paradigm.”

1998
VMware founded, introduces software providing completely virtualized set of hardware to a guest operating system.

Walter Reed Army Medical Center upgrades to 100 megabits/sec Asynchronous Transfer Mode network to accommodate virtual LANs, a stepping stone to the cloud-enabled office.

1999
Salesforce.com founded in San Francisco apartment.

Defense Department shifts communications networks from ATM to a 1-gigabit/sec Ethernet backbone.

2000
Government agencies begin developing computer “grids,” an open-source networking technology that lets users share resources in a manner not subject to central control.

2001 
Interior Department becomes one of several agencies to experiment with adopting the application service provider model for delivering applications to workforce.

Agriculture Department links XML soil survey data with GIS, an early example of using software as a service to link devices across the Internet.

2004
State Department launches pilot to switch out PCs for thin clients at overseas posts and domestic offices.

2005
EPA announces project to use grid computing for air quality monitoring, a sign that government acceptance of collaborative networks is widening.

Intel releases Pentium 4 models, first Intel processors to support virtualization on the x86 platform.

2006
AMD releases Athlon 64 processors, the first to support virtualization.

Amazon launches Elastic Compute Cloud, an infrastructure-as-a-service that lets organizations contract for computers to run their applications.

2007
File hosting and synchronization service Dropbox Inc., founded by MIT student, making cloud storage a commodity.

2008
Apptis Inc. and ServerVault Corp. announce secure, managed, federally compliant cloud infrastructure.

2010
OMB issues “cloud first” mandate, requiring agencies to identify three services to move to the cloud and retire associated legacy systems.

GSA announces it will use cloud computing as primary means for hosting the government’s official information portal, USA.gov.

SAP offers agencies Enterprise Resource Planning via the Terremark cloud, enterprise-level software-as a-service.

2011
GSA moves 17,000 e-mail users to Google Apps for Government

DARPA seeks mission-resilient cloud to ensure military can withstand attack against pieces of the network.

2012
Energy Department sets up YourCloud to broker secure cloud services for agency and national labs.

Salesforce.com unveils Government Cloud and AppExchange, multitenant services designed for the public sector.

2013
CIA inks $600 million deal with Amazon Web Services to build a private cloud, bolstering confidence in security of the cloud.

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by nuagecg on June 4, 2013  •  Permalink
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Going Green with Cloud Computing

Reposted from Greener Ideals.com

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Looking for ways to help the planet? While cloud computing may not seem all that eco-friendly at first glance, a closer look reveals a number of green benefits. Here are some of the ways that the cloud can help your organization cut its carbon footprint down to size:

Green cloud computing infographic

Fewer Machines

Thanks to virtualization and server utilization rates of around 60-70%, large, shared data centers are usually able to employ fewer physical machines to achieve the same capacity as an equivalent number of in-house data centers. Large data centers can also dynamically allocate resources where they’re needed, where individual enterprises must often buy more machines than they need to handle peak data loads. This reduction in physical servers means less energy expended in running, cooling, manufacturing, transporting, and replacing these machines, and that can mean big savings over time.

In fact, it’s estimated that a large enterprise can eliminate as much as 30,000 metric tons of CO2 from its footprint over five years simply by moving its HR application to the public cloud. That’s the equivalent of taking 5900 cars off the road.

Environmental Savings

Resource sharing is another way that the cloud can help your organization save the planet. It costs fewer resources to power, cool, and maintain one large data center than it does to do the same for smaller, compartmentalized data centers. In addition, large data centers can often afford to upgrade to more efficient equipment (insulation, building systems, and, of course, servers), thereby cutting down even more on energy expenditures.

Finding a Green Cloud Provider

Of course, not all data centers are created equal. There are some things you should investigate to make sure that your cloud computing provider is taking advantage of all the environmental-savings possibilities:

  • What are their server utilization rates? You want to see rates around 60% or more.
  • Are their centers designed for maximum efficiency? Look for companies that have received LEED certification and Energy Star recognition.
  • Do they use renewable energy sources? You can feel good about data centers that take advantage of solar, wind, geothermal, and other earth-friendly opportunities.
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by nuagecg on May 28, 2013  •  Permalink
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NetSuite to Increase Focus on ERP for Manufacturers

Reposted from IT World.com

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By Chris Kanaracus

Capitalizing on apparent demand from customers, NetSuite is adding new capabilities aimed at manufacturers to its cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.

NetSuite will announce a new version of its existing manufacturing ERP during the SuiteWorld conference in San Jose on Tuesday, CEO Zach Nelson said in an interview prior to the event. It’s also going to announce a partnership with Autodesk that will see the latter’s PLM (project lifecycle management) application integrated with NetSuite, Nelson said.

“By integrating with their PLM we’re effectively integrating with their design products as well,” of which Autodesk has many, for 3D modeling and other areas, Nelson added.

All told, NetSuite will now be able to tout itself as a company able to give manufacturers an integrated suite spanning from initial product design to manufacturing, distribution and sales, potentially improving its ability to compete with the likes of Infor, Epicor and SAP.

While NetSuite overall grew about 30% last year, its manufacturing software business shot up 60%, according to Nelson. “The cloud is basically transforming every industry at different rates,” he said. “Now what you’re seeing is the last large industry group, manufacturing, is beginning the transition.”

The “ancient” systems manufacturers have used can’t adapt to industry trends such as direct-to-consumer sales and new manufacturing methods, Nelson said. “I don’t know what was before the Stone Age, but that’s what they’re running.”

NetSuite is making another announcement at the conference that will take NetSuite’s e-commerce capabilities, which got a boost last week through the acquisition of order management vendor OrderMotion, and allow them to be used in a “one to many” fashion between a company and its supply chain partners, he said.

In addition, NetSuite will announce a new partner program called Built for NetSuite. This will provide customers with “an added level of confidence” that partner-built applications work well with the core NetSuite software, Nelson said.

NetSuite is expecting 5,000 people to attend the conference in San Jose, up from 3,500 last year.

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Nuage Consulting Group is a partner of NetSuite, based in the Washington D.C., Virginia and Maryland area. For more information about how Nuage can help you implement Netsuite solutions, click here! To learn more about NetSuite, click here.

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by nuagecg on May 21, 2013  •  Permalink
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NetSuite: ERP ‘Perfect Storm’ Spells ‘Huge Channel Opportunity’

Take a look at this article posted on CRN.com featuring one of Nuage’s founders, Lou Balla!

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By Ken Presti

A confluence of three industry trends is generating major sales opportunities for partners, according to NetSuite (NYSE:N)’s vice president of channel sales.

“On-premises ERP solutions experience refresh cycles of about eight to 10 years, and that refresh is gathering momentum,” said NetSuite vice president Craig West, during the company’s SuiteWorld conference being held this week in San Jose, Calif. “On top of that, the cloud has emerged as a game-changing technology at the same time that we are seeing increased demand. Between the three of those things, we are seeing a perfect storm that represents a huge channel opportunity.”

West added that for the past two years, NetSuite has invested heavily in channel enablement, as well as technological enhancements. He says those efforts are helping the San Mateo, Calif.-based company gather momentum with cloud-focused channel partners.

[Related: NetSuite Takes Aim At Bringing The Cloud To Manufacturing]

“NetSuite is gathering depth that matches the breadth of its portfolio,” said Daniel Edwards, partner at NCompass Solutions, an Atlanta-based solution provider. “They’re making great strides in a number of key areas such as converting areas of customization into modules that are much easier to work with. Beyond that, we can see them helping us to get into more opportunities.”

Those opportunities also translate to an increased emphasis on differentiation at the level of the partner,” said Lou Balla, president of Bethesda, Md.-based Nuage Consulting Group, a developer of cloud-based business applications and NetSuite partner.

“We differentiate through smooth implementations backed by our knowledge of the technologies and the business needs of our customers,” Balla told CRN. “And we’re glad to see them evolve their product line and move further upstream into the enterprise. This adds credibility to their brand and opens up more customers.”

West also noted that he’s seeing an increased number of accounting firms function as channel partners.

“These are mostly firms that do things like taxes, audits, and compliance,” West said. “But they’re also getting back into the business of helping their customers with system selection, which actually helps them to standardize and makes their functions more efficient. They used to do those things in the past, but got out of the business as the software stack became more complex. But, cloud is something that is more manageable to them, so we’re seeing an uptick in deals coming from those firms.”

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Nuage Consulting Group is a partner of NetSuite, based in the Washington D.C., Virginia and Maryland area. For more information about how Nuage can help you implement Netsuite solutions, click here! To learn more about NetSuite, click here.

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by nuagecg on May 17, 2013  •  Permalink
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Why Cloud Computing is Accelerating in the Enterprise

Reposted from Cloud Tech

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By Louis Columbus

Translating time into dollars matters far more to many CEOs I’ve spoken with versus what platform their applications are running on.

What matters most is getting all they can out of every hour their business is operating.  They are all focused on getting beyond the constraints that held their growth back in the past – everyone wants a growth accelerator today.

For manufacturers especially, this includes applications with depth of functionality that can be quickly deployed regionally, and in more cases than ever, globally as well.  Line-of-business leaders want applications that make an immediate impact on their entire value chain.

Just having a cloud strategy is not enough for any enterprise software company anymore. Owning the pain prospects and customers go through daily to get work done is all that matters.

Every application and platform component needs to contribute to the goal of reducing customer’s challenges of doing business.  In studying companies who excel at this, I’ve often used stock market indices to see how they compare to market averages and their competitors.

Charting progress using the cloud computing stock index

Creating and using stock indices to track the performance of specific industry and market sectors is a great way to cut through hype.  I’ve been using these for over a decade to track industries and markets of interest, and have built the Cloud Computing Stock Index. You can download the latest summary here.

If there are companies you think need to be included please let me know.  I deliberately left out IBM, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP as a prerequisite is that a firm derive at least 50% or greater revenue from cloud-based applications and services.

The graph below shows all-time performance of the Cloud Computing Index relative to Microsoft, Salesforce.com. NetSuite and Workday.

Figure 1 stock index

Key takeaways

  • NetSuite posted a 62.6% increase in stock performance, followed by Workday (+20.57%), Salesforce (+4.23%) and the Cloud Computing Index (+4%) with Microsoft seeing a 8.18% decline in share price during the period.
  • NetSuite, Salesforce and Workday continue to gain new customers in the mid-tier and enterprise areas of the market based on depth of functionality, rapid application development (RAD), and increasing success creating alliances with system integration, selling and technology partners.
  • Workday’s expertise in Human Capital Management is accentuated by the depth of analytics and trend analysis and expertise in cloud-based integrations.  Their depth of functional expertise in these areas is leading to rapid growth.
  •  NetSuite is succeeding with its two-tier ERP selling strategy against long-standing ERP vendors including Oracle, SAP and others.

Bottom line:  Salesforce, NetSuite and Workday show how developing cloud-based applications designed for ease of use and speed of deployment are winning new customers in the enterprise – and driving up their stock price as a result

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Nuage Consulting Group is a partner of NetSuite, based in the Washington D.C., Virginia and Maryland area. For more information about how Nuage can help you implement Netsuite solutions, click here! To learn more about NetSuite’s ERP, click here.

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by nuagecg on May 13, 2013  •  Permalink
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10 Ways Cloud Computing Is Revolutionizing Manufacturing

Reposted from Forbes

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By Louis Columbus

The best manufacturers I’ve visited this year all share a common attribute: they are obsessed with making themselves as easy as possible to work with from a supply chain, distribution and services standpoint.  Many are evaluating cloud-based manufacturing applications including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and several have adopted cloud-based applications across their companies.

With so much interest, there is much confusion as well.  I recently spoke with Cindy Jutras, founder and CEO of MintJutras.  Her firm has recently completed a survey of SaaS adoption in manufacturing, distribution and other industries.  She found the following:

  • 49% of respondents in the manufacturing & distribution industries do not understand the difference between single- and multi-tenant SaaS architectures.  Overall 66% of respondents to the survey did not know.
  • SaaS-based applications are 22% of all manufacturing and distribution software installed today, and will grow to 45% within ten years according to MintJutras.
  • The three most important characteristics of a SaaS solution in manufacturing and distribution include giving customers a measure of control over upgrades, consistent support for global operations and allowing for rapid and frequent upgrades.

 

Why Manufacturers Are Looking To Cloud Computing  

Manufacturers are under constant pressure to increase accuracy, make process speed a competitive force, and capitalize on their internal intelligence and knowledge to make every supplier, distributor and service interaction count.  The manufacturers spoken and visited with to gain the following insights are in the high tech, industrial and aerospace and defense industries, where rapid product lifecycles and short time-to-market schedules are commonplace.

Cloud-based strategies give these companies the chance to bring their own innate intelligence and knowledge into every sales situation.  While on-premise systems could also do this, cloud-based systems were quicker to roll out, easier to customize and showed potential to increase adoption rates across resellers.

One manufacturing manager explained how during a new product launch the speed and volume of collaboration was so rapid on between suppliers and distributors that an allocation situation was averted.  That he said, made senior management believers.  These epiphanies are happening daily in manufacturing.

Based on my visits with manufacturers, here are the ten ways they are using cloud computing to revolutionize manufacturing:

  • Capturing and applying company-wide intelligence and knowledge through the use of analytics, business intelligence (BI), and rules engines.  For the many manufacturers who rely on build-to-order, configure-to-order and engineer-to-order strategies as a core part of their business models, using cloud-based platforms to capture knowledge and manage rules is accelerating. A key part of this area is mobility support for analytics, BI and rules engine reporting and analysis.
  • Piloting and then moving quickly to full launch of supplier portals and collaboration platforms, complete with quality management dashboards and workflows.  Among the manufacturers visited, those in high tech are the most advanced in this area, often implementing Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and demand management applications that deliver real-time order status and forecasts.
  • Designing in services is now becoming commonplace, making cloud integration expertise critical for manufacturers.  From simplistic services integration on iPhones to the full implementation of voice-activated controls including emergency assistance in the latest luxury cars, adding in services integrated to the cloud is redefining the competitive landscape of industries today.  Revising a product or launching an new product generation with embedded services can mitigate price wars, which is why many manufacturers are pursing this strategy today.
  •  Accelerating new product development and introduction (NPDI) strategies to attain time-to-market objectives. Using cloud-based platforms in high tech manufacturing is growing today as time-to-market constraints are requiring greater collaboration earlier in design cycles.
  • Managing indirect and direct channel sales from a single cloud platform tracking sales results against quota at the individual, group and divisional level is now commonplace across all manufacturers visited.  Dashboards report back the status by each rep and for sales managers, the profitability of each deal.
  • Using cloud-based marketing automation applications to plan, execute and most important, track results of every campaign. Marketing is under a microscope in many manufacturers today, as marketing automation applications have promised to deliver exceptional results and many manufacturers are still struggling to align their internal content, strategies and ability to execute with the potential these systems promise.
  • Automating customer service, support and common order status inquiries online, integrating these systems to distributed order management, pricing, and content management platforms. Manufacturing industries are at varying levels of adoption when it comes to automating self-service.  The cost and time advantages in high tech are the highest levels of adoption I’ve seen in visiting manufacturers however.
  • Increasing reliance on two-tier ERP strategies to gain greater efficiencies in material planning, supplier management and reduce logistics costs.  Manufacturers are also using this strategy to gain greater independence from a single ERP vendor dominating their entire operations.  Several manufacturers remarked that their large, monolithic ERP systems could not, without intensive programming and customization, scale down to the smaller operational needs in distributed geographic regions.  Cloud-based ERP systems are getting the attention of manufacturers pursuing two-tier ERP strategies. Acumatica, Cincom, Microsoft MSFT -0.38%, NetSuite and Plex Systems are leaders in this area of ERP systems.
  • Reliance on cloud-based Human Resource Management (HRM) systems to unify all manufacturing locations globally.  This often includes combining  multisite talent management, recruiting, payroll and time tracking.  Contract manufacturer Flextronics uses Workday to optimize workforce allocations across their global manufacturing centers for example.

Bottom Line:  Using cloud-based systems to streamline key areas of their business, manufacturers are freeing up more time to invest in new products and selling more.

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Nuage Consulting Group is a partner of NetSuite, based in the Washington D.C., Virginia and Maryland area. For more information about how Nuage can help you implement Netsuite solutions, click here!

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by nuagecg on May 7, 2013  •  Permalink
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Why Companies Using The Cloud Are So Happy

Reposted from Infoworld.com

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By David Linthicum

As reported by my friend and Forbes writer Joe McKendrick, “A new survey finds that roughly one out of four organizations are heavily into cloud computing, and they are providing lessons from which everyone else can benefit.” The lessons come from having two or three years of real experience, enough time to see the real benefits and issues.

Keep in mind the study is sponsored by RightScale, a cloud vendor, and it was done in a way to discover the positive, not the negative. It’s as if Dunkin’ Donuts sponsored a study on breakfast foods. You wouldn’t expect to find results related to obesity or diabetes.

Still, the results are interesting and in line with what I see in the marketplace. One finding was that fairly new, bigger enterprises are the leading adopters of cloud. Although the survey of 625 companies found the cloud is “commonplace,” 8 percent of respondents wanted nothing to do with cloud.

RightScale used the survey to categorize how many companies fall in its list of cloud “maturity” stages: 17 percent are cloud watchers (no implementations or pilots), 26 percent are cloud beginners (active studiers and perhaps a few pilots), 23 percent are cloud explorers (with multiple pilots and perhaps some deeper cloud deployments, and 26 percent are cloud-focused (with multiple deployments).

Other findings:

  • 18 percent of advanced cloud users (cloud-focused) see security and compliance as a challenge, versus 38 percent of the greenhorns.
  • 80 percent of advanced-level respondents are seeing faster time to market for applications, versus 25 percent of beginners.
  • 87 percent of advanced respondents report they were gaining faster access to infrastructure, compared to 30 percent of beginners.
  • Experienced cloud companies don’t necessarily have fewer outages, but they’re shorter in duration. Because of greater exposure to cloud, 57 percent of the veterans had an outage in 2012, compared to 32 percent of the novices. But the length of an outage at an experienced site was 4.6 hours, compared to 5.8 hours at the beginner companies.
  • About 65 percent of the experienced companies reported higher system availability, compared to 20 percent of the novices.

As I’d expect, the more comfortable a company gets with cloud computing, the less daunting the issues identified early on seem. Many of the issues that cause IT organizations to push back on cloud computing — compliance, security, ownership, and resiliency — are solvable problems, even though they require a bit of proactive planning.

As more companies gain experience, cloud computing becomes what it really should be: a new platform that has some clear advantages and issues to address. That should feel normal to most of us.

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by nuagecg on May 1, 2013  •  Permalink
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5 Reasons Cloud Computing Is Booming

Reposted from Huffington Post

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By Drew Hendricks

Cloud computing has experienced serious growth in recent years–even the Department of Defense is jumping on board. However, some people are a little concerned about giving up hard copies and going completely virtual. Big change is always difficult to deal with. However, getting on this bandwagon is a great idea that can save money and time (assuming the cloud server chosen has a solid reputation). Here are 5 of the biggest reasons cloud computing is gaining in popularity.

1. It Saves Money (and the Environment)

Keeping paper copies, updating them, making more copies to distribute, shredding them, ordering more paper and ink–it’s a vicious cycle. Many companies waste serious cash on this process, not to mention the leg work of employees whose sole responsibility is to keep up with the filing. Switching to cloud computing can save a lot of money and trees, which is why many companies are going green and upping the bottom line at the same time.

2. It Saves Time

All of that updating, filing and printer maintenance wastes precious time that can be better spent elsewhere. Cloud computing also gets rid of the risk of double work. When one employee updates a document but forgets to send it to one person, maybe that one person decides to take on the task herself. This is another cycle that needs to be broken–and cloud computing can do that.

3. It’s Easier

Let’s say 10 people all need the latest information on an RFP that’s due soon. One person may be in charge of the budget, another the narrative, and of course the Executive Director needs to oversee it all. A lot of meetings, back and forth emails and stress are in order, right? Wrong–if cloud computing is involved. Everyone can see the latest updates from their platform of choice in real time.

4. It Ups Organization

People have a tendency to file away hard copies and then forget about them. With cloud storage, everything is in one virtual place and it’s simple to use a search function to find documents. This also leads to less double work and helps keep everyone on the same page.

5. It’s Safer

Most offices and homes don’t have the ultimate security systems–but cloud servers do. There’s no risk of a fire, a burglary or a flood damaging documents. Instead, everything is safe and sound in the cloud. This also relieves some stress, which is always a good thing. Infrastructure as a service is increasingly popular with cloud servers leading the way.

It’s easy to see why cloud storage is falling into everyone’s favor. Why not give it a try and see how it can improve the business (and sanity of the employees)?

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by nuagecg on April 23, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by nuagecg on April 23, 2013

http://nuagecg.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/5-reasons-cloud-computing-is-booming/

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