Google battles Amazon for corporate Clouds
Google says it's in the enterprise Cloud market to stay.
Google says it's in the enterprise Cloud market to stay.
Software as a service is here to stay. So CIOs need the tools to manage their sprawling portfolios of SaaS applications with the same rigor they use for on-premise software.
Year after year, the cost of disk space has plummeted. Since you can pick up a terabyte for $50, it's often seemed a false economy to be careful with storage.
Cloud consultants aren't that much different from the consulting and contracting firms that IT has used over the years. But the economics of cloud consulting are a whole bunch different from what the Big 5 firms were doing with SAP and Siebel. Thanks to the price points of cloud solutions (typically, a monthly fee) and the expectation of Web open systems (all I do is point and click, right?), behemoth consulting gigs are few and far between.
The hype around cloud computing is hard to ignore and as each vendor is trying to put the word "cloud" in front of all its products, enterprises are finding it extremely difficult to sift through the noise and really find which products work best specifically for their data center.
Last week, Apple unveiled its iCloud service to cheers at its WWDC in San Francisco. CIOs, though, weren't so thrilled. How will iCloud impact the enterprise? This question needs to be answered, hopefully before Apple launches iCloud this fall.
Cloud computing is practically mainstream, according to the latest CIO Economic Impact survey of 291 IT leaders. In fact, nearly half (48 per cent) of the CIOs surveyed said they have adopted the government's Cloud First policy, which requires agencies to evaluate cloud options first, over traditional IT approaches, before making any new IT investments.
When Jim Honerkamp was hired as CIO of Steel Technologies last summer, he immediately identified a major problem on the company's IT org chart. Of the 34 technology professionals employed by the $1.6 billion processor of flat-rolled steel, nearly half were working in IT infrastructure. The anemic business-analysis group had a staff of three.
If you are a professional or small business currently beta testing Microsoft's cloud-based productivity and collaboration suite, Office 365, you will want to add your registered domain name to the service.
As with any new exciting technology, companies commonly look towards creating a "strategy" around the movement in order to ensure their investments achieve the greatest ROI. In the 1990s, it was all about how companies needed a "Linux" strategy; the last decade has been dominated with companies needing a "virtualization" strategy; and the trend I'm seeing today is everyone talking about needing a "cloud computing" strategy.
I'm guessing many of you are asking if cloud computing isn't just a new name for ASPs, software as a service, outsourcing or, for us older guys, timesharing. While the cloud certainly shares principles with all of them, something more significant is happening, something with the same impact as the generational shift from mainframes to client/server.
Windows Intune, Microsoft's Web-based PC management and security platform, is available today for purchase or for a 30-day free trial.
As more sourcing executives consider incorporating SaaS solutions into their overall technology vendor landscape, the potential to significantly disrupt the current software market grows. And while SaaS adoption is expected to expand in the coming years, the challenge for sourcing professionals will be a lack of uniform adoption across the whole software market. In some software categories, SaaS will be a disruptive technology, in others the only option, and in many cases SaaS will have minimal impact.
Apple said earlier this week that it will hold an event on March 2 in San Francisco, with all signs pointing to an iPad 2 unveiling. This lit up the blogosphere with predictions about what might be in the iPad 2, whether or not Steve Jobs will be presenting, and, of course, what might be the "one more thing" Apple is famous for at these events.
The business benefits of a cloud computing model have been well stated. You cut costs by switching to more flexible on-demand IT resources that can better handle the ebb and flow technology needs at a company.