Friday Cloud News Roundup
Hubspan Predictions for 2012
With the New Year less than a month away, more companies are making predictions about what the year ahead will see for business. Hubspan, a business integration provider, has recently their predictions for what they see as the next years focus in the way of cloud opportunities, It and business integration.
The predictions for the year include:
- Global uncertainty will drive companies to get closer to existing customers and look to maximize current relationships.
- Continuing consumerism of IT to drive end-user visible tools.
- Cloud costs will continue to compel adaptation in new ways
For these and more ideas on where the business of cloud will go in the following year, read more.
Cloud Connects Across Devices Main Incentive
A recent survey that looked at the various reasons that companies choose to adapt to the cloud showed that the ability to connect employees across a multitude of devices was the biggest reason to move to the cloud. The survey interviewed over 3000 IT decision makers in eight countries from both public and private sectors.
Among the findings were that only 14% of the businesses downsized after adapting to the cloud and 20% actually hired cloud experts as part of the transition. Almost half of the small businesses in the US when asked named access to information as the biggest reason for the change to the cloud. These and more are in the survey overview at MarketWatch.
Healthcare Cloud Problems Highlighted
Sometimes the same old problems show up in new technologies. In this recent story in Information Week, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York seemed like the perfect place for cloud adaptation. But a lack of coordination through IT and problems with communication at the beginning gave them a new set of problems with their cloud based solution.
Because they decided to not bring IT into the decision process, multiple hosts were used for a variety of field workers across the network, making it difficult for nurses to coordinate because of multiple IDs and log-ins. A great look at how even the best technology can be implemented in a way that doesn’t utilize it to the full extent. For more on this case study, read more at InformationWeek.
Does Salesforce Offer a Social Marketing Cloud?
Paul Greenberg from the Enterprise Irregulars, a wonderful little blog on the business side of the tech world of enterprise has some interesting comments to make about radian6. If you are familiar with Salesforce then you know that this is one of their latest acquisitions.
In this article Greenberg looks at the recent claim that radian6 is a “social marketing cloud” whatever that may mean. In fact, it is his whole dissecting of the phrase and others like this that makes this piece of particular interest to anyone looking to understand the new marketing and sales trends in the cloud. For more of his perspective, read more.
Five Development Trends to Watch
eWeek takes a look at five trends in the coming year that will affect developers in the cloud business. But these five trends will probably affect more than just developers, as all of the businesses that are involved in cloud technology will be affected by these enterprise technology movements.
- HTML5
- Big Data
- Analytics
These and more are highlighted in an insightful article that looks at how not only are the major developers going to need to be aware of this movement in cloud technology, but how these trends will affect each other. For this and more check out the full story at eWeek.
Five Ways to Benefit from the NIST Cloud Roadmap
This week the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a road map for government technology managers who are looking to set up cloud systems. This has been a long discussed and awaited guide, but can be intimidating for anyone first looking through it. Government Computer News recently released a very enlightening five step guide, with a link to the draft of the NIST Roadmap, to help IT managers along the way to the cloud roadmap.
The guide lists five major steps that every manager should contemplate as part of their plan when they are designing their cloud system using the roadmap. Among those five steps are:
- Ask you vendors to map their services to the NIST Roadmap when discussing plans.
- Compare Agency use cases with those provided by the NIST Roadmap
- Focus on Deployment
For a look in more detail at how you can utilize these and other ideas for the NIST roadmap in your own cloud plans, be sure read more.
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