Friday Cloud News Roundup
Increased Spending on Cloud Apps
In a recent IDG Enterprise survey that included 554 IT professionals including 357 IT heads, 60% of US companies have at least 1 cloud application, this was reported in an article in IT World.
Further, more than 70% of these companies intend to spend more on cloud services in the next twelve months.
The top reasons for increased spending include:
- Business continuity
- Speed of deployment
- Flexibility to react to market conditions
- Greater data consistency and integration
- Improved customer support
Read the full article to see more statistics for the survey, visit IT World now.
SMB’s, Strong Adopters of Cloud
An article in CRN talks about a December 2011 survey conducted by Edge Strategies to over 3,000 SMB’s in 13 countries.
It showed that almost 80% of the respondents are either currently using paid cloud services or are already planning to subscribe in the next 2-3 years.
Aside from ccost savings, these companies expect the cloud to make their operations more productive, flexible, innovative and responsive.
In the survey, these are the top 4 services uses of the cloud:
- Cloud-based e-mail
- Voice communications
- Instant messaging
- Online backup and database services
From these statistics, it is seen that SMB’s are the drivers of cloud computing growth in the next 3 years.
Visit CRN.com to read the full article and check out the statistics of the survey.
CloudTP Event Participations
Two cloud events will be attended by key people of Cloud Technology Partners (CloudTP).
On April 18, founder and CEO Chris Greendale will take part in a panel discussion in the MIT Enterprise Forum in New York entitled, “Cloud Computing: The Next Generation”.
Joining him in the panel are representatives from Agile Equity, Xerox, Gage Networks and more.
Topics for discussion include:
- Current state and future of cloud computing from an IT and business perspective
- Hot cloud companies
- Where lucrative opportunities exist
Also, VP John Treadway will be participating in the panel discussion of the Enterprise Cloud Summit entitled, “Is Open Stack the Answer to the Walled Garden?” on May 6-10 in Las Vegas.
Topics to be discussed will include Openstack’s rapid growth, production and hype and also, the question, “How open is too open?” will be addressed.
Visit the Sacramento Bee to view the full details of these events.
Air Force Moves to the Cloud
Government agencies are indeed following the “Cloud First” policy. In a recent release in Nextgov, it was announced that the Air Force is considering commercial cloud computing services for 1 million of its unclassified networks.
The agency will soon be shifting from desktop computers to thin clients to save on operations and maintenance costs.
The most important factor that they will be looking at is of course, security that includes:
- User authentication
- Robust connectivity
Visit Nextgov to read the full article.
Cloud Services for Managing Big Data
Before, there was no cloud service provider that is focused on providing services to projects that must work with big data – until now.
In a release in Virtual Strategy Magazine, the not-for-profit organization, Open Cloud Consortium announced the release of the first ever integrated set of cloud services that manage big data – Tukey.
These providers, also referred to as Science Cloud Service Providers (SciCSPs) are focused on meeting the needs of the research community and supports:
- Long term archiving of data
- Parallel processing
- High end computing
Several research projects are already utilizing the beta version. According to the Director of International Center for Advanced Internet Research Joe Mambretti, “Tukey enables scientists to share their big data sets with researchers around the country and the world”.
Visit Virtual Strategy Magazine to read the article and see the full set of services that Tukey provides.
Lower Cost on Long-Term Cloud
Writer Roger Strukhoff discusses a survey conducted by IDG Enterprise in his Sys-con article.
According to the survey, more than half of security executives believe that there will be long-term cost savings with cloud computing.
Though there are still some concerns regarding the implementation of cloud, majority will still increase their cloud spending within the year and intend to perform most of their IT operations in the cloud.
According to Strukhoff, the results simply show that cloud computing is no longer the new kid on the block, but rather, something that is being taken seriously by enterprise IT.
Visit Sys-con to read the full article and to also check out the details in the upcoming Cloud Expo in New York this June.
Summit for Open Source Cloud Computing
The Ubuntu Cloud Summit is a one-day event for both technology and business attendees interested in how open source cloud computing can help their organizations.
Topics of the summit will include:
- The Open Cloud
- Lessons from cloud deployments
- Open source cloud technologies
The event will be held on May 8 in Oakland, California. Visit the Ubuntu Cloud Portal to view more details of the event.
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