GMO Cloud

Mobile Applications Enhanced By the Cloud

With the prevalence of mobile applications, predictions about the obsolescence of the web are also becoming the talk of the town.

A short article in Atelier talks of this web vs. mobile apps debate. According to a survey conducted to experts and internet stakeholders, this evolution will progress by 2020.

Apps will continue to become enterprise’ valuable source of income, and can further support apps to have comparable processing power and capability as traditional web applications.

How will cloud computing affect this feud between the web and mobile applications? Visit Atelier to find out.

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Friday Cloud News Roundup

The CFO’s Growing Role in Cloud Adoption

Company CFO’s are expected to play a significant role in the purchasing and management of IT services. This was induced from a reasearch conducted by Vanson Bourne, to senior financial decision makers on behalf of Google, a summary of which was published in CBR Online.

Here are some conclusions derived from the survey:

• More than 60% of respondents believe that cloud increases IT’s ability to innovate
• 93% say that cloud computing willbe important to the success of their company in the next 12-18months
• Almost all respondents believethat cloud computing provides quantifiable benefits

As other key decision makers are seeing the cost benefits of the cloud, IT service purchase and management are beginning to be influenced by non-IT officers.

Read the ful article in CBR Online and see more result on how cloud computing is seen as a catalyst for innovation and why it is slowly becoming an attractive option for businesses.

Subtrends Affecting Cloud Strategy

According to Gartner, cloud computing trends need to be continuously monitored to prevent organizations from making costly mistakes or miss market opportunities.

An article in Help-Net Security talks about the five cloud computing subtrends that will affect cloud strategy. These are the important aspects that need to be factored in the monitoring the development of technology:

• Formal decision frameworks facilitate cloud investment optimization
• Hybrid cloud is an imperative
• Cloud brokerage will facilitate cloud consumption
• Cloud centric design becomes a necessity
• Cloud computing influences future data center and operational models.

These subtrends will be accelerating, shifting or reaching a tipping point over the next few years and these need to be considered in organizations’ planning processes.

Read further about these subtrends in Net-Security and see how each of these can be optimized to keep up with the rapid change in today’s technologies.

Business Continuity Management

A release in Marketwatch talks about the results in the 2011-2012 Continuity Insights and KPMG LLP Global Business Continuity Management (BCM) Program Benchmarking Study.

The results showed that business continuity management has become a key discipline so that organizations can better mange operational risks.

Here are some market trends that were cited:

• There is already an increasing number of BCM programs that organizations have already integrated with their strategic planning capabilities
• Rapid changes introduced bycloud, mobility applications and social media have changed the ways in approaching business continuity
• More than half of respondents already have full-time BCM coordinators.

Visit Marketwatch for the link fo the full report and find out what the 685 execuritve respondents from 40 countries are saying about Business Continuity Management.

Open Stack

A group of major cloud vendors have collaborated to create standards for the cloud.

The Openstack coalition was founded and supported by large vendors such as:

• HP
• IBM
• Rackspace
• Red Hat

By creating these standards, they aim to differentiate themselves on service. They believe that they will be able to address common CIO concerns about the cloud.

Visit CIO Journal to read the full article and see which organizations have joined Openstack.

Open Data Center Alliance

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has released new cloud usage models to help beter mange security and infrastructure issues across cloud computing applications.

As listed in Network Computing, these five usage models are:

• Identity Management Interoperability Guide 1.0
• Cloud-Based Identity Governance and Auditing 1.0
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Privileged User Acess 1.0
• Cloud-Based Identity Provisioning 1.0
• Single Sign-On Authentication 1.0

Visit Network Computing to get the link for downloading these models.

Proper Transition to the Cloud

D&H Distributing believes that busineses will need guidance as to what kind of cloud capabilities will best serve their business models.

An article in Echannelline talks about the organization’s initiative in teacing resellers in the SMB space on how to transition their end users toward cloud-based technologies.

Furthermore, this movement is in support of Microsoft’s “Smart Coud Solutions”. Aside from giving businesses access to online tools and data, this will help businesses increase productivity through hosted IT services and applications.

To read the full release and find out more about this new cloud initiative, visit Echannelline now.

Cloud Analytics Summit 2012

Another exciting update on this year’s Cloud Analytics Summit includes the participation of Richard Broome, the CIO and VP of Operations of Host Analytics, in a panel of executives about industry-specific customer success stories.

The summit is to happen on Wednesday, April 25 in California.

Visit Marketwatch to view the full details of the event.

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How Hoteliers Can Make Use of the Cloud

While it is clear and obvious for some industries on how they can leverage on the power of cloud computing, the hospitality industry is not entirely part of it.

A transcript of an interview with Fladgate partner, Anthony Lee by Hotel Industry discusses what hoteliers need to know about the cloud.

According to Lee, in the front line perspective, the industry is already utilizing the cloud in the form of global distribution systems (GDS’s) such as Galileo and Amadeus. On the back-end perspective, there are already activities toward web-based systems.

Here are major considerations that were mentioned:

Ensure sensible precautions to secure data
Secure a sensible contract and meaningful service levels

Risks, according to Lee, will always be present – whether it is technological or caused by people. The key here is to ensure that these risks are contained and that the right provider is chosen.

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Cloud Computing: Energy Efficiency

Is cloud computing doing more for green initiatives aside from cutting down business costs?

An article in Greenbiz shares a summary of the Fourth Annual Energy Efficient IT Report conducted by CDW, a leading provider of tech products and services for various industries. Out of 760 respondents consisting of individual from private businesses, nonprofits, schools and governments, more that 60% see cloud computing as an energy-efficient way to consolidate data centers.

Though isolating and measuring energy use still needs to be identified, the CDW still concluded that cloud computing might play a bigger role in energy efficiency as majority of respondents having virtualized servers claim that energy is reduced by 28%.

Visit Greenbiz to read further environmental impacts that cloud computing has on businesses.

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Shifting Towards the Cloud With Proper Governance

When it comes to cloud adoption, virtualization simply is not enough. Businesses still need to evolve, optimize, benchmark, cycle through, and then optimize further.

An entry in IT-Director.com shares a very comprehensive excerpt from an HP Expert Chat Session podcast entitled, “How to Best Pursue Cloud Computing Models” with Glenn West, the Data Center and Converged Infrastructure Lead for Asia Pacific and Japan in HP’s Technology Services Organization as guest.

This interview provided some actionable recommendations on how IT can support cloud benefits, re-architect their data centers with low risk and become the benefits enabler.

Here are some takeaways from the interview:

• Cloud is more than just the technology, it’s also about people and processes
• The cloud needs to go through different levels of maturity
• Part of the process involves standardization – the service life cycle
• Prepare for hybrid cloud

The points above are only the tip of the iceberg. There are so much more techniques that businesses can extract from this article. Visit IT-Director.com to read the full version and see why you need to understand the cloud and how you can optimize it for best results.