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Research Shows Increased Cloud Adoption by SMB’s

Another cloud services provider, Parallels rebuts the general assumption that cloud computing is used more by enterprises, as it showed results from a recent research.

As written in an article in MSP Mentor, the firm found that the US SMB cloud market grew by 25% in 2011 or increased to $15.1B.

Going further in their research, they inferred that medium-sized businesses preferred phone conferencing services while micro and small businesses seek cloud-based applications on:

  • Back-up
  • File sharing
  • Accounting
  • Email achieving

These small businesses were reportedly to double the amount of paid cloud applications in the next three years and that they will be starting to move beyond basic web services. One indicator is the 45% rate of US SMB’s that are promoting their businesses on Facebook, a cloud-based social network site.

Read more about how small businesses can utilize the cloud to expand their operations cost-efficiently, visit MSP Mentor.

 

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Friday Cloud News Roundup

roundup

Cloud Council of 7

Though cloud computing is becoming the preferred technology choice, challenge remains that most CIO’s still cannot link the current definitions of cloud computing’s business value.

It is then that a group of business users, policy makers, technology and service providers and academics working with cloud technology have decided to form a non-profit group called Cloud Council of 7 (CCO7). The group, which launched their operations last 22 Feb 2012, aims to find ways to help enterprises make informed decisions when specifying and selecting cloud technologies and services.

Founding members have identified 7 characteristics of cloud technology that need to be taken into consideration. These include:

  • Dynamic scalability
  • Financial efficiency
  • Solution adaptability
  • Multi-tenancy

Visit Brandenton.com now to view the rest of the characteristics and see how this new group can guide CIO’s, CTOs, Tech vendors and senior IT executives in the specification, development and deployment of cloud computing services.

Fed-Initiated Guidance on Cloud Implementation

An article in InformationWeek expressed how cloud computing represents a paradigm shift much bigger than IT.

In the article, it says that the government has the potential to be the cloud market’s single largest purchaser and that this government segment can play a major role in shaping how services are purchased and consumed. Agencies adopting the cloud need to think carefully how they work with the cloud service providers to hammer out the terms of service. Here are some factors that they need to consider:

  • SLA’s – clear forms, definitions and mechanisms
  • Security – FedRAMP, baseline guide
  • Privacy – Compliance with the Privacy Act of 1974

Visit Information Week to read the article and see how the federal government helps various agencies adopt and address cloud concerns.

Innovation Program by the Cloud Security Alliance

The last Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) summit during the RSA Conference discussed the dramatic increase in cloud security awareness as delivered in an article in CFO World.

According to Jim Reavis, co-founder and executive director of CSA, the open market has produced inadequate information security for cloud computing. With this in mind, the CSA aims to have some initiatives in:

  • Developing relevant solutions to address security issues
  • Mobile computing initiatives
  • International push into Asia Pacific

In a nutshell, the CSA hopes to identify key issues related to trust security that inhibit the adoption of cloud and those that incubate technology solutions that address systematic cloud computing security gaps.

Read the full article about the CSA initiatives and how this will help eliminate barriers to cloud adoption by organizations, visit CFO World.

Will the Cloud Lead to Software Obsolescence?

An interesting article in Cloud Computing Topics speculates around the concept of software being obsolete because of cloud computing.

As the author sees it, this will rather present new opportunities for business software to reach markets that on-premise versions cannot.

The author also mentioned some instances where there will always be a market for both on-premise and cloud solutions:

  • Email
  • CRM Application
  • ERP Solutions

At the end of the article, the author suggests that a typical company should adopt a mix of on-premise and cloud-based solutions as appropriate to meet their needs and budget.

Read about the comparison of on-premise and cloud versions and see how the author arrived at this conclusions, visit Cloud Computing Topics.

Cloud Fair 2012

The newest and largest cloud computing conference and expo, Cloud Fair 2012 Cloud Computing Conference and Expo is to be held on April 17-19 in Sherator Seattle.

As announced in Daily Markets, leading cloud companies will be attending to deliver reports, user case studies and hands-on tutorials.

Some keynotes include:

  • Box COO Dan Levin
  • AWS Technology evangelist Jimesh Varia
  • Comcast’s Martha Tate
  • Google’s Senior Manager Adam Swidler

Find out more about the expo and read on the rest of the keynote list at Daily Markets.

Cloud Security Summit 2012

User identity is the next big issue in cloud computing safety, this is according to security company Ping Identity in reference to the 2012 Cloud Security Summit on July 16-20 at Vail Colorado.

The focus of the event would be exploring the central role of identity in enterprise. Much as there are organizations and experts on this matter, there is still no definitive “perfect way” to handle identity in the cloud as the ability of IT to address security issues is still in its infancy.

The main objective of the summit is to establish best practices that can adapt to a rapidly changing marketplace and help limit breaches that stem from shifts such as the trend toward the use of personal technology in business.

Read the full article on this year’s Cloud Security Summit and see what else will be tackled in the event, visit The Info Boom now.

 

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Energy and Utility Companies Use Cloud to Increase Productivity

Energy and Utility EfficiencySome major energy companies such as ExxonMobil and Atmos Energy Corporation are already using cloud computing for geo-imagery or consolidation of operations across business units.

A write-up in CloudTweaks synthesizes a report issued by the Carbon Disclosure Project in June 2011. According to the article, cloud-enabled energy companies can:

  • Reduce energy consumption
  • Lower carbon emissions
  • Decrease capital expenditures on IT resources

… And that by 2020, these companies are estimated to achieve:

  • Annual energy savings of $12.3B
  • Annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200M barrels of oil

Through the new cloud business model and its support tools, companies in the energy industry can definitely improve operational efficiency.

View the link to the report and read more information about how the cloud benefits the energy and utility industry at CloudTweaks.

 

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Cloud-Based Business Intelligence Increases Popularity

Cloud Business IntelligenceA recent release in MarketWatch announced a study conducted by TechAisle in SMB business intelligence adoption and trends.

The study showed that 22% of SMB’s are already using business intelligence (BI) and that 27% are planning to use BI in the coming year.

As the number of users appreciating business intelligence and big data analytics increases, more of them are using various vendors for different type of business intelligence areas:

  • Cloud-based business intelligence
  • Collaborative business intelligence
  • Mobile business intelligence

In studying the trend and the planned usage of the technology, cloud BI shows a lot of promise as usage rate is expected to increase by 59% from its 2011 figures.

While there are challenges to the adoption, benefits such as ease of use, real time analytics and platform integration will accelerate it.

Visit Market Watch to view the whole article and to find out the link to TechAisle’s report.

 

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Best of Both Clouds: Hybrid

Hybrid CloudAn article in ITWorld centers on online marketing firm, Hubspot, and how they realized that they would need additional computing power, hence, CIO Jim O’Neill’s creation of the hybrid cloud where they can keep their important web hosting functions in the private cloud, and use public cloud for flexibility of resources.

In the 2011 Gartner Data Center Conference, 78% of some 2,500 attendees planned to build private cloud services by 2014.

O’Neill emphasized though that creating a hybrid cloud takes careful planning. The challenge remains to be the absence of standards for interoperability between public and private clouds.

Gartner researcher Thomas Bittman shares that while this is the case, there are four centers of gravity for hybrid cloud environments:

  • Dominant private cloud vendor VMWare
  • OpenStack model
  • Amazon’s series of cloud offerings
  • Large vendors such as IBM, HP, Intel, etc.

These centers have particular characteristics that can help organizations in choosing the right hybrid for their business.

Read the description of each center in ITWorld and see how any of the four can be combined to maximize an organization’s cloud interoperability requirements.

 

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