GMO Cloud

Move to the Cloud Fuels Business Growth

With scores of businesses looking to the future as the country begins to pull out of one of the worst recessions in recent history, many are making changes to move more of their IT structure to the latest technological innovation, the cloud. This move is having a lasting impact on many areas of business as traditional IT jobs are changing to include new skills and specialties.

With an ability to look again towards the future, business are finding that IT desktop support staff can be reduced as it moves to the clouds but additional training for employees working with new software systems will be needed. As business moves into the cloud a shift from physical resources such as IT and capital expenses to efficiency and utility will begin to effect business practices across the board.

Discovering just how cost efficient outsourcing their IT structure is, one of the first areas of business many companies are moving to the cloud is their disaster recovery services. “For the past two years companies have had to put a hold on disaster recovery. Now with the economy improving IT Departments are once again able to invest in disaster recovery,” said Mike Klein, President and COO of Michigan’s Online Tech.

Another sign of how quickly the business world is moving to the cloud can be seen in the entertainment business, where Amazon, Google and Apple have all made big leaps into providing various entertainment platforms to their consumers through the cloud. Google alone has spent over $8 billion on infrastructure and will continue to spend more.

A good example of the local impact of this is Indianapolis, where the focus the last few years has been to move workers out of the traditional workplace and into the information technology sector. The Indianapolis Business Journal recently wrote about the scarcity of quality tech workers in the area because of the growing cloud computing sector. The call for IT workers in the cloud computing industry was outstripping the ability of the area to provide them, causing the local universities to increase their number of course offering training in the tech industry.

A sure sign of the growth of cloud replacing traditional IT is the recent activity in the enterprise side of business. The latest acquisitions of several cloud providers such as TimeWarner’s purchase of NaviSite and Verizon’s takeover of Terramark combined with the latest news of CenturyLink’s $2.5 billion bid for Savvis point to a new direction for enterprise to move to the cloud in a big way.

As more and more businesses look to the cloud for future growth and control of costs, those that choose to not embrace this change may find themselves with serious economic and business disadvantages.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.

Will 2011 be the Year of the Cloud for SMBs?

The last few years has seen quite a few changes and challenges for small and medium businesses, not the least of which is the growing move to the cloud. Various organizations and business leaders have been predicting the “year of the cloud” for several years now, and it begins to look like 2011 may finally be it. The debate whether the cloud is simply a fad or if it is a new trend that is here to stay seems to have finally been answered as a critical mass of business has finally made the move to the cloud.

Recently IDC reported worldwide revenues for public cloud servers will reach $3.6 billion by 2015 and it expects servers for private cloud service to reach $5.8 billion. This sudden shift represents the move by IT managers to simplify their current IT infrastructure, increase efficiencies and lower costs.

“These evolutionary, and revolutionary, changes in IT deployment and business attitudes are having a profound impact on traditional IT environments,” said Katie Broderick, senior research analyst, Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends and Strategies, IDC. Broderick went on to point out how allocating the more mundane tasks to the cloud have freed the manpower in many businesses to concentrate on tasks that add value to their business. She added that this movement is “critical to driving cloud adoption” and noted that SMBs are looking to be one of the largest groups that will be reaping the benefits of the cloud.

Many analysts are now predicting the adaption of SaaS and IaaS will double in the next few years, with SMBs leading the drive as mobile devices become a larger tool in the workforce. The proliferation of various mobile devices has lead many businesses to the cloud according to a new market study by New York based Access Market International (AMI) Partners. The study, entitled 2010-2011 State of SMBCloud Services Market pointed to the expansion of mobile devices into the marketplace as a key player in cloud growth.

“Users now want to take the things they can do in their private lives into their professional working practices,’ said Hugh Gibbs, vice president of research at AMI. He pointed to the ability to access email, simple internet apps and social networking sites, or checking availability of colleagues wherever and whenever they need to as one of the big changes that is driving more and more SMBs to the cloud.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.

Five Top Reasons to Go to the Cloud

You have probably seen lists like this in many places on the web lately as more and more bloggers and web writers see the value of moving any kind of business, whether it is a small start-up or a large enterprise, onto the cloud. Since we have always believed in the value of the cloud, here are our top five reasons we feel that any business should be looking at moving their business to the cloud.

Data Backup – One of the most important elements, this is also one of the best reasons to move as many elements of your business as you can to the cloud. Backup of critical data is a headache for almost all businesses and yet you can easily setup a backup of all your data through a variety of solutions such as Carbonite, SugarSync, and CrashPlan. Combine this offsite cloud backup with two additional copies kept elsewhere (the 3-2-1 rule of three copies, two separate data and one offsite) and you will never have to worry about losing your data in a disaster again.

File Sharing/Virtual Machines – With the cloud you can have all your data accessible to all your offices at the same time. Since the data is shared in the cloud, the same documents are accessible without creating multiple copies that float around between offices. The same is true of the concept of virtual machines. With all your data on the cloud, workers can move from office to office or desk to desk, access what they are working on from anywhere. And with the software all in the cloud, investment in software is under control with plenty of options for a wide variety of cloud operating systems that means businesses can always have the latest software versions and the power of top-end machines without the investment.

Hosting Your Website – More and more businesses are seeing the wisdom in not going through the effort and money to buy the servers and spend the time creating and running their company site. Having it hosted in the cloud saves time, money and gives the business time to invest in ways to use that site to grow the business instead of just maintaining it.

Cloud Based Business Tools – Why spend the time and money on buying and learning software tools that you will need to maintain for everyone in your office when you can use cloud based office tools such as SalesForce for CRM-based solutions or even track statistics anytime and anywhere. These cloud-based business tools are flexible and can be tailored to your business needs, accessed from anywhere including your laptop when you are looking for that important piece of information for an upcoming business meeting, and give you a quick look at who uses what tools to help you forecast your business needs.

Cost Savings – This is the one you hear everywhere about the cloud for a good reason, it is probably the biggest reason most companies start looking at moving their operations to the cloud. The sheer cost of infrastructure and IT staff to support it has made moving into the cloud look better and better each year. If your business does game development, video and other media or you are looking to launch a business, you will find that the cloud makes collaboration easy. There are more companies offering cloud hosting so the options are better than ever, and once the move has been made, most companies find themselves wondering why they didn’t do it sooner.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.

Cloud Hosting Applications – The Scientific Community and Cloud Computing

The Cloud has an impact on more than just business; it has also brought its unique abilities to the scientific community. In the last decade the number of scientific instruments available that can add to the data stream has been enormous, and continues to grow. While this has spurred software development within the various scientific disciplines, hardware processing capabilities have struggled to handle the sheer volume of data. One of the areas where The Cloud has been brought in to handle this is astronomy, where the glut of data has been overwhelming for researchers.

One of the results has been the development of astroinformatics, the science of the exploitation of the information pertaining to astronomy through the development of grid and cloud computing. In Canada, researchers with The Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR) in cooperation with CANARIE, a national research network organization is working to create a cloud-based platform to support astronomy research. The goal of the project is to create access for astronomers to datasets and resources in customized virtual compute and storage clouds. This would give them entrée to data that was previously only accessible locally and will allow astronomers across the country to handle the vast datasets being generated by global observatories. In addition, the expertise of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics and the National Research of Canada will be available through this network.

CANAR states that they envision this new cloud environment will “provide astronomers with novel and more immediate hands-on and interactive ways to process and share very large amounts of data emerging from space exploration”.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.

Are Private Clouds on Mainframes the New Hosting?

For many of the old timers in the mainframe world, the word cloud alone will get you an eye roll or two. They will tell you that it is just a new word for a function that mainframes have been performing for years. But is it?

Sure, there are many that claim that it is nothing more than a resource made available in a company with security and solid management controls that is dynamically provisioned, in other words a mainframe. But what seems to be missing from this definition is user control. And most experts will tell you that it is a key attribute of cloud hosting.

And one of the key characteristics that gives mainframes their reputation as old technology is the very controlled environment that makes it so secure. An administrator is needed to provision computing power for any specific task, unlike in the cloud technology. And this is why x86-based distributed architecture is the mainstay for cloud computing and not mainframes.

Even with this reasoning, mainframe vendors still claim that as many as 73% of their clients are looking to use their mainframes as part of the move to the cloud. In fact, IBM has been advocating for mainframes as cloud platforms the last several years, especially since the introduction of the zEnterprise last year. IBM introduced virtual operating systems over 30 years ago and with the addition of Linux, running virtual X86 servers on their mainframes was a logical next step.

But the problem of self-provisioning remains. When you have a system where in some companies the mainframe is in a locked room where no one can access it, it is hard to see how to develop self-service features. IBM’s system x cloud computing leader, Reed Mullen, claims that the problem Is a reflection of the culture of mainframes, not the technology. But even Mullen admits that any implementations are still going to be run through IT, probably via a request email to have resources allocated. Point and click allocations don’t seem to be part of the picture.

One scenario where mainframes as cloud platforms may be happening now is worldwide outsourcing companies with developers spread across the globe. These developers would have the ability to set up their own testing and development platforms, and some may be mainframe based. Mullen of IBM agrees this is the most likely situation with today’s technology and says it “is perhaps the dominant usage of a cloud infrastructure in mainframe environments today.”

As the cloud matures more situations may develop that will lead to a wider adaptation of mainframes to cloud platforms, but for now the ability still seems somewhat limited. But no matter how you look at it, the development of business units to self-provision a mainframe-based cloud is coming. It will probably change the way mainframes are seen as they run more of the same software and grow their service-management side. They may soon be seen as just another high-end element in the cloud world, instead of a class on their own.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.