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08.8.2011

The upcoming San Diego conference, HostingCon 2011 will be starting soon, running from August 8th until the 10th, and for those amongst the 1800 attendees and 150 vendors displaying at the show, it is a must attend for anyone in the hosting industry. This includes designers and developers who use hosting in their work or owners of the many support businesses such as computer hardware manufacturers, software providers or bandwidth companies.

Of course, anyone who is the owner of a hosting company is not only bound to be at the show, many will be on hand to talk about the current developments in the hosting industry. You can be sure that GMO Cloud America will have several of our people in attendance and we are hoping you will come by and say hello while you are there. In addition there will be an extended vendor hall with 150 booths displaying every element of the business. Even with the expansion from last year, all the booths are completely sold out and iNET Interactive who puts on the show has around 70 speakers lined up to present a wide array of talks about an industry that has seen tremendous change and growth since the last event.

Networking will be Key

It is no surprise that as part of the signup process a networking tool will be launched at the show to enable all attendees a chance to connect with potential business partners and make new alliances while at the show. Networking is the key to an event like this and the show is organized to help attendees make the most of it. There will be a WHIR-sponsored networking lounge as well as a special room for semi-private networking close to the speaker sessions. In addition, iNET’s Kevin Gold points out that there will be “numerous nooks throughout the conference center for ad-hoc meetings.” In addition to the networking locations, booths and educational presentations, there will be additional opportunities to meet and talk at the huge planned opening ceremonies, keynote talk, daily happy hours and lavish closing ceremony.

A Prospect for Unparalleled Learning

This is the seventh year for this event, and it seems that every year brings fresh opportunities to learn about the latest developments of the hosting world. That isn’t surprising, since it seems that every year the industry evolves and keeping up can be a job in itself. For many past attendees the show has become a chance to find out the latest technology, meet with vendors to discover recent developments and attend talks to hear some of the best and brightest in the industry share their knowledge.

Speakers will be addressing a wide range of topics including business development, emerging trends, technology and operations as well as marketing and sales. Be sure to come by and hear our partner OnApp’s Ditley Bredahl talk about cloud hosting on Tuesday morning as well as Parallel’s Jack Zubarev’s talk on the future of automation for providers. With keynote talks from Leading Edge Forum’s Simon Wardley, Tier 1 Researcher Antonio Piraino and the legendary Birger Steen on the road ahead this is bound to be an enlightening and invigorating event.

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.

08.4.2011

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.

08.3.2011

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.

08.2.2011

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.