September 8th, 2011
As an illustration of yet another way that cloud computing and virtualization is moving out of the traditional datacenter and into the middle of business, Diebold ran a demonstration of a cloud-based bank ATM at this year’s VMWorld conference in Las Vegas. The prototype is the world’s first development of cloud technology for an ATM machine and uses virtualization for remote servers that replace the standard built-in computing resources. These changes will give the ATM machines more reliability and security while at the same time reducing complexity.
Diebold Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Frank A Natoli Jr. called the machine a “game changer” and just part of the Diebold roadmap towards even more efficiencies through cloud-based technology in cash machines and self-service kiosks. With this move, Diebold is looking to build on its reputation for innovation by delivering to the financial retail market improved operational efficiency and enhanced security that will help them retain and grow their customer base through optimal customer experiences.
These new virtualization ATMs will no longer need an individual on-board computer as each terminal will be tied into a fleet to deliver centralized computing. This will allow the single physical server in the cloud to provide a variety of resources to a multitude of “virtual” ATMs, resulting in consolidation and sharing of resources for greater efficiencies.
More importantly for banking, security will be enhanced with this consolidation as it will allow the creation of a single secure datacenter with a secure location for IP addresses. This development to improve security and mitigate fraud while delivering the optimum customer experience provides a powerful combination of innovation and technology. Diebold is currently seeking to recruit banks for initial setups as part of the upcoming proof-of-concept study.
Natoli named this advancement as a major milestone for the company. “Virtualization will fundamentally change the way Diebold – and its customers – deploy solutions to the marketplace. It enables unified management of a wide array of services and paves the way for orchestration of multiple channels.”
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September 6th, 2011
The cost of moving to the cloud is one of the top considerations for organizations looking to include cloud as part of their IT planning. In the past, when the cloud was still a new idea, most people were happy to point out the cost savings that most enterprises would realize from moving to the cloud. Since ROI was generally realized within six months for server virtualization, the Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) migration has, in general, been seen as a win-win situation whenever costs was discussed. But this budgeting view is somewhat limited. Organizations need to look beyond virtualization when considering cloud computing costs and estimated costs savings.
The results of a recent report by Forrester Research show that many IT organizations are seeing a slowing in virtual migrations because of unexpected costs or lower return due to misallocation. Most of these unexpected costs are because IT Management can sometimes avoid reporting specific costs of virtualization when presenting budgets.
Tracking the Details
Although 64 percent of IT Management did believe that virtualization costs needed to be shown in detail including tracking and analysis, 48% admitted that they submitted those costs as a single line item in their budgets. An inability to measure these costs or not having the knowledge in how to track them was the biggest reason given for not providing details.
Most of this problem stems from the fact that traditionally very few companies require IT Departments to supply chargeback to track costs for their department. To determine a cost on a specific item such as virtualization is just not part of the culture or expected in most IT budgets.
Data Storage
In addition, the cost of moving and storing data is often overlooked in the overall cost of moving to the cloud. Most companies do not even consider the initial amount of data that they may move to the cloud, let alone what that data will be five years from now. Network bandwidth is crucial to the workload in the cloud, and needs to be taken into consideration when budgeting cloud expenses.
Multiple Application Vendors
For some, the cost of integrating the apps from various vendors brings an unexpected problem when looking at moving to the cloud. It may mean taking smaller steps into that migration as these vendors develop their own methods of integration. If a company uses Microsoft for email and Cisco for voicemail, as an example, they may want to keep those applications and they find that certain applications are not compatible in the cloud. Time and money can be spent excessively unless this is explored thoroughly at the first stages of migration.
Testing for the Cloud
Migration also includes the cost of testing software to see if it is ready for the cloud. If your system has a large application that is crucial to your business and it has never been tested for the cloud, time and money can be spent debugging to make it ready. A good example is New York’s Marist College who needed to move their large-scale ERP system to the cloud. The problem was that the servers were not yet approved by the vendor. Although the vast majority of the migration went smoothly, there were challenges. As CIO Bill Thirsk put it, “Stabilizing the system within a cloud that already supported 900 virtualized servers gave us quite a challenge. It was a matter of changing some code, which took some time and effort to figure out exactly which lines needed to be changed.”
New Costs for IT – Rent and Utilities
If you are moving from an in-house set of servers to the cloud, you may not be thinking of these kinds of costs in your budget. IT Departments budgets may not, generally, even have line items for rent and utility costs. The bottom line may still mean that costs are being saved; it is just that these costs are generally in a different department, so the introduction of these hard costs needs to be considered. These are not often costs that will show up in your estimates, but the costs are part of the price of doing business in the cloud. It needs to change from a thought process of lump investments in hardware to a monthly fee for services, that include such things as rent and utilities.
One Time Fees
Setup costs, pilot programs, these are all elements of the migration costs that are not part of the ongoing costs, but still need to be considered as part of the overall budget. Many IT Departments look primarily at the ongoing service costs, and forget that there are setup fees to take into consideration. Pilot programs can be costly if contract terms and minimum discounts are not agreed upon prior to trying any pilot program. All too often the turnover from pilot to implementation happens much more quickly than anticipated, leading to unexpected costs in the process.
In general, with the cloud still so new there is a lot that many companies have to learn when evaluating just which cloud services work for them. Both benefits and costs need to be considered, with an eye on the reality that an immature industry brings change that is both exciting and difficult at the same time; opportunities and challenges abound, sometimes with big payoffs.
Gartner Research Vice President Frank Ridder summed it up succinctly when he noted, “Organizations need to understand these changes and develop realistic cloud sourcing strategies and contracts that can reduce risk.” He continues to emphasize that companies need to keep in mind the services sourcing cycle that includes four main drivers: sourcing strategy, vendor selection, contracting and management and governance. That life cycle will remain an important and critical arena for planning and managing resources.
Get started today on outsourcing your infrastructure to the cloud by taking advantage of GMO Cloud America’s $150 hosting credit.
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September 1st, 2011
When a place with the stature of The Tate Museum announces it is scrapping its entire website to rebuild it as an interactive open source site that is cloud hosted after over ten years of html-centric traditional hosting, it is bound to be news.
Their current site, which used hand-coded HTML files, sees over 18 million visitors a year. It has what is often referred to as a brochure style website, intended to give potential and current Tate Museum visitors vital information, but lacking the ability to deliver interactivity. It is this interactivity, especially with regards to how it would engender debate amongst the users, which brought the museum to the decision to move to Drupal, an open source content management system and to have it hosted in the cloud.
The head of Tate online, John Stack, says that the project is already at the two year mark in its development and that when completed will see every page of the site completely redesigned. After testing the concept of cloud hosting with what Stack refers to as “bits of clouding” the decision was made that the best use of resources would be to move the entire site completely to cloud hosting. This move would save the Tate Museum on ongoing costs as well as make it possible to stay current on software and give them some flexibility with the site.
Discussing the advantages of this move, Stack explained, “Previously, we would want to deploy pre-supplied software, such as e-learning and open source software, only to find that we needed specific versions of PHP or MySQL. As it wasn’t in the package, we faced additional costs and had to go round the houses to find money. We had no time to wait around, working out what to do with hosting.”
With the new cloud hosting, the plan is to encourage visitors to get involved in discussions on art, include mobile accessibility of the site for visitors from their cell phones while at the Tate, and the ability to change content rapidly with each new exhibit became a reality and well within the museum’s recently reduced budget.
With a small IT department, a need to respond to constant challenges as exhibits change and a down-sizing of budgets for all non-profits including museums, this was the perfect time to make the move for the Tate Museum to cloud hosting.
“Engaging with a global online audience, as well as our millions of gallery visitors, is an increasingly important part of what Tate does,” explained Tate Media Director Marc Sands. Looking forward to the developing of apps for weekly art debates and new games based on current exhibits, he said he is looking forward to this new technology giving the Tate an ability to “open up even more exciting and diverse ways to make this possible.”
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.
August 31st, 2011
There has been a flurry of activity lately regarding the acquisition of various companies within the cloud community. Dimension Data acquired OpSource just prior to the purchase of cloud/hosting companies including Terramark, Sawis and NaviSite.
There is an unmistakable trend within the cloud hosting model that indicates a movement towards traditional server-based hosting models moving into self-service based cloud models. What are the factors driving this trend? Two prime factors are seen to be pushing the hosting community. One is the competitive price positioning for a vendor because of the higher operational efficiencies and lower TCO cloud hosting offers. The other is a response to customer demands for self-service options where those options are more flexible and services-centric.
While it is unlikely that traditional hosting services with dedicated physical server environments including co-locations services will be going away any time soon, the pay-as-you-go self-services cloud model exemplified by Amazon Web Services is just beginning to take on the marketplace and looks poised for gigantic and rapid growth.
After all, why would anyone return to traditional hosting once you have gone to the cloud and find you can have a server online in a few minutes instead of the weeks you spend negotiating with a vendor, signing a contract that binds you to them for several years and then waiting around for several weeks to begin to access your resources? No wonder Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource said recently that “cloud is eating hosting’s lunch.” You could say they are eating hosting’s breakfast and dinner too.
In the end the reality will probably look like a mid-point between managed service and self-service, with a bit of each. OpSource is a good example of this as they provide managed services in addition to their cloud hosting. The managed services include performance, location, database and security management required whenever you have complex customized environments. There will probably remain a need for traditional server-based hosting in the case of legacy client-server applications. But when it comes to the scalability and elasticity that fast growing SaaS and large ISVs require, that is where cloud hosting will see some true growth.
There are three main ways in which we will be seeing cloud adoption:
1. Developers and business users bypassing corporate IT and financial guidelines in order to access “rogue” cloud services, particularly external SaaS and IaaS services. It has been rumored that as much as 60% of current adoption happens through this scenario.
2. The transformation of legacy applications into cloud applications.
3. Whenever you have large projects that involve either testing or software development
We are typically seeing this led by big system integrators and telcos for large-scale migration and development projects, especially in the Fortune 500 companies. This is generally followed by the evolution of the development/test case that concludes with a movement of production to the cloud. There are some cases where the application’s production is tested temporarily in the cloud and then returned for final production on-premise. No matter which scenario is employed, this is a giant opportunity for the partnering of enterprise with system integrators and cloud hosting providers to help enterprise begin the process of moving to the clouds. This is a partnership that is bound to benefit both sides as enterprise begins the migration of large-scale development to the clouds.
Telco companies are the common thread in several of the recent acquisitions. Verizon purchased Terramark, Century Link acquired Sawis and now Dimension Data (which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan’s NTT Holdings) acquired OpSource.
It is obvious that the telcos have lagged behind the leading cloud players such as Amazon and RackSpace, even with the strengths of large-scale network resources, extensive global reach, deep wireless experience, strong IP backbone and co-location services. Unable to leverage the cloud they have chosen to acquire what they don’t have in order to combine their own traditional strengths with the new cloud models and drive new revenues.
With Layers 1 and 2 being seen by telcos as commodities, the offering of high quality networks, seamless content/app availability for mobile devices and massively scalable utility cloud services will drive differentiation and value. By playing directly to telcos advantages and strengths, these decisions will push bandwidth and data usage.
In the next couple of years cloud infrastructure hosting is going to be a major market opportunity. It is also going to be an opportunity whose market cycle may well run into the next decade.
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.
August 29th, 2011
For many, cloud computing seems to be all about choice. But that choice goes beyond the choice of cloud service providers or where to run your IT workloads. Increasingly, the choice goes back to how any company’s IT department will choose to see itself. Are they part of the IT solution and so a forward-looking department or are they against it and so seen as a nay-saying department that will only hold the company back in the dark ages.
The Business Litmus Test: Cloud or No Cloud
These days many larger enterprises are using the question of the cloud, even with setbacks like Amazon’s recent crash, to test their IT department’s outlook. Can they pass the test when asked for a solution to a situation that they expect will have cloud-like capabilities for reaction time, flexibility, infinite options and pay-as-you-go features?
The question will force the IT department to choose and either present an option that has cloud capabilities as part of the package or hold to an older solution that labels them as part of the past instead of the future. Any kind of embrace of the cloud as a solution will put IT on the path towards being seen as once again masters of the future and deliverers of the latest and greatest technological solutions for the entire business. In other words, in the words of Cloud Connect guru Alistair Croll, “The cloud genie is out of the bottle. Stop looking for the cork and start thinking (about) what to wish for.”
The New IT: Manager vs Orchestrator
With the acceptance of the cloud comes a new role for IT. The old role of the “factory manager” who ran around making sure the technology was in good working order is gone. That may be the old comfort zone for many IT Managers, but life is change and change can be good.
With the addition of more software, platforms and infrastructure-as-a-service, IT will find itself with less of the day-to-day techie work and acting more as the orchestrator of the entire symphony of services under the IT umbrella. Directing how the services are run instead of providing that service can be a big leap, but if the decision to move to the cloud is done with thought and research the move from daily technical manager to overall service orchestrator can be done with a minimum of pain.
In the long run, it is up to most IT Managers to decide if they are the solution or the problem and to ask both the long term and short term questions. This process points out that the move to the cloud is producing some serious fundamental shifts that will affect how and what IT is. The best solution is to be proactive in this development so that your department is the one presenting the solutions. That way, when you do have to send some of the process outside your four walls you will know why, and the impact those decisions will have on your end users.
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.
August 26th, 2011
There are many notable trade shows and conferences throughout the rest of this year across industries and a range of cloud computing topics for CIOs, IT executives and professionals in the cloud space. We’ve assembled a brief list of some of these events and a look at where and when they will be happening. Links will send you to respective websites where you can learn more and register.
VM World
August 29-30
Las Vegas, NV
VMworld 2011, hosted by VMware, is the leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure event of the year. It’s specifically designed for IT professionals seeking to accelerate success in their enterprises as they preserve existing investments while aligning their specific requirements to enable the cloud.
CIO Retail Summit 2011
August 28-31st
Scottsdale, AZ
This will be a gathering of CIOs, IT executives, analysts and solution providers to discuss the evolving role of technology in the retail industry. With the economic impact on shoppers habits, everyone from big box stores to convenience and grocery need to adapt to new ways of finding what their shoppers demand. Discussions will cover topics from mobile trends to talent management and PCI DSS Compliance in the Cloud.
MSP World
http://www.mspalliance.com/events/mspworld-las-vegas
September 13-15th
Austin, Texas
Once again the premier Managed Services and Cloud Computing Event will be co-hosting the event with ITEXPO West to give managed service providers a single vendor-agnostic focus. The conference will be presenting talks on a wide variety of topics including and an MSP Leadership Course for Executives, discussions on Professionalism and Ethics, a look at Financial and Business Questions concerning the Cloud and MSPs, Strategies for Evaluating Vendors, Help Desk Best Practices and more.
CTO Telecom Summit 2011
http://www.ctotelecomsummit.com/
September 18-21
Scottsdale, AZ
Mobile has transformed the Telco Industry and many companies are looking to find the competitive edge and stay ahead of the technology curve. This is the perfect show to find out more about the trends affecting your industry such as 4G, cloud computing, and data monetization. Join CTOs and executives from Tier 1 and 2 Telecommunication carriers, cell phone service providers, cable providers for networking opportunities and agenda sessions with top analysts and solution providers in the field.
GigaOM Mobilize
http://event.gigaom.com/mobilize/
September 26-27
San Francisco, CA
Opportunity. Everywhere. That’s the theme of Mobilize 2011, and why, this year, our Mobilize event is doubling in scope, providing you two days of insight and analysis. The conjunction of mobile computing and cloud-based services will unleash an entire new wave of product and market growth. At this year’s Mobilize 2011, we’ll show you how Cloud Computing and Mobile Web creates the beginning of further opportunity.
Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit North America 2011
http://www.t1r.com/events/index.php?e=41
September 25-27th
Las Vegas, NV
An important event for any CIOs, cloud decision makers, vendors and investors, this is a convergence event that will be looking at the economic, cultural and technological conditions that is transforming the way IT is bought and sold today. Key topics will include The State of the Cloud-movers and shakers and who’s doing what; Why Cloud is Irresistible – and what you can do; The Role of Hosters, Vendors and Datacenter Operators in the Cloud Value Chain; Privacy, Security and Legislative Challenges; Mergers and Acquisitions, investment and financing and more.
Cloud Security Alliance Innovation Conference
https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/events/csa-innovation-conference-2011/
October 6
Silicon Valley, CA
The CSA Innovation Conference will gather IT architects, senior executives, start-ups, and industry leaders to discuss current challenges, best practices, breakthroughs and trends in cloud computing and security, and, most importantly, witnesses demonstrations of working prototypes (or a more mature readiness levels) of new cloud-related security capabilities.
Cloud Computing Expo
http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/
November 7-10
Santa Clara, CA
Cloud Expo is returning to Santa Clara with more than 5,000 delegates and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors. “Cloud” has become synonymous with “computing” and “software” in two short years. Cloud Expo is the new PC Expo, Comdex, and InternetWorld of our decade. By 2012, more than 50,000 delegates per year will participate in Cloud Expo worldwide.
UP 2011 Cloud Computing Conference
December 5-9
Mountain View, CA
UP 2011 is developed to promote collaborative analysis of the latest trends and challenges in cloud computing and ICT, looking at core process and strategies in the rapidly shifting world. We create thought provoking conference panels, workshops, and tutorials which are selected to cover a range of the hottest topics in ICT.
CIO Cloud Summit
http://www.ciocloudsummit.com/
December 8-9
Scottsdale, AZ
The CIO Cloud Summit will help C-suite executives better understand the true capabilities of cloud computing and the transformational opportunities it can bring to their business. Through a unique blend of focused case studies, CIO think-tanks, CIO debates, analyst workshops and visionary keynotes, technology executives will leave the event feeling invigorated and enthusiastic, with critical takeaways that can be implemented back at their business.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg as more events continue to show up on our calendar. We’ll be following them all closely. We’ll also let you know which events GMO Cloud America Executives will be attending. And, let US know if we missed any events that you’ll be attending!
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.
August 24th, 2011
Every year more and more information is becoming available through various networks on the web. Because of this wealth of information, data centers are running out of storage. More and more businesses are moving to the cloud in an effort to find better and more cost effective ways to deal with this data overload and while the cost of data storage has dropped tremendously, the scale of the problem shows that we need some new solutions.
A report by IDC on the digital universe suggests that this situation is accelerating at a rapid rate, with the amount of digital information created in the world having now gone beyond a zettabyte, which is a trillion gigabytes, for the first time. In fact, it is said that the amount of data generated is now doubling every two years. The ability to use that data and to find new ways to store and retrieve it is explored in this presentation by the technology research firm based on their five year study of the way data is created and the evolution of metadata to help companies manage it. Metadata, data about data, is growing twice as fast as digital data. And that is just the beginning.
The presentation discusses new tools for data management, new security practices that help companies identify which information needs to be secured as over half of all information that should be secured on the net is not, and how cloud computing solutions fit into this new era. A lack of trust by many in the digital universe is compounded by the fact that the proliferation of mobile devices has created a situation where the amount of information that needs to be secured is growing faster than our ability to secure it.
The dilemma is apparent once you look at the numbers. It is predicted that the number of servers, both physical and virtual, will grow by a factor of ten in the next decade. During that same amount of time, the amount of information datacenters will need to manage will grow by a factor of 50 with the number of files expected to grow by a factor of 75. When you add to this that the expected growth in the next decade of IT specialists is less than a factor of 2, the problem is clear.
Where the movement to the cloud comes to play in a solution to this, along with how Big Data will play a significant role is explored in this well thought-out production of what the stumbling blocks and solutions are in Extracting Value from Chaos. The call to action should be a must read for any CIO and business executive interested in planning the coming growth in IT and the digital world at large.
Our 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.
August 8th, 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.
August 4th, 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.
August 3rd, 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.
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