Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

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Microsoft Pitches Private Cloud To IT With System Center 2012

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Microsoft’s System Center 2012 is available today as a Release Candidate, the last milestone before a final release. Along with Hyper-V and Windows Server, the upgraded System Center forms the key building blocks for Microsoft’s private cloud strategy, providing management tools for desktops, mobile devices, both physical and virtual servers, and a mix of resources across private data centers and public clouds such as Windows Azure.

While Release Candidates for some pieces of System Center 2012 were already out, as of today all eight components of the suite are free for anyone to download at this link, with final versions out in the first half of 2012. The exact release date has not been specified, but Microsoft Management & Security Division Vice President Brad Anderson tells Ars Microsoft is shooting for the early side of that time frame.

While the desktop management tools are Windows-only, Microsoft is providing cross-management tools for mobile devices, with security and configuration management covering iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. This, for example, lets IT specify how often smartphone users must change their passwords. In the data center, System Center supports both Linux and Windows servers, with Anderson telling Ars that nearly 20 percent of System Center customers use the software to manage at least some Linux servers.

System Center 2012 boosts the number of supported hypervisors. The current Virtual Machine Manager in System Center supports Hyper-V and VMware, despite VMware being Microsoft’s biggest rival in virtualization and management tools. System Center 2012 broadens the cross-platform hypervisor support by adding Citrix’s XenServer to the mix.

Read More:

http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/01/microsoft-pitches-private-cloud-to-it-with-system-center-2012/

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Can your IT outsourcing contract coexist with the cloud?

Friday, January 13th, 2012

If your enterprise is committed to a long-term managed services or information technology outsourcing (ITO) contract, you might be looking longingly at the agility and efficiencies of cloud-based delivery models. If you’re like many enterprises that rely on managed services, you might be less than thrilled with the quality, responsiveness and flexibility you’re getting. Cloud seems like a better path, but you’re contractually obligated, potentially for several more years.

Source: http://gigaom.com/cloud/bils-it-outsourcing-contract-cloud/

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2. iOS Platform App Features

3. Android System Architecture

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2012 Cloud Computing Award Winners Announced

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

The 2012 winners for the annual Cloud Awards Program have been announced today.

Cloud computing is a field of IT and computer systems where services are typically offered remotely as a service, as opposed to within the organization’s own firewall. Judged among almost 200 entries, the final winners represent "the best of the best in their fields."

The annual cloud computing awards program, open internationally across the US and EMEA regions, recognizes and celebrates industry leaders and pioneers in the field of cloud computing. Categories include B2B Customer Strategy, Best Cloud Infrastructure, Data Innovation of the Year, Developer of the Year, Most Promising Start-Up, Best Platform as a Service, Security Innovation, Best Software as a Service and Web Services Excellence.

Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson said: "Almost 200 organizations entered the program, which is among the first of its kind. We were swamped by entries, and the standard was remarkably high. Judging the submissions was a challenging task. But we’re happy to endorse all of the winners as among the best of the best in their respective fields.

Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/2012-cloud-computing-award-winners-announced-2012-01-10

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Cloud is complex—deal with it

Monday, January 9th, 2012

Cloud as a complex system

What’s interesting is that it turns out science has a whole body of work around complex systems. A complex system, according to Wikipedia, is “a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.”

That’s certainly true of the modern interconnected IT environment. Just look at automated trading systems and the famous “flash crash” for an example—systems designed for increasing market returns reacted to each other in a way that temporarily crashed that very market. Other examples abound, and I’m sure your own IT environment often behaves in ways that no single application or other element was designed to do explicitly.

What science teaches us about complex systems is that they are made up of many individual agents, each of which effect and are affected by agents around them. The feedback loops of events created by agents affecting each other both directly and indirectly, combined with the mechanisms that choose behaviors to in response to those events, combine to create the systemic behavior that is so unpredictable.

Cloud as an adaptive system

The thing is, however, a certain class of complex systems, complex adaptive systems, have the additional trait that they can change their behavior in response to the success or failure of previous behaviors when a given event occurs—or when a certain series of events occurs. This ability to “learn” and adapt to the surrounding system environment creates amazing outcomes, including many of the most rich, enduring and powerful systems in our universe

The developer as DNA

I want to leave you with one last thought, however. One of the things about complex adaptive systems is the learning or adapting traits of the agents in the system. In the world of evolution, the main agent of learning or change is DNA. In the world of IT, the agent of learning or change is the engineer or software developer.

If something goes wrong with an application, developers are on the hook to fix it, change it or kill it. If existing hardware fails to create new opportunities to innovate, engineers find new approaches to introduce into the ecosystem to shake things up.

Source: http://gigaom.com/cloud/cloud-is-complex-deal-with-it/

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Public vs. Private Cloud Debate Goes On

Friday, December 9th, 2011

While there are important differences between a public cloud and a private cloud computing environment, industry leaders say the pros and cons of each aren’t as significant as the fact that both options are available for businesses and enterprises. At the recent CloudBeat 2011 conference in Redwood City, Calif., executives of various companies delivering cloud technology and services said any combination of public, private or hybrid clouds may be the right solution for any company based on its needs.

During a panel discussion provocatively titled "The Private Cloud is Way Overrated," moderator Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, which sells an automated cloud management platform, made the point that public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, are commodity-based, pay-as-you-go services for buying compute cycles from a third party. A private cloud is the same service, but operated within just one company.

"If you take that as the definition, are those two in competition, or do they complement each other or both? Because often it’s misconstrued as that the private cloud is the false cloud," Crandell said. That prompted a response from Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, which develops on-premise private clouds for its customers: "That’s like saying an espresso machine is a false Starbucks."

Source: http://www.networkcomputing.com/private-cloud/232300112

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How to outsource everything to the cloud

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Remember the blurry old days when software was sold in boxes? If you were born in early 80’s, you might even have had the joy of installing software from floppy disks. Gladly, those times are past us.

Setting up a website, building a customer database, sending out newsletters and many other impractical tasks have become affordable for everyone, at a fraction of the costs 20 years ago, thanks to a plethora of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses.

Here you’ll find a brief overview of web-based services that you can start using today to help bootstrap your company.

  1. Designing your logo and corporate identity
  2. Email and Office Software
  3. Setting up your website
  4. Web Analytics
  5. Customer Support
  6. Relationship Management
  7. Sending promotional emails and newsletters
  8. Forms and Surveys
  9. Social Media Management, Monitoring and Analysis
  10. Accounting and Invoicing
  11. Conclusion

Source: http://sgentrepreneurs.com/innovation-technology/2011/11/30/how-to-outsource-everything-to-the-cloud-except-yourself/

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IT outsourcing concentrates on data centre hardware spending

Friday, October 14th, 2011

A new research, which is published by Gartner, predictes that spend on data centre hardware will expand by 12.7% from 2010’s spending levels and reach $126.2 billion by 2015, which includes the cost of servers, storage facilities and enterprise data centre networking equipment. Moreover, research director at Gartner Jon Hardcastle stated that this year will see worldwide data centre hardware spending levels surpass 2008’s levels.

Additionally, Hardcastle suggested that in-house enterprise data centres are unlikely to benefit from these trends as companies maximise their usage of virtualisation technologies and boost their infrastructure effectiveness. Furthermore, Gartner predicts that 2% of data centres will contain 60% of data centre floorspace and will amount to 71% of data centre hardware spending.

Source: http://www.ihotdesk.com/article/800757704/IT-outsourcing-driving-concentration-of-data-centre-hardware-spending

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Beyond today’s Cloud to Outsourcing 3.0

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

IT industry analysts indicate that today in the form of ‘Outsourcing 3.0’, the public Cloud services will combine with on-premise virtual private Clouds to deliver business services. Additionally, Chris Morris, IDC research director for Cloud technologies and services, says that the move of infrastructure to Cloud providers is allowing them to begin to dictate standards and prices. Moreover, the Cloud will be ‘Outsourcing 3.0’, where organisations will consume many ‘messy’ services and putting all that together will be a big challenge for CIOs by 2015. Furthermore, service sourcing and management becomes a key element of the CIO capability. Kevin Noonan, Ovum research director, also says that there is increasing interest in so-called community Clouds, which are specialised on-shore services. What’s more, HP announced its governmental secure Cloud services targeted at state and federal government agencies.

Source: http://www.cio.com.au/article/400470/beyond_today_cloud_outsourcing_3_0/

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First step of IT services – outsourcing

Thursday, August 18th, 2011

Today cloud computing is very important among IT services. You may regard it as a utility just like electricity and telephones. However, IT gurus suspect that the end game of IT as a utility is some five to ten years away and moving organizations from where they are now. They mostly owning their own IT assets with varying degrees of outsourcing, however, it will be a process of graduation over time to progressively greater levels of outsourcing, hosting, and managed services.

The motivator will be how attractive the return on investment is for each move away from owning and managing one’s own technology. However, even very large corporations seldom have all the skills and all the technology in-house to keep themselves at the cutting edge of technology. Hence, regulations and the benefit that IT outsourcing services vendors mostly use up to date versions of systems sparing clients the trouble and costs of having to update out-dated systems. Therefore, outsourcing and managed services are a good idea for most organizations as they solve so many maintenance, management, poex, and capex challenges. In a world, outsourcing positions you early and optimally for the end game of computing as a service and your ROI on outsourcing is significantly improved.

Source: http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2011/08/outsourcing-is-the-first-step-towards-it-services/

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Software Outsourcing Industry

Friday, August 12th, 2011

Today there is a trend that outsourcing providers will gradually turn into experts in migrating to the cloud and offering this type of services. If you wish to migrate some of your applications or build new ones, a software outsourcing company can help you during this process. Herer are some guidelines on how an outsourcing provider can help you with your cloud migration.

1. Hiring a specialist in software outsourcing will help you to plan carefully when you store your applications and data into the cloud.

2. What an outsourcer can provide when migrating to the cloud? The consulting point is particularly important as the IT department has a lot going on having to understand the processes and figuring out how to integrate the new technologies and applications can become quite difficult. Moreover, outsourcing companies will create software tools to automate migrations and they specialize in certain types of migrations.

3. Many companies are developing applications that take advantage of the cloud, which will change the way applications are coded. And this will increase outsourced development.

4. These external providers can manage infrastructure and applications, build, test and develop applications and software, instead of your in-house IT department.

Nowadays cloud computing integration and migration services are already included in some outsourcing offerings. The IT outsourcing industry as well as IT departmetns, must also change and adapt to the cloud computing trend.

Source: http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2011/08/how-is-the-software-outsourcing-industry-embracing-the-cloud/

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