Tag Archives: computing

There’s a culture shift on IT outsourcing, cloud computing

Nearly 60pc of IT and business decision makers now believe organisations must place the priority on outsourced infrastructure over traditional in-house services, a study from global cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions provider Savvis suggests.

The study also reveals that three out of five survey respondents agree that owning and operating in-house IT infrastructure drives up costs and wastes resources. This view marks an increase from 2010, when 38pc of IT decision makers attributed IT ownership to waste in resources and higher costs.

"This study reveals a significant shift in the way organisations analyse and approach IT services," said Bill Fathers, president of Savvis.

"IT departments are now looking to strengthen collaboration, efficiency and competitive agility – and they’re turning to secure, outsourced environments and cloud computing to help meet their objectives."

Globally, organisations are now outsourcing just over 25pc of their IT infrastructure. In five years, organisations expect to expand outsourcing to more than 40pc of their IT services, the survey reveals.

The need for increased agility is leading half or more of the decision makers in the US, UK and Japan to increase the amount of infrastructure they outsource.

The majority (56pc) of surveyed IT executives keep most of their infrastructure in-house, with the practice more prevalent in Japan, where 78pc of respondents indicated reliance on in-house services.

The survey also shows continuing momentum for cloud computing, with 85pc of organisations saying they use private and public cloud for storage, big data analytics and other applications.

Savvis commissioned research firm Vanson Bourne to survey 550 IT and business decision makers in the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Source: http://www.siliconrepublic.com/strategy/item/29169-theres-a-culture-shift-on/

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Worldwide IT Outsourcing Fattens Up 2012 Spending Pie

When you slice a pie, you might save the biggest piece for yourself, or take just a sliver if you’re trying not to overindulge. In the predictions game, finding a glimmer of good news can also depend on how you slice up the overall picture.

The analysts at Gartner have taken another look at the worldwide IT spending pie for this year, and the slice that covers IT outsourcing looks like a good piece. According to a recent Gartner report, worldwide spending for IT outsourcing services is on pace to reach $251.7 billion in 2012, a 2.1 percent increase from 2011 spending that totaled $246.6 billion.

Last month, we reported on Gartner’s re-forecast of the whole worldwide IT spending market, which was actually a downgrade to a 3 percent increase over 2011 totals, putting worldwide IT spending on pace to reach $3.6 trillion in 2012. (In January of this year, Gartner analysts had actually predicted we would see 3.7 percent growth in worldwide IT spending for 2012.) The downgrade was attributed to cautious spending brought on by the eurozone crisis, the weaker U.S. recovery, and the export slowdown in China.

The fact is, however small, we will see some growth in worldwide IT spending in 2012, and that growth is coming from somewhere. Thus, the Gartner gurus started slicing up the pie. They found the fastest-growing segment is coming from the IT outsourcing market, and even more specifically from cloud compute services, which is part of the cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment. Cloud compute services are expected to grow 48.7 percent in 2012 to $5 billion, up from $3.4 billion in 2011. This is not surprising as Gartner has been pointing to cloud computing as a growth point for some time now. Just last month, we told you about Gartner’s revised predictionfor an IT services spending rebound, which analysts are guessing will go up 4.8 percent to $905 billion globally in 2013, driven in part the rise of infrastructure and platform clouds.

The application outsourcing segment is also expected to increase slightly, reaching $40.7 billion, a 2 percent increase from 2011 spending of $39.9 billion. Gartner analysts say this growth reflects the needs of the enterprise to manage extensive legacy application environments and commercial off-the-shelf packages that run the business.

The increase in application outsourcing is also not unexpected, according to Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner. "The burdens of managing the legacy portfolio, along with the limitations of IT budgets, have shifted the enterprise buyers to be cautious and favor a more evolutionary approach to other application services, such as software as a service," Britz said. He explained that while custom applications will remain at the core of many organizations, the trend is toward SaaS enablement in the cloud where new applications can be SaaS-deployed to incrementally extend and modernize the organization’s portfolio.

Overseas, while there will be some impact from the ongoing business slowdown due to sovereign-debt issues in Europe and slowing exports in China, Gartner expects the IT outsourcing market in the emerging Asia/Pacific region to represent the highest growth. With the exception of Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, the countries in Asia/Pacific are new to outsourcing usage, understanding, and sophistication. Spending on IT outsourcing in the Asia/Pacific region will grow 1 percent in U.S. dollars in 2012 and exceed 2.5 percent growth in 2013.

In North America, Gartner expects to see more organizations transitioning IT work to annuity managed service relationships to reduce IT costs, which will effectively keep IT outsourcing growing through 2016. Continued reluctance by the enterprise to hire or make large capital purchases, as well as pursuit of asset-light IT strategies, continues to push organizations in this region toward consuming externally provided services.

On the downside, the challenging economic scenario that worsened in many key European countries in late 2011 continues, resulting in a forecast for western Europe IT outsourcing growth to decline 1.9 percent in U.S. dollars during 2012. Gartner analysts believe the European public sector will continue to see a cautious budget environment throughout 2012, as many central and local government entities concentrate on outsourcing initiatives aimed at reducing IT cost.

Data center outsourcing, a mature segment of the IT outsourcing market, represented 34.5 percent of the market in 2011, but growth will also decline 1 percent in 2012. "The data center outsourcing market is at a major tipping point, where various data center processing systems will gradually be replaced by new delivery models through 2016," Britz explained.

source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh081312-story10.html

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First Look at Google Compute Engine for Video Transcoding

For those of us in the cloud computing world, the most exciting thing that came out of Google I/O this year wasn’t skydivers wearing Glass, and it wasn’t a new tablet. The big news was that Google is getting into the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service space, currently dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Specifically, Google has launched a new service called Google Compute Engine to compete with Amazon EC2.

This is exciting. The world needs another robust, performant, well-designed, cloud virtual machine service. With apologies to Rackspace and others, this has been a single-player space for a long time – EC2 is far and away the leader. Google obviously has the expertise and scale to be a serious competitor, if they stick with it. How does it look?
Early reports are positive. Google Compute Engine (GCE) is well designed, well executed, and based on infrastructure Google has been using for years. Performance is good – especially disk I/O, boot times, and consistency, which historically haven’t been EC2′s strong suit.

But how well suited is GCE for cloud video transcoding? We have some preliminary results, acknowledging that more testing needs to be done. Here are some basic tests of video transcoding and file transfer using Zencoder software on both GCE and EC2.

Raw Transcoding Speed

Performance is our top priority, so Zencoder uses the fastest servers we can find. On EC2, we use Cluster Compute instances, which are fast dual-CPU machines in two sizes: 4XL and 8XL. We compared these with the fastest GCE instance type, which is currently a single-CPU 8-core server.

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These tests were done using an H.264 source video at 640×360 and 1280×720 resolutions, and were encoded by Zencoder using the same single-pass output transcoding settings (H.264 Baseline profile, AAC, one-pass Constant Quality transcoding, etc.).

Google Compute Engine vs. Amazon EC2

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Using default Zencoder settings, both types of EC2 instance are faster than GCE. The economics are a bit closer, and there isn’t a clear winner between 4XL EC2 instances and GCE. So GCE is a viable option for transcoding where cost is a higher priority than raw speed, though AWS customers can make use of Reserved Instances and Spot Instances for further cost reductions.

We noticed that the 16-core EC2 instances were roughly twice as fast as GCE 8-core instances when under load with 6 simultaneous transcodes.  Given the similar clock speeds, but half the number of cores, this is what you would expect.  However, if Google adds similar 16 core machines, they could have comparable transcoding speeds.

Transfer Speeds

When transcoding video in the cloud, network I/O is almost as important as CPU. This is especially true for customers working with high-bitrate content (broadcasters, studios, and creatives). So how do GCE transfer speeds compare to EC2?

To test this, we ran four sets of benchmarks:

  • Amazon S3 to Amazon EC2
  • Amazon S3 to Google Compute Engine
  • Google Cloud Storage to Amazon EC2
  • Google Cloud Storage to Google Compute Engine

We did this by testing the same 1GB video file stored on Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and on Amazon S3. Transfer was performed using 10 HTTP connections. (Zencoder does this by default to optimize transfer speeds, and it can dramatically speed up large file transfers over HTTP.)

GCE vs EC2 Transfer Speeds

 

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This is interesting. We expected Amazon-to-Amazon transfer to be fast, which it was. But we also expected Google-to-Google transfer to be fast, which it wasn’t. In fact, it appears that GCS is slower than S3, and GCE transfer is slower than EC2, such that even if you’re using Google for compute, you may be better off using S3 for storage. Transfer was 2.3x faster from S3 to GCE than from GCS to GCE.

More Tests Needed

Consider these results preliminary. Further testing needs to be done to take into account more variables, such as:

a)  Instance-to-instance differences. This is especially true for file transfer, which can vary widely based on network conditions and instance variability.

b)  Additional applications. These benchmarks only cover transcoding, which is a CPU-bound benchmark. Other applications are limited by disk, memory, etc., and these tests don’t speak to anything other than transcoding.

c)  Scalability.  Scalability is extremely important for anyone using the cloud for video transcoding. More tests are needed to see how GCE compares with EC2 when it comes to enormous scale – tens of thousands of servers (or more). At what point do users run into capacity issues? Performance problems? Design limitations? Instability?

Exciting Future for Cloud Infrastructure

Even though EC2 wins in these early tests, we’re excited about Google Compute Engine. To be a serious competitor for high-performance transcoding, Google needs to add larger instances with faster CPUs. But adding new instance types is easy. Nothing prevents Google from doing this. What is hard is building a robust, performant, feature-complete, scalable cloud platform, and Google seems to have succeeded. If Google is committed to this product and developers for the long run, the cloud virtualization world may have just gotten a second legitimate player.

source: http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/07/23/first-look-at-google-compute-engine-for-video-transcoding/

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The problem with cloud computing: Clouds

Thanks to the cloud, websites and apps around the world can tap into vast, remote stores of data and computing power.

And thanks to the cloud, one good blow to one of those vast, remote storage centers can take down websites and apps around the world.

That’s what happened this past weekend. A ferocious lightning storm in Northern Virginia took down Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, Heroku and more — not because any of those companies are based in Northern Virginia, but because they all apparently rely heavily on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud facility there. Amazon said the storm, for reasons not immediately explained, took out both its main power supply and its backup generator.

The outage brought to mind a similar incident a year ago, in which an outage at the same Amazon facility felled Reddit, Quora and several other sites.

Does the ability of one local weather pattern to affect web users around the globe point to a fundamental flaw in the cloud? Have we entered a world in which Internet users in Palo Alto, Johannesburg and Taipei must watching the weather report for Northern Virginia?

Not necessarily, but it does highlight the reality that the cloud is as much a physical system as it is a virtual one. And as with most physical systems, redundancy is essential to reliability.

Amazon already has U.S. facilities in Oregon and Northern California in addition to Northern Virginia, and it encourages major customers to take advantage of its Elastic Load Balancing service, which is supposed to shift traffic from one cloud center to another to keep things running smoothly. In the past, some of the companies affected by outages have admitted that they didn’t sign up for this option, which costs extra. Everyone whose business depends on reliability by now should know that it’s worth the price.

But in this case, it seems that some of the companies affected were in fact using Elastic Load Balancing — and it failed too.

If that’s true, this latest outage could spur a different kind of diversification in the cloud. Namely, companies might take a harder look at using providers other than Amazon, the industry leader. Rackspace and Microsoft Windows Azure have been the two closest competitors. But in a timely development, Google announced last week, the day before the outages began, that it is poised to enter the field as well.

The increase in competition will put pressure on Amazon to beef up its reliability. If it doesn’t respond, its customers will.

Source:

http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20120707/business/707079956/

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Cloud computing raises security issues

The Internet “cloud” has become the hottest topic in computing, but the trend has created a new range of security issues that need to be addressed.

The cloud is associated with things like personal emails and music which can be accessed on computers and a range of mobile devices.

But the US military and government agencies from the CIA to the Federal Aviation Administration also use cloud systems to allow data to be accessed anywhere in the world and save money—and, ostensibly, to enhance security.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others are major players in the cloud, which seeks to transfer some of the data storage issues to more sophisticated data centres.

Strategy Analytics forecasts US spending on cloud services to grow from $31 billion (around Rs1.7 trillion) in 2011 to $82 billion by 2016.

But some experts say security implications of the cloud have not been fully analysed, and that the cloud may open up new vulnerabilities and problems.

“If past is prologue I don’t think any system is absolutely secure,” said Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “The analogy most people give is having a lock on your door. It’s not a guarantee no one will break in, but it’s a question of how much time it will take, and if your lock is better than your neighbour’s.”

In a cloud environment, “this makes the job of the attacker so much harder, which means the amateur hacker might be obsolete,” said Sidiroglou-Douskos, who is working on a US government-funded research project to develop “self-healing” clouds.

But if a system is breached, analysts say, the amount of information lost could be far greater than what is in a single computer or cluster. “You can have better defences” in the cloud, “but if an attack happens, it’s highly amplified,” says Sidiroglou-Douskos.

The four-year MIT project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency seeks to develop systems that automatically fix data breaches in a manner similar to “human immunology”, says the researcher.

A number of cloud security breaches have raised concerns, including attacks on the Sony PlayStation Network, LinkedIn and Google’s Gmail service. One hacker recently claimed to have stolen credit card numbers from 79 major banks.

“Crimes target sources of value. Large company networks offer more targets to hackers,” says Nir Kshetri, a professor of economics who studies cybercrime at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Source:

http://www.livemint.com/2012/06/24215806/Cloud-computing-raises-securit.html

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Cloud computing: Oracle becomes a believer

Business software maker Oracle is finally adapting to a shift in computing that is threatening to turn the company into a relic.

The 35-year-old company hailed its technological transition Wednesday at its Redwood Shores, California headquarters, where hyperbolic CEO Larry Ellison announced plans to distribute more than 100 business software applications over the Internet instead of selling them as products that have to be installed on individual office computers.

The concept of leasing software applications reachable on any Internet-connected device is known as "cloud computing." It’s an idea that Ellison has frequently mocked as a passing fancy, but his comments Wednesday made it clear that he realized some time ago that the trend had become a serious business.

RELATED: Five things you need to know about the cloud

Ellison said it took thousands of Oracle engineers the past seven years to develop the company’s suite of cloud computing services. The work was code-named "Fusion," but Ellison acknowledged it became so disjointed that he understood why it was skewered as "Project Confusion."

Despite all the manpower and money that Oracle poured into its cloud computing expansion, the company still couldn’t build everything on its own. To fill the gaps, Oracle has spent more than $3.5 billion buying some of the early pioneers in cloud computing, including RightNow Technologies and Taleo.

"This was as difficult a thing that we have ever done at Oracle," Ellison conceded Wednesday during a presentation that The Associated Press watched on a webcast. He said he now believes Oracle has "the most comprehensive cloud on planet Earth."

All boasting aside, Oracle will have to prove that it can adjust to the changes triggered by cloud computing. All this while still trying to profit from the old model of installing and maintaining software on the premises of its corporate and government customers.

Ellison acknowledged it won’t be easy, saying "very few technology companies cross the chasm from one generation to the next."

Oracle Corp. is in no danger of fading away anytime soon. The company remains of the of the world’s most successful software makers, with annual revenue of about $37 billon and a market value of $137 billion.

But the 67-year-old Ellison, an elder statesman among Silicon Valley’s CEOs, doesn’t want to risk becoming obsolescent. He is trying to stay a step ahead of longtime rival SAP as it also embraces cloud computing while Oracle tries to catch up to one of Ellison’s former proteges, Marc Benioff, who is now CEO of Salesforce.com Inc. Not long after leaving Oracle to start Salesforce, Benioff emerged as cloud computing’s more persuasive evangelist.

Salesforce.com is expected to generate $3 billion in annual revenue this year and has a market value of $19 billion.

Ellison, who has an estimated fortune of $36 billion, was one of Salesforce’s earliest investors. He also owns a 46 percent stake in a Salesforce rival, NetSuite Inc., run by another former Oracle executive, Zach Nelson.

Oracle’s expansion into cloud computing also puts Ellison on a collision course with an old antagonist, software entrepreneur David Duffield. Ellison bought Duffield’s former company, PeopleSoft, for $11.1 billion in 2005 after a bitter takeover battle that lasted 18 months. Duffield has since started a cloud-computing service called Workday that sells human resources management tools.

Ellison predicted Oracle eventually will trump Salesforce and Workday by offering a wider and more secure range of services that will fulfill all the cloud computing needs of big companies and government agencies.

Oracle’s new services include "”social relationship management" tools to analyze what people are saying on Facebook’s social network and other online forums such as Twitter. In an apparent effort to underscore his commitment to Oracle’s new focus, Ellison sent his first tweet shortly after leaving the stage Wednesday. His message promoted Oracle’s new cloud computing applications while still saving enough space to throw a jab at SAP.

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Oracle CEO to lay out ‘cloud computing’ strategy

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will outline his company’s strategy for selling more business software services over the Internet, a rapidly growing concept pioneered by Salesforce.com.

Wednesday afternoon’s presentation at Oracle Corp.’s Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters is the latest sign of the intensifying battle in "cloud computing" — the technology industry’s catchphrase for software that can be accessed on any Internet-connected device that subscribes to the service. The approach is a departure from the traditional method of licensing and installing business applications on individual machines, a sales system that has helped established Oracle as one of the world’s most successful software companies.

Ellison, a flamboyant leader known for his acerbic remarks, publicly ridiculed cloud computing as a passing fad for years even though he invested some of his personal fortune in Salesforce.com Inc. and another similar company, NetSuite Inc.

Now that Salesforce has grown into a company on track for $3 billion in annual revenue, Ellison is trying to ensure that Oracle gets a share of the business. So far this year, Oracle has agreed to pay more than $3.5 billion to buy several cloud computing rivals. Another rival, SAP, also has been snapping up cloud computing services to expand into the field, too.

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com announced that it’s paying $689 million to buy Buddy Media to help its customers manage their marketing campaigns on Facebook and other social networking elements. Those offerings run on the cloud computing model. A day later, Oracle said it’s buying Collective Intellect Inc. for an undisclosed sum as it also expands its social media tracking services.

Source:http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-06/D9V7O45G1.htm

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Cloud computing to lift off in China

It has been reported that cloud computing is quickly emerging as one of China’s fastest growing industries. The annual rate of growth has been calculated at 40%.

The nation currently accounts for less than 3% of the global cloud computing market share as it was valued at $90 billion in 2011, however with such a rapid growth this is sure to increase.

It has been estimated that China’s cloud computing market is estimated to grow from about 16.7 billion CNY (£1.67 billion) in 2010 to 117.4 billion CNY (£11.7 billion) in 2013, with a compound annual rate of growth of 91.5%.

This represents a staggeringly fast rate of growth in just a few years. Furthermore, by 2015, the Internet Society of China predicts that the Chinese cloud computing market will be worth 1 trillion CNY.

The majority of this growth is to be pushed by the Chinese governments. For example, the “China Cloud”, a National Cloud Computing Industry Development Plan, has been recently approved by the State Council.

A wide range of cloud strategies are covered along with a development strategy, key tasks that need to be carried out, a technology roadmap and supporting systems for China’s cloud computing industry.

In addition, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has announced instructions on developing innovative cloud computing services through pilot and demonstration projects. The five cities that are set to pioneer cloud computing services are that of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Wuxi.

China really is pushing a lot into cloud computing it seems as a further 1.5 billion CNY is to be allocated to 12 key projects from the first five cloud computing cities. This has been provided by the National Financial Support Program for Cloud Computing Demonstration Projects.

This program will aim to develop ten cloud computing demonstration enterprises in the next three years, each with over 10 million users and an annual revenue of more than 5 billion CNY.

Source:http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/blog-hub/2012/may/29/cloud-computing-to-lift-off-in-china/

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Has cloud computing come of age?

Cloud computing is a much bandied about term and yet a much misunderstood word.

But every company, large or small, wants to be part of the cloud that has been defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Part of the confusion around the term arises from such technical jargon while the rest stems from the complexity of the technology. Cloud computing essentially allows a user with just a screen, keyboard and Internet connection to work from anywhere without needing to worry about software upgrades and the like.

We’ve heard all this before, of course. Given that the application services provider and application infrastructure provider technology models were similar in nature and went through a hype cycle before fading away from public memory, the scepticism around cloud computing and security concerns over this evolving technology do not appear to be going away in a hurry.

Despite this, cloud computing holds a lot of promise, according to research firms. A Microsoft-commissioned study, conducted by IDC, predicts that cloud computing will generate over two million jobs in India by 2015. And a study by research firm IDC for EMC India Pvt. Ltd concluded that cloud computing in India would be a $4.5 billion market by 2015.

NIST talks about three broad cloud models—public (free Web-based email services, Google Apps and Office 365 to name a few), private (in-house data centres) and hybrid (a mix of public and private). It also refers to three service delivery models—software as a service, infrastructure as a service and platform as a service.

However, for cloud computing to evolve into a successful model, security concerns would have to be addressed even as consumers of this technology work towards understanding the return on investment (RoI) as they convert their capital expenditure (capex) models to an operating expenditure (opex) models with the help of cloud computing.

Besides, the needs of a mobile workforce that believes in a BYOD (bring your own device) trend have to be addressed, since mobile devices introduce an additional security dimension.

These were some broad areas debated by participants at a panel discussion on Cloud Computing: Issues, Opportunites and Challenges, in Mumbai on 24 May.

Participants in the round table were Vijay S. Mahajan, vice-president, centre of excellence and infra projects, corporate IT at Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd; Ajit Mavinkurve, chief information officer, TML Distribution Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of Tata Motors Ltd; Alok Shende, founder and director of Ascentius Consulting; Suresh Ramani, chief executive of Techgyan Pvt. Ltd; Akshay Amar Garkel, manager, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. Ltd; and Srikanth Karnakota, director, server and cloud business, Microsoft India Pvt. Ltd. The debate was moderated by Leslie D’Monte, technology editor of Mint.

Read More:

http://www.livemint.com/2012/05/28210021/Has-cloud-computing-come-of-ag.html

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New cloud computing standards introduced

THE GOVERNMENT has launched new standards aimed at providing guidance to businesses on moving to cloud computing.

The Department of Enterprise and Jobs said yesterday that cloud services were reshaping the future of computing “but one of the primary concerns with the emerging cloud paradigm is the lack of standards to guide its adoption and implementation”.

The National Standards Authority of Ireland (an agency of the department), in partnership with the Irish Internet Association, yesterday launched the new standards, entitled, SWiFT 10: Adopting the Cloud – Decision Support for Cloud Computing.

The standard is designed to provide guidance to organisations both large and small on the various issues that need to be considered when moving to the cloud.

Minister for Innovation Richard Bruton said: “A central part of the Government’s plan for jobs and growth is targeting key sectors where Ireland has competitive advantages and the potential to foster growth. One such sector is cloud computing, and various studies have reported that Ireland has potential to create high levels of growth and jobs in this sector if we move early.

“The launch of new Government-backed standards to help guide businesses of all sizes that are looking to move to the cloud marks the delivery of one of these measures.” He added: “This is an important move by Government to help increase the numbers of Irish businesses, small and large, who successfully adopt the cloud.”

Source:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/

0522/1224316503963.html

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