Health care provider reports reduced costs and latency from new cloud service from ClearSky Data.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Tag: CLOUD
Moving the Cloud Closer to the Business
We will soon reach the point where connectivity to cloud resources is going to become a serious issue in terms of real-time computing functions. So, how do we bring the cloud closer to us?
InformationWeek: Cloud
Plante Moran Takes Agile Approach During Microsoft Cloud Migration
Amy Moore, rapid application development team leader for Plante Moran visited the InformationWeek News Desk at Interop ITX to take us through their process for moving their nearly 10-year-old legacy intranet over to the Microsoft suite of cloud products.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Cloud Computing Spurs Hybrid Architecture Adoption
Enterprises turn to the hybrid cloud for disaster recovery, data archiving and other applications.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Serverless computing may kill Google Cloud Platform
Google, which has had to claw its way back into cloud relevance in the shadows of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, suddenly finds itself playing catchup again, thanks to the rise of serverless computing. Although Google Cloud Platform still trails AWS and Azure by a considerable margin in general cloud revenue, its strengths in AI and container infrastructure (Kubernetes) have given it a credible seat at the cloud table.
Or would, if the world weren’t quickly moving toward a serverless future.
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Cloud computing reversal: From ‘go away’ to ‘I can’t miss out’
Isaac Asimov once said, “I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.” That quote has stuck with me to this day. There’s no doubt that computers and computing have changed our lives. Without them, we would be slaves to processes and paper.
I was reminded of Asimov’s quote when I saw the results of a recent poll done by Comvault of 100 IT leaders. More than two thirds said that they were worried about keeping up to date with the latest products and iterations across the major cloud providers. In other words, they fear missing out.
About a quarter (24 percent) of those polled said they were a cloud-only organization, which perhaps means they are very small or very new businesses. Additionally, 32 percent said they are cloud-first, with plans to become cloud-only, so they are likely mid-sized businesses. Also, 6 percent said they did not have a specific migration plan, which means they are BDCs (big dumb companies).
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Oracle’s Hurd, AT&T’s Donovan on their massive cloud migration deal
If worries about digital transformation projects keep you up at night, imagine how it would feel to be responsible for moving thousands of internal databases to the cloud for a company with more than $ 160 billion in annual sales and 260,000 employees. That’s the job that AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan is undertaking, and he’s working with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd to do it.
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(Insider Story)
CIO Cloud Computing
IDG Contributor Network: The history of cloud: a fairy tale
Once upon a time, in a magic, faraway land called “The 1990s,” every application had its own set of physical servers. Citizens of this land, who sometimes called themselves “developers,” feared getting fired for not having enough capacity to handle peak loads. New physical servers took months to be delivered, so developers ordered more data center hardware than they probably needed. Because it was so difficult to get new machines, developers treated them like pets, gave them names and took great care to keep them up and running at all times. Everybody was so excited about the “Internet Bubble” and the land grab that was going on that no one seemed to care about underutilized hardware.
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IDG Contributor Network: 8 steps to IT control in a self-service cloud world
The natural cycle in IT is to move from decentralized to centralized services. When networking first appeared, it was implemented at a department level for printer sharing. It was decentralized—resulting in a hodgepodge of networks and protocols. Eventually IT organizations determined that it was much more efficient to centralize this effort and we saw the adoption of large-scale, TCP/IP networks. Today nearly every IT organization has a centralized networking team that manages and deploys IP-based infrastructure.
When SaaS applications such as Salesforce first appeared, they were adopted by sales organizations. As adoption levels grew, enterprises needed centralized data integration, identity and access management, and other functions that are inefficient to deliver at departmental scale. Today Salesforce is typically managed by a centralized IT organization.
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IDG Contributor Network: When to use a public or private cloud infrastructure
With the vast quantities of data generated daily and the complexities of the required processing escalating, the cloud is emerging as a forerunner in the computing domain. Reducing operational costs and improving analytical power, there is little doubt that cloud computing is the way to go to optimize organizational business intelligence.
The question, though, arises with regard to which platform to select. There are three platforms to keep in mind – private, public and hybrid clouds – and each is designed for specific targets depending on the type of data being used, and the level of security and management required. Depending on particular business needs and intricacy, different platforms are suited and different questions should be asked.
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Data center construction increases thanks to the cloud
A new report from a real estate firm that specializes in data center construction and leasing says data center construction in North America is up 43 percent over the same period in 2016, and industry consolidation has driven $ 10 billion in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) so far.
Jones Lang LaSalle just published its report on the North America data center market, highlighting trends such as consolidation, enterprise hybrid cloud, security, and high-performance computing.
+ Also on Network World: Ireland the best place to set up a data center in the EU +
While construction continues at a record clip, the report also found that absorption of data center space available for lease has returned to normal levels after record leasing in 2016. So many of the cloud providers are still digesting the capacity they picked up last year.
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IDG Contributor Network: Driving operational excellence with your cloud vendors
Once, there was a pin factory. It employed ten workers – each of whom performed a different task. This organizational structure allowed them to generate 48,000 pins every day. If the people working at the plant were working independently, the output of each would have been limited to 20 pins at most – totaling 200 pins. This story describing division of labor was used in Adam Smith’s 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, as an example of operational excellence (OE).
If your company is to survive in a competitive market, OE must be sought, explained Faisal Hoque in Fast Company. In other words, the enterprise must “identify, understand and create the capabilities, behaviors and focuses necessary for repeatable, continuous and measurable operational improvement,” said Hoque.
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15 questions for screening a Salesforce Platform Cloud consultant
The Platform Cloud covers a very wide range of custom development and integration projects. Some parts of advanced Sales and Service Cloud projects include elements of the platform, so most consultancies’ have reasonable levels of general experience. However, the Platform Cloud has the widest range of third-party products and add-ons, so you will need to drill down on their specific experience.
This brief set of questions is designed to help you evaluate the suitability of a Salesforce.com (SFDC) consultancy. It is not to be used as a questionnaire for the consultancy to fill out in the RFP. Instead, use the questions conversationally so you can see their flinches and know where to probe.
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20 questions for screening a Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultant
Marketing Cloud projects have not been part of most consultancies’ Salesforce work, so they likely don’t have a lot of general experience. Further, because of the range of products and add-ons available, there is still an issue of general competence and ability to execute. And when it comes to marketing business process expertise, you need to set your expectations very low: they either will be experts in the product or the process, but almost never both.
This brief set of questions is designed to help you evaluate the suitability of a Salesforce.com (SFDC) consultancy. It isn’t to be used as a questionnaire for the consultancy to fill out in the RFP. Instead, use the questions conversationally so you can see their flinches and know where to probe.
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20 questions for screening a Salesforce Service Cloud consultant
Service Cloud projects have been part of most consultancies’ Salesforce work for years, but because of the range of products and add-ons available, there is still an issue of general competence and ability to execute. Further, there is a huge range of service models out there, so it is critical that the consultant understand how your service team works. If the consultant doesn’t get it, the system they build for you will be clunky or just get in the way.
This brief set of questions is designed to help you evaluate the suitability of a Salesforce.com (SFDC) consultancy. It is not meant to be delivered as a questionnaire for the consultancy to fill out in the RFP. Instead, use the questions conversationally so you can see their flinches and know where to probe.
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Cloud Powers a Hybrid IT and New Digital Existence
Enterprise data centers aren’t going away soon, but the role of the cloud will expand rapidly in our personal and business lives.
InformationWeek: Cloud
25 questions for screening a Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant
Sales Cloud projects are the bread-and-butter of most consultancies’ Salesforce.com work, so there probably isn’t an issue of general competence and ability to execute. However, there is a huge range of business models and sales channels out there, and it is critical that the consultant understand how your sales function works, and the difference between one of your profit-driving deals and a break-even “sustainer.” If the consultant doesn’t get it, the system they build for you will be clunky or just get in the way.
This brief set of questions is designed to help you evaluate the suitability of a Salesforce.com (SFDC) consultancy. It is not meant to be delivered as a questionnaire for the consultancy to fill out in the RFP. Instead, use the questions conversationally so you can see their flinches and know where to probe.
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Oracle refreshes entire SaaS line, aiming to fuel cloud momentum
As the migration of enterprises to the cloud picks up steam, Oracle is intent on keeping up. It has taken to refreshing its SaaS applications twice a year, bringing them up to feature parity with its on-premises software and adding brand-new features for e-commerce and internet-centric supply chain management.
Oracle Cloud Applications Release 13, announced Wednesday, is the newest iteration of the company’s cloud-based business applications. It upgrades the user interface across all the apps and delivers new capabilities for supply chain management (SCM), ERP, human capital management (HCM) and the CX Cloud Suite for customer experience management.
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Fix your databases now as you migrate to the cloud
If you have lame databases in your on-premises systems, don’t move them to the cloud. They’ll still be lame databases.
As thousands of enterprises move their application workloads and data to the cloud, too many move whatever they have, include their lame databases. It’s easy to just lift and shift them you’ll find the popular on-premises databases also available in the cloud. So you end up with the same limitations, just running somewhere new.
Don’t do that. Instead, reevaluate the type, and the brand of databases you’re using as part of your cloud migration.
Use the cloud migration effort to vastly improve your data management and data use capabilities. For example, consider moving from SQL or relational databases to NoSQL or object-based databases, which maybe a better fit for your patterns of data use.
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IDG Contributor Network: When to use a public or private cloud infrastructure
With the vast quantities of data generated daily and the complexities of the required processing escalating, the cloud is emerging as a forerunner in the computing domain. Reducing operational costs and improving analytical power, there is little doubt that cloud computing is the way to go to optimize organizational business intelligence.
The question, though, arises with regard to which platform to select. There are three platforms to keep in mind – private, public and hybrid clouds – and each is designed for specific targets depending on the type of data being used, and the level of security and management required. Depending on particular business needs and intricacy, different platforms are suited and different questions should be asked.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IDG Contributor Network: Cloud security: Trends and strategy
Cloud computing can generate mixed feelings. Corporate leaders generally welcome technologies that produce efficiency, agility and speed. Cloud services deliver those benefits, yet many are concerned about security, even while being often uninformed about how widely the cloud is used within their own businesses.
Executives of large companies, for instance, tell us that they are holding back on the cloud because of security concerns. But when our professional services teams engage with them, we generate log files and find evidence of large numbers of cloud services the company’s employees are using every day.
It is easy to understand the disconnect. Consider a simple example: a director of HR, tasked with filling several critical positions as quickly and confidentially as possible, turns to a low-cost SaaS recruiting tool. Job descriptions, resumes, cover letters, job offers and other documents are shared and possibly uploaded to a third-party server. Soon enough, candidates arrive for interviews. Mission accomplished, thanks to an efficient cloud-based business tool, with the C-suite never needing to know all the details.
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Monitor cloud services for compliance, security from a single view
Moving to the cloud is supposed to reduce the headaches for IT administrators, but often it has the opposite effect of increasing their workload, especially around security and visibility. Not only do they have to make sure on-premises systems adhere to regulatory compliance, but that their cloud services do as well.
Security specialist Qualys addresses these issues of security and visibility with its new app framework, CloudView, which complements existing Qualys services for security, compliance and threat intelligence with real-time monitoring of all enterprise cloud services from a single dashboard.
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“Accelerated cloud adoption requires new adaptive security solutions that support fast-moving digital transformation efforts,” said Philippe Courtot, Qualys CEO, in a statement. “Our new CloudView and its apps add unparalleled visibility and continuous security of all cloud workloads to provide customers complete cloud security in a single, integrated platform and drastically reduce their spend.”
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Google finally gains traction in cloud services
Google has long run a distant third behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud services business, but it finally seems to be catching some momentum, if the most recent quarter is an indicator of future trajectory.
During an earnings call with Wall Street analysts, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google Cloud Platform continues to experience “impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors.”
To be more specific, Pichai said Google closed three times as many $ 500,000-plus deals in the most recent quarter as it did in the same time period last year. Of course, that is kind of pointless without knowing the exact number. And given Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported overall revenue of $ 25.8 billion for the quarter, it’s likely a few drops in the bucket.
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Should ‘Made in America’ apply to cloud providers?
Let’s start by acknowledging the elephant in the room: The top three public cloud computing providers are all U.S.-based, so enterprises in the United States, and even in most other countries, are facing a natural U.S.-based monopoly on public cloud computing technology. So, there is a de facto “buy American” cloud provider policy due to the fact that you really can’t do anything else right now.
However, a few evolutions are taking place. First, the rise of cloud providers in China and some European countries has some thinking that commoditization of the public cloud space could open up the U.S. market to public cloud providers based outside the United States. Second, the globalization of enterprises means that many U.S.-based companies have more assets and employees outside of the United States than within.
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Microsoft’s cloud revenue grows, while IBM’s fades
This is a tale of two cloud players, both old-guard IT firms with vested interests in on-premises software sales. One is making a very successful transition to the cloud era, while the other is failing badly. And it’s a familiar story. Microsoft is kicking butt, and IBM is getting its butt kicked.
In its most recent quarter, Microsoft announced revenues of $ 23.3 billion, $ 7.43 billion of that comes from what it calls “the Intelligent Cloud,” including Azure, a 97 percent year-over-year increase. There was another $ 8.45 billion from the Productivity and Business Process business, which includes Office and Office 365. The company did not separate out the installed software sales from the on-demand version, but it did say that for the first time, Office 365 is outselling the on-premises version.
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Public cloud: Real-world lessons of strategic success
The commodity days of the cloud are over. It’s time to get strategic. That’s the message of today’s leading cloud strategies, as forward-thinking CIOs are no longer turning to the public cloud to cut costs. Instead, the public cloud is viewed as an opportunity to get out of the business of managing data centers and focus on projects that are more strategic for the business.
Whether that means building a mobile app or new website to strengthen customer engagement, these shifts signal how strategic the public cloud has become for many companies. As a platform for running key business applications and services, the public cloud is a popular facilitator of digital transformations that enterprises are undertaking to boost bottom- and top-line growth.
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IDG Contributor Network: Has big data reached a tipping point in the cloud?
There is no doubt that big data analytics is fast becoming integral to business intelligence. Besides many initial failed projects, primarily due to the massive infrastructure needed to store, process and analyze big data in-house, there is an increasing number of success stories. This gives pause to completely discount the paradigm.
Moving big data analytics to the cloud seems to accompany these successes. It is impossible to ignore the competitive edge gained by organizations leveraging big data analysis. From real-time data analytics facilitating industrial processes to financial trading algorithms, big data is a definitive part of the corporate future.
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Review: Google Cloud Spanner takes SQL to NoSQL scale
Scaling a relational database isn’t easy. Scaling a relational database out to multiple replicas and regions over a network while maintaining strong consistency, without sacrificing performance, is really hard.
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(Insider Story)
InfoWorld Cloud Computing
Cloud app slow? Blame the app, not the cloud
It’s 7:00 a.m., and you’re in the office early. You’re hoping that nobody else is accessing the public cloud the company uses and that the inventory application will perform well for a change. However, even with just a handful of users on the cloud at that time of the morning, performance is still lackluster.
The knee-jerk reaction is to blame the cloud provider. The provider is, of course, the host of the application and data thus any performance problems fall on its shoulders, right? Wrong.
Nine times out of ten I’m finding that performance issues are due to application design and the selection of enabling technology, rather than issues with the cloud infrastructure. Keep in mind that if you’re at capacity in a public cloud, you can simply add more. You can even scale on-demand as needed.
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Trump’s cybersecurity order pushes U.S. government to the cloud
President Donald Trump has finally signed a long-awaited executive order on cybersecurity, and he called for the U.S. government to move more into the cloud and modernize its IT infrastructure.
The order, signed on Thursday, is designed to “centralize risk” and move the government’s agencies toward shared IT services, White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said in a press briefing
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