Category Archives: Cloud Computing

What is cloud computing? A beginners guide | Microsoft Azure

Most cloud computing services fall into three broad categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (Saas). These are sometimes called the cloud computing stack, because they build on top of one another. Knowing what they are and how theyre different makes it easier to accomplish your business goals.

The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructureservers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systemsfrom a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis. To learn more, see What is IaaS?

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering, and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases needed for development. To learn more, see What is PaaS?

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure, and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet, or PC. To learn more, see What is SaaS?

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What is cloud computing? A beginners guide | Microsoft Azure

IBM’s Cloud Computing Holds Major Potential: Should You Buy? – Yahoo Finance

International Business Machines Corp.s IBM investor briefing last month reflected its continuing focus on being a cloud-first company. In 2016, cloud revenues grew 35% to $13.7 billion, while the annual exit run rate for cloud-as-a-service revenue increased 53% on a year-over-year basis to $8.6 billion.

In its latest quarterly earnings report, the tech giant reported cloud segmental revenue growth of 45% from the prior-year period. Additionally, IBM has over 50 cloud centers globally, and its Bluemix platform was one of the largest open public cloud deployments worldwide at the end of 2016.

IBMs Watson on Cloud is also a key growth driver for the company. The company expects Watson to reach over 1 billion people by the end of 2017, and IBM estimates the market for Watson on Cloud as a decision-making support system to be worth nearly $2 trillion by 2025.

Cloud Computing: Robust Growth Expectations

IBMs growth expectations from cloud computing remain positive in the long haul. Management anticipates market opportunity in enterprise cloud to be greater than $800 billion by 2020. Moreover, the company expects more than 85% of enterprises to commit to multi-cloud architectures by 2018, which is positive for its hybrid cloud offerings.

The overall growth expectation for the public cloud computing services market is very bullish. According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market was projected to grow 18% through 2016 to $246.8 billion in 2017. This figure will increase to $383.3 billion by 2020.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is projected to be the highest growth service driven by improvement in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and massive adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT). IaaS is projected to grow from $25.29 billion in 2016 to $71.55 billion in 2020.

IBM Lags Behind in the Cloud

Despite impressive growth figures and bullish sentiments, IBM lags behind the likes of Amazon AMZN and Microsoft MSFT in the public PaaS and IaaS cloud computing markets. According to Synergy Researchs latest report, Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintained its dominant position in the market followed by Microsofts Azure, Alphabets GOOGL Google, and IBM at the end of fourth-quarter 2016.

The research firm noted that these three have gained market share in the last one year at the expense of smaller players, as well as strong growth from both Microsoft and Google. However, their combined market share of 23% lags compared with Amazons 40%.

We believe that IBMs hybrid approach has yet to find many takers in both the public and private cloud markets. Despite significant investments first on acquiring SoftLayer for $2 billion and then spending more than $1 billion on data centers its client list is not as impressive as Amazons or Microsofts.

China: IBMs Savior?

Per Gartner, China has become a significant IaaS cloud market. The research firm noted that While China's cloud service market is nascent and several years behind the U.S. and European markets, it is expected to maintain high levels of growth as digital transformation becomes more mainstream over the next five years.

IBM is now planning to tap into Chinas fast-growing cloud computing market through a new company formed in collaboration with Wanda Internet Technology Group. The new company will offer IaaS and PaaS to Chinese businesses. Reportedly, IBM will have a share in revenues.

Moreover, as a part of the deal, the company will launch Watson services to China. IBM is expected to offer Watson Conversation services, which will allow developers to add natural language interactions between clients and applications.

Bottom Line

In its Q1 earnings report, IBM reported a bigger-than-expected drop in revenue, marking the 20th consecutive quarterly sales decline. Demand for its legacy hardware and software businesses is stagnating, but IBM has been slowly shifting towards cloud-based areas over the years.

Despite lagging behind in comparison to its competition, IBM is developing a niche for its hybrid cloud services, along with Strategic Imperatives like cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. And with Watson, IBM is advancing in vital areas like Internet of Things, healthcare, and financial services end-markets that will support growth in the long run.

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IBM's Cloud Computing Holds Major Potential: Should You Buy? - Yahoo Finance

Kentucky Derby Horses | Cloud Computing – The Courier-Journal

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Eight tips to fake it 'til you make it. Allison Ross/Wochit

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What you need to know about Thunder 2017. Rachel Aretakis/Courier-Journal

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The Derby that followed the infamous Triple Crown run by Secretariat set records and introduced a 1970s fad to the infield. Mary Ann Gerth/CJ

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Going to Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby? There's no proof you experienced the greatest two minutes in sports unless you take a selfie. And there's five that you must take at the track. Wochit

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Looking to save some cash at the 2017 Kentucky Derby? We've got you covered. Taylor Riley/Wochit

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A look at the entertainers and politicians who land in Louisville in early May, and a peek at legendary Derby Eve parties. Mary Ann Gerth/CJ

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The Oaks Lily was created in 2006 as a partner to the Kentucky Derby's Mint Julep. Bailey Loosemore/Wochit

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Chef David Danielson and his team will prepare an official menu for 22,000 people in premium seats at Churchill Downs. Bailey Loosemore/CJ

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Not all juleps must be Mint Juleps. Here's how to make one with basil. Wochit

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It's the Courier-Journal's most requested photograph -- a finish-line photo of the 1933 Kentucky Derby, showing the on-horse duel between two jockeys. Mary Ann Gerth/CJ

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Fashion, comfort must blend together for a successful Derby outing. Wochit

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Here are a few tips to help you avoid getting ripped off during the Kentucky Derby season. Wochit

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It's common knowledge that tickets to Oaks are less expensive than Derby. But how much less? Kirsten Clark/The CJ

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Even if you don't burn easily, take precautions against skin cancer. Wochit

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Tips and advice for getting to and from Churchill Downs for Oaks and Derby. Matthew Glowicki/Wochit

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Men, it's easy to be classy at the Derby. Just take this guy's word for it. Wochit

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Louisville chefs give tips on getting into the most popular restaurants after the Kentucky Derby. Bailey Loosemore/Wochit

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The Kentucky Derby's official drink was actually first created in the 18th century. Wochit

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The Kentucky Derby winner's trophy for Derby 143 arrived at Churchill Downs on Wednesday. Here's a few facts about the unique trophy Michael Clevenger

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Christine Moore, milliner at Rodes for Her, holds nothing back when she talks about hats and offers tips.

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A landmark piece of sports journalism, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, was written in 1970 by Louisville native Hunter S. Thompson, and illustrated by Ralph Steadman. It was published in the short-lived Scanlan's Monthly magazine. James Bruggers/CJ

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Looks from the Macy's 2017 Kentucky Derby Festival Spring Fashion Show. Madeleine Winer/The CJ

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Future Cardinals, Wildcats and Hilltoppers took the court Saturday night at Freedom Hall at the 2017 Kentucky Derby Classic Festival showdown. Marty Pearl, Special to CJ

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Highlights from the Kentucky Derby Festival Classic Night of Future Stars at the IU Southeast gym in New Albany, Indiana.

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This dapper bow tie designer rocks his 'Best' look Taylor M. Riley

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The Courier-Journal's Kirby Adams breaks down what all comes with a KDF Pegasus pin. Scott Utterback/CJ

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Kay Erickson is the woman who puts the gold Kentucky Derby Festival pins into the envelopes for the past 10 years Wochit

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Meet the five new princesses that will make up the Royal Court for the 2017 Kentucky Derby Festival. Scott Utterback/The CJ

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Kirby goes to the KDF headquarters for the announcement of the theme for Thunder Over Louisville 2017. Video by Jeff Faughender

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Designer Ron Jasin talks about his start and his design of the KDF poster. Matt Stone, The C-J

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Kirby Adams introduces you to the newly crowned KDF 2017 Royal Court! Video by Jeff Faughender

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How to act like a Derby insider

Thunder Over Louisville 2017: What to know

The wild ride that was the 1974 Kentucky Derby

5 selfies you need to take Derby day

How to save at least $75 on Derby Day

Celebs bring the bling to Kentucky Derby

History of the Oaks Lily

Official menu for the 143rd Kentucky Derby

How to make a julep

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History of the Mint Julep

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2017 Kentucky Derby Festival Fashion Show, presented by Macy's

Future college stars face off at the KDF Classic 2017

Highlights: KDF Classic Night of Future Stars

This dapper bow tie designer rocks his 'Best' look

What do you get with the KDF Pegasus pin?

Kay Erickson: The Kentucky Derby Festival gold pin lady

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Kentucky Derby Horses | Cloud Computing - The Courier-Journal

IBM Reports 20th Straight Quarterly Revenue Drop, While Cloud Computing Grew 33 Percent – CRN

IBM reported the 20th straight quarter of year-over-year revenue declines Tuesday as the company said that sales in its first quarter ended March 31 were down 2.8 percent, despite sales gains in the vendor's cloud services and other "strategic imperative" products and services.

The company's stock dropped nearly 5 percent in after-hours trading on the news of the financial results, which significantly missed financial analysts' revenue expectations.

IBM reported total revenue of $18.16 billion for the quarter, down 2.8 percent from $18.68 billion in the first quarter of 2016. That fell short of the $18.39 billion Wall Street analysts had been expecting, according to Thomson Reuters.

[Related: From A Partner Program Perspective, IBM Says Its Cognitive Transformation Is Already Complete]

Net income for the quarter was $1.75 billion, down 13 percent from $2.01 billion one year ago. GAAP earnings per share were $1.86 compared to $2.09 one year ago.

IBM emphasized the first-quarter growth in its strategic imperatives including cloud computing (up 33 percent to $3.5 billion), analytics (up 6 percent), mobile (up 20 percent) and security (up 9 percent) product and service offerings.

"In the first quarter, both the IBM Cloud and our cognitive solutions again grew strongly, which fueled robust performance in our strategic imperatives," said President and CEO Ginny Rometty in a statement. "In addition, we are developing and bringing to market emerging technologies such as blockchain and quantum, revolutionizing how enterprises will tackle complex business problems in the years ahead."

Strategic imperatives have generated $33.6 billion in revenue over the last 12 months, according to IBM. In the first quarter, they generated $7.8 billion in sales, representing 42 percent of the company's total revenue.

But IBM's challenge is that revenue from its older legacy businesses and product lines is declining, even as it spends resources to ramp up the new products and services.

Most of the company's business segments recorded revenue declines during the quarter. Global Business Services was down 3 percent to $4.01 billion from $4.13 billion one year before; Technology Services & Cloud Platforms was down 2.5 percent to $8.22 billion from $8.42 billion one year earlier, and Systems was down nearly 17 percent to $1.40 billion from $1.68 billion one year ago.

The Cognitive Solutions segment did see growth in the quarter, up 2 percent to $4.06 billion from $3.98 billion one year earlier.

On an earnings call with analysts, Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter said IBM had seen good growth in the company's Watson services for vertical industries, such as financial services, health care and life sciences, as well as Watson in technology areas like security. "We also had good growth in Watson IoT," he said.

But new product and service development have increased IBM's spending, holding down profitability. "We continue to invest in our strategic imperatives and build out our practices around cognitive, cloud, mobile and digital design," Schroeter said. "Over the last year, we've added nearly 8,000 resources to these businesses. There also continue to be accounts where we are investing more to deliver on important client commitment."

IBM is expecting profitability to improve in the second half of 2017, Schroeter said. The CFO cited new systems products the company will bring to market, lower development costs associated with those products, the expected signing of some significant Global Technology Services contracts, and expected growth in Global Business Services revenue.

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IBM Reports 20th Straight Quarterly Revenue Drop, While Cloud Computing Grew 33 Percent - CRN

How mobile cloud computing infrastructure enables modern workers – TechTarget

Smartphones and tablets have little value in the workplace if they can't access corporate data and applications. Mobile cloud computing infrastructure makes it easier for IT to provide this access.

Today's IT admins face the challenging task of managing the countless amount of mobile devices that connect to enterprise networks every day. Find out how to eliminate the most common mobile data security pain points and pitfalls in this complimentary best practices guide.

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Traditional enterprise applications are designed for Windows PCs that store data locally and on network file shares. The most popular mobile devices run Apple iOS and Google Android, which means they're incompatible with Windows applications. They also have much less storage capacity than PCs and can't easily access network drives.

Mobile cloud computing infrastructure acts as a bridge between the old and new ways of doing things. In doing so, it enables workers to be productive from anywhere on any device. Some of the most important cloud technologies for mobile organizations include enterprise file sync and share (EFSS), mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) and desktop and application virtualization.

EFSS services let IT control users' sharing privileges and track access to specific files.

EFSS services emerged from the consumer market. Users turned to the public cloud for a place to store files, access them from multiple devices and share them without having to deal with cumbersome email attachments. As more people brought their mobile devices to work, they began storing corporate data in these consumer-grade services with no IT oversight.

EFSS aims to provide that same level of user-friendly functionality along with IT management and security features. Most services offer a mobile app and a web interface through which users can upload files to the cloud, share them with others and open them with compatible productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word. This approach opens up corporate data access to a much wider variety of devices.

Of course, more access means more security concerns. EFSS services let IT control users' sharing privileges and track access to specific files. And some providers offer an on-premises or private cloud version for additional peace of mind.

EFSS does the trick when a mobile user needs to access a specific file. But other times, a mobile app needs constant access to large amounts of corporate data. Developers and IT professionals can use MBaaS to build this access directly into an app.

Traditionally, it's complex to develop a native mobile app that ties into back-end systems. It requires significant manual coding, and any changes on the back end can break things on the front end. Developers must deal with these issues for each system that an app needs to access, so scalability is a significant problem.

MBaaS aims to simplify the process. It abstracts the back-end infrastructure and presents a singular, unified interface in the cloud. Developers then connect their apps to the MBaaS using APIs and software development kits, and the service handles the connections to the desired infrastructure components.

Virtualization and mobility have a complicated relationship. On one hand, running Windows desktops and applications in a data center and delivering them to mobile devices is a relatively straightforward way to get legacy software on modern endpoints.

On the other hand, Windows is made for a keyboard and mouse, neither of which mobile devices have -- making for a subpar user experience. And don't forget the cost and complexity often associated with VDI.

On that last point, the cloud has emerged as a viable alternative. Desktop as a service lets organizations take advantage of a virtual desktop infrastructure's benefits, while a third-party provider handles the storage and support infrastructure. Similarly, applications as a service lets users access individual virtual apps through the cloud.

There is no one right way to use mobile cloud computing infrastructure to enable workers. Many organizations will rely on a combination of EFSS, native mobile apps, desktop and applications as a service and more.

To accommodate this variety, vendors in the end-user computing market now offer workspace suites -- bundles of technology that provide one place for workers to access all the applications and data they need from any device. Workspaces are still in their early days, and they require a good amount of integration work to live up to their promise. If they succeed, they will truly unlock the power of the mobile cloud.

What does mobile cloud mean?

What's the best cloud approach for mobility?

Do you need MBaaS to develop mobile applications?

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How mobile cloud computing infrastructure enables modern workers - TechTarget

Cloud Computing might skip Kentucky Derby – ESPN

Trainer Chad Brown on Monday said he is "leaning towards passing" the Kentucky Derby with Cloud Computing, a decision that has implications regarding the potential field for the May 6 Derby at Churchill Downs.

Cloud Computing currently sits 20th on the Derby points list, pending a decision by the connections of Conquest Mo Money as to whether to supplement for $200,000 and run.

Cloud Computing most recently finished third in the Wood Memorial, only the third start of a career that began on Feb. 11. Brown said Cloud Computing would have his first work since that race this weekend.

"The horse looks great, but he is lightly raced," Brown said. "We haven't made a final decision yet, but we're leaning towards passing and pointing to the Preakness or even a summertime campaign. We'll see what he's ready for right now."

Brown and the owners of Cloud Computing, Seth Klarman and William Lawrence, have one certain starter in the Derby in Practical Joke, who was second in the Blue Grass in his final prep. Brown said Practical Joke would work this weekend at Keeneland, then move over to Churchill Downs and have his final work there. Joel Rosario has the mount.

Assuming Cloud Computing skips the Derby, that would provide an opportunity for Untrapped, currently 21st on the points list, to get in. He finished sixth in the Arkansas Derby on Saturday.

Currently 22nd on the points list is Lookin At Lee, third in the Arkansas Derby. Steve Asmussen trains both Untrapped and Lookin At Lee and on Monday said both remain under consideration for the Derby.

Several riding assignments are pending for the Derby, most notably runners trained by Asmussen and Todd Pletcher, both of whom potentially will juggle multiple entries. Pletcher's lone confirmed assignment is John Velazquez on Always Dreaming.

One assignment finalized Monday was with Irap, who won the Blue Grass with Julien Leparoux. In light of Classic Empire winning the Arkansas Derby and moving on to the Derby, Leparoux will remain with Classic Empire. Irap will be ridden by Mario Gutierrez, reuniting him with trainer Doug O'Neill and owner Paul Reddam, the team that won the Derby with I'll Have Another in 2012 and Nyquist last year.

* The winning Beyer Speed Figure of the Sunland Derby, won by Hence, has been adjusted to 97 from its original 93, according to Andrew Beyer. Irap and Conquest Mo Money, second in the Arkansas Derby, both exited the Sunland Derby.

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Cloud Computing might skip Kentucky Derby - ESPN

Top Hybrid Cloud Providers – Datamation – Datamation

Its likely that the hybrid cloud providers will see a robust market for years into the future. However, there is some debate about what, exactly, constitutes the hybrid cloud. The term hybrid cloud has several definitions but all are rather similar to each other in the final analysis: a hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds working together but remaining distinct from each other. The clouds can either be from a public cloud provider (Salesforce, Amazon) or a private cloud that you maintain in your own data center.

This is the generally accepted definition. What's variable is the connection between one cloud provider and a company's own services. For most IT professionals, providers and services, a company using Salesforce or Microsoft Azure with their own internal systems is considered a hybrid cloud.

Not so, says Gartner, the leading IT market research firm. It defines the hybrid cloud as the coordinated use of two or more cloud environments operating in harmony. That could mean two public clouds, like ServiceNow and NetApp, or a public and private cloud connection.

"When we talk about hybrid cloud, we expect it will have all the attributes of cloud computing, so you access it as a service. It's scalable and elastic, you pay per use. Those are the fundamental definitions of cloud. If you have cloud plus non-cloud with coordination between them, that's great but it's not cloud. You are getting cloud on one side not on the whole experience. We call that hybrid IT," said Ed Anderson, research vice president with the firm.

Equally off the beaten path is Gartner's view on the top hybrid cloud providers. The reflexive answer would be the typical thought leaders: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. But Gartner views hybrid providers not as the service providers but as consultancies that will come to your business and help connect you. Microsoft and IBM have on-site consulting services but Google and Amazon do not to any great degree, he notes.

"If you called up Amazon and said 'I need a hybrid cloud,' they would say 'hybrid with what?' Well I want it to work with VMware,' they would say we have this capability or talk to a partner. In general that's not their offering services," said Anderson.

That's why his choices of the top hybrid providers might come as a bit of a surprise, but these are the firms that will show up, hold your hand, and make the connections between the public cloud and your internal systems, whether they follow the private cloud model or traditional IT.

Microsoft is one of the few vendors to offer a true hybrid cloud solution because it has a little bit of everything. It has built massive data centers around the U.S. and globally, providing the compute and storage capacity anyone from a small business to giant enterprise would want.

Where Microsoft has surpassed market leader Amazon is that it had popular on-premises applications that it has successfully tuned for the cloud, giving it an enormous lead over the rest. Amazon, Google and IBM have no answer to Office 365 and Sharepoint, and Microsoft has made the most of that.

It also offers SQL Server and Dynamics as on-demand cloud apps, with the same features as the on-premises version. And everything is built on Windows Server, which is widely used, making migration easy.

Microsoft also has a services division, its MVPs, that Amazon and Google cannot match. IBM, of course, has its Global Services that are more than capable to help cloud migration projects.

Anderson described IBM as a "really holistic provider" offering components across the board, from general hosting to bare metal provisioning, shared multi-tenant public cloud, hosted private cloud, and its services business can help you deploy a private cloud in your data center.

IBM offers multiple entry points to the cloud, including its SoftLayer public cloud services (IaaS), Bluemix private cloud (PaaS) and Cloud Managed Services (SaaS) solutions. Bluemix is a development environment supporting multiple languages, including Java, Ruby, and Python. CMS supports analytics, SAP, and Oracle, among other SaaS offerings.

SoftLayer, which has turned into one of IBM's smartest acquisitions, gave the company a kick-start in cloud services. Its specialty is bare metal provisioning, meaning you provide the operating environment. It offers you nothing but the hardware. AWS, Azure and Google Compute all provide the operating environment for you. Oracle is the only other major bare metal provider, and it's a much newer entry in the field.

Accenture is the largest IT services provider in the world and has a huge array of managed services to provide brokerage between cloud and coordinated use. "They are a first class outsourcer with a lot of consulting capability," said Anderson.

Accenture has built what it calls a cloud management platform, a managed service where they set up a portal and bring all your IT and external cloud partners into that portal, providing one place to request and provision services and offers a dashboard to see all your services in one place, plus integrations on the back end.

While it serves all major cloud providers, Accenture also has a subsidiary called Avanade, a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft dating back to 2000. This group specializes in and has a particularly deep understanding in Microsoft products.

Selling its services business which was built around EDS, the services giant it acquired in 2008 may seem counterintuitive but it worked out well for HP Enterprise because HPE was doing broad outsourcing and consulting.

With the divestiture of the services business last year, HPE built a new services group that functions more like a technical services business, helping clients with implementation of cloud services and managed services.

HPE's strength is it does much with integrating its own data center products compute, storage, and networking with public cloud services. Anderson said the company has particularly deep expertise around VMware and managed services around, along with coordination between internal systems and the offering from Microsoft and Amazon.

CSC has been through quite a bit of change. In 2015 it spun off the sizable business that handled federal IT into a new company, called CSRA, and last year acquired the HPE services business. It also bought a company called ServiceMesh, which does hybrid control integration and brokerage capabilities.

CSC was early to the hybrid market, starting almost a decade ago when it began offering platforms for clients to build SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services. It was an early adopter of VMware and told clients it could set up a shared environment with a public cloud provider or help them set up a dedicated hosted private cloud based on VMware.

What really helped it, said Anderson, was a single rate card across the environments. "It didnt matter the deployment, you paid for it the same way." However, he adds that CSC hasn't changed its strategy much recently to be more of a cloud integrator and broker and services provider.

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Top Hybrid Cloud Providers - Datamation - Datamation

Sutter Health CTO: Cloud computing offers ‘huge upside’ for big data initiatives – FierceHealthcare

Sutter Health, a 24-hospital system in Northern California, generates a lot of data. Like many other providers, its looking for ways to deploy analytics to generate actionable information for clinicians.

Those big data initiatives are virtually impossible with outdated data centers, Sutter Health Chief Technology Officer Wes Wright told CIO Insight. Cloud computing offers far more flexibility for data analytics software to take on a larger role.

The cloud offers us a level of elasticity that we could never achieve in our own data centers, and that, in turn, gives us the freedom to do things like spin up and spin down Hadoop clusters as demand dictates, Wright said.

RELATED: Health systems ditch data centers in favor of cloud computing

Healthcare was slow to adopt cloud computing because of privacy concerns, but Wright says its clear by now that the upside is huge. Over the next two years, he expects to leverage the cloud to push precision medicine initiatives by combining genomic data with clinical records. And as more health systems show they are having success with cloud computing, the rest of the industry will follow suit.

Its going to allow healthcare IT to experiment with more innovative, cutting-edge projects like big data because scale in the cloud is so elastic, he said.

RELATED: HHS clarifies cloud providers as business associates under new guidance

While cloud computing offers a strong value proposition by improving access to data and reducing the costs tied to running a data center, migrating to the cloud is rife with pitfalls. Analysts and providers recommend a gradual approach that accounts for unanticipated costs and staff training and prioritizes applications that are best suited for the cloud.

Hunterdon Healthcare System in New Jersey is in the midst of eliminating its data center in favor of the cloud, but botched the transition to a cloud-based email and calendar application, Hunterdon CIO Daniel MorrealetoldComputerworld. The new system confused administrative staff members and prompted a weeklong training from outside consultants.

"We did not provide our executive assistants who manage multiple calendars at the same time with the tools they'd need to be efficient," he said. "We recognized that by day two and saw that we had messed up."

After some hesitancy, healthcare is jumping headlong into cloud computing. The Department of Health and Human Services has made a strong push to put more systems on the cloud, and CIO Beth Killoran recently said the agencys goal is to have 30% of its systems on the cloud by the end of the year, up from 18.5% in 2016.

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Sutter Health CTO: Cloud computing offers 'huge upside' for big data initiatives - FierceHealthcare

Microsoft Acquires Deis To Broaden Cloud Computing Scope – Forbes – Forbes


Forbes
Microsoft Acquires Deis To Broaden Cloud Computing Scope - Forbes
Forbes
Microsoft wants more developers to use its platform & tools. Specifically, Microsoft wants more cloud computing developers to come into its fold. With this truth in ...
Microsoft Azure Getting More Serious About Enterprise IT, Latest Cloud Effort Aims At Conquering Enterprise Market ...University Herald

all 4 news articles »

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Microsoft Acquires Deis To Broaden Cloud Computing Scope - Forbes - Forbes

Manufacturing Sectors Are Rapidly Moving to Cloud Computing – Manufacturing & Engineering Magazine

With the shift to the technological revolution growing nearer and nearer manufacturers are increasingly opting to use cloud computing as their first step towards the future. More than half of European manufacturers are now adopting a cloud-first approach and a report released by ScienceNow: The Cloud Computing Tipping Point estimated that almost all in the manufacturing sector (86%) are expected to complete the shift within the next twenty-four months.

This is higher than the average shift in other business sectors such as financial services which has an estimated average increase to 77% over the next two years. The popularity for cloud computing is taking a lot of stress from manufacturers across the globe. Due to the nature of the job many companies and employees find themselves under constant pressure to increase accuracy, capitalize internal intelligence and process speed at a competitive force. High quality tech is needed in modern manufacturing and using the cloud could be the solution people need for a little breathing space.

Cloud based strategies offer companies the chance to bring their own innate intelligence and knowledge into sales situations without having to sift through evidence of onsite systems. The cloud is quicker than physical options and once people gain the knowledge to understand how the system works it seems to be the quicker option while also being easier to customize and access.

Manufacturing industries are at various levels of adopting automating self-service but by changing to automating customer service, support and enquires can also shift to the online realms, meaning managerial roles can be part shifted to online too. Alongside pricing and content platforms that the cloud and IoT systems make easier than ever before to use, access and control.

Using cloud based systems seems to streamline key areas of the manufacturing business, freeing up more time to invest in new products and in turn sales.

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Manufacturing Sectors Are Rapidly Moving to Cloud Computing - Manufacturing & Engineering Magazine