Category Archives: Cloud Computing
IT Leaders Forum: Shedding light on cloud computing
For some, cloud computing represents a return to the era of the mainframe, when dumb terminals connected to central computers serving thousands of users.
This, of course, is a gross over-simplification of a revolution that is happening in computing, one that will turn the IT department and IT staff careers upside down, but which promises more flexible and adaptable computing power.
If you look at the next five to seven years, most organisations will be in the cloud, says Josko Grljevic (pictured), head of information systems at TheTrainline.com. But it will be very difficult to differentiate yourself in the cloud unless you do something smart.
Nevertheless, TheTrainline.com is currently considering a shift to a public cloud so that it can hand over management of the physical server hardware to a specialist cloud hosting organisation, such as Microsoft Azure or Rackspace, thus freeing up Grljevics team to focus on applications.
Likewise, Stephen Anderson, datacentre engineer at Intel IT Engineering, believes that cloud will become the norm within the next five years. We will have a federated, open cloud so that we can seamlessly link everything, everywhere, whenever we require it, says Anderson.
Intel spent over a decade moving its systems to an internal cloud. Our journey to the cloud has been going on for about 12 years, says Anderson. We originally started with a horrible, post-millennial sprawl of servers that we moved to shared services. In the mid-2000s, we did virtualisation and then moved into the full cloud in about 2009.
However, because Intel remains reluctant to host its intellectual property from customer information to proprietary semiconductor technology outside of its firewall for security reasons, Anderson sees the public cloud being used more for extra compute power and capacity at Intel, rather than for hosting and running core data and applications. Vendor lock-in: going up (not down)
There could be other reasons, too, for Intel and other companies unwillingness to adopt the public cloud such as fears of vendor lock-in and the reluctance of software vendors to license their products under cloud-friendly tariffs.
Every cloud provider wants to leverage and extend their reach with you. So, we have Microsoft email and Microsoft absolutely wants to push its whole collaboration suite, says John Harris, vice president of global strategy at pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
At the same time, though, Salesforce.com has its own suite of social collaboration tools, which it also wants to push on customers. In addition, collaboration tools such as Yammer recently acquired by Microsoft have also infiltrated the workplace under the IT departments radar, adding to the complexity.
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ChinaSoft International Signs Strategic Cooperation Agreement with Alibaba Cloud Computing to Develop PaaS Platform
BEIJING, Oct. 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --ChinaSoft International Limited ("ChinaSoft" or "the Company") (SEHK:354), announced that it has signed a cooperation agreement with Alibaba Cloud Computing Limited ("Ali ": a subsidiary of Alibaba Group) on the development of PaaS (Platform as a Service) platform on the Alibaba Cloud system ("Ali Cloud"). ChinaSoft will port its Resource One ("R1") middleware (including Framework/Portal, SOA Suites, BizFoundation) onto the Ali Cloud environment as part of the PaaS layer, while Ali will provide all necessary infrastructures for ChinaSoft to implement R1 on Ali Cloud, and both parties will market this service to its customers.
Both parties will work together to bring various products in ChinaSoft's Resource One software family onto the Ali Cloud system to provide Java based development service as well as Cloud based SOA service. ChinaSoft's R1 will add functionality and extend scalability, flexibility and simplicity to applications quickly and reliably. This is an important part of Cloud infrastructure that will be crucial to enterprises as well as government institutions as they migrate or initiate software applications in the Cloud. The implementation of the R1 PaaS layer further enhances Ali Cloud's capabilities and will provide software developers a set of Java or SOA based software tools. The solutions enabled by R1 on PaaS will improve time-to-market, ease of development, flexibility of deployment and increased ROI for Ali Cloud clients.
For ChinaSoft the partnership with Ali Cloud is an important step forward in its strategic expansion into innovative and emerging Cloud technology. The IT services business model is changing due to the evolution of information technologies like social networking, mobile communications, big data analytics and cloud computing. As part of its growth strategy set in 2011, ChinaSoft embraced the Professional, Outsourcing and Emerging (POE) structure. The Company will pursue growth in its traditional IT professional consulting & solutions business and outsourcing business while pushing into innovative and emerging technologies such as cloud computing and mobile communications. The Company believes that the POE structure will enable rapid growth as well as improve profitability in the coming years.
About ChinaSoft International Limited
ChinaSoft International is a large comprehensive software and information service corporation in China, and offers "end-to-end" software and information services including IT consulting services, IT technology services, IT outsourcing services and IT training to major information technology sectors such as government administration, manufacturing, finance, telecommunications and high-tech development. ChinaSoft International has offices in 25 cities across the world including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Dalian and Xi'an in mainland China, Princeton and Seattle in the United States, London in England and Tokyo in Japan. For more information about ChinaSoft International Limited, please visit http://www.chinasofti.com.
About Alibaba Group
Alibaba Group is a leading e-commerce company based in China. Since it was founded in 1999, Alibaba Group has grown to include the following core businesses: Alibaba.com, Alibaba Group's flagship company and a global e-commerce platform for small businesses; Taobao Marketplace, China's leading C2C online shopping destination; Tmall.com, a popular B2C online marketplace in China for quality, brand name goods; eTao, a comprehensive shopping search engine; Alibaba Cloud Computing, a developer of advanced distributed cloud computing services; and China Yahoo!, one of China's leading Internet portals. Alipay, a leading third-party online payment service in China, is an affiliate of Alibaba Group.
Contacts:
Janet Lai Tel+85229152830 EmailJanet@chinasofti.com
Gao Ying Tel+861082861666 ext. 8027 Emailgaoy@chinasofti.com
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Where does the ICO's new cloud guidance take you?
The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has issued its long-awaited guidance on cloud computing. Unfortunately, the wait has not lived up to expectations. As a result, it is not possible to follow the ICO advice on cloud computing and still have a solution that could be called a cloud solution.
The information commissioner acknowledges that organisations might find it difficult to exercise any meaningful control over their cloud providers. However, he warns, that does not mean that cloud customers will not be ultimately responsible for any data breaches by their service provider.
The ICO warns organisations to tread cautiously if a cloud provider offers "take it or leave it" terms and conditions. Such contracts, it says,may not allow the cloud customer to retain sufficient control over the data to fulfil their data protection obligations.
Organisations must therefore check their cloud provider's terms of service carefully, to ensure they meet their obligations under the Data Protection Act.
There is only one way to read this guidance. Since most cloud service providers do not comply with the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), the ICO is, in effect, banning the use of cloud services.
Since most cloud service providers do not comply with the Data Protection Act, the ICO is, in effect, banning the use of cloud services
Dai Davis, lawyer
The reality is, the whole purpose of commercial cloud services is to pile it high and sell it cheap.It is not that those services "may" not give sufficient control to a cloud customer they are designed not to. None of them do so.That is the whole rationale behind piling it high and selling it cheap.
The result is that none of those cloud services give meaningful legal guarantees to cloud customers.
Yes, a cloud customer could negotiate a one-off solution from a cloud provider. If the cloud customer is willing to pay enough, anything is possible.But the cloud customer would not then end up with what a normal businessman would regard as a cloud solution it would end up with a bespoke outsourcing solution.And it would not end up with most of the benefits of the cloud certainly not the cost benefits.
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IDC Survey: U.S. Corporations Aim to Tackle IT Challenges with Cloud Computing
TROY, Mich., Oct. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Forty-four percent of U.S. executives aim to tackle current IT challenges through leveraging cloud solutions, and they are planning to invest more in cloud computing in the future. That is the finding of an IDC survey commissioned by T-Systems. Corporations expect cloud computing to deliver lower IT costs (26 percent) and to enable them to replace legacy systems (21 percent) and adopt new applications more flexibly (14 percent).
"As the U.S. cloud services market continues to mature, enterprises find that overall business impact and productivity gains from the cloud are as significant as achieving cost reductions," said David Tapper, IDC VP Outsourcing and Offshore Services Market Research. Cloud computing is seen as most likely to deliver solutions for Customer Relationship Management (31 percent), productivity tools like email, collaboration or Office packages (28 percent), online stores, and Enterprise Relationship Management (26 percent each).
Corporations continue to have reservations about security, but they are no longer the decisive criterion against cloud. The concept of security now extends to issues such as how cloud computing will impact compliance requirements or data availability. That is prompting corporations to consider the right cloud type and cloud service needed. Enterprises see an opportunity in the private cloud for providers to fulfill their security requirements and agree on service level agreements. 40 percent of U.S. respondents have implemented a private cloud strategy while only 13 percent are relying on public cloud and 16 percent on hybrid cloud solutions.
In the course of adopting cloud computing, enterprises are increasingly considering new service providers, and they are also considering providers whose services they have not previously used. In ERP more than half are considering providers with whom they have had no previous experience. "CEOs," Tapper said, "are ranked as most significant in the decision-making process on using clouds. The result is that buyers are viewing cloud as strategic in achieving critical business objectives for which CIOs and IT vendors must ensure that their cloud solutions help achieve these objectives and associated business benefits."
"The survey results validate that one of the greatest needs in deploying cloud-based solutions is to find the right partner who can assist with the question of cloud readiness and bring forward a clear plan on how to migrate to the cloud," said T-Systems North America Managing Director Heike Auerbach. "T-Systems has been migrating and managing complex applications to the cloud for more than seven years longer than any other IT service provider. It was gratifying for us to see that customers profoundly value an experienced partner as they make the journey to the cloud."
For the cloud survey commissioned by T-Systems, IDC asked CIOs and other top IT managers of 104 U.S. corporations in the summer of 2012 how they now rated cloud computing. IDC conducted the same interviews in the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and Brazil.
IDC analysts and T-Systems cloud experts are presenting the survey findings and the latest cloud solutions in free webcasts. The live webcast for the U.S. market will take place at 2 p.m. Eastern Time on October 18. To register, contact http://www.t-systems.com/webcast.
About T-Systems
Drawing on a global infrastructure of data centers and networks, T-Systems operates information and communication technology (ICT) systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions. As Deutsche Telekom's corporate customer arm, T-Systems provides integrated solutions for the networked future of business and society. Some 48,200 employees at T-Systems combine industry expertise with ICT innovations to add significant value to customers' core business all over the world. The corporate customers unit generated revenue of more than $12 billion US dollars in the 2011 financial year. http://www.t-systemsus.com.
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IDC Survey: U.S. Corporations Aim to Tackle IT Challenges with Cloud Computing
Oracle CFO: no acquisitions needed to compete in cloud
By Noel Randewich
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Oracle Corp has all the pieces it needs to compete in cloud computing but is always interested in looking at compelling M&A opportunities, Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz told investors.
Speaking at Oracle's annual investor day on Thursday, co-founder and Chief Executive Larry Ellison also said the company is near to turning around its struggling hardware division, talking up Oracle's high-end, proprietary computer hardware.
Catz said Oracle is now a one-stop shop for companies moving to cloud computing, while rivals like Amazon.com and Salesforce.com each offer some but not all of the necessary components.
Echoing comments by Ellison to CNBC television earlier this week, Catz said Oracle has no need for any big acquisitions, but left the door open.
"You know us, I'm a personal shopper for our CEO. When we find something that's really compelling that we think we can make a lot of money for all of you with, we're going to buy it," she said.
"We don't feel pressed to buy anything. We've got all the most incredible parts right now," she added.
Ellison was slow to embrace cloud computing, which is a broad term referring to the delivery of computer services via the Internet from remote data centers.
But his company is now rushing to promote its own offerings in the rapidly growing area and has also acquired several firms selling Internet-based software as its corporate customers embraced younger cloud rivals including Salesforce, Amazon.com and Google Inc.
Oracle's strategy is to offer its customers complete cloud-computing packages, including operating systems, databases and software, as well as the hardware infrastructure needed to run them.
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Open source cloud computing slow to catch on, survey finds
The open source cloud computing market has been heating up in the last year with momentum for OpenStack building, Citrix CloudStack spinning out of OpenStack to be its own project and Eucalyptus slowly gaining tractions. But a new report from cloud management company Zenoss finds slow adoption of these open source platforms so far.
In the survey of more than 600 members of Zenoss' open source community, fewer than 1 in 5, 18%, said they have deployed an open source cloud management platform. Maturity of the projects, lack of support and security were the top-cited reasons for the lack of adoption.
MORE CLOUD: Amazon looms as Oracle rounds out its cloud strategy
OPENSTACK GETS NO LOVE: Gartner report slams OpenStack
Of users that do deploy open source cloud platforms, OpenStack is the most commonly deployed platform, claiming almost 50% market share among these users surveyed. The project, backed by Rackspace, HP, Dell, IBM, Cisco and other tech heavyweights, has come under some criticism recently from Gartner. The project recently released its sixth version of the OpenStack code.
CloudStack, which is backed by Citrix but managed by the Apache Software Foundation, is the second most popular with 19% of adoption, followed by Eucalyptus at below 10%. Despite the low adoption rates, 43% of respondents said they are thinking about deploying an open source cloud in the future.
The report notes some other interesting figures about overall cloud adoption, finding that VMware is the dominant hypervisor in the enterprise, powering three-quarters of virtualized environments. KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen each followed in terms of their prominence, with about one-fifth of respondents noting they use those hypervisors. Only 16% also said they were using a platform as a service (PaaS), although 30% of those who said they are not said they are interested. As a comparison, another recent survey of more than 750 respondents by North Bridge Venture Capital partner Michael Skok found that 82% of users were using a software as a service (SaaS) application. A Gartner report recently found that SaaS has by far the most investments in it so far, with it being a $14 billion industry compared to the $6 billion infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market and the $1.2 billion PaaS market.
Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
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