Upcoming CloudTV
Tuesday, March 16th
OpSource co-founder, CTO and industry insider John Rowell will take on the concept of “cross-border” clouds and their impact on enterprise cloud adoption in the third episode of CloudTV’s “The Real Cloud” webinar series. This month’s guest is influential blogger Dave Rosenberg, who is best known for his seminal Software, Interrupted blog on CNET. Rosenberg is also the co-founder and former CEO of open source infrastructure software provider MuleSoft as well as an advisor to numerous open source and cloud start-ups.
Rowell and Rosenberg will discuss why, despite huge spending and a never ending supply of new products, enterprise IT is no less complicated than it was a few years ago. More and more IT shops are interested in taking advantage of the public cloud but only if they can keep their data behind the firewall. If this kind of hybrid approach is ever going to work, cross-border clouds that can connect a more secure public cloud to data behind the firewall will have to emerge.
“We have been hearing for what feels like eons how the cloud will save the enterprise, yet we still haven’t seen mass adoption,” said John Rowell, co-founder and CTO, OpSource. “I really look forward to hearing Dave’s thoughts on how we can use concepts like the ‘cross-border’ cloud to jump-start enterprise cloud usage. This should be a lively discussion and I encourage anyone thinking about deploying the cloud today to jump into the fray.”
Register >>
New Content
- Podcast: Cloud Computing and Commodity
James Urquhart - Manager, Cloud Computing & Virtualized Data Centers Marketing at Cisco Systems
David S Linthicum - Author & Founder of Blue Mountain Labs
James Urquhart and Dave Linthicum talk about Cloud Computing as a commodity, and how this may play out as Cloud Computing providers mature.
- Article: What is Cloud?
Simon Wardley - Manager, Software Services & Cloud Computing at Ubuntu / Canonical Ltd
The term "Cloud" has enough momentum that it's going to stay, but before discussing the term, a bit of history and background is needed. Here is an overview of how the concept developed and came to be known as cloud computing.
- Paper: Questions to Ask Your Cloud Vendor
By Ben Kepes & Krishnan Subramanian
This report articulates a number of questions to ask when evaluating cloud applications. These questions fall into several distinct groupings, including: Business Requirements; Reliability; Availability; Upgrades, Maintenance and Outages; Security; Privacy; Data Ownership; Integration; and Customization questions.
- Paper: Adaptive Planning & NetSuite Case Study: Kardia Health Systems
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
The CFO/CIO of Kardia Health, Tom Kelly, implements Web-based technology platforms to reduce the time it takes to prepare monthly financial statements, produce reports and manage the business with rolling forecasts and analyses.
- Presentation: Nothing But Net
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
A presentation from SaaSCon2009, on the transformation of Kardia Health & 2nd Wind with the use of Web-based software including: Google Apps, NetSuite, WorkOasis, Adaptive Planning, EchoSign, Concur, eFax, Halogen, Monster, WebEx, Zoomerang, and other on-demand applications.
- Paper: 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment Uses ServiceExpress for Facilities Management Solutions
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
ServiceExpress consolidates 2nd Wind's utility and waste management services and provides energy management information reporting to all of the company's retail locations throughout the country.
- Paper: NetSuite Case Study: 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
The CFO/CIO of 2nd Wind discusses the implementation of NetSuite and the benefits it brought to the company.
- Paper: Adaptive Planning Case Study: 2nd Wind
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
Explosive growth overtaxed 2nd Wind's enterprise systems and IT infrastructure so they turned to Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. They saw an immediate improvement in the flexibility and scalability of its systems, but soon recognized a need to implement strategic financial functionality.
- Paper: Google Apps Case Study: 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment Gets in Shape for Legal Discovery
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
Initially, 2nd Wind implemented Google Apps to replace its Exchange server. Soon after, Tom Kelly began to look for an archiving solution and found Google Message Discovery.
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New Contributors
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Tom Kelly
Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO
Healthcare IP Partners |
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New Content
- Podcast: Why SOA Governance is Critical to Cloud Computing
David S Linthicum - Author & Founder of Blue Mountain Labs
Cloud Computing needs SOA governance to be successful. If you think about it, at the end state of our architecture we'll have thousands of services and data elements under management, and thus need to control how they are accessed, added, deleted, and altered. Therefore, we need an approach, processes, procedures, and technology, and that's called governance. In the world of enterprise architecture, governance means control, or to mandate the use of standards and approaches, almost a management concept. In the world of SOA, governance means designing, building, testing, and implementing policies for services, and monitoring their use.
- Video: An Interview with the CEO of Concur Technologies
Steve Singh - Chairman and CEO at Concur
The CEO of Concur Technologies discusses what it takes to build a successful business and the future of mobile and cloud computing.
- Video: The Cloud as Enterprise Tool: Integration in All Directions
Jeff Kaplan - Founder & Managing Director at THINKstrategies
Cloud Computing can add enormous value to existing enterprise IT assets - but only if the cloud is recognized as an opportunity for strategic integration, and not for mere migration of existing IT functions and models to someone else's data center. Peter Coffee and THINKstrategies' Jeff Kaplan discuss the business process goals, and the service management considerations, that should drive a cloud integration initiative.
- Article: Why Multitenancy Matters In The Cloud
Alok Misra - Co-Founder and Principal at Navatar Group
There's a debate in the software industry over whether multitenancy is a prerequisite for cloud computing. Those considering using cloud apps might question if they should care about the debate. But they should care, and here's why: multitenancy is the most direct path to spending less and getting more from a cloud application.
- Podcast: Intellum Interview Series with Randy Bias on Cloud
Randy Bias - Founder at Cloudscaling
The CEO of Intellum sits down with the Founder of Cloudscaling, Randy Bias, for a discussion on Cloud Computing. They talk about leveraging the cloud for startups, SMBs and Enterprises; Fears and Concerns; the Future of Cloud; and more.
- Article: The Cloud Cannot Ignore Geopolitics
James Urquhart - Manager, Cloud Computing & Virtualized Data Centers Marketing at Cisco Systems
In Cloud Computing, "virtual" geography and "physical" geography are both extremely important. There are many reasons to consider "location" and "borders" in cloud computing. Unfortunately, how governments perceive those concepts versus how networks do can be at odds.
- Article: Software's Temperamental Star
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
The outlook for on-demand business applications remains promising, but there is room for improvement.
- Article: One Company's Budget: Getting Back Into Shape
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
An exercise equipment retailer overhauls the IT department budget, swapping old programs for hosted applications.
- Paper: A Company achieved an ROI of 837% and a one-month payback migrating to Google Apps!
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
Nucleus Research conducted an ROI study with 2nd Wind Exercise and found that this 300-user specialty retail company achieved an ROI of 837% and a one-month payback. 2nd Wind replaced its existing Microsoft Exchange environment with Google Apps, reducing IT costs while improving cross-company communication and collaboration.
- Video: 2nd Wind Exercise on the risks and rewards of Google Apps
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
CFO/CIO Tom Kelly describes the decision to move to Google Apps and the migration from their Microsoft Exchange server. He answers questions on security, mobility and shares insights on best practices. He also discusses how he saved the company nearly $1M over a 3-year period in moving to this cloud computing solution.
- Video: 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment talks about Google Apps
Tom Kelly - Author, Entrepreneur, Cloud Evangelist & CFO/CIO at Healthcare IP Partners
Tom Kelly talks about a company's migration to Google Apps.
New Research Profiles
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The Researchers at Boston University are exploring the merits of "Colocation Games" (CGs) as a novel, economically-sound framework upon which emerging cloud architectures could be implemented. This work is funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. It introduces Colocation Games as the basis of a general framework for modeling, analyzing, and facilitating the interactions between the various stakeholders in distributed/cloud computing environments, where resources are offered in an open marketplace to independent, rational parties interested in setting up their own applications.
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Carnegie Mellon University is actively involved in several cloud computing research programs and is one of the test sites for the Open Cirrus program. Their research includes studies on Multi-Tier Indexing for Web Search Engines, Integrated Cluster Computing Architecture, and others.
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The researchers at Duke University are conducting research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with NCSU, UNC Chapel Hill, and NCAT State University to explore and test Trustworthy Virtual Cloud Computing.
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Florida International University (FIU) researchers are leveraging cloud computing, using a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant on the Google/IBM Cloud, to analyze aerial images and objects to help support disaster mitigation and environmental protection.
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The researchers at Indiana University are working on several cloud computing projects with grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). Their research includes: Large-Scale Distributed Scientific Experiments on Shared Substrate; Exploring the use of cloud techniques to overcome current medical computing obstacles such as long computation time and large memory requirements; and The FutureGrid project that will provide an experimental platform that accommodates batch, grid and cloud computing.
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The team at MIT is working in collaboration with Yale University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison on a comparative study, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CLuE grant, of approaches to cluster-based, large-scale data analysis. In addition they are also independently studying Cloud Computing Infrastructure and Technology for Education.
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The team at the North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University is conducting research, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF), in collaboration with NCSU, Duke University, and the University of NC at Chapel Hill to explore and test Trustworthy Virtual Cloud Computing.
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The researchers at North Carolina State University are working on several cloud computing projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). They include two collaborative studies on Trustworthy Virtual Cloud Computing and Hybrid Opportunistic Computing for Green Clouds. In addition, NetApp has contributed hardware, software and services to NCSU to expand their Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) and build the next generation of cloud computing environments.
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The Purdue University team is investigating linguistic extensions to MapReduce abstractions for programming modern, large-scale systems, with special focus on applications that manipulate large, unstructured graphs. They also provide a cloud computing testbed called Wispy to TeraGrid users.
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At UC Irvine they are using a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for a project that provides support for efficient fuzzy queries on large text repositories.
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The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to researchers at SDSC to explore new ways to manage extremely large data sets hosted on massive clusters, which have become known as computing “clouds”. This research will use the LiDAR topography data hosted by OpenTopography as a test case and will focus on how cloud computing can aid the management and processing of massive spatial data sets.
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The University of Santa Barbara is actively pursuing several advancements in cloud computing. Their Massive Graphs in Clusters (MAGIC) project is focused on developing software infrastructure that can efficiently answer queries on extremely large graph datasets. They have also designed an open-source implementation of the Google AppEngine interface.
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The team at the University of Massachusets Amherst Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) are using a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant and the Google/IBM cloud to learn more about world relationships.
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The researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are conducting research, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF), in collaboration with NCSU, Duke University, and NCAT State University to explore and test Trustworthy Virtual Cloud Computing.
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The Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine has developed a virtual appliance that integrates state-of-the-art genomic tools on Cloud Computing platforms in a robust, user friendly, and automated package called CloVR. By providing a set of push-button pipelines for applications in viral, prokaryotic, metagenomic and eukaryotic sequencing projects, CloVR will facilitate the further integration of genomics into environmental and biomedical research.
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The research team at the University of Maryland's Cloud Computing Center at College Park is working on a range of projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). They include: A Hadoop Toolkit for Distributed Text Retrieval; Data-Intensive Text Processing; Commodity Computing in Genomic Research; and a series of other independent studies.
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The Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory, formerly GRIDS Lab, is a software research and development group within the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The CLOUDS Lab is actively engaged in the design and development of next-generation computing systems and applications that aggregate or lease services of distributed resources depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-science requirements. The lab is working towards realizing this vision through its two flagship projects: Gridbus and Cloudbus.
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The team at the University of Minnesota is working on a project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), that proposes a cloud proxy network that allows optimized and reliable data-centric operations to be performed at strategic network locations.
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The team at the University of Utah is working with the University of Washington on building a new infrastructure for computational oceanography that uses the Google/IBM cloud to allow ad hoc, longitudinal query and visualization of massive ocean simulation results at interactive speeds.
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The team at the University of Virginia is working on several cloud computing projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). They include, Feedback-Controlled Management of Virtualized Resources for Predictable eScience and Image Super-Resolution Using Trillions of Examples.
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The team at the University of Washington is working with the University of Utah on building a new infrastructure for computational oceanography that uses the Google/IBM cloud to allow ad hoc, longitudinal query and visualization of massive ocean simulation results at interactive speeds. In addition their Astronomy Survey Group is conducting research to Scale the Sky with MapReduce/Hadoop.
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The team at the University of Wisconsin Madison have designed the Hierarchically-Redundant, Decoupled storage project (HaRD) to investigate the next generation of storage software for hybrid Flash/disk storage clusters. They are also working with MIT and Yale University on a comparative study, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CLuE grant, of approaches to cluster-based, large-scale data analysis.
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The team at Virginia Tech is collaborating with NC State University on studying Hybrid Opportunistic Computing for Green Clouds. This project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), explores a new computing model of offering cloud services on active nodes that are serving on-demand utility computing users.
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At Wayne State University they are working on developing a unified learning approach, namely URL, to automate the configuration processes of virtualized machines and applications running on the virtual machines and adapt the systems configuration to the dynamics of cloud. This research is funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.
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The team at Yale University is working in collaboration with MIT and the University of Wisconsin at Madison on a comparative study, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CLuE grant, of approaches to cluster-based, large-scale data analysis.
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New Contributors
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Jon Beck
SVP of Sales, Client Services & Business Development
OpSource |
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New Content
- Article: Some Thoughts on Cloud Adoption Methodology
Jason Carolan - Director, Global Systems Engineering & Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc
Cloud data centers focus on two main areas: time to market and cost management. Technically it provides an abstract platform to deploy services and APIs to manipulate those services. The enabler is automation and the ability to systematically optimize the platforms and services. Granted the focus here is moving forward with a transformational platform but its useful to look backwards to address other challenges beyond technology.
- Article: The Hidden Costs of Internal Clouds
Ellen Rubin - Founder & VP of Products at CloudSwitch, Inc
Concerns about security and loss of control in public clouds have led to an alternative model - the internal cloud - that replicates the cloud environment inside the corporate firewall. Here are some of the reasons why the economics of internal clouds make them inherently less efficient than a public cloud, especially as new technology makes the public cloud safer and more reliable.
- Paper: NCOIC Analyses Cloud Computing with SCOPE
Kevin Jackson - Engineering Fellow at NJVC, LLC
As an analysis tool, the Systems, Capabilities, Operations, Programs and Enterprise (SCOPE) model is used to characterize interoperability-relevant aspects of a system or capability in terms of a set of dimensions. Organized hierarchically, these dimensions (and possible sub-dimensions) represent specific aspects of a system or its surrounding environment. This process enables a quantitative and/or qualitative interoperability assessment of the target system or capability. With the development of a cloud interoperability best practice as a goal, the NCOIC CCWG is working to identify all significant cloud computing dimensions.
- Video: The Future of the Internet
Padmasree Warrior - Chief Technology Officer at Cisco Systems
Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior, talks about the past, present, and future of the Internet.
- Article: Marketing’s Big Disconnect
Christine Crandell - SVP of Global Marketing at Accept Software
People do what they are paid to do, and the pay for Sales personnel clearly reflects that. For Marketing, however, the linkage between revenue and compensation is far from clear. So institutionalizing a positive alignment between Sales and Marketing requires changing the way Marketing teams are compensated.
- Article: Don't Pass on PaaS in 2010
By Sam Charrington - VP, Product Management & Marketing at Appistry, Inc
While IaaS solutions are interesting, they fail to fully deliver on the scalability, elasticity and cost improvements enterprises seek to gain by moving applications to the cloud. This is due to the fact that the true costs of delivering applications and services in a cloud environment relate not to the racking and stacking of infrastructure, but rather to the development, deployment and management of applications - and only PaaS solutions can address these costs. Here is a look at what a platform-oriented cloud solution provides.
- Video: On-Premise, On-Demand & Cloud Computing
Russ Daniels - VP & CTO, Cloud Services Strategy at HP
- Podcast: 10 Cloud Computing Trends
David S Linthicum - Author & Founder of Blue Mountain Labs
Dave talks about a recent article that discusses the "10 Cloud Computing Trends That are Rapidly Catching On".
- Article: Part 2: How Much Does it Take to Start a SaaS Company?
Kevin Dobbs - Founder & Managing Partner at Montclair Advisors, LLC
It definitely takes a commitment to build a true SaaS company, especially when you consider some facts about companies that have gone public. Hear is an overview of those facts and what they mean for start-ups.
Upcoming Events
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New Contributors
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The Cloudbook Magazine: Issue One
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With the emergence of cloud computing, we felt that the community of writers, suppliers and consumers interested in cloud needed a monthly magazine that reflected both a consolidated view of what happened in cloud for the month, and also provided a place for contributor viewpoints to be published.
We invite you to take a look at this first edition. Links are included for all article summaries so you can easily get to the original content.
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New Content
- Paper: The Future of Cloud Computing: Opportunities for European Cloud Computing Beyond 2010
Ignacio M Llorente - Full Professor & Head of Research Group at the Complutense University of Madrid
This document provides a detailed analysis of Europe’s position with respect to cloud provisioning, and how this affects in particular future research and development in this area. The report is based on a series of workshops involving experts from different areas related to cloud technologies.
In more detail, the identified opportunities are: (1) Provisioning and further development of Cloud infrastructures, where in particular telecommunication companies are expected to provide offerings; (2) Provisioning and advancing cloud platforms, which the telecommunication industry might see as a business opportunity, as well as large IT companies with business in Europe and even large non-IT businesses with hardware not fully utilized. (3) Enhanced service provisioning and development of meta-services: Europe could and should develop a ‘free market for IT services’ to match those for movement of goods, services, capital, and skills. Again telecommunication industry could supplement their services as ISPs with extended cloud capabilities; (4) provision of consultancy to assist businesses to migrate to, and utilize effectively, clouds. This implies also provision of a toolset to assist in analysis and migration.
- Video: Using Facebook to Grow Your Business
Clara Shih - Author, Entrepreneur & Director, Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy at Salesforce.com, Inc
This webcast features Facebook trends and stats, specific examples and tips for SMBs, and a case study from an Allstate insurance agent who has embraced Facebook for his business's marketing and customer service efforts.
- Article: Cloud Computing and Commodity
James Urquhart - Manager, Cloud Computing & Virtualized Data Centers Marketing at Cisco Systems
Understanding Commodization and Commodification and how they apply to cloud computing.
- Paper: Improving the Live Migration Process of Large Enterprise Applications
By Benoit Hudzia - Senior Researcher at SAP Research
Recent developments in virtualization technology have resulted in its proliferation of usage across data centers. Ultimately, the goal of this technology is to more efficiently utilize server resources to reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by abstracting hardware and consolidating servers. This results in lower equipment costs and less electrical consumption for server power and cooling. However, the TCO benefits of holistic virtualization extend beyond server assets. One of these aspects relates to the ability of being able to migrate Virtual Machines (VM) across distinct physical hosts over a network. However, limitations of the current migration technology start to appear when they are applied on larger application systems such as SAP ERP or SAP ByDesign. Such systems consume a large amount of memory and cannot be transferred as seamlessly as smaller ones, creating service interruption. Limiting the impact and optimizing migration becomes even more important with the generalization of Service Level Agreement (SLA). In this document we present our design and evaluation of a system that enables live migration of VMs running large enterprise applications without severely disrupting their live services, even across the Internet. By combining well-known techniques and innovative ones we can reduce system down-time and resource impact for migrating live, large Virtual Execution Environments.
- Article: Oracle's Sudden Jump Into the Cloud
Dr Stefan Ried - Sr Analyst at Forrester Research Inc
Oracle is about to launch its Cloud Computing strategy with a worldwide roadshow. What does this mean for Oracle customers and partners?
- Article: The Cloud Computing Challenge
Dr Stefan Ried - Sr Analyst at Forrester Research Inc
Cloud Computing challenges the CIO legally as well as technically. There are many challenges which CIOs will face when running firm critical applications and data over the Internet. The most successful CIOs have built an IT governance strategy to avoid the uncontrolled variety of technologies, meta data and business process evolution in their IT landscape.
- Article: Yet Another Cloud - How Many Clouds Do We Need?
Dr Stefan Ried - Sr Analyst at Forrester Research Inc
A Proposed Cloud Taxonomy. Vendors are increasingly confusing customers as too many different things are related to cloud computing. A first trial of a possible cloud-taxonomy is categorizing cloud services by IT-Infrastructure vs Business Value and by the level of privacy a certain concept embraces.
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