Features

Lightbits Announces Banner Year As Demand Increases for Cloud Solutions
Ever since the COVID-19 shutdowns began, cloud technologies have been in the spotlight. Not only because they enable working and communicating from anywhere - but because with the right solution, it's possible to have better, more secure, and cost efficient operations. - 01/28/2022

What is the Top Driver for as-a-Service Deployments?
As-a-service IT consumption models have proven to become increasingly popular across the IT landscape in recent years, and it is easy to see why. Even before Covid-19 hit, organizations were being pushed to address fluctuating markets, technical innovations and unplanned events increasingly quickly. CAPEX planning can leave them with long product life cycles and an inability to pivot - locking them into costly spending patterns and damaging their capacity to meet today's shifting business dynamics. - 01/05/2022

Control Privileged Access, Protect Your Assets: The Future of Zero Trust and PAM
No threat facing business today has grown as fast, or in a manner as difficult to understand, as the danger from cyberattacks. Cyber threats are increasing in both volume and sophistication, and as the world continues to become more digital with every passing day, cyber threats will only keep growing in both aspects. As a result, organizations today are turning to a Zero Trust security framework model in order to keep both their data and their customers' data. - 07/27/2021

How to Implement an Intelligent Automation System for Your Enterprise
History has shown repeatedly that the two elements that consistently prove to be major growth drivers for any enterprise are experience and productivity. A positive experience for customers, employees, partners and vendors can easily become the differentiating factor for an organization looking to capitalize on organic growth using the word of mouth. Similarly, productivity gains by eliminating redundant processes, increasing employee satisfaction, or by improving process efficiency, can increase agility and speed of innovation in an enterprise. - 01/05/2021

How Financial Services Firms are Addressing the Requirements of Digital Transformation, Security, and Compliance
The financial services sector is experiencing significant commercial disruption coupled with rapid innovation as established institutions strive to become more agile and meet evolving customer demand. - 11/09/2020

The Critical Role of Remote Migrations in the Coming Year
The upcoming year is a critical time for the cloud. As more and more companies are looking to leverage cloud solutions and managed services on a large scale, the COVID-19 pandemic has put cloud technologies in the spotlight. - 10/19/2020

Gaining Control in a Multi-Cloud Environment
In recent years, cloud adoption has become much more manageable, as organizations have the ability to diversify spend and skills, build resiliency, and cherry-pick features and capabilities depending on each cloud service provider's particular strengths, all while avoiding the dreaded vendor lock-in. To overcome the challenges of integrating data between the multiple clouds in a multi-cloud environment, organizations are leveraging logical data fabric, a flexible, modern data-integration approach, which seamlessly shields users from the disparities of the dissimilar clouds. - 09/30/2020

Unlock Digital Transformation Potential with SDTN Technology
In life there are very few things, if anything at all that are a "sure thing" - even that filly in the 3rd race. The coronavirus pandemic has certainly put a number of things in perspective; businesses around the globe are accelerating digital transformation initiatives, risk is augmented. Measuring twice to cut once means mitigating risk, but how? - 06/01/2020

Top 5 Cloud Computing Companies
Cloud computing technology is actively being adopted by many organizations. Data forms the backbone of most industries. Therefore, companies are investing in technology to provide adequate space for company information. - 12/05/2019

NetFoundry Announce Developer Platform for Programmable, Zero Trust Networking
One of the biggest trends to have taken the industry by storm over recent months is the Zero Trust model, and it has shaped how organizations consider the way that they should approach cybersecurity. - 11/19/2019

Pax8 Grants MSPs an Easy Solution to Adopt and Deploy Microsoft Azure
Pax8 has today announced a new partnership deal with Nerdio, an enabler for MSPs to build and rapidly grow successful cloud practices in Microsoft Azure. - 11/07/2019

Axcient Announce Axcient X360 at IT Nation
Denver-based Axcient Inc., an award-winning leader in business availability and cloud migration solutions for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), last week announced the launch of Axcient X360. - 11/07/2019

Alarm.com Acquires OpenEye to Expand Commercial Solutions
Video Surveillance-as-a-Service Offering Creates Growth Opportunities in Enterprise Market for Service Providers - 11/04/2019

Mellanox Technologies Announce Solutions for SONiC Deployments in Data Centers and Enterprises
The Open Compute Project held its second annual Regional Summit this week in Amsterdam. This year's theme was "Open. Together." Mellanox Technologies announced ASIC-to-Protocol support offerings. - 09/25/2019

What are the Benefits of a Cloud Contact Center?
The business contact center is a fairly old, and very useful, concept. But if your call center is using old tech, you're probably already experiencing limitations. - 06/19/2019

Weather Data for Mobile Apps and Websites that Utilize Cloud Computing
There are plenty of mobile apps and websites that make use of cloud computing to sync data in the cloud. Some of these can use weather data to provide real-time information that helps visitors or mobile users to stay better informed. - 04/23/2019

Migrating Communications to the Cloud? Avoid these Three Roadblocks
When navigating the unified communications as a service (UCaaS) market, it's easy for buyers to get lured down long side roads of distraction and get cross-eyed from the overload of providers, features, and service options. How do you avoid the detours? Three primary roadblocks can slow decision makers in selecting a UCaaS provider. Here's how to keep your communications cloud migration on the fast track. - 04/22/2019

3 Innovative Ways To Use Cloud Computing To Your Business
In today's modern world, it seems that the Internet is inescapable and has become a medium by which almost all transactions are made. Technology has become a staple for companies that want to expand, gain new customers, and improve on their processes. Ecommerce, lead generating tools, and cloud computing are only some of the new business resources that keep companies in top competitive shape. - 01/07/2019

How Familiar Are You With Cloud-Based Social Media Analytics?
Social media channels are driving business success. Marketers are immensely trusting social media platforms as the viable marketing channels today. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn etc are seen as the "land of leads and connection" by the brands. - 11/21/2018

How You Can Choose Affordable and High Quality Essay Writing Service
The essay writing service is one of the easiest ways to solve the problem when you require completing the assignment within tight schedule. - 10/10/2018

Why TCP/IP is No Longer Good Enough to Secure and Ensure Realtime IP Networking
One of the fundamental protocols the public Internet relies on every millisecond of everyday may be dying out as "code" gets better and private networks mature as overlays to the public Internet. - 09/10/2018

Expert Advice for Choosing Between Cloud Computing and Fog Computing
Time is money and the best way to be effective is to gain competitive edge with faster and more efficient information-gathering methods. The IoT has forecast that by the year 2020, the amount of devices connected to the internet will surpass 30 million. - 04/03/2018

How the Cloud Can Elevate Solar and Wind Power
Cloud-based apps are already transforming our lives and how businesses operate in countless ways - from managing our bank accounts to hailing taxis and booking vacation homes, all from our smartphone. Now, cloud technology is transforming how off-grid systems, including street lights, telecom systems, security cameras, IoT devices, and other critical infrastructure are managed, and how they perform. - 03/13/2018

Human Factor Adjusts Cloud Security Approach
Cloud security is now more dependent on the ability of business users to handle sensitive data, rather than on security services offered by cloud providers. In 2015, Gartner predicted that customers will be responsible for 95% of security failures in the cloud through 2020. - 03/07/2018

Cloud Management 2.0: The Next Big Challenge
Since AWS launched EC2 in 2007, and until recently, cloud adoption in the enterprise has been tactical, born out of the necessity to move fast. Teams could launch their app on the cloud in days instead of months. It was a triumph of self-service over the slower service-desk approach. - 02/28/2018

Private vs. Public Cloud: A Q&A with Jeff Kaplan, CEO of Breakthrough Technology Group
According to the latest report from 451 Research, more than half of enterprises want to become cloud-first businesses within the next two years, with the majority attracted to software as a service running in a public cloud environment. - 02/14/2018

A Steadfast Dedication to SMB Cloud Success- Chicago Business Provides Customized, High-Touch Services
You're reading Cloud Computing magazine, so you know more about cloud than the average Joe. You probably understand that cloud allows for more efficient modeling and scalability, and greater uptime. And you may think that cloud-based solutions can help you lower your costs too. - 02/12/2018

Cloud Infrastructure

Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Is It Right for Your Organization?
Until recently, technology solutions consisted of separate servers, storage and networks configured and physically managed on premises, based on a custom design for every organization. Then came converged technology, which combined servers and storage according to a reference architecture to deliver a pre-built, pre-packaged solution. - 07/11/2017

News

News Briefs
Audit, consulting, tax and advisory services firm Deloitte has purchased cloud consulting firm Day1 Solutions Inc. for an undisclosed sum. The company says it's also adding 3,000 U.S.-based engineers to its ranks as part of its cloud effort expansion. Most of those new positions will be based in new cloud studios to be opened in Orlando, New York and Washington, D.C., over the next year. Synergy Research Group says the cloud business was worth $148 billion last year and is growing 25 percent annually. - 07/11/2017

Cover Story

Do the Math: Multi-Layered Attacks = Need for More Sophisticated IT Security
Cyber criminals are after your corporate data, and they're going to great lengths to get it. With the help of sophisticated botnets, the Internet of Things, and multi-layered attack strategies, the threat to sensitive customer data and intellectual property has grown stronger. Developing an effective security strategy starts with an understanding of how these attacks work and the motives behind them. - 07/11/2017

Cloud Storage

Are You Dense? Why Data Center Storage Needs to Be
Storage capacity demands for all types of organizations continue to increase dramatically every year - many are now reporting a doubling of data in less than a year. No one in the industry is taking any bets on that number remaining constant. - 07/11/2017

Cloud Security

Cloud Access Security Brokers: Why Businesses Need Them, Software Giants Are Acquiring Them
Cybersecurity is a large and growing problem for today's businesses. The pressure is on to find solutions that help protect organizations' applications, data, and other assets. Because more applications are moving to the cloud, we've seen a rise of interest in a relatively new product category known as the cloud access service broker. - 07/11/2017

Cloud Recognition

TMC Announces Data Center Excellence Award Winners
The data center has become the heart of communications and computing. That's why TMC runs the InfoTech Spotlight Data Center Excellence Award program. - 07/11/2017

Cloud Infrastructure

Why Having the Right IT Infrastructure Should Be a Top Business Priority
Regardless of their industry or company size, IT departments are in the middle of a metamorphosis. IT leadership and their teams are no longer on the hook for simply keeping the lights on and the error messages at bay. Increasingly, they're tasked with identifying opportunities for technology to create efficiency and innovation. - 07/11/2017

Cloud Communications

Operating IT at the Speed of Innovation
The year 2017 is in full swing, and the question of whether or not businesses should move their on-prem IT workloads to the cloud has long been answered. (It's an unequivocal yes). - 07/11/2017

Cloud Analytics

Romonet Lowers Data Center Costs Via Analysis, Prediction
London-based Romonet is a private company that helps businesses lower their data center costs through information analysis and prediction. Cloud Computing magazine recently interviewed CEO Danny Reeves to learn more. - 07/11/2017

Cloud Recognition

TMC Announces 2016 Cloud Computing Excellence Award Winners
It's time again for the unveiling of the Cloud Computing Excellence Award winners. This time around we're highlighting the companies and products that made their mark in the cloud communications and cloud computing arenas over the past year. - 03/08/2017

Cloud Compliance

Will Compliance Road Bumps Slow Public Cloud Growth?
There is no doubt that public cloud adoption hit a serious inflection point in 2016. We've seen Amazon Web Services report an annual revenue run rate of more than $13 billion, growing at an incredible rate of 55 percent. And Microsoft's aim to be the first cloud provider to hit $20 billion started looking more like a possibility as it began wooing leading cloud adopters like Adobe to the Microsoft Azure platform. - 03/08/2017

Cloud Storage

Saving Big By Consolidating Secondary Workloads
Virtualization in the data center helped businesses collapse their primary workloads for better efficiency. Now companies like Cohesity are working to help companies collapse their secondary workloads. - 03/08/2017

Cloud Management

Network Performance Monitoring: Why the Cloud Calls for a New Approach
Cloud-based network performance monitoring solutions have been in the news a lot lately, as Juniper Networks recently moved to purchase AppFormix, and that company and others emphasize that the cloud calls for a new approach to NPM. - 03/08/2017

Cloud Management

Let There Be Light: Virtualized Network Management in the Age of Encryption
Encryption is understandably necessary in today's world and it's very important for our collective privacy. But it also presents a major challenge for broadband network operators when it comes to traffic visibility and identification. - 03/08/2017

Cloud Networks

Optical Technology: Facebook's Voyager Creates Disruption
Facebook has come out with an open DWDM transport solution called Voyager that is shaking up the optical networking arena. - 03/08/2017

Cloud Security

Secure & Compliant IAM: How to Succeed at Identity and Access Management Governance
Identity and access management governance technology use has increased throughout the last several years as the solutions are now standard for organizational security and access. Manual processes previously used to manage user accounts and passwords no longer fit the bill like the automated IAM solutions that automate the entire user account lifecycle. - 03/08/2017

Cover Story

Cloud Energy Consumption: The Next Acid Rain Story?
The technology industry of the 21st century needs to heed the environmental lessons learned from the Industrial Revolution. If it does not, we are on a path to jeopardize the environment on our quest for a digitally enhanced social and corporate experience. - 03/08/2017

Cloud Trends

Cloud Trends Facing a Market in Transition
There's a seeming contradiction in cloud trends. According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, research firm IDC says that spending on cloud infrastructure is trending up and, in fact, is outpacing spending rates on traditional IT. Another report in the journal, however, cites a survey from tech industry consortium CompTIA that says enterprise cloud application adoption rates are trending down. How can that be? - 12/07/2016

Vertical Cloud

Legal Industry in the Cloud: Building a Niche-Specific Solution
Legal professionals have a weighty list of must-haves, both to succeed in representing cases, and to meet the complex, and non-negotiable structural, filing and regulatory requirements of the industry. - 12/07/2016

Cloud DevOps

Playing for Keeps with Cloud Sandboxes
Cloud sandboxes enable developers to build and test new applications in cloud sandboxes, then just tear down the virtual sandbox environment when testing is completed. - 12/07/2016

Cloud Migration

The Best of Both Worlds: Hybrid IT's Rising Popularity and Best Practices for Implementation
Many businesses are turning to hybrid IT solutions as their demand for IT infrastructure grows beyond their in-house capacity. Indeed, hybrid IT - a popular approach that comprises a mix of in-house resources, managed hosting, network, and public and private cloud-based services - is being seriously considered in boardrooms of companies both small and large. - 12/07/2016

Cloud Strategies

IBM Tells Its Cloud Story
IBM is considered among the top cloud providers. Just where it fits in the mix, however, depends upon to whom you're talking. - 12/07/2016

Cloud Management

ParkMyCloud Delivers Big Savings for AWS Users
The move to the cloud has been lauded for its ability to provide people with networking resources on demand. Indeed, you could think of Amazon Web Services and the like as utilities. But while you can switch off a light or turn off a faucet to manage your power and water usage and cost, there's no easy way to hit the off button on the cloud when it's not in use. - 12/07/2016

Cloud Management

The Need for Cloud-Centric Network Performance Monitoring
Digital business is forever altering the landscape for how organizations brand themselves, maintain customer loyalty, go to market, generate revenue, and more. Digital business practices have driven a rapid shift to hybrid cloud-based IT, and along with that, a resurgent and critical dependence on the role that networks and network performance play. - 12/07/2016

Cloud Caas

In Which Cloud Computing Provider Should Your Business Invest?
When cloud computing technology first became scalable for businesses, competition was stiff, as all of the top tech providers, and numerous commercial and enterprise companies, were vying to become the go-to cloud tech provider. However, the market eventually elevated Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to the top of the ranks of cloud tech providers. - 12/07/2016

Public Sector Cloud

Government Organizations to Increase Cloud Spending
The MOVE IT Act and Cloud Infrastructure Act offer the public sector an opportunity to be more efficient, agile, and innovative through effective IT investments. With these initiatives in place, agencies are turning to the engine that powers government IT systems - the cloud. - 12/07/2016

COVER STORY

Free File Sharing Isn't Really Free: It Can Cost You Your Business!
Recently, the industry has been buzzing about various free, third-party file-sharing tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. While these applications can be beneficial, many reports are finding that there are a number of security risks tied to unauthorized or unregulated use. - 12/07/2016

SPECIAL FEATURES

The Data Center of The Future Will Be an Open Software Defined Cloud
Increasingly, companies require highly efficient, cloud-enabled data centers. But they often lack the internal IT resources necessary to achieve that goal. At the same time, however, they cannot be competitive using their legacy proprietary hardware and software infrastructure. These IT leaders are becoming aware of the consequences of choosing an open or closed cloud environment. Combined with an open software defined approach, Supermicro offers companies optimized, energy-efficient data center solutions and empowers them to determine their cloud future on their own terms. - 10/31/2016

Cloud Security Excellence Awards

Cloud Security Awards: The Winners
The Cloud Computing Excellence Awards honor vendors that have most effectively leverage cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to the market. - 10/31/2016

CLOUD HARDWARE

What Is Commodity Hardware?
Networks are becoming more software-centric, with the goal of making communications service providers more agile, cost-efficient, quick to market, and less vendor-dependent. But while software is where much of the value resides, the fact is that it has to run on something, and that something is hardware. - 10/31/2016

FUTURE OF THE CLOUD

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (And What It Will Take from an Infrastructure Perspective)
Machine learning has grown in importance and uptake in recent years as more organizations seek to employ this technology for faster and more efficient decision making. - 10/31/2016

CLOUD TRENDS

Intel Begins Volume Shipments of Silicon Photonics Products
The data center has become the hub of a ton of innovation lately. One example of this innovation is Intel's work around silicon photonics. - 10/31/2016

CLOUD TRENDS

Big and Small Efforts Aim to Address the Data Center Energy Drain
It's well understood that data centers are energy hogs. The good news is there has been a lot of activity - and some success - in lowering their environmental impact. - 10/31/2016

COVER STORY

Cloud Cost Containment Strategies: Benchmarks for Effective Cloud Migration
There's a quiet, yet significant, revolution taking place in the technology sector. It's the muffled sound of enterprises selecting software solutions without the usual cadre of research, budgeting, IT department involvement, and integration. - 10/31/2016

CLOUD SECURITY

Why We Need to Bring Virtualization to Software Pre-Production
A new report my company has published highlights the need to bring virtualization technology to the pre-production portion of the software lifecycle to provide developers and testers with production-like environments on demand. - 10/31/2016

CLOUD SECURITY

Administrators Can Use DNS RPZ for Malicious Site Queries
The Domain Name Server Response Policy Zone is an open, vendor-neutral standard for the interchange of DNS firewall configuration information. RPZ was developed by the Internet Systems Consortium to fight the abuse of the DNS by groups or individuals with malicious or harmful intent. - 10/31/2016

CLOUD COMMUNICATIONS

Oracle Buys NetSuite for $9.3 Billion
Oracle recently revealed plans to buy cloud company NetSuite for $9.3 billion. The deal is expected to close later this year. - 10/31/2016

CLOUD COMMUNICATIONS

Agiloft Makes Things Easier on Cloud Company Enki
Before founding high-performance managed cloud services provider Enki, Dave Durkee and Eric Novikoff were CIO and director of engineering at NetSuite. So they thought it only logical to build their new venture based on technology from a company with which they were intimately familiar. But, ultimately, the men abandoned the NetSuite solution after finding it too cumbersome and expensive to work with. Instead, Enki adopted a business process management solution from Agiloft. - 10/31/2016

CLOUD COMMUNICATIONS

Legal Industry in the Cloud: Building a Niche-Specific Solution
Legal professionals have a weighty list of must-haves, both to succeed in representing cases, and to meet the complex, and non-negotiable structural, filing, and regulatory requirements of the industry. - 10/31/2016

FEATURES

Slimming Down the Cloud 'Waste' Line
Spinning up cloud services is almost as easy as grabbing food to go at your favorite burger joint. We've made fast food so convenient, affordable, and packed with calories, it's become a national problem, because our consumption doesn't match our nutritional needs or activity levels. Now imagine how much worse it would be if we had no ingredient lists, no easy way to count calories, and all of our weight gain for the month showed up in a single day. - 08/11/2016

FEATURES

How to Talk Cloud and OpenStack
The advent of public cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and others have changed what it means to adeptly deliver IT infrastructure. With cloud computing, resources can be provided as services and shared to build economies of scale to meet demands in real time and can be tracked with usage metrics, such as showback or chargeback. All of these resources can be delivered without proprietary tools, instead using Internet identifiers, formats and protocols. Companies are looking to realize those benefits inside their own data centers and firewalls and OpenStack is the tool to do it. - 08/11/2016

Cover Story

Digital Realty: Delivering Stability Amidst Digital Disruption
In today's age of digital disruption, where organizations need to adapt rapidly changing business and customer needs, the demand for high-performance services and more bandwidth that is needed to access increasingly powerful applications continues to skyrocket. As a result, cloud adoption - more specifically, hybrid cloud adoption - is building momentum. - 08/11/2016

Product Review

SuperMicro MicroBlade
Server blades have been around for many years and are available from all major computer companies. Over the years, they have improved considerably in terms of power and flexibility, and one company that has been at the leading edge of blade innovation is Supermicro. - 08/11/2016

FEATURES

Shadow IT: Balancing Efficiency With Security
With great access comes great responsibility, especially with regard to IT security policies. In recent months, discussions around security have evolved to include the growing risks associated with Shadow IT. While the practice of Shadow IT has existed since computing became a staple of the workplace and tech-savvy employees started skirting the rules, the risks of Shadow IT have skyrocketed with the exponential rise of mobile devices and cloud technology. - 08/11/2016

FEATURES

We Need to Talk About Multi-cloud
Over the past several months, there have been whispers and murmurs surrounding hybrid and multi-cloud IT reality. Recently, though, those murmurs have gotten louder. In fact, in IDC's Cloud FutureScape 2016 Predictions report, the analyst firm asserts that more than 80 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technology by 2017. I, along with my expert team of engineers at Faction, want to embrace this movement. What it means is that businesses will require multi-cloud-friendly solutions that will allow them to take full advantage of the cloud's value proposition, while also benefiting from the best-of-breed features by working with multiple cloud providers. - 08/11/2016

How IDaaS Helps Manage the Risk of Digital Transformation
When it comes to identity management strategies, a cloud transformation is underway: More and more companies and software providers are evolving from the traditional on-premises Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions to a hybrid cloud model. Say hello to Identity as a Service (IDaaS). - 08/11/2016

FEATURES

Should My Company Migrate to the Cloud?
From email and file sharing to CRM systems and critical infrastructure, businesses are moving their systems to the cloud at a phenomenal rate. But, before diving head first into the cloud, keep in mind that migrations don't happen overnight and that any company considering this move must carefully evaluate both the risks and rewards. - 08/11/2016

FEATURES

Combining HPC With Big Data Analytics
Three important trends keep coming up in conversations with customers in the high performance computing (HPC) and big data markets. The first is that more and more users want to combine HPC workloads with big data analytics workloads on the same infrastructure. The second trend is the demand for flexibility to run workloads on either bare metal, virtual machines, or, most recently, in containerized environments. The third trend, closely related to the second, is the demand for flexibility to run on-premises and in the public cloud. - 08/11/2016

FEATURES

The Shortfalls of Large Service Providers
In the age of the cloud, everything is up for change. The growing demand for cloud services is not only redefining the technology landscape, it's also reshaping channel operations and disrupting traditional structures. While big companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google offer brand-name services, they can't compete with local managed services providers (MSPs) in their customer-centricity and the level of attention they are able to deliver to their clients. - 08/11/2016

Strategic Solutions Series

Choosing the Right FedRAMP Provider
Much as it has become a staple in commercial endeavors, cloud computing has found firm footing within the federal government, helping drive operational efficiencies and reducing costs. In fact, federal agencies are required to leverage cloud computing to improve flexibility, increase responsiveness, and reduce costs - and to justify the use of a non-cloud provider. In his 2011 memo to government CIOs, then United States CIO Steven VanRoekel stated: - 05/18/2016

Public vs. Private

Public vs. Private: A Primer on Cloud Management
By now, the benefits and simplicity of cloud computing are well understood, and the promise of benefits like cost-savings, greater efficiency and increased application agility have inspired companies of all sizes to kick start their journey to the cloud. In fact, it's expected that the cloud infrastructure and platform market will grow by 19 percent annually from 2015 to 2018, reaching 43 billion dollars by 2018. - 05/18/2016

Cloud Banking

Why the Financial Markets Have to Bank on Cloud
The future of the banking industry is in flux. Financial institutions face a downward trend in fees, greater competition from non-banks, and disruption across the industry. The rise of an interconnected global financial system that includes a complex web of institutions, markets, trading partners, and instruments has brought with it a need for better, faster, and more powerful computing at tremendous scale. - 05/18/2016

CCaaS

Business Case for Service Providers to Offer CCaaS
Cloud-based contact center solutions are as much an opportunity for service providers as they are for businesses. To capitalize on this potential, though, they must first understand the inherent factors that make CCaaS as compelling for them as it is for their business customers. Detailed below are four of the most prominent attributes. - 05/18/2016

Future of Cloud

Cloud Computing by 2020
Ever since we defined the core virtualization and traffic steering technologies to be the foundation of cloud computing in the early-mid 2000's, we have continued to add to and evolve the concept of the cloud. Today, we talk about private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. There is cloud bursting to scale application demand and the U.S. federally mandated Cloud First initiative. Everyone wants to be a part of the cloud, even though the concept is hard to define and diagram. - 05/18/2016

Strategic Solutions Series

Application Assurance for the Borderless Enterprise
Cloud computing has been among the chief enablers of the borderless enterprise, allowing business to adopt new technology and application strategies - specifically, the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model continues to proliferate corporate strategy conversations as a means of providing access to business applications and services and allowing employees - and entire businesses - to become more agile. - 03/14/2016

2015 Cloud Computing Excellence Awards
Cloud Computing Magazine's 5th Annual Cloud Computing Excellence Award recognizes vendors that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market. We congratulate this years winners and look forward to even more exciting and innovative ways to leverage cloud computing in the coming year. - 03/14/2016

IoT and Virtualization - A Cloud Enabled Symbiotic Relationship
If, as Cisco projects, IoT is to scale to 50 billion devices by the year 2020, it will require an agile and elastic infrastructure that only a mature virtualized cloud-based architecture can deliver. Looking at this from the opposite perspective, the virtualization of the network infrastructure may or may not see the return on investment in terms of cost and operational benefit if the demand for IoT does not develop. - 03/14/2016

The Storage Chaos Era: How to Cope with Today's File Synchronization and Migration Challenges
There's good news and bad news in the world of cloud storage. For starters, organizations big and small have a plethora of choices when it comes to moving data from on-premises storage systems to the cloud in order to slash CAPEX, achieve greater agility and provide users with better opportunities to collaborate. - 03/14/2016

Healthcare and Cloud: Protecting Patient Data
The security of a healthcare organization can be as precarious as a row of dominos: Just one weak link in the chain can take down an entire network once an attacker has access. In 2015 alone, the highest-profile healthcare security breaches - Community Health Systems, Anthem and Premera - resulted in the exposure of 96 million personal health records. The impact of the breaches didn't end there, as several network partners of each of those companies were impacted, due to the very nature of information sharing up and down the value chain. - 03/14/2016

Feature

Why the Cloud is the Best Place to Manage Customer Identity Data
As the amount of data generated by always-connected consumers continues to increase, IT departments are scrambling to deploy technologies that are able to put that data to use. Understanding how to safely leverage this data using established business systems is a major challenge. Historically, this task fell to legacy identity and access management (IAM) technologies, which could easily manage hundreds or thousands of corporate employee identities and devices. Customer identities and devices, however, number in the millions, and managing that much data exposes several shortcomings in traditional IAM technology. - 12/14/2015

Feature

Pros and Cons of Public and Private Cloud Platforms
In a private cloud, the same architectural pooling is possible, on a smaller scale, and similar mechanisms exist to create and share multi-tenant resource pools using software like OpenStack. However a private cloud is single-tenant, so the resource pooling has a lower isolation requirement (because the whole cloud is isolated). - 12/14/2015

Feature

Renting Your Infrastructure? Ensuring Security When You No Longer Own the Network
That lack of control and visibility can result in significant security repercussions when moving the entire corporate network to the cloud. The cloud presents a much greater challenge for ensuring that individuals get access to only the data and apps they need, and that your entire network isn't left wide open for just anyone to wander the virtual halls. - 12/14/2015

Awards

2015 Cloud Computing Excellence Awards
The past year has been nothing short of explosive for the cloud computing space, with vendors and providers from every market segment evolving their product portfolios, either adding cloud-based offerings to their portfolios or enhancing previously introduced cloud products. The reason is simple. While the extent to which companies are leveraging cloud-based services and applications to conduct business, those that are not using cloud at all are dwindling in numbers. As a result, vendors are faced with an imperative: migrate their capabilities to the cloud or run the risk of losing customers to competitors to have. - 12/14/2015

Strategic Solutions Series

Application Assurance for the Borderless Enterprise
During the course of the past decade, the corporate environment has evolved dramatically, with perhaps the greatest change influencing most every business being mobility. Driven by ubiquitous connectivity and an ever-growing selection of mobile hardware - including smartphones, tablets, laptops - mobility has changed not only the way businesses communicate, but the way they budget, hire, manage, and operate. It has created a new breed of business, the borderless enterprise, where traditional offices and desks, while still part of the physical environment, have given way to a work-anywhere philosophy, increasing productivity, responsiveness, and efficiency. - 12/14/2015

Product Review

SuperMicro SuperServer 2028U-TR4+
One of the largest challenges data center architects have to contend with is power consumption and heat dissipation. As the IT industry grows, it is becoming a target of environmentalists and others who are looking to reduce carbon emissions. This is where Supermicro fits in. The company describes itself as a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server, storage technology and green computing producing low-power, high density server solutions optimized for embedded and hyperscale workloads in data center and cloud environments. - 07/15/2015

Feature

Services in a Cloud World: Identity Crisis or Opportunity?
While the Cloud and its impact on the technology industry is written about frequently, often overlooked is its impact on the Professional Services (PS) businesses of technology companies. Traditionally representing 20 percent or more of software companies' total revenue, PS has been a key contributor to financial performance as well as a key service to assist customers in adopting, integrating, and implementing software technology and updated business processes. In the world of the cloud, the role of PS is increasingly playing an integral role in defining the customer experience and driving overall enterprise growth. - 07/15/2015

Feature

Preparing Your Infrastructure for the Hybrid Cloud
Many companies are looking at the hybrid cloud as the ideal way to improve agility, shift or reduce costs, or drive greater innovation. But, what they don't consider is that today's enterprise IT environment is not inherently designed to support the move to the hybrid cloud. On-premises systems and public clouds each have their own management tools, driven by the particular product vendors or service providers. This dichotomy results in no single way to control, manage or secure shared compute resources across the entire enterprise IT environment. In fact, it could actually increase costs and complexity, and require more employees, which would negate any benefits a company expects to derive from a hybrid cloud strategy. - 07/15/2015

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From Pilot to Production: Getting High Performance Private Clouds off the Ground
There is tremendous interest in hybrid clouds among enterprises today. Hybrid clouds afford the opportunity to combine the scalability, reliability and efficiencies of a public cloud with the security and control of a private cloud. - 07/15/2015

CEO Spotlight

Alan Masarek, Vonage
In short, Vonage has a stellar brand, a low cost structure, great technology platforms, and excellent cash flows and financial flexibility, and we combine all of this with a highly experienced leadership team. - 07/14/2015

CEO Spotlight

Tom Goodmanson, Calabrio
You've been at Calabrio for seven years. What first attracted you to the company and why did you feel it was a good fit for you? What did you have to offer the company? - 07/14/2015

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IS BYOD DOA?
Decades ago, the laptop planted the seed for what has now become one of today's most rapidly evolving workplace trends: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Driven by the introduction of new technology, desire to increase employee productivity and interest in reduced liability, employers are embracing BYOD policies in droves - permitting employees to use personally owned iPads, tablets, computers and smartphones for work-related tasks. Whether in the office, at home or on-location, BYOD allows for effortless device connectivity and exchange of data and information anywhere, anytime. - 04/27/2015

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The Definitive Guide to Desktop Layering
A recent Gartner report compared four methods of delivering applications in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and found "application layering" to be the best. Gartner's analysis is boosting interest in this already-hot new desktop and application management technology. With this latest validation, vendors are quick to include their products in the layering category. However, to distinguish effective layering solutions from products that just "check the box," IT organizations must understand what desktop layering is, and what essential requirements layering must meet if it is to truly overcome the challenges of delivering and managing Windows desktops in the cloud. - 04/27/2015

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10 Trends Driving Cloud
The dominant trendsetter in everything cloud is often the simple inquiry and knowledge of, "What is the other guy doing with the Cloud?" The deeper we dug into what our own customers at dinCloud were doing, the more shocked and amazed we were. It's from this "monkey see, monkey do" scenario that the top ten cloud trends for 2015 emerge. Ignore them at your own peril, or, do what everyone else is doing: Jump in and hang on for the ride. - 04/27/2015

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Application Aware Data Protection - How to Get There!
Many IT organizations have had the same data protection tools and practices for years, even decades, and see no need for that to change. But Application Owners need to know that they'll be able to recover their data at the application level when disaster strikes, and yesterday's solutions are simply not up to this job. It's time for modern, application-aware data protection. Here's how to get there. - 04/27/2015

Security

Are You Investing Enough in Data Security?
According to the majority of IT executives, security is a key ongoing concern. Yet, if you ask security vendors or look at survey data, most enterprises aren't taking the steps necessary to protect their infrastructure or their data as well as they should. In fact, under normal conditions, talking potential security risks is an exercise in futility, because every business has appropriate and sufficient security measures in place. Just ask them. - 04/27/2015

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The Cloud, The Phone, The Simple Alternative
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you undoubtedly have heard of the cloud. In fact, even in the instance you have been under said rock, you almost certainly have been using cloud apps in your daily routines. - 04/06/2015

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PureCloud: Delivering a Purely Exceptional Customer Experience
Several industry players have commented to me of late that, if you aren't in the cloud, you're nowhere. It certainly seems this is the case, given the growth of cloud-based services over the past 24 months. Indeed, there is some merit to that theory - but it's only a partial truth. As much as cloud services adoption has increased both steadily and significantly, cloud is far from being the only delivery model. As a result, for vendors looking to maximize their market presence, it will become part of their overall product offering, by which they are able to offer similar-quality services to a variety of target markets - all markets, ideally. - 04/06/2015

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With Office 365, Managed Outsourced Cloud is the Better Cloud
What's not to like about cloud-powered Office 365? It provides a host of benefits to small and medium-sized businesses, including collaboration capabilities; mobile solutions; email, file and document accessibility from anywhere on any device; and real-time communication from a single platform. The solution also helps reduce both capital and operational costs. - 04/06/2015

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CEO Spotlight: Brad Wilson and David Russell, Geist Global
Brad Wilson has been with Geist Global for more than 16 years and currently has strategic oversight for its data center operations. David Russell came to parent company PCE in mid-2014. Both are seeing significant growth for the company, which has resulted in the development of a brand new 14 million-dollar global headquarters in Lincoln, Nebraska. - 04/06/2015

Features

How Workload Automation Can Help Businesses Manage Cloud Resources
It's no secret that cloud services have become vastly popular among today's businesses - especially since they allow companies to easily and quickly scale their environments, optimize resources, and lower fixed costs like AC, rent, and electric, which normally come with owning physical machines. - 04/06/2015

Feature Story

Cloud: The Key Element to PerkinElmer's Scientific Collaboration
Often, conversations around migration to cloud computing tend to focus on cost benefits, and there are, without doubt, significant cost savings that can be achieved through moving business applications to the cloud. But, while cost is certainly a contributing factor, we shouldn't allow us to overlook the tremendous opportunity cloud represents for business process enhancement and increased collaboration - the factors that increase revenue and drive real business success. - 12/09/2014

Feature Story

Carrier SDN vs. Enterprise SDN, an Architectural Perspective
The Software Defined Networking trend has been picking up momentum and new use-cases are continuously evolving since its initial launch. In this article, we will take a look at this evolution, from the very basics to carrier-class SDN. We will do this through the lens of fundamental SDN architectural characteristics. These basic ingredients ultimately define the type and scale of market applications, as well as the roadmap of products implementing them. Additionally, we will demonstrate how these ingredients are centered on the pivotal SDN control plane distribution. - 12/09/2014

Feature Story

Cloud Rolls in, Apps Rolls out
Organizations moving to the cloud spend most of their time considering the type of cloud they need, which cloud services providers to choose, what SaaS applications will fit the bill, and so on. But there's one thing most organizations, especially smaller ones, overlook: What happens when they need a custom application? Their old application development skills and tools won't work in the cloud. And when you build apps for the cloud, you have to build one for every potential device that will connect to your business. That means hiring consultants or lots of developers. - 12/09/2014

Feature Story

Don't Let VDI Be a Red Light in Your Data Center
The first electric traffic signal system was installed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914. The signals were wired to a nearby booth and controlled by hand. While this may have been sufficient for their needs 100 years ago, the continued growth of cities - and the accompanying traffic - means it's no longer possible to manage traffic manually. Now, we rarely stop to think about today's highly complex, computerized traffic management systems employed throughout the world. - 12/09/2014

Feature Story

Ensuring Positive Business Outcomes in the Services-Centric World
Office walls and set hours traditionally delineated what most of us thought of as work. Those constructs are giving way to more flexible and far-flung work environments. Employees, once chained to their desktop phones and computers, today freely move around the office and the world, and the availability of broadband networks and mobile devices means they can do their jobs any timeanytime and just about anywhere, and from any device. - 12/09/2014

The Customer Experience Makeover: And the Winner Is...
Interactive Intelligence launched the Customer Experience Makeover: Contact Center Style contest as a fun way to cut through the clutter and do something unique that could both enable the lucky winner to have a great experience, and enable other organizations to benefit by following along in the process to see what could be accomplished with the latest tools and technologies. - 12/03/2014

Publisher's Outlook

Why Google and Apple Should Fear the new Microsoft
In decades of covering Microsoft, I don't recall the company enjoying so much positive press at one time. They are literally transforming before our eyes. Here's how: - 06/11/2014

Feature Story

Challenges of Assuring User Service Quality in the Cloud
With seemingly "E"verything moving to the cloud, a significant amount of attention has been paid to what can and should be moved, when, where, why, how and by whom. However, not much has been written about the challenges associated with the actual user experience posed by moving information and apps from a dedicated resource to a shared one. After all, many of the benefits of cloud from scalability to availability to cost savings are rooted in increased sharing. However, with sharing comes the potential for service degradation caused by latency, packet loss, jitter and a host of other issues. - 06/11/2014

Feature Story

The New World of PaaS
As with any emerging technology, cloud computing has taken on multiple identities, in terms of usage, implementation, and uses as time passes. From the generic concept of cloud computing, we've now reached what can best be described as an Anything-as-a-Service world, where nearly any traditionally locally deployed technology can be delivered through public and/or private clouds. Security, DR, Storage, Communications, Testing, and nearly any software package businesses require is readily accessible through cloud services. But, at the heart of all of these lie IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), when enable the agility and flexibility cloud "business" boasts. - 06/11/2014

PanTerra Networks - SmartBox - Simple, Secure Cloud File Sharing with Built-in Unified Communications Features
PanTerra Networks is probably the most innovative unified communications and file sharing cloud-based service provider you've never heard of, until now. TMC Labs was somewhat familiar with PanTerra Networks, but even we were surprised by the sheer number of UC and file sharing features built into their WorldSmart product suite when we took it for a test drive. WorldSmart's unified cloud services delivers just about every form of file sharing, communications & collaboration - voice, video call, IM, email, desktop sharing and fax. The WorldSmart suite includes two major components, CloudUC and the just launched (Jan 2014) SmartBox, which PanTerra calls, "the world's first file sharing service that communicates." - 06/06/2014

Scale-Out Virtual Environments and the Future of Storage Infrastructure
International research firm IDC recently found that more than 50 percent of all server workloads today are implemented in a virtual machine (VM). Due to the capabilities of virtualization technologies, there has been a clear paradigm shift in data center infrastructure and management. Virtualization has become a mainstream technology used by data centers and service providers alike. - 06/06/2014

Managing Migration to the Cloud
A recent study featured in ComputerWeekly, found that more than 40 percent of IT professionals surveyed confirmed that their company's operational efficiency improved after moving to a cloud environment. - 06/06/2014

Cloud Trends

Nine Cloud Patterns to Expect in 2016
As consumers use more digital devices, at home and at work, CIOs are responding as mobile and the cloud converge. They will spend more on mobile cloud, recognizing that users can store and access much more mobile data on the cloud and their data is safe and accessible if their mobile device is lost or stolen. - 05/31/2014

Feature Story

Healthcare, HIPAA and the Cloud
Business continuity is particularly important for acute care facilities where patients' lives are at risk daily. These facilities don't just need their medical equipment up and running, but the supporting clinical and business systems must be kept going as well, which where SunGard kicks in. - 02/20/2014

Feature Story

Cloud Storage Pricing: It's Open Warfare
One thing that has long been true of storage - it gets ever cheaper. Storage has its own version of Moore's Law. The other thing that's true is storage demands are ever increasing, often outstripping what IT can buy and install. - 02/20/2014

FEATURE STORY

MSPs Take Charge of Cloud
Managed Service Providers (MSP) may not have the buzz of a FaceBook, Twitter or Google. But when you want serious applications, MSPs are increasingly the place to go. - 02/20/2014

Feature Story

TransCertain Sure About Secure Data
There are thousands of security vendors, but none quite like TransCertain. The company's flagship product is CertainSafe, now on version 2. CertainSafe is really a vault for your data in the cloud, offering secure Web access. Details on this tool can be found in Tom Keating's review which follows. - 02/20/2014

Feature Story

REVIEW: CertainSafe Brings Enterprise Features to File Share
TMC Labs liked how CertainSafe brings ultra-high-level security while simultaneously not forcing users to jump through hoops to gain access. The Web-based interface was very intuitive and user-friendly and we liked that this newer version is more touch friendly. TMC Labs was very impressed with CertainSafe, and would not hesitate to recommend this solution to organizations looking for a highly secure cloud-based method of sharing information with high usability. - 02/20/2014

Product Review

GFI MAX Backup: Speed is the Essence
Hosted backup has not only relieved IT personnel from dealing with backup tapes, cleaning tapes, managing offsite tapes, checking backup logs, but it has also opened up a huge revenue opportunity for MSPs looking to resell online backup solutions. Many small and some medium-size companies with limited or no internal IT resources don't want to deal with the hassle of popping tapes in and out, running cleaning jobs, assigning Mary to take over tape duties when John is on vacation, remembering to return offsite tape backup tapes, etc. Thus, companies are more than glad to use the power of the Internet to have a simple, easy-to-use backup solution that eliminates many of these problems and gives peace of mind should disaster strike. - 01/03/2014

One-time Skeptic Oracle Now 100 Percent Serious About Cloud
Oracle has come a long way in five years. It was at a shareholder meeting in 2008 when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison let loose as he often does, this time not attacking a rival, but lambasting the whole notion of the cloud. - 01/03/2014

Learning - and Profiting - From 'Superstorm Sandy'
It was just a year ago that a huge portion of the Eastern U.S. got slammed by what has since been dubbed "Superstorm Sandy," a hurricane of such epic proportions that weathercasters and businesses alike will be talking about it for generations to come. - 01/03/2014

COVER STORY

The Power of Iceland: RMS and Verne Global Take to the Cloud
While RMS Cloud offers many process efficiencies that benefit both RMS and its customers, the real value of its migration is a complete business transformation thanks to RMS(one), not only for RMS, but its entire industry, which has now been reinvented by a forward-looking team that wasn't content resting on the laurels of its success to date. With its partners at Verne Global and Datapipe, RMS and its customers, which are not IT companies, are able to embrace IT while focusing on their core businesses. - 01/03/2014

Product Review

CertainSafe, the Virtual Safety Deposit Box, Drives Secure Collaboration
TMC Labs learned about a new product launching by TransCertain called Certain- Safe that could be a game changer when it comes to cloud-based collaboration. Fortune 1000 companies and indeed even smaller companies are reluctant to put their most sensitive and confidential data in the cloud to be shared with their partners and customers. - 09/04/2013

Cover Story

The Right Vision at the Right Time
Over the past few years, much has been written and said about cloud computing. One thing is for certain: the segment of cloud known as Communications as a Service (CaaS) will have staying power in the market thanks to a company called Interactive Intelligence. - 09/04/2013

Feature Story

Leveraging Cloud to Meet Compliance Challenges
There are many common misperceptions surrounding cloud computing - one of which is that regulatory compliance requirements preclude many organizations from being able to leverage outsourced, managed cloud services. - 09/04/2013

Feature Story

Cloud Adoption Exceeding Expectations, New Global Study Finds
Adoption of the cloud by both U.S. and European businesses is smashing all preconceived notions that indicated companies were moving warily into the technology, or holding off entirely, according to new research recently released and obtained by Cloud Computing. - 09/04/2013

Industry Profile

Taming Video Archives With the Cloud
The explosion in video use today - on the web, in corporate marketing and training and of course in professional content creation - presents a conundrum for CIOs charged with managing it all. - 09/04/2013

Comm on the Cloud

Are Service Providers Hedging Their Bets?
Transitioning to cloud is not as easy as slapping gear in a data center calling it cloud and you are off and running. Well, you are running - chasing revenue as fast as you can. As I learned from speaking with Sonian, building for cloud delivery is very different that moving it to a data center or virtualizing it. However, it will be a few years before the market grasps that yet. - 05/17/2013

PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE CLOUD

Multitenant or Single? That is the Question
Deep in the recesses of corporate server rooms everywhere, administrators debate the merits of public cloud computing solutions versus private or even hybrid cloud computing solutions. Security, control, and access - these are all issues being tossed into the dispute. But public versus private is ultimately the wrong query. Rather, IT should be asking 'multitenant or single tenant?' That is the question. - 05/17/2013

FEATURE STORY

Healthcare IT Leaders and the Cloud: Cautious Yet Optimistic
As healthcare IT leaders move forward with digitizing their electronic records, cloud computing is increasingly being considered a viable option for many provider organizations. There are clear business benefits of moving to the cloud, including the opportunity to reduce upfront capital expenditures, scale up or down based on business needs, improve service with SLA guarantees, and support workforce collaboration and mobility. - 05/17/2013

COVER STORY

Network Control in the Cloud Demands Visibility, Control and Speed
More and more businesses - both small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises alike - are migrating business-critical applications to the cloud in the hopes of achieving lower cost and greater efficiency. - 05/17/2013

FEATURE STORY

MSPs and Cloud Services Converge Through Intermedia's Acquisition of Telanetix
When the deal is made final, Intermedia, which is already the world's largest third-party hosted Exchange provider, will become one of the largest U.S. providers of cloud voice and hosted PBX services for SMBs. The acquisition is one of the latest examples of an MSP and cloud player merging their offerings, narrowing the gap between the two growing segments to create a carefully and fully managed cloud services experience. - 05/17/2013

FEATURE STORY

BC/DR Strategies and the Cloud
The aftermath of Superstorm Sandy - which pummeled its way through the Northeast last fall, leaving millions without power, cable and phones for days on end - left IT decision makers and other executives seriously considering their business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategies. Since disaster recovery is more about preparation than recovery, a BC/DR strategy, even for small businesses that do not have a dedicated IT staff, is critical. - 05/17/2013

FEATURE STORY

Performance Management in the Cloud: Challenges & Solutions
As technology changes continue to accelerate, service providers are seeking new ways to manage more complex, high-bandwidth, IP-based data services. A consistent challenge for IT managers and administrators is to proactively monitor performance across the cloud, identify threats and decrease any impact on the end customers. - 05/17/2013

FEATURE STORY

Cloud Computing is More Reality than Hype
Despite the hype, media attention and adoption patterns to date, the cloud is still a relatively new technology with many questions still to be answered. Nevertheless, the concept of moving sensitive business information and applications into an off-premises environment managed by a third party is profoundly changing how businesses think about, purchase, and manage technology. That change has led technology leaders to invest in new strategies, both in their internal operational environments, as well how they approach their customers, with many of the leading technology vendors leading the charge. - 05/16/2013

Special Feature

Brokering the Cloud for IP Telephony Services
Most recently, the concept of "cloud services brokering," a term defined by Gartner, has described the implementation of this premise to reflect a focus on the integration, aggregation and customization of third-party cloud services and applications. - 01/29/2013

Features

2013 Cloud Computing Storage Excellence Award Winners
Storage - it's the one thing you are certain to outgrow with time. The massive volumes of multimedia content being produced and consumed are overwhelming traditional storage facilities, leading to an increase in the use of cloud-based storage. - 01/28/2013

On the Cover

Telefonica Takes Businesses to the Cloud
Perhaps best known as a leader in the telecommunications sector, Telefonica has remained steadfast in its mission to fully support its more than 300 million customers by developing and providing cloud services that are designed for large enterprise and small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) as well as SoHo and consumer markets. - 01/28/2013

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Is the Cloud There Yet?
Cloud computing has come a long way in the past few years in terms of acceptance and implementation, however as 2013 kicks off, the barriers toward adoption - namely security and integration - still plague CIOs considering shifting to cloud-based technologies and services. - 01/25/2013

Editorial Series

Interconnection: A Key Element for Successful Cloud Computing
As cloud computing continues to evolve, there have been a number of predictions about the impact "the cloud" will have on the colocation business. With more customers increasingly interested in either providing cloud services or consuming cloud services on some level, Cologix, a network-neutral colocation and interconnection provider, is indeed enabling the growth of cloud. - 01/25/2013

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Helping Government Migrate their Applications into the Cloud
Government organizations are constantly faced with the daunting task of doing more with less. Many have turned to cloud computing for the answer and made major investments in cloud solutions like salesforce.com. Now, they must migrate their legacy applications into the cloud in order to truly realize the cost savings, simplification and consolidation that cloud technologies can provide. - 01/25/2013

Defining Your Cloud Strategy

The Road Toward a 'Cloud-Enabled' Organization is Paved with Good Intentions, But What Are They?
hype around cloud (yes, it still exists) has made it difficult for senior IT executives to know where to start, let alone begin to understand the benefits of what it means to be a "cloud-enabled" organization. The choices, the jargon and the frenzy around cloud is, well, jarring for IT leaders who are in earnest looking to make the right decision for their respective organizations. - 01/25/2013

Cover Story

2013: The Next Frontier of Cloud
By many accounts, 2012 was the year cloud moved past the hype phase into the adoption stage. In fact, cloud computing is expected to grow 19 percent in 2012, becoming a $109-billion industry compared to a $91-billion market last year, according to Gartner. - 10/16/2012

Feature Story

Optimizing Cloud Infrastructures, Driving Business Innovation
With the ever-increasing number of cloud infrastructure providers, businesses are now able to choose from a variety of options to align their cloud strategy with their specific business needs. The cloud drives business innovation by being infinitely scalable, completely secure and able to turn on a dime to innovate without any interruption of service or extra cost to customers. - 10/16/2012

Cloud Compliance

Prevailing Against the Challenges of PCI Compliance in the Cloud
Implementing the technical and administrative controls that will pass a PCI audit is challenging enough in a traditional data center where everything is under your complete control. Cloud-based application and server hosting, however, adds additional complexity to these challenges. Cloud teams often hit a wall when it's time to select and deploy PCI security controls for cloud server environments. - 10/16/2012

Feature Story

The Future of Mobile Cloud
As more enterprises adopt cloud services and embrace enterprise mobility initiatives, mobile and cloud are converging. With more mobile workers and consumers supporting tablets, mobile content, mobile video and personal cloud services, the IT world is in another state of transition as "mobile" serves as both the protagonist and subject of this unpredictability. - 10/16/2012

Strategic Solutions Series

Building the Better Cloud: ServerCentral Puts its High Performance Cloud Infrastructure to the Test
While cloud computing continues to grow in both demand and the number of players in the market, there are only a few real contenders when it comes to public cloud services. Many cloud service providers, including Amazon, may be an affordable option, but they typically do not offer the performance and reliability organizations need to truly leverage the benefits of cloud. - 10/16/2012

Special Feature

2nd Annual Cloud Computing Excellence Awards
Over the past several years, Cloud Computing has become one of the defining trends in technology, acting both as a catalyst to function of evolution in both enterprise and consumer markets, as well as fixed and mobile network environments. Judging from most analyst and research firm reports, the impact of cloud computing is only beginning to be felt. As questions surrounding reliability, security, compliance, and ROI are being answered, more and more businesses are moving their cloud applications from test scenarios to live production - as many cloud vendors have expressed, "people are doing 'real' things in the cloud now, not just testing and toying around with the ideas." - 10/16/2012

Feature Story

Cloud Redefines IT Outsourcing Requirements
Amid all the hype surrounding cloud computing, it's still unknown to the extent enterprises are planning for and adopting cloud computing as a replacement for traditional data center infrastructure technologies and management processes. But there has been enough traction among enterprises that IT outsourcing (ITO) is being transformed by the shift to cloud. - 08/03/2012

Feature Articles

Cloud Balancing: Don't Put All Your Apps in One Basket
As more organizations shift toward moving their technologies into the cloud, perfecting the balance of where applications reside is paramount to performance and, most certainly, avoiding potential outages. - 08/03/2012

Cover Story

Monetizing SaaS: A Survival of the Fittest
With worldwide software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue forecast to reach $14.5 billion this year, there is no doubt that the cloud phenomenon is reaching a critical mass. Just take a look at the latest industry news and it's impossible to miss headlines about the latest SaaS companies that are taking their product public. Investment firms are pouring millions of dollars into this growing segment because of the promise it holds, yet only the strong will survive. - 08/03/2012

Editorial Series

Why Businesses Need to Put APM in the Cloud Ahead of Anything Else
As more companies look towards implementing a variety of cloud deployments to gain infrastructure efficiencies and operational cost savings, many times planning for application performance management (APM) gets lost in the process of defining the infrastructure requirements and implementation of the cloud components. - 08/03/2012

SPECIAL FEATURE

Cloud Telephony: It's Not Just Another Buzzword
Turning to the cloud for unified communications, PBX solutions or hosted VoIP can give businesses access to sophisticated communications infrastructure. In fact, small and medium-sized businesses are adopting cloud-based services at rates twice as fast as larger corporations, primarily because they aren't as risk-averse or don't have be concerned about integration with legacy systems. While the best-known service is cloud computing, cloud telephony is built on the same foundation - a vendor provides a product or service in a virtual environment. - 04/30/2012

FEATURE ARTICLE

Big Data Drives Maturing Cloud Storage Market
Cloud backup and disaster recovery service providers are the companies both consumers and businesses trust with valuable, often irreplaceable data. Although more businesses are looking to the cloud for their storage needs, the industry is challenged with addressing the hurdles that delay widespread adoption. - 04/30/2012

FEATURE ARTICLE

Public vs. Private Cloud? It's Not An 'Either / Or' Decision
While cloud computing is still in the early stages of growth and widespread adoption is still several years out, few would argue cloud is a game changer. At this phase in the cloud movement, as cloud-based services are on the rise and service providers continue to emerge, it's an exploratory time for businesses which areundergoing the validation of cloud. - 04/30/2012

Special Feature

TMC Announces Cloud Computing Awards Winners
The First Annual Cloud Computing Excellence Award recognizes companies that most effectively leveraged cloud computing in efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market. - 01/01/2012

Feature Article

SMBs Leverage Enterprise-Class Cloud Solutions
Microsoft Corp.'s global "SMB Cloud Adoption Study 2011" investigated how cloud computing will impact small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the next three years. According to the research, 39 percent of SMBs expect to be paying for one or more cloud services within three years, an increase of 34 percent from the current 29 percent. It also finds that the number of cloud services SMBs pay for will nearly double in most countries over the next three years. - 01/01/2012

Feature Article

Data Security: Barrier or Bridge to the Cloud?
Cloud has opened up several IT strategy considerations for businesses, with security top of mind for chief information officers as they evaluate the potential benefits of shifting to the cloud for their computing needs. Cloud Computing has taken an in-depth look at the conceivable risks involved by speaking with some of the industry's leading cloud and security experts on how to overcome these challenges, separating fact from fiction. - 01/01/2012