CLOUD COMPUTING — 3rd Quarter 2014

Ensuring Positive Business Outcomes in the Services-Centric World

he 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. Read More >>>



Feature Articles

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

COLUMNS

The Future of the Cloud

Changing Everything, Again
Think back 20 years ago, when legacy hardware technology ruled the communications industry. With the aim to replace all that hardware, an all-in-one software platform hit the market - changing everything. Now move ahead 20 years. The cloud is in full view, and another platform is poised to change our industry again. Visionary? Or just a case of uncovering the cloud's true capability? The answer is, it's both. And the approach is pure.

Cloud Connectivity

Why the Network is Critical to Cloud Success
It's certainly no secret that cloud solutions have become an important and increasingly necessary part of how companies do business today. For enterprises, implementing cloud-based services can help boost productivity, enhance efficiency and reduce costs.

Cloud Backup

Can the Cloud Take on Disaster Recovery?
As someone who talks a lot about redundancy, I was troubled by the thought of talking about the cloud with regard to disaster recovery. City of Asheville CIO Jonathan Feldman, though, was impressed by the ideas and concepts put forth by CloudVelox. Like every good CIO, however, he started small with the company, migrating important, but non-essential elements of the systems under his control, before moving forward with growing capacity.

Communications on the Cloud

Cloud is Not a Replacement
The IT/Telecom space is really a product pushing realm. We talk about solutions, but the solutions are often just hardware and software to replace the hardware and software you have. Now, with this cool new buzz word, "cloud," we can replace the hardware and the software with stuff in "the cloud." "Google found that 81 percent of U.S. respondents believe that implementing Cloud technology will improve employee productivity and 71 percent felt it would reduce the time required to bring new products and services to market."

Cloud Management

A Winning Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Application outages can inflict serious damage on businesses, from travelers stranded because of a booking application outage to a bank being unable to serve its customers online or problems with electronic trading systems.

View from the Cloud

2014 Future of the Cloud Survey has Surprises - Nice Ones for a Change
Did you know that 90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years? Do you realize that 80 percent of it is unstructured? Why is this important? After Gigaom Research and North Bridge Venture Partners released their fourth 2014 Future of Cloud Computing survey, I had a chance to pick the brain of Michael Skok at Gigaom's Structure event. Skok is founder of the Future of Cloud program and General Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. He believes that, within three years, more data will live in the cloud than anywhere else.

Publishers Outlook

EasyNDA Aims to Lubricate Business
We live in a sharing society, which seems to be divided by generational lines that dictate your level of privacy. At 30 and under, you likely share virtually everything about yourself online. Older than that, you probably guard your privacy more. Interestingly, there are companies that look at their internal confidentiality the same way. Some startups will not share anything about their plans for years -preferring to stay in stealth mode, while others start tweeting their plans from the moment they get the idea, through funding and potential IPO.

Silver Lining

Microsoft vs Google: Winner Take Cloud
From Cloud Arena, the bell has just rung signifying the next round of the Microsoft vs. Google battle. This time, it is Microsoft which comes out swinging, announcing it is doing away with OneDrive cloud storage limits for its Office 365 customers-further evidence that storage has become nearly a commodity (sorry, Dropbox).

IN EVERY ISSUE

View From the Cloud
By Peter Bernstein

Publisher's Outlook
By Rich Tehrani

Silver Linings
By Erik Linask