CLOUD COMPUTING — 3rd Quarter 2015

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... Read More >>>



Feature Articles

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.

Renting Your Infrastructure? Ensuring Security When You No Longer Own the Network
The popularity, agility and cost benefits of the cloud have enticed many companies - even some large enterprises, like Time and Yamaha - to ditch their data centers and move their corporate networks entirely to cloud providers like AWS, Google or Microsoft. It's a trend that has strong momentum.

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.

Pros and Cons of Public and Private Cloud Platforms
For the past few years, enterprises have grappled with the personal cloud dilemma: “Should we use private or public cloud?” To some degree this has moved beyond a binary, either-or decision and now, many enterprises are using both.

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.

COLUMNS

Silver Lining

The Cloud Grows Up
When I think back over the past few years to the conversations I've had with various cloud insiders, it's no small wonder how quickly the industry has grown in a relatively short time. On the one hand, two to three years is an eternity in technology, but with the skepticism surrounding the idea of moving business critical applications and data into what was effectively an unknown environment, there was much to overcome and an entire industry driving growth. - 12/15/2015

State of Cloud Computing

The Cloud Wars: The Battle for Enterprise IT has Just Begun
Do you remember when Amazon was known mostly for selling books online, Google was just a search engine, and Dell just built PCs? Dell recently acquired enterprise storage giant EMC, more evidence of a growing trend that companies, while still rooted in traditional IT infrastructure, are embracing the cloud. - 12/15/2015

Cloud Management

How the Hybrid Cloud Hit the Mainstream
Cloud computing is now the de facto standard for most businesses, and few companies are settling for just one or two public and private cloud solutions. Hybrid cloud computing has reached a tipping point for mainstream adoption, due to technology advancements that offer flexible cloud management capabilities. - 12/15/2015

Cloud Integration

Avoiding Cloud Silos
The cloud has transformed the way companies purchase and deploy software. Department managers buy best-of-breed solutions for marketing automation, budgeting and forecasting, financials, procurement, expense management and more. This open marketplace can create “cloud silos,” which offer a single department the opportunity to increase productivity, but can actually hamper visibility into business drivers when data in these critical systems have to be accessed across or between systems. - 12/15/2015

Business Continuity

Business Continuity is Not Just Disaster Recovery
What is the most important asset that your business owns? Many – even most – executives would answer this question with elements of the business's technology infrastructure: data, IT, telecommunications, manufacturing systems, and so on. To be sure, business continuity means keeping these sectors up and running under the most demanding conditions using techniques such as data backup, redundancy, and so on. - 12/15/2015

Publisher Outlook

Nuance Brings Artificial Intelligence to the Omnichannel World
"The robots aren't coming, they are here," is all I could think of as I mulled over my notes from a recent meeting with Gregory Pal (News - Alert), Vice President, Marketing, Strategy & Business Development at Nuance Communications. Coincidently I also happened upon an article at the same time about how robots are doing more of the writing of the stories you read from the Associated Press – saving time and money and, more importantly, allowing sharing of stories that are of interest to various groups, but which couldn't previously be covered profitably. - 12/15/2015

View from the Cloud

Welcome to Your Cloud Security Resource
(ISC)2 and TMC (News - Alert) recently launched the Cloud Security Resource Community (www.cloudsecurityresource.com), which I hope will quickly become your go-to place for news, information, insights and links to a wealth of resources for IT cloud security professionals. It is also a destination I hope you will rely on often as a place that enables all of your organization's employees, including C-levels, to better understand the challenges that moving to an increasingly always on, everywhere connected, cloud-centric world poses. - 12/15/2015

Application Development

DevOps: What, Why and How
DevOps (Development + Operations) is defined by Wikipedia as a software method that emphasizes communication, collaboration, integration, automation, and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other IT professionals. In spirit, it is a new movement that seeks to integrate all parts of the software development cycle with actual operations, so they run as a team rather than dis-jointed or individual silos that don't communicate well with each other. It has recently taken off due to the rise of mobile applications, Software-as-a-Service, or any other online services that require constant production 24x7x365, versus the prior era of selling packaged software. - 12/15/2015

IN EVERY ISSUE

View From the Cloud
By Peter Bernstein

Publisher's Outlook
By Rich Tehrani

Silver Linings
By Erik Linask