CLOUD COMPUTING — 2nd Quarter 2013

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. Read More >>>



Feature Articles

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

COLUMNS

THE FUTURE OF CLOUD

The Cloud: The Great Equalizer for the Small Contact Center
Good news. This is changing. Market leaders are now offering powerful, simple and cost-effective cloud solutions designed specifically for small contact centers. And not surprisingly, these offerings are inherently more mature and scalable. Small centers no longer have to settle. They now have access to the same cloud platforms as the big boys. The cloud is the great equalizer.

CLOUD COMMUNICATIONS

UCaaS: Recognizing Favorable Shifts and Their Implications for Service Providers
It's undeniable that the unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) space is kicking into high gear. Recently, its growth has been the subject of deep analysis and reports that have confirmed expedient growth for the market over the next several years. In fact, UCaaS subscriber numbers are forecasted to grow sixteen-fold over the next five years, and UCaaS revenues expected to grow almost as quickly, according to Synergy Research Group.

CLOUD STORAGE

The New World of Hyper-Scale Unstructured Data
Such rich media represents a unique and rapidly proliferating type of Big Data best characterized as "Big Unstructured Data." Usually the term Big Data refers to analytics performed on relative small structured data files. In contrast Big Unstructured Data refers to massive size files as typified by HD video and other video files that are each hundreds of gigabytes. In media and entertainment (M&E) specifically, the advent of High-Frame Rate (HFR) movies, at 48 frames per second, and soon in 60 frames per second and even higher, easily will be generating10's of Terabytes of digital file content per hour. Imagine the countless hours of video that will eventually be captured and maintained across the worl

THE OPEN CLOUD

Open Projects Drive the Open Cloud
Open source software is licensed via an open source license, examples of which include Apache, GPL, GNU and MIT licenses. The copyright holder is usually a foundation established for the purpose, and licenses generally cover rights to study, change and distribute the software at no charge and for most any purpose. The code is developed in an open, collaborative manner by volunteer developers and by commercial entities interested in leveraging the software for use in their own products.

CLOUD COMPLIANCE

Shared Infrastructure, Shared Options
Deciding whether to invest in a cloud offering or not on the surface seems to be a simple financial exercise. The ability of the provider to share the cost of what would otherwise likely be expensive infrastructure across many customer benefits everyone with lower costs. And it's not just the capital investment that's shared, it's the ongoing operating expenses associated with maintenance that gets shared, too. But sharing network infrastructure means sharing network infrastructure everything - including configuration options that may or may not be appropriate for your application, and the risk that goes along with it.

CLOUD SECURITY

Five Trend-Drivers for Cloud Security in 2013
What's ahead for the cloud in 2013? You can expect a growing recognition of the ROI-driven value of investments in cloud security. Once considered relatively small, the global cloud security market is projected to reach more than $6 billion in revenue by 2016, according to Transparency Market Research.

CLOUD CONVERSATION

The Year of the Hybrid Cloud for the Enterprise
The challenge for enterprise-scale companies is in making hybrid cloud as reliable and as manageable as their time-tested data center systems. To achieve the increased flexibility and cost savings that cloud deployments offer, application management and cloud service vendors are stepping up to provide increased visibility into cloud-based application performance. As IT operations teams realize this shift in management capabilities, they will quickly move to deploy applications in hybrid cloud environments.

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.

IN EVERY ISSUE

View From the Cloud
By Erin E. Harrison

Publisher's Outlook
By Rich Tehrani

Silver Lining
By Erik Linask