CLOUD COMPUTING — 4th Quarter 2014

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. Read More >>>

What the Xbox Live Outage Can Teach Us
What happens when the cloud fails and customers aren't able to access their resources, applications, data, or services? The cloud is supposed to be the great equalizer, providing scalability, security, and reliability, ensuring that all your apps and services are available whenever you need them. In fact, Ted Brown writes starting on page 22 about why managed Office 365 is a great alternative for SMBs.

2015: The Year of Bigger, Better, Faster, and Cheaper Cloud
With 2015 around the corner, now seems like a great time for everyone to prognosticate on what's going to happen next year. With that being said, I'll throw my hat in the ring and submit some of my ideas on where I think things will go next year. It will be fun to look back and see where I was right and where I was wrong.

Three Keys to Cloud in 2015
Now that cloud services have become part of IT's "new normal," commonly referred to as "Hybrid," it seems obvious that the approaches and tools we use to manage IT would also evolve and mature, though the pace of evolution varies amongst companies, of course. According to a Gartner survey, more than 55% of CIOs indicate they would host all critical apps in the cloud by 2020. Cloud services use cases can vary greatly, but often hold common themes around converting traditional application to SaaS, or adding disaster recovery to existing datacenters with RaaS.

Delivering the Invisible
Harry Beckwith wrote a good book titled, Selling the Invisible. When we are selling cloud services, we are selling the removal of hardware from the premise. Cloud services are essentially the invisible, the intangible. The real feat, though, is to deliver the invisible. The whole idea of being a technology provider is that you make the technology invisible to the customer.

Opengear Adds Cellular Failover Capability to Support
As cloud computing adoption continues to grow, the market is also evolving, with ever-increasing needs being placed on cloud resources, making capabilities that only yesterday were considered "next-gen," yesterday's news. One of the trends emerging from the evolution of cloud computing is Fog Computing. The idea is that, in order to create faster and more efficient applications and services, processing power must be moved closer to the user, to the network edge.

Four Rules for Enterprise Application Performance
In my role as Director of Product Management at BlueStripe Software, I get to see how large-scale distributed enterprise applications are designed and how they work (and don't work). I engage with customers and get to see their distributed applications up close. I've personally reviewed hundreds of application deployments across a variety of industries, application types, technology stacks, and architectural philosophies. And I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to talk with IT Executives about the problems that concern them the most.

Single Sign-on for Cloud and On-premises Apps
A few years ago, no one was sure business operations should be run from the cloud, and enterprise organizations spent significant time and money making sure applications were safe and sound and securely locked down in their on-premises environments. The mere notion of turning them over to an outside cloud service provider sparked fears for the security and privacy of corporate data. On-premises access control was relatively easy, but business apps stored in the cloud relied on the provider's security policies, which may or may not have been as good as what the organization could provide on-premises.

It's Time to Re-evaluate Cloud Deployment and Management
It's exciting to see that cloud is being embraced by so many. From small businesses to the largest, cloud computing solutions are eagerly being rolled out for CRM, telephony, UC, accounting, storage and anything else you can think of. While the benefits of the tech are clear, what we need to worry about now is management of these cloud solutions.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), Mobility and the Cloud, Perfect Together?
There is no denying that when it comes to "Big Things" in the technology world, whether they are next or already here, if look at any predictions list for 2015 you are more than likely to see the terms Internet of Things (IoT), mobility and cloud as the headline categories with a lot of granularity on what comes next under each. Interestingly, as we move forward, they are not only highly inter-related, but are proving to be virtually and physically almost perfect together.