CLOUD COMPUTING — 3rd Quarter 2016

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... Read More >>>



Feature Articles

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COLUMNS

View from the Cloud

The State of the Cloud 2016, According to Rolta AdvizeX
Today I moderated a really interesting webinar called "The State of the Cloud in 2016" that featured speaker Paul Timmerman, who is the CTO and senior vice president of business development for technology infrastructure solutions provider Rolta AdvizeX. So I thought I'd use this space to tell you a little bit about that. - 10/31/2016

Cloud & Virtualization

Settling the Question: What is the Cloud?
What is the cloud? Lately I've been asking IT experts that question, and I'm amazed by the variety of responses. - 10/31/2016

Cloud Communications

Selling More Cloud via Channel Partners
In an interview with Paula Bernier, the new editorial lead on Cloud Computing Magazine, I was asked how to get channel partners to sell more cloud services either on top of network or in place of network. I have been on more than one webinar where the object of the presentation is to puke as much information out in the allotted time as possible. That doesn't work. Ever. - 10/31/2016

Publisher’s Outlook

You Can Get Fired for Choosing Dropbox: A True Story
An MSP is contacted by a publicly-traded company looking for help managing its IT. When the MSP goes to the company conference room to explain how it can protect the company's servers, the decision-maker explains that the company doesn't need servers, it is using Dropbox. - 10/31/2016

Silver Lining

State of the Magazine, State of the Market
The cloud has enabled enterprises and small and medium businesses to more easily and affordably acquire the communications and computing resources they need to be more competitive. That's because the cloud allows for shared but secure resources in multi-party environments. With the cloud, everybody wins, given the decreased strain on users' IT departments; just-in-time scalability; and, according to some sources, lower costs. But the argument for moving to the cloud is less about actual cost savings and more about the ability to quickly and easily spin up the necessary resources to support new services. - 10/31/2016

IN EVERY ISSUE

View From the Cloud
By Peter Bernstein

Publisher's Outlook
By Rich Tehrani

Silver Linings
By Erik Linask