Cloud Tech News

Some manufacturers recently have made an impact with a "five nines" uptime guarantee, so here's some perspective. Five nines is 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, or 25.9 seconds a month. Four nines is 52.6 minutes per year, which is one hour of maintenance, roughly. Realistically, no one can guarantee uptime because uptime really needs to be measured from the host or application perspective.

VMWare is well known for its virtualisation products, so it's not surprising that it is establishing a presence in the cloud computing world. Its hybrid cloud service, VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service, runs off of vSphere and vCloud.

Economic uncertainty surrounding the US government sequester, European debt crisis and weakening GDP in China has resulted in volatile spending patterns across most segments of the market. According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), as a result of the current economic climate, business technology spending was slightly below expectations in the second half of 2012 and first quarter of 2013.

Enterprise security can be a labyrinthine, complex beast, but when we get down to the nitty gritty, security can be simplified by six simple questions: who is logging in, what are they accessing, where is the device from which that person logs in, when was any asset changed, how are they authorised, and what is the impact of the event?

Maintaining security that meets the risk and compliance requirements of the enterprise is a constant challenge. Systems and networks are becoming more open and accessible, but at the same time, threats have become more advanced, persistent, and complex.

The scary part about shopping for a cloud solution is that even if the managed services provider claims compliance, this doesn’t mean that they actually are compliant.

IBM recently made three significant announcements about its vision for how cloud computing will be adopted by enterprise customers. Ovum considers that the concept of an open standard-based approach to cloud computing represents one such way a technology can gain wider adoption, but cautions that it will need wide cross-vendor support to make an impact on the market.

At the beginning of 2013, we sent out invites to our IT infrastructure monitoring community with regards to their adoption or consideration of Converged Infrastructure. As it turns out, not only is Convergence a hot topic right now; 1/3 of our respondents are already running Converged Infrastructure in their environments.