Cloud Tech News

In some ways, everything about IT is about creating uniformity. Standard configurations. Synchronised patches. 1000 identical laptops shipped to all employees. We place a high premium on "everything being exactly the same", and for good reason.

If you've been around the block a few times, you're probably wondering why the title of this post isn't '50 reasons VPNs suck in the cloud'. VPNs have long been the bane of both administrators and users (and let's not forget support). They're clunky, complex, and costly, and the same is true when they're deployed to secure cloud access.

Quick quiz for all you Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

First the good news: Cloud Computing is real, it’s here to stay, we’re doing a reasonably good job of defining it, and it’s already providing significant business value to countless organizations around the globe. Now the bad news: there’s still plenty of confusion over the what Cloud is and how to achieve value with it.

As companies ebb and flow with today’s IT trends, the topic of Cloud Computing continues to be a hot topic – and with good reason too. Adoption of Cloud is on the rise according to our VMworld survey showing more than 75% of attendees planning to use Cloud.

I hate to be breaker of bad news, but the reality is that cloud computing is more than an abstract concept. Just because you moved to the cloud doesn’t mean that all those messy servers, networking devices, storage, environmental controls, etc have all been decommissioned.

What makes some enterprises adopt cloud computing while others, despite being well informed, decline the opportunity? IaaS providers tout lower cloud computing cost, boast easy scalability, and assure security; but these marketing messages have enticed only 10% of U.S. firms to adopt cloud deployments thus far and another 10% plan to do so within the next 2 years. Are some identifiable cloud computing problems preventing the other 80% of firms from embracing the cloud?

One of the most frustrating issues for IT staff is how long data has to be kept around - after all it costs money to store it.