Cloud Tech News

In February 2013, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the beta version of AWS OpsWorks, a configuration and deployment service for AWS public cloud-based applications and their related resources. While AWS usually creates its services from scratch, OpsWorks is based on third-party technology, namely the open source Chef-based SaaS offering, Scalarium, developed by Peritor, a small Germany-based IT service provider that AWS acquired in 2012.

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.

Regardless of whether you approve of the buzzword itself, there is little doubt that the practices gamification embodies and promotes can be beneficial to a wide array of organizations in achieving overarching business strategies and tactical objectives. To reach a nirvana state with any gamification initiative, organizations need to consider the key factors discussed below.

Hurricanes in Vermont. Earthquakes in Washington, D.C. Tornadoes in Missouri. Natural disasters seem to be all over the news lately. Would your firm be able to recover in a reasonable amount of time and resume operations? There’s nothing to stop a flood. As some experts point out, “Water always wins.”

Kirill Tatarinov’s keynote this morning at Microsoft’s Convergence 2013 marks a subtle, yet very significant shift in how this technology leader is marketing itself to partners and the outside world. They are humanizing their marketing, messaging and products.

Over the last five years a number of new technologies that provide huge technological advantages (and create management headaches) have been developed. We have attempted to leverage these advances to the benefit of our organizations, while at the same time struggling with how to incorporate them into our established IT management methodologies.

The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is growing up. Vendors are endeavoring not only to help enterprises define, configure, and deploy increasingly complex applications, but also to abstract these applications from the underlying IaaS infrastructure. It is shifting from a bottom-up infrastructure-centric view to a top-down application-centric view.