As the path of Hurricane Irene became apparent late the week of August 22, GreenPages’ Managed Services operations team realized we had some serious planning to do.  

On the morning of Thursday August 25, our Operations Management team reviewed our plan for Hurricane Irene, which was bearing down on our Network Operations Center in Charlestown, MA as well as GreenPages’ Kittery, ME headquarters.  The topic of conversation: how would we maintain availability of our critical systems...

Dell is the latest organisation to take the plunge into the cloud after announcing its new data-storage rental service, due to be rolled out later this year.

After months of rumours circulating about when Dell would be cloud-bound, the announcement came during the VMworld virtualization and cloud conference in Las Vegas this week where Dell said that it was finally taking the plunge.

The new product, unsurprisingly named, Dell Cloud, will be available outside of the US next year and uses VMware's...

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The Canadian Federal Government recently...

I attended the Microsoft Partner Conference last month in Los Angeles, CA, and there were two major topics during the week.  The first was the recent release of Office 365 which is the epicenter of Microsoft’s cloud computing vision.  The second was which Hollywood stars we would see, obviously.   

However, the only star I saw was an Allison Iraheta performance that Microsoft sponsored at the Staples Center.  (Allison, if you were unaware, came in...

Today, the Cloud computing model and the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds provide an very interesting and important value proposition for companies seeking to co-locate their servers virtually or to upgrade the existing colocated servers at a lower cost with better services.

For many years now, small to mid size businesses including ISVs have been running colocated servers with the ISPs and hosting vendors. The cloud computing/IaaS model gives them new opportunities and possibilities to enable the...

The Canadian Federal Government recently announced plans to create a single IT department ‘Shared Services’ that will save $100-200m a year through consolidation-driven efficiencies. As highlighted in this fact sheet there is lots of ‘low hanging fruit’ for cost savings due to a...

As the meteoric rise of the cloud continues, IT leaders are pushing for better standards to address key issues such as security and data portability in the cloud. Only last month another organisation joined the demand for standards. IBM-backed Cloud Standards Customer Council, www.cloud-council.org, announced its committee members which include Citigroup, Costco Wholesale and Deere & Co as well as launching its working groups covering such topics as: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Software as a Service (SaaS);...

Challenging, uncertain economic times accelerate sales cycles and lead to more closed deals for business intelligence software providers.  Companies get an urgency to reduce costs and risks, relying on the insights gained from these...

Amazon's Web Service was temporarily disrupted this week when a data centre in Dublin was struck by lightening, causing a break in service to parts of America’s East Coast and shutting down a number of sites including Netflix, Reddit and Foursquare.

European services were also disrupted but the cloud service was restored quickly after a half hour break. However, the incident was reminiscent of a similar disaster suffered by the organisation in April which lasted for two days.

A spokesperson for...

A particularly powerful area to apply Cloud computing is the automation of “unstructured content workflows” – Those business processes conducted manually via Word documents sent via email, conference calls and other multimedia that sits outside of enterprise applications.

Applications like CRM tackle a particular sub-set of processes relevant to customer information, and can often implement workflows like ‘Sales Quote’ for example. However this is just a record for reporting...