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...

Confidence in the security of cloud computing is shockingly low, according to a new report.The study by SunGard Research, published last week, was derived from a survey of 250 UK chief information officers (CIOs). Findings showed that a paltry 10 percent were “completely confident” when it came to security and resilience of third party cloud offerings.In addition, a further lack of trust was cited by two-thirds of those polled who had already experienced downtime for cloud applications. However, it wasn't all bad news: 68 percent...

Apple has announced the pricing structure for its latest innovation, iCloud which allows customers to share music, books and photos between multiple computers and mobile devices, including an iPhone and desktop computer.Customers are to be given an initial five gigabytes of free space and those needing more will be able to purchase additional storage in annual chunks. For example, 10GB of additional space will cost £14 ($20) a year, 20GB will cost £28 ($40) and 50GB will cost £70 ($100).However, most customers...