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Why One CIO is Pleased with the Cloud

Adnan Raja September 24, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting, Security 0 Comments

Like many other top IT executives in the public and private sectors, a CIO at the National Institutes of Health, Alastair Thomson, is guiding his agency’s staff toward the cloud.

  • Science is Getting Bigger
  • Big Data Fueling Push toward Cloud at NHLBI
  • The Power of Invisibility
  • Hello, I’m Available
  • Security as a Priority

Science is Getting Bigger

Science is ballooning. According to two bibliometric researchers, Ruediger Mutz of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Lutz Bornmann of Germany’s Max Planck Society, the amount of published science is growing at 8-9% per year. “That equates to a doubling of global scientific output roughly every nine years,” explains the British journal Nature. “Bornmann and Mutz find that global scientific output has probably kept up this dizzying rate of increase since the end of World War II.”

Publication is of course not the only way science is growing, as CIOs at science-oriented organizations are reminded on an everyday basis by the scope of their projects. The data used for research used to be discussed in terms of megabytes, then gigabytes. Today, it’s typical for a project to be working at the level of terabytes or petabytes.

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Study: Cloud Beats Dedicated Systems on Availability

Adnan Raja September 16, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting 0 Comments

Availability is one of the biggest concerns of information technology chiefs. The NIH ran a study comparing availability of cloud and dedicated machines. Cloud won.

  • Availability Among Top Three CIO Concerns
  • Availability: Cloud Hosting vs. Dedicated Servers
  • Cloud for Fast Processing of Huge Datasets

Availability Among Top Three CIO Concerns

Unfortunately for CIOs, there are many aspects of their role that can be stressful. For a survey featured in CIO magazine in 2015, 276 CIOs and other top IT leaders discussed the elements that can give them the most trouble; and the top three were security, availability, and making the right hires.

Let’s look specifically at the issue of downtime; in other words, the need to optimize availability.

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Vendors Bolstering Thin Clients to Account for Cloud-Hosted Desktops

Adnan Raja September 8, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting 0 Comments

Vendors such as IGEL Technology, HP, and Dell are boosting their support for cloud desktops to be used with their thin clients. This trend shows how manufacturers are having to keep pace as cloud becomes increasingly prevalent.

  • Thin Clients Move to Embrace Cloud
  • Thin Client OS Issues: Altra Federal Credit Union’s Experience
  • Thin & Zero Clients Expand Support of Protocols
  • Blast 2.0
  • Gartner: 38.4% IaaS Growth in 2016

Thin Clients Move to Embrace Cloud

In this increasingly cloud-based world, the makers of thin clients are modifying them so that their customers can seamlessly take advantage of cloud-hosted desktops and software.

The extent to which the business world has implemented desktops and software delivered through cloud hosting has expanded in recent years, with companies increasingly wanting to have third parties take care of managing the infrastructure. Meanwhile, the thin client market has been struggling, especially because low-end PCs have grown closer in cost. In order to stay in the game and get the attention of desktop virtualization companies, thin client heavy-hitters, including Dell, IGEL, and HP, have taken steps to support cloud-hosted desktops.

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Achieving Operational Excellence in the Era of Cloud Hosting

Adnan Raja September 6, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting 0 Comments

In the age of cloud hosting, as it’s increasingly adopted by enterprises, chief information officers can struggle to maintain operational excellence. Here’s how to deliver consistency with OE as you adopt cloud.

  • Challenges of the Multiple-Vendor Cloud World
  • Knowing What You Mean by “Operational Excellence”
  • Partner with the Provider so You Can Achieve OE
  • Governance of the OE Plan
  • Protecting Your Partnerships
  • Choosing a Strong, Secure Cloud Hosting Partner

Challenges of the Multiple-Vendor Cloud World

In 2016, the business world is benefiting from an increasingly broad variety of cloud tools; and the extent to which they are being adopted continues to grow. For information chiefs in enterprises with sizable on-site app hosting infrastructures who are in the process of adopting cloud more aggressively, you are going to face some threats to the continuity of strong computing operations. In a multi-vendor hosting scenario (i.e., that of cloud), on-site ways to check systems, strategize for disaster recovery, process transactions, manage system modifications, and schedule tasks are a few examples of the many IT responsibilities that can become unexpectedly complicated. Leaders both in business and IT will often not think it’s necessary to pay as much attention to these elements in the expanding cloud climate. However, everything must be integrated in some manner, and with the multi-cloud or multi-vendor situation which is becoming so common, it’s challenging for the quality of operations of your IT services not to suffer.

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Is Cloud Hosting the Future of Business?

Adnan Raja August 29, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting 0 Comments

It’s often difficult to tell if a technology is really taking hold, or if news of its trendiness is mostly industry chatter of businesses that are invested and trying to sell their biased perspective. Is cloud the future, or is it just hype?

  • What is Cloud Computing or Cloud Hosting?
  • How Fast is the Rise of Cloud, Especially IaaS?
  • Pros & Cons of Cloud
  • Strong Cloud Hosting for Your Business

When you search for “cloud computing” on Google, you get 74 million results. Compare that to “dedicated server,” which has only 569,000 results. That gives you a sense of the massiveness of this tech concept. Of course the cloud transcends the datacenter to be a major topic in consumer computing, such as iCloud storage, as well.

To what extent, though, does cloud go beyond being a trend? Is cloud hosting the future of business? Let’s look at what cloud computing is; forecasts on its growth; and pros and cons of this form of computing.

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Computing as a Cloud-Hosted Utility Has Become a Mainstream Idea

Adnan Raja August 22, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting 0 Comments

Small and medium businesses are increasingly adopting cloud, according to a recent survey. In fact, it is almost ubiquitous, with 95% of SMBs now using cloud or planning to use it. As businesses are increasingly using these services, the notion of cloud as a utility is going mainstream.

  • Business Cloud on the Rise: Survey
  • Cloud Hosting as a Utility
  • Business & On-Demand Cloud Hosting

Business Cloud on the Rise: Survey

Almost 19 out of every 20 SMBs currently use a cloud service or are in the planning stages of adopting one, according to a recent survey. Many companies are transitioning to cloud hosting because they are frustrated with their providers of traditional web hosting services.

The poll, from industry research outfit Clutch.co, looked at 300 companies with fewer than 1000 employees. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) said that they have switched hosting web providers since 2011. Fully 86% of businesses said that they had problems with their web host within the last twelve months.

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Risk Management for Healthcare Cloud Hosting

Sam Guiliano August 13, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting, Healthcare IT 0 Comments

Following a two-year deceleration of cloud growth, the technology again gathered steam in 2015. With the vast majority of healthcare providers now adopting cloud, it’s become critical to consider risk management for this transition. Here is a five-stage plan to see your organization through.

  • Slow-Down & Speed-Up of Cloud in Business
  • Hybrid Cloud and Risk Management in Healthcare
  • Five-Stage Cloud Risk Management for HIT
  • Managing HIT risk with Your cChoice of Cloud Vendor

Slow-Down & Speed-Up of Cloud in Business

In 2013 and 2014, there was a slow-down in the previously breathtaking ascent of cloud hosting. However, last year, the industry accelerated again, with 5.4% more organizations adopting the IT method.

Business generally has been moving to cloud, but healthcare companies have been somewhat more hesitant to implement these systems because of concerns with compliance and security. Nonetheless, 5 of 6 healthcare providers (83%) had cloud in place even back in 2014, according to the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Furthermore, Becker’s Healthcare notes in 2016 that “[c]ompared to previous years, providers are more likely to use cloud implementations and leverage mobile and analytics capabilities in the cloud than before.”

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Cloud: Public, Private, or Somewhere in Between?

Adnan Raja August 3, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting 0 Comments

Public and private clouds both have their advantages. To benefit from both of their strengths, many enterprises are choosing a hybrid cloud.

  • Public and Private Cloud
  • Why are Some Companies Choosing Hybrid?
  • Optimizing Agility
  • Maintaining Compliance
  • Facilitating Partnerships
  • Leveraging Real-Time Decisions
  • Moving Forward with Cloud

Cloud is generally considered a solution that can help businesses control their expenses while giving them the agility to innovate and outmaneuver their competition. The question many organizations have is which type of cloud makes the most sense: public, private, or hybrid. Let’s look at general understandings of the public and private categories and why many enterprises are choosing the compromise of a hybrid.

Public and Private Cloud

Total expenditure on cloud infrastructure is projected at $38.2 billion this year by IDC. This technology is only continuing to grow, so businesses have options – it’s just a matter of deciding which route to take. It used to be that organizations would determine which one of those models made sense primarily based on their industry. Finance companies would generally choose private cloud, for instance. By keeping their cloud in-house, they were able to retain full control of security parameters and know where data was at all times for easier compliance with regulations.

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Understanding Hybrid Cloud

Adnan Raja August 2, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting 0 Comments

As businesses tried to determine whether they should continue to keep their IT on-site or process it with third-party cloud hosts, many ended up choosing a compromise: hybrid cloud.

  • The Hybrid Cloud: What is it?
  • Why do Some Companies Choose Hybrid?
  • Hybrid Doesn’t Always Make Sense
  • Examples of Hybrid Cloud Use
  • Strong Hosting Partner for Your Hybrid Cloud

For the first few years that cloud was becoming prominent, it was praised by IT and finance professionals. However, those who were working with extremely sensitive or mission-critical systems remained reluctant about the technology. What enterprises started to do was strike a balance and adopt the hybrid model, rather than going all-in with either in-house or public systems.

The Hybrid Cloud: What is it?

A hybrid cloud mixes together public cloud hosting from an infrastructure-as-a-service vendor (a company that provides cloud servers) with a private cloud set up internally. In other words, the public and private cloud systems are distinct and established in separate locations, each with their own data centers and specifications. They interact through an encrypted connection which allows apps and information to flow between the two.

It’s critical to understand that hybrid is not one cloud with public and private aspects but two completely different clouds joined together, notes James Sanders of ZDNet. “This allows organizations to store protected or privileged data on a private cloud, while retaining the ability to leverage computational resources from the public cloud to run applications that rely on this data,” he says.

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Cloud Backend: The Chief Concern for IoT Standards?

Sam Guiliano July 27, 2016 by under Cloud Hosting, Technology 0 Comments

The Internet of thing is growing at a breathtaking pace. That means connectivity at both home and work will become more and more complex. As the IoT makes computing increasingly complicated, some say we should be concerned primarily with the backend rather than interoperability.

  • Speed of IoT Growth
  • A Jumble of Disconnected Cloud Services
  • The Issue of Interoperability
  • Changing the IoT Standardization Focus to the Backend
  • Cloud that Meets Rigorous Standards

Speed of IoT Growth

The Internet of things is expanding at a rapid rate as enterprises and vendors are becoming more aware of the possibilities presented by this all-inclusive approach to connectivity. The IoT market was forecast last year by IDC to grow at a whopping 16.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2014 and 2020, rising from $655.8 billion to $1.7 trillion. To put that into perspective, it’s nearly as fast as the growth of public cloud, which is predicted by IDC to achieve a 19.4% CAGR between 2015 and 2019; and keep in mind that much of that public cloud growth will actually be because of the growth of IoT.

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