In the last 15 years, I wrote the first service level agreement for the company that invented data center colocation, and I drove two publicly traded IT software and hardware companies with traditional enterprise licensing terms to move to usage-based pricing models. The experience has taught me a lot about how large enterprises think about…
Read MoreThe first step of the journey to the cloud for enterprises seems to be complete. The proof is that few enterprises today are running their infrastructure in an entirely cloud-free manner. Looking back over the past few years, the clear motivation for the first step to the cloud was usually cost-cutting and driving efficiency. Today,…
Read MoreWow. Gartner says that, “The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of the new IT spend.” Even better, they predict, “2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises…
Read MoreThese days, it is difficult to determine whether a cloud has actually gone down. There might be a brief outage, but caching and other systems kick in, and it is largely invisible. If your cloud-resident application is available and working for 90% of your audience, but not the other 10, is the cloud up or…
Read MoreWhen most IT professionals talk about cloud computing, they are thinking about infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or maybe platform as a service (PaaS). What does not come to mind easily is that a huge percentage of IaaS is put to use to drive software as a service (SaaS) offerings, and SaaS itself is the…
Read MoreThe reason so many people attended the talk is that there are fundamental questions over the cloud model in APAC. Last year, at the same conference, many of the questions and comments from IT executives in China focused on the ROI and deployment cloud computing itself. Since then, a lot of technology infrastructure has moved to the cloud, but it also pull the business processes along with it so that the business processes themselves are spread across the cloud. IDC estimates that cloud computing has generated 14 million jobs worldwide and innovation result from cloud could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues. That’s why this year, it seems like the general consensus in APAC is…
Read MoreIf you still believe that your systems management consoles should be running on servers in your data center, you’re definitely from the pre-cloud era. Even if you believe your systems management and security consoles should be running on infrastructure as a service instances you control, you’re also out of date. The evidence is in, and…
Read MoreAmazon Web Services did it again. Its new service, OpsWorks, is an application management service with the ability to manage applications of any scale or complexity in the AWS cloud. This integrated system manages resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, software updates, and monitoring and access control. The service is another offering from the leader in…
Read More“Software defined” is the latest buzzword in IT and cloud. Some people hate it because marketers are jumping on ”software defined” almost as fast as they jumped on the word “cloud” years before they had real cloud products. Cloudwashing was a real phenomenon, and it was easy to say. “Software Defined Washing” just doesn’t roll…
Read MoreRecently I was honored to give a keynote about the future of cloud security at the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA 2013 . This video is worth your time to watch. It covers a brief history of cloud security, where it is headed, and who it will impact. The bottom line is that no…
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