We all know how quickly the cloud is taking over the company IT space.  Well Microsoft (via research firm IDC) has declared in a new study, that, by 2015, 14 million new jobs will be created globally by the Cloud Computing revolution.

Cloud Computing allows critical data and applications to be managed in centralized remote data centers, reducing costs and complexities required to manage a network.

The study also mentions that by 2015, business revenues will increase by up to $1.1 trillion.

Different regions will experience different rates of growth, of course, but the majorit of the growth will likely occur in India and China.

Interestingly, it will also be small and mid sized business driving most of the growth.

“The basic rationale for job growth is that IT innovation allows for business innovation, which leads to business revenue, which leads to job creation — a premise that is not unique to this study,” the IDC report says.

For many organizations, the majority of their IT spending is to maintain older, non-cloud systems.  Moving to the cloud can allow reduce some of that spending according to John Gantz, VP and chief research officer at IDC.

The latest Azure (Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform) outage was the result of a calculation error caused by the extra day In February, according to Microsoft.

On the Azure blog, Bill Laing, VP for Service and Cloud goes on to say they are still trying to determine the exact cause, but that the extra day to be the most likely culprit.

“Windows Azure operations became aware of an issue impacting the compute service in a number of regions. The issue was quickly triaged and it was determined to be caused by a software bug,” he said.

“While final root cause analysis is in progress, this issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year.”

He continues that although they believe they have resolved the issue, some problems may still arise.

“Some sub-regions and customers are still experiencing issues and as a result of these issues they may be experiencing a loss of application functionality. We are actively working to address these remaining issues,” he added.

It is estimated that by 2016, “Cloud Computing” will be a $250 billion business.  More than half of Global 1000 companies are expected to utilize the clouds over the next few years.

Cloud computing allows a seperation between on-site computers (and devices) and resources used to provide access to data and applications.  Among the benefits are reduced cost, complexity, and easy scalability.

How is the cloud trend affecting IT infrasturcture, decisions and processes?

Primarily, companies do not need to spend the enormous amount on hadrware that was needed in the past.  With that goes severe maintenance and labor costs.

Despite the upside, there are a few questions that one must ask before selecting a cloud solution. Among these are:

1) How quickly can it scale?

2) How often does the network experience connectivity issues?

3) What is the absolute speed one can expect when using the service?

Cloud Computing is the new “in thing”, but companies must realize that simply being on The Cloud is not enough – It is important that the provider has the power to adapt to your changing needs, quickly and seamlessly.

Some believe that the flexible nature of cloud computing is changing the dynamics of IT outsourcing.

In a new study from the K2 Advisory group, Chief Information Officers, world-wide, are increasingly adopting more flexible labor options.

“In particular [they] favour outcome-based contracts from firms supplying cloud services,” Dr Katy Ring, director of K2 Advisory, said.

“Whilst the theory is good, large scale uptake of these types of contracts is unlikely in the short term due to levels of vendor risk and lack of experience from both procurement and sourcing advisors.”

The study also points out that internal IT departments will still have a role.  It will be their charge to ensure that cloud technologies actually are suited for the needs of their organization.

Nicola Mortimer, head of ICT and business development at O2, recently said that the cloud is changing business dynamics with a greater emphasis on flexibility and mobility.

http://www.k2advisory.com/

It used to be that even mentioning putting mission critical systems in a virtual environment would get you blank, confused, and sometimes hostile stares.  Over the years, however, virtualization technology has matured significantly, and many businesses have begun to adopt it.

Part of this spur in adoption has been driven by the “cloud” buzz. “We’re telling customers that the more you virtualize, the better it will be for you when you move to cloud,” said Bobby Mulligan, director of online and cloud services at Champion Solutions Group. “At first, they’re cautious, until they get the performance matching up to what production requires. After they see that, they’re a lot more willing to adopt virtualization.”

Still, there is room for the technology to grow.  VMware CEO Paul Maritz recently cited analyst predictions that over half of workloads, industry-wide, will be processed in virtual environments by the end of the year.

Some VARs are noting extreme adoption rates.  Shane Vinup, president and CEO of Minnesota technology solutions provider, Cyber Advisors, estimates that 95% of his customer base has migrated at least one mission critical application to a virtualized environment.

What is driving the adoption

Vinup shows that the “tipping point”, when IT directors and CTOs get over their skepticism and decide to give virtualization a try, occurs when they see that virtualization will not hurt performance.  In fact, in many cases, they will see performance improvements.

Often, virtualization is a step needed on the path to the cloud, and businesses are starting to realize this. “What’s happening is that companies are developing cloud strategies and they’re moving their whole data centers from physical to virtualized in preparation for private cloud offerings,” stated Mike Strohl, president of Entisys, a California based virtualization VAR. “This means everything is being virtualized, except for critical databases.”

Data Warehouses: First Tier is The Final Frontier

Ask most IT directors, and they will shudder at the thought of virtualizing their critical data warehouses. “In most data warehouse environments, there’s a legacy mindset of putting big data on a large physical array and physical server.

But that’s going to hold back the infrastructure from evolving. “We’re getting customers to realize that through virtualization, they’re not going to have to sacrifice performance — they’re actually going to gain and utilize more resources,” Shepard said. “It’s all about application portability and mobility, and you have to do it through virtualization.”

“We’ve done a good job of taking lot of infrastructure applications and virtualizing them. Now the focus is on virtualizing tier one applications,” says Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s president of customer operations.

Microsoft is making adjustments to its (comparatively low-end) cloud platform, Azure, in an effort to woo smaller developers.  As of October 1, “extra-small computer” pricing will be cut by 20 percent.  MS is also allowing users greater flexibility in how they use their cloud computing hours.

Here’s Microsoft’s chart detailing the changes:

Microsoft UK has promised  to give its BPOS customers vouchers against future credits after a seven hour service outage last weekend.

This is the latest in a string of service interruptions for the tech giant this summer.  This time however, it is being labeled as an “Act of God” incident, as human error was not to blame, but thunder storms.

Cloud services from both technology giants went down amidst lightning storms in Ireland yesterday.

According to Amazon’s service health dashboard, there are still issues in the Euro Zone Western region, although other zones are operating at normal availability.

After the outage, Amazon was forced to recover some block stoage servers manually.  Amazon said this process required some capacity devoted towards other tasks to be used, thus hurting overall performance.

Some think so, including GreenPages Technology Solutions CEO Ron Dupler. Monday he was the first speaker at their annual technology summit.  He urged the 100+ CIOs and CTOs that the time is now to seize upon cloud technologies.

“Cloud is here now!” affirmed Dupler in keynote address starting the conference, which has become a summer tradition for information technology (IT) professionals trying to keep their heads above waters in the rapidly changing world of IT.  “It is real. It is happening. And we all need to seize the day and deal with it.”

Dupler said IT officers who did not embrace the cloud would be left behind, and said they were similar to doomsayers of old.

Dupler, for his part, said that IT professionals who dismiss the cloud are  “trying to perpetuate the past” and ultimately are either going to “change their mind” or find themselves “working in new fields.”

The Kittery, Maine-headquartered GreenPages was an early cloud adopter and has been at the front of the cloud computing services paradigm shift advising customers to move to a fully virtualized IT environment in preparation for the cloud computing services era.

Technology research, Gartner, has projected that global cloud computing services revenue will hit $148.8 billion in 2014.

Dupler counseled IT executives attending the summit to look at cloud computing as an “opportunity” instead of a “threat.”

“In the future this is about integrating service platforms,” said Dupler. “It is helping you turn internal IT into a service platform itself and integrating various service platforms.”

http://www.greenpages.com

Dell (NSDQ:Dell) is leveraging its partnership with the Rackspace-led OpenStack open source cloud project to the fullest with the launch of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service system based on the OpenStack cloud operating system.

According to Dell, “OpenStack is a massively scalable infrastructure-as-a-service cloud solution. It offers support for existing ecosystems plus opportunities to influence future direction.”

The Dell Openck Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service arrives just as cloud technology has matured enough for customers to want alternatives to proprietary licensed software cloud models.  John Igoe, director of cloud strategy at Dell put it thusly:

“This is one of the first reference architectures in the environment that can be purchased and deployed,” Igoe said of the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution.

The Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution IaaS play comprises the OpenStack cloud operating system; cloud-optimized Dell PowerEdge C servers; a new Dell-developed OpenStack installer called “Crowbar;” and services from Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders.

According to Igoe, Dell’s new OpenStack cloud system will not cannibalize existing Dell offerings. Igoe said Dell wants its customers to have different options for moving forward with the cloud.

Kudos to Dell for being a leader in this burgeoning space.

Click here for more information about the new Dell OpenStack-Based Cloud.