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.

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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.

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.

Although there is malware attacking  all operating systems, increasingly the attacks are targeting the Android Market.

One of the key strengths of Android, being open source, also provides an avenue for exploitation.  The Android Market doesn’t have the stringent filtering process used by Apple, for example, meaning that it is much easier to become infected with malicious software.  Google has partially remedied the situation with an Android “Kill Switch” update, but doesn’t go far enough.

Mobile security can be enhanced in many ways.  For example, BES has hundreds of policies that can be controlled and used to help lock down devices for enhanced security.

In addition, here are some easy user-level tips to be more secure:

• Only download from trusted sources

• Be mindful of what persmissions and access the downloaded app will request

• Keep your Mobile OS and software up-to-date

• Avoid sites that have questionable content.  They are havens for malware.

• VPN Access: When accessing corporate network resources via smartphone, use a SSL VPN connection to secure the session.

• Password protect your mobile device to avoid personal data being accessed

The Mobile device revolution has increased productivity for businesses, and made communication more convenient for the public at large, but these benefits do not come without risks.  Remain mindful of these risks, and take appropriate precautions so that your mobile device, data,m and personal information are secure.

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/

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.

Here’s Microsoft’s chart detailing the changes:

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.