Cloud Computing / Features

After years of planning, and months of supplier selection, the NSW government Department of Services, Technology and Administration (DSTA) has called for proposals for its data centre reform program, which will consolidate some 100 disparate facilities into two. The five shortlisted suppliers had until the end of January to put forward their ideas and capabilities for the shared data centres — either existing or purpose-built facilities — for government agencies across the state.

The shortfalls of Google Apps will likely resonate with the inordinate amount of Microsoft shops in the industry. Years of investment in SharePoint developers, Exchange support teams and business processes built around the fickle aspects of Microsoft Office and its ribbon interface cannot be discarded easily. That’s ultimately where Microsoft’s strength is likely to reside. No matter when its Office 365 bundle is released, and despite numerous attempts to forge links between legacy applications and Google Apps, the complexity of a migration for a large organisation would likely be a headache most CIOs are eager to avoid. At least, that can be said for Coca Cola Amatil CIO, Barry Simpson.

Ultimately, some of the problems facing Microsoft’s Cloud strategy are those affecting many of its long-standing product suites. “Clearly Microsoft is trying to back-solve that problem to the legacy product set and clearly that’s problematic,” AAPT’s chief operating officer and effective CIO, David Yuile, says.

IT behemoths, Microsoft and Google, have for years been embroiled in battles over who would control the move by different industries to the Cloud. Since at least 2007, Australian universities and education authorities eager to outsource their email have turned to either provider in lieu of limited competition from the market. For the next battle, however, the stakes are higher. Both Google and Microsoft are betting all of their chips on a sector that is likely to prove much more lucrative than any before it: Enterprise.

Rackspace will help enterprises build private clouds using the OpenStack cloud operating system, the company announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, Dell is seeking enterprises and service providers for proof-of-concept OpenStack trials with its Dell PowerEdge C family of servers.

When people moved from paper to digital files on a computer, it didn't take long to realize that you can get just as burdened by digital stuff as by hard copies. Before long, companies sprang up to sell utility programs to help you find and organize the stuff on your computer. We're going through a similar cycle right now, with many of us moving our digital assets to servers in the cloud, and finding that managing stuff scattered across a myriad of sites belonging to a myriad of companies can be terribly frustrating.

There are more than a few critics of cloud computing, even at PCWorld; I'm probably one of them. But I've been turning over in my mind different perspectives on the cloud. I've tried to set aside the views of the IT executive, who seems to dominate the debate.

Yet another survey is indicating that security is a big issue for those intending to take up cloud computing.

Most of us don't like paying for antivirus (AV) software, but at least home users can rely on one of the free options, such as Microsoft Security Essentials, avast!, or AVG Free.

When Ben Fried left his post as IT managing director at Morgan Stanley and took over as Google's CIO in May 2008, he knew what he was getting into: supporting a user base full of technology experts and computer industry stars, like co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt and Vice President Vint Cerf. In a recent interview with IDG News Service, Fried spoke candidly about his job and shared tips and advice for fellow CIOs, including the urgent need for tablet device strategies. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

It's always a challenge for IT departments to anticipate how corporate technical demands will evolve, especially when IT budgets have been as tight as a drum for two years.

For years, using voice recognition technology on phones or other devices has been a novelty -- something people try once but never again, usually because it works so poorly. But recent developments, including harnessing the computational power of the cloud, have made it more usable and will make it even better in the near future, according to Microsoft.

Cloud computing is changing the way we do business but as Zachary Ochieng finds out, it is the first baptism of fire for a number of CIOs.

It is 8pm midweek and three senior executives at Altium are working on a document they need first thing the next day — a presentation to staff about behavioural change. The program manager is editing text; the company president is asking questions about the program; and CIO, Alan Perkins, is answering his president’s questions.

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.

Sydney-based Verb IT is the first company in the Asia Pacific region to provision an HP Performance Optimised Datacentre (POD) next-generation data centre in a shipping container. The new Verb DC site where the POD is located is a standard industrial warehouse in Wyong on the NSW Central Coast (one hour north of Sydney). Verb DC is schedueld to go live in September after a 14-week project, including the POD delivery time. In what is being painted as a big win for the Central Coast IT industry, the new POD will provide computing services to local businesses and the world.

There has been a spate of interesting - and contradictory - stories and research reports about how enterprises are or will embrace cloud computing, topped off by a report by Forrester analyst James Staten that concludes that for all the talk about private clouds, they're a pipe dream for all but a few enterprises.

The promise of cost savings derived from cloud computing is attractive, but concrete financial returns are not always quickly achieved. Except, perhaps, when it comes to disaster recovery.

Cloud computing promises the ability to move applications and systems to the location and platform that makes the most sense--in terms of risk and economics--at any given time.

Though most U.S. companies still list customer and other corporate information as their most valuable assets, many keep pushing this data farther from safe lockdown in the data center--and are about to give it another strong shove in that direction.