Cloud Computing

Thousands of federal employees will be using cloud-based email systems as government agencies take their first steps in meeting a mandate to inaugurate cloud services within their information technology systems. The White House has directed 25 large agencies to launch at least one cloud-migration pr...

Vendors seeking to provide cloud-based information technology to federal agencies now have some idea of the potential market for their offerings. The General Services Administration has asked vendors to submit bid and qualification information that could lead to their selection as contractors for e...

Today's cloud computing phenomenon is causing havoc among many legacy hardware and software vendors who worry that the increasingly competitive market is going to cannibalize and commoditize their traditional products and services. One company that may sit in an advantageous position is Dell. I've l...

Cloud deployment and delivery architecture offers many opportunities to reduce cost and improve service levels, sometimes too many for the beleaguered IT team. So how can your IT team identify what cloud components might be considered early opportunities for your infrastructure? In Part 1 of this tw...

Cloud deployment and delivery architecture offers many opportunities to reduce costs and improve service levels -- sometimes too many for the beleaguered IT team. So how can your IT team identify what cloud components might be considered early opportunities for your infrastructure? Cloud deployment...

The buzz around cloud computing has been so steady for so long that industry observers should be forgiven if they were lulled to sleep. But events of the past couple of weeks served as a cold water wake-up call that may have obscured cloud's supposedly bright future. The first was an unplanned outag...

Dell's announcement of new solutions and investments around its Virtual Era data center strategy provided clear insights into the company's future plans and direction. The new solutions include the following: vStart; Email and File Archive; and Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions. Dell also plans ...

Salesforce.com is on a buying binge as it attempts to build on its extraordinary sales momentum and broaden its market penetration within existing customer organizations and among new organizations. Since the end of last year, Salesforce.com has acquired five companies starting with Heroku and Etact...

For the past two years, media and vendors alike have proclaimed the cloud to be the next wave of IT -- promising to change computing as we know it. The reactions of many IT veterans who have lived through similar marketing barrages in the past have ranged from a cautious wait-and-see attitude to out...

Amazon surprised the music world this week with the rollout of several products that will allow consumers to store and access their digital music in the cloud. Perhaps no one was more surprised, though, than the music studios, who appeared to have learned the details of the offering shortly before t...

Amazon on Tuesday announced a triple-play entry into the cloud-based music storage field. The online retail giant's trifecta consists of Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Amazon Cloud Player for Android. These three services let customers store music in the cloud and play it on any...

Those of us who have been around the IT block a few times have witnessed remarkable changes in hardware and software capabilities. The big ones are fairly obvious in hindsight: from mainframes to minicomputers in the 1960s; from minis to PCs in the 1980s; and from dumb terminals to client-server te...

HP's recent Strategy Summit in San Francisco provided a coming-out party for the company's CEO Leo Apotheker before 350-plus IT industry analysts, and he wasted little time setting an agenda. Information, Apotheker said, represents the world's "most valuable commodity," reinforcing HP's plan's to su...

Monday was a big day for old-line tech companies: IBM discovered e-commerce and HP discovered cloud computing. HP CEO Leo Apotheker outlined the company's strategy at the HP Summit 2011 in San Francisco on Monday, emphasizing cloud computing, Internet-connected hardware, and its goal to plant webOS ...

More and more, we are seeing tablets and smartphones becoming integral to user access. Coupled with the ever-increasing burden of managing or even seeking to lower storage costs, this has become a major challenge for IT departments. Public cloud storage -- also known as "Storage as a Service" -- mak...