Cloud Computing

The move to adopt cloud technologies by federal agencies has opened up IT opportunities for many vendors. As momentum builds within these agencies to explore the cloud, support is coming from other quarters. Last week, for example, by Rep. Gerry Connolly said that "Cloud computing offers the federal...

Amazon wants to make your cloud computing simple. The company announced Elastic Beanstalk on Wednesday. The application makes it easier to use Amazon's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services. The new application lets developers quickly deploy and manage Web services such as storage, computing...

It may be too late to worry about how 2010 impacted us all, but it is not too late to think about how it will shape events this year. In some respects, 2010 was not a year that changed any one course dramatically. Most of 2010 was built around some familiar themes: consolidation, M&A, emerging t...

I'd like to take this space to elaborate on one of the predictions for 2011 I made last month. I suggested that community clouds aimed at specific vertical markets and supply chain relationships would become more prevalent, as various organizations recognized the value of sharing cloud resources and...

CIOs are increasingly looking to move to the cloud to cut equipment and staffing costs. However, moving to the cloud can often be a difficult transition. It's not just a question of picking up your systems and going; enterprises need to do thorough and careful planning. They must rethink their exist...

Oracle on Wednesday announced two cloud-based office productivity suites for the desktop and mobile devices -- Oracle Cloud Office and Oracle Open Office 3.3. Both products will compete directly with Google Docs and Microsoft Office. The products are designed to be enterprise-level suites with appl...

Communications as a Service. Cloud communications. Hosted PBX. You've heard the terms, and you've witnessed the hype. But what are these technologies? And what will they do for your business? Generally, a CaaS solution involves your business utilizing the resources, equipment and software of a servi...

U.S. government agencies will be moving quickly to implement contracting reforms for the procurement of information technology in the wake of policy changes revealed last week by the Office of Management and Budget. For IT vendors competing for a share of the $80 billion annual federal IT market, ke...

The U.S. General Services Administration selected more than a dozen companies to provide cloud-based information technology products for federal agencies last month, signaling a concrete investment in the cloud environment and underscoring the federal commitment to using the technology. GSA said it ...

The U.S. government has largely failed to achieve the same productivity gains that private sector firms have experienced from utilizing IT -- despite spending $600 billion on information technology over the last decade or so. As a result, the federal Office of Management and Budget has initiated a n...

In what looks like a poke in the eye at Microsoft, Google has introduced Google Message Continuity, a service designed to safeguard Exchange messages through Gmail. The Postini-based service targets those who run Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007. It is designed to make sure users never lose access to...

As the year winds to an end, it is incumbent on all industry pundits to make predictions about what they envision for the coming year. Since I'm often lumped into this category, I'm obliged to offer my views about how the world will evolve over the next 12 months from a cloud computing perspective.

The U.S. government's drive to adopt cloud technology has generated a huge opportunity for vendors -- and has sparked fierce competition for the business. In the latest go round, Unisys, in partnership with Google, emerged victorious with a contract to provide a cloud-based email system for the Gene...

In a move that confirms the U.S. government's recent emphasis on seeking cloud-based information technology solutions, the United States General Services Administration has awarded a contract for converting the agency's email system to a cloud platform. GSA gave the $6.7 million, five-year task orde...

Though evidence abounds of cloud computing moving from the hype stage to successful adoption and deployment, many enterprises are still not clear on how to adopt cloud and make it part of their enterprise IT strategies. This is in part due to a misperception about what cloud computing is and the num...