Cel mai deschis blog despre afaceri și tehnologie

As I already said in a previous post, there are a number of questions that show up frequently enough regarding the cloud computing and the switch to cloud. And the decision to migrate or not to cloud solutions hangs often by the answers to those questions.

The first question is „What is the true meaning of the Cloud?”. As with any major technology transformation, there are many definitions of cloud computing. In very simple terms, cloud computing is a new consumption and delivery model for information technology (IT) and business services that is characterized by: on-demand self-service, location independent resource pooling, rapid horizontal and vertical scaling, pay-per-use. And the exciting impact comes from enabling new service consumption and delivery models that support business model innovation.

The second is „What applications should I move to the cloud and what changes to my network do I have to make to use Cloud?” A wide variety of applications are good candidates to be moved to the cloud. Legacy applications are certainly great candidates for offloading from your internal data centers. Web servers and web applications like SharePoint, .NET, Drupal, Wordpress, Blogspot, Wikis, corporate intranets are all good candidates. As most cloud`experts said, when selecting applications for the cloud you need to be aware of the distance between the data center and the cloud region you’ve selected. According to Forrester Research, the changes to a company network are minimals. Because we taking about an outbound traffic only, nothing inbound. Therefore are no changes to your network configurations.

„How can I implement the Cloud computing security?” is the third question that show up frequently. When an organization decides to move to the cloud, it must first determine its foundational controls which form the backbone of the company’s security principles. Plans must be laid out in order to secure the company’s assets so that when the company subscribes to cloud computing, all the needed security controls must already be in place. Also, the company will have to be workload-focused instead of cloud-focused. When moving to the cloud, the organization must take into consideration each workload, so that it will be able to enforce a security program which is focused on the workload with a possibility to implement non-traditional security measures.

Now, having the answers for the most important questions asked before switching to the cloud, your decision related to adopting or not adopting cloud computing technology can be easily taken.

Sources: educause.eu, infoworld.com, ComputerWorld, Forrester Research

Do you use webmail? Or Gmail / Yahoo! Mail / Hotmail, etc? Do you communicate by messenger, whether it’s GTalk, Live Messenger, Yahoo, Skype or others? Then it means that you are in „cloud”. Messenger is the simplest example of cloud: an application that uses an instant communication service hosted on a server about which you know nothing.

Two of the most prestigious research and consulting companies in business software (Gartner and Forrester Research) predicted an increased activity in the cloud computing area for 2012-2013. Increasing sales, diversifying offers, the appearance of new „clouds” (public or private), are just few of the aspects on which Gartner & Forrester experts bets.

Organizations gain a competitive advantage when they can increase the sophistication of their BI applications. One way to achieve this is to move beyond basic historical reporting and evolve to strategic, predictive analytics and alerts that help anticipate the likelihood of a future event, such as customer churn. Your business are as full of information like the DNA, and precious as gold. All you have to do is learning how to discover them. And use them. And with MicroStrategy Data mining and predictive analysis you can extract everything that is valuable from your data.

If your company activates in retail, distribution, services, telecom, or in any other consumer-oriented business environment, you know that understanding customer motivation to do or not do a certain acquisition is essential for your business survival and development. You need to quickly identify changes in consumer tastes and preferences and act immediately to improve their experiences.

Why didn`t we finish the project on time? Which are the reasons why we exceeded the budget? Do we have enough available employees to start a new project? In financial terms, is it profitable to begin this project?

As I said in an earlier post about ERP Prediction for 2012, this year cloud-based ERP will continue to gain ground at the expense of traditional ERP. Why? Because enterprises will continue to adopt SaaS-based applications to replace legacy, high-maintenance and often marginally effective systems in use today.

One of the most critical and time-consuming aspects of retail and distribution is managing the stock. You want to sell the products in stock, but you also need to ensure that you have sufficient stock to meet variable demand. You must have real-time control and visibility of your stock in order to respond to market requirements and remain competitive.

Operating costs as low as possible, increased productivity, innovation. These are some of the major objectives of managers today. Therefore, more and more of them started to look toward online communication and collaboration applications. And more than 4 million companies and 40 million users now handle their e-mail, documents, and other office tasks using Google's online professional office suite, Google Apps. And for good reason. Because Google Applications offer a stunning range of cloud-based productivity options to even the smallest firms. Everything you do at work is now available anywhere, anytime, from any online connection. And it's all for just $50 per year per user for the Business version, which includes additional storage and high-quality, unlimited support.