Infographics

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, the rise of information technology has meant progress but it has also raised many challenges. Even with green IT initiatives, global data center energy consumption is on the rise and IT departments are continuing to look for ways to become more efficient. The nature of cloud computing solves for many IT problems and in the infographic below, we have illustrated how cloud computing is making a difference. In addition, projects like Open Compute, are helping IT industries create more efficient data centers.

Email is a mission-critical function in most businesses today, and efficient management of email services is vital to ensuring maximum uptime and productivity. Hosted email platforms can have a profound impact on the accessibility, mobility, and productivity of organizations of any size to enable employees to focus on high value tasks that drive competitive advantage. Check out the numbers in the below infographic that illustrate some mind boggling numbers related to business email.

Music distribution, news consumption, and postal mail delivery have all felt the effects of cloud-delivered models that break old, inefficient ways of doing things in place of faster, higher performing, easier-to-deliver technologies. Information access is also starting to make the move from page flipping to mouse clicking via the cloud. Recently, Britannica announced that it will no longer print physical encyclopedias and publish all of its content online. That shift prompted us to explore the reach, scale, and access of Wikipedia’s traditional online-only access model against the conventional print version of Britannica.

Hosting over 400,000 sites across 112 countries, the Rackspace Cloud Sites product is the Platform-as-a-Service many advertising agencies and web design shops go to for creating sites that are stable, scalable and backed by support that is available in a moment’s notice.

Email was the first killer app for mobile. The growth of mobile smartphones and tablets as must-have business tools is due in part to their ability to facilitate secure, instant access to email, the most used form of business communication. Take a look at how mobile and email have grown and continue to grow together and get the latest tips to help you stay ahead of the curve.

Cloud computing helps businesses get off the ground with little upfront investment and operate on a shoestring while accessing technology and applications traditionally reserved for big businesses. Services like web hosting, hosted storage, and email hosting take the financial strain and workload off of business so they can focus on their core competencies. Take a look at what a big deal the cloud is becoming for small businesses.

Music has played a significant role in the increase of cloud computing usage.  In 2010, digital music revenues accounted for nearly half of record company revenues. This shift to the cloud is changing the face of how we buy and listen to music. How much of an impact? We did a little research and looked at some numbers and have illustrated them in the following infographic. Take a look:

The holidays brings an increase in an online shopping and consequently brings an increase in cloud usage. We found it interesting to look at the numbers from the holiday shopping season released by comScore, Deloitte and Google Trend data. We’ve taken some of these numbers and published them in the following infographic – we hope you find it interesting!

The 2011 holiday shopping season is here. We’ve saved you some time and put together your very own online shopping guide with best practices on how to avoid identity theft when shopping online, best coupon sites, some cool shopping apps and best days to shop. Take a look.

The holidays are right around the corner and by now, you should be prepared for the seasonal surge of traffic that is about to hit the web. We recently did a Scaling for the Holidays blog post series on how to prepare for scaling traffic: Scaling Horizontally or Vertically?, Caching, Web Server Tuning and Load Balancing. Below is a fun infographic with some additional tips on how to prepare for the holiday traffic, web traffic that is.