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One of the biggest missteps enterprises make is treating cloud computing like a technology, when instead it should be viewed as an entirely new business model.

Are you kicking yourself because you missed out on the opportunity to learn how to turn Big Data into big dollars for your enterprise?  Fear not; the latest Enterprise Open Cloud Forum roundtable recording is available for you to download here!  Below you have access to the presentation slides, a quick recap of content and the mp3 audio download (download the mp3) so you can listen on your own time.

So you’re thinking a move to the cloud might be in your future? You’ve come to the right place! But before you move your enterprise business to the cloud, brush up on your cloud knowledge to be sure you have all the information you need. This is important stuff and we’re here to help.

When it comes to cloud adoption, are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

Cloud Service Oriented Architecture: A Composite Model for Realizing Higher Order Of Agility The previous post on Cloud Service Oriented Architecture (C-SOA) discussed what’s required to achieve a high level of agility in the enterprise. The net result of extending SOA architecture principles beyond the enterprise firewall to leverage cloud resources (C-SOA) will be very effective in achieving this goal.

Cloud Service Oriented Architecture (C-SOA): Loosely-Coupled Highly-Orchestrated Service Delivery Cloud Service Oriented Architecture (C-SOA) is an architectural approach to leverage cloud computing resources while utilizing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) disciplines to drive substantial business value. In this convergence, SOA provides the underlying enterprise platform to consume cloud services. Historically, as business requirements evolved, enterprises continued to deploy new systems for almost every new application suite. These systems in turn were deployed with respective servers, storage, networks and processes. The constant additions of these systems — sometimes compounded by mergers and acquisitions — resulted in silos or islands of systems. Consequently, they are more difficult to leverage or integrate resulting in more complex tightly-coupled enterprise architecture. This complexity affected the ability to maintain these systems and was costly to change as business needs continued to evolve. The need of this level of agility is a key aspect of survival to many companies. C-SOA has the potential to prevent building silos again – this time in the cloud, which will be far more complex and difficult to reconcile. Service reuse, extensibility, abstraction, business value and agility are, not surprisingly, common shared attributes of both SOA and cloud computing. Let us explore…

As cloud computing continues to evolve, I’ve noticed one major difference in the IT executive thought process. When I was meeting with Fortune 500 IT executives a few years back — around 2008 — they had a lot of concerns about cloud computing. They were particularly concerned with security. Inevitably, security would become a main point in any cloud computing conversation.

Enterprise IT is under great pressure to decrease cost, increase agility and improve speed of delivery. At the same time, IT is presented with a unique opportunity to achieve better alignment with business, which is truly transformational. Undoubtedly, virtualization, as a horizontal technology, has helped datacenters reduce operational costs. Meanwhile, cloud computing, as a service delivery model, will help enterprises shift risk to their service provider and allow them to take bigger steps towards changing business outcomes. This increased level of agility to help enterprises capture new business opportunities, respond to market changes and address new compliance mandates is a crucial attribute for the transformed IT. The new IT – an amalgam of people, processes and technology – focuses on innovation and less on operation. In this post I’ll explain further. Read on…

Have you ever forwarded a work or office email to a personal Gmail or other account? Maybe it was to avoid storage issues and bypass your company’s 100 MB limit or one GB storage limit compared to Gmail’s 25 GB?