Global Public Sector Partner of the Year Award Goes to ePlus at VMWare Partner Exchange 2013
VMWare held its annual partner event on 26th February in Las Vegas and declared ePlus inc the winner of the VMWare Partner Network Award in the Public Sector category. The VMWare Partner Exchange program educates and empowers partners to help them deliver top solutions for software defined data centers. ePlus has a team of certified professionals providing end to end private cloud solutions and it specializes in VMWare Infrastructure virtualization, business continuity, disaster recovery and desktop virtualization. ePlus has actively helped public sector organizations deploy Vmware based solutions in the areas mentioned above. ePlus is a technology integrator assisting organizations to upscale their IT and supply chain processes through top IT products, managed services, lease financing and customized software. It was founded in 1990 and has over 850 affiliates providing services to state and other public sector organizations from its headquarters in Herndon, VA. VMWare is a market leader in cloud computing virtualization platform and its VMWare Partner Exchange is a global event for its partners where associates attend over 200 sessions including training and workshop and become adept at implementing VMWare’s latest solutions.
Top Ten Countries For Cloud Computing
In a recent study by BSA-The Software Alliance, it found that while some countries have open policies as regards adoption of cloud computing but have restrictive laws about data or a biased competitor policy. Criteria adopted for ranking countries in cloud computing are security, cyber crime prevention, privacy of data, IPR, free trade, readiness for IT, broadband deployment capabilities and data privacy. Based on these criteria the top ten countries in the order of ranking are:
- Japan
- Australia
- The United States
- Germany
- Singapore
- France
- United Kingdom
- South Korea
- Canada
- Italy
The study also showed that Singapore is the fastest growing, leapfrogging to fifth place from a lowly tenth the previous year. Malaysia is following in the footsteps of Singapore with tightened IP laws, cyber crime laws and digital trade facilitation. The US climbed a bit up the rankings thanks to its advances in standards development in cloud computing, and Germany slipped down to fourth. Canada, India and Russia, surprisingly, do not figure in the top ten but have implemented international IP agreements and have made some progress. A stumbling block uncovered by the BSA study is the restrictions in cross border data flows. The BSA group recommend that governments need to have stricter privacy regulations without restrictions on data flows or obligations to use only local IT infrastructure. BSA is also known as The Software Alliance, a trade group representing software makers globally and a member of the International Intellectual Property Alliance, engaged primarily in stopping copyright infringements.
Cloud Computing Gives a Boost to Startups Says Rackspace Survey
A survey of US and UK based executives conducted by Rackspace Hosting jointly with Manchester Business School of UK showed that startups benefited immensely from cloud technologies, mainly saving on costs and thus making them profitable.
Statistics of the survey show 62% claiming cloud computing increased their profits while 92% emphatically agree that cloud computing played a key role in their early stages of development. 26% said cloud computing helped drastically reduce their IT Budget and spending. Surprisingly, even large global corporation, apart from startups, are positive about the positive aspects of cloud computing in terms of increased profitability and cost reductions that were employed towards hiring critical manpower and in implementing innovations to drive their businesses. One reason is that cloud computing environments and service providers provide a set of ready tools for communication, research and information services, something on which they would have had to spend a huge amount in the pre-cloud days.
Tool that Monitors Health of Clouds Launched by Rackspace
Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is a new tool from Rackspace that helps businesses to check and confirm correct operation of cloud technology infrastructure. This tool can be used from anywhere and helps to monitor their infrastructure. The technology was actually developed by Cloudkick, a company Rackspace acquired in 2010.
Users can now use the GUI based control panel or the API route to check performance of a technology resource connected via IP or URL if it is open and not behind a firewall. The tool runs on any cloud service from anywhere in the world needing just the IP address of the service to be monitored. The underlying API based on node.js provides flexibility and interoperability between on premise clouds, private and public clouds regardless of location, giving access to the monitoring engine employed by Rackspace in the background. The best benefit is that the tool keeps a constant watch and warns of changes in performances so that administrators can bring things back to level by using the built in scaling service to meet increased loads. Future upgrades may incorporate features that keep simultaneous tabs on CPU, disk, memory and network usages. Rackspace is a leading technology provider heavily into open source technology powering its OpenStack based Open Cloud Platform.
Cloud Implementation is Challenging and Costs Higher says KPMG Report
KPMG survey entitled “The Cloud Takes Shape, involved over 650 IT and business executives from 16 markets worldwide. The net finding of a survey showed that 33% of those polled say that cost of cloud computing implementation exceeded their expectation while a similar number stated that it was more challenging than anticipated. Contrary to expectations the cost of transferring data to the cloud exceeded budgets and there were hiccups along the way in transforming the IT infrastructure for a smooth transition.
A spin off of the survey is that there is an increased awareness about the importance of streamlining business process design to work along with cloud implementation if full benefits are to be realized as perceived. Simply moving house does not work and a process redesign is deemed essential given the inherent complexities of cloud adoption.
All said and done, companies still find cloud implementation an attractive option in terms of enhanced performances and cost reductions. As ever majority of those polled had security concerns uppermost in their minds. A significant percentage (80%) stated that if there was a universal independent certifying body, it would raise confidence levels. Data integrity, privacy and safeguarding were the other major concerns highlighted in the survey.
The nub of the survey, hidden costs, needed to be given more attention and overcome by careful planning and implementation.
KPMG is one of the biggest top professional service companies and a top auditor, based in Amstelveen, Netherlands.
