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There's been a lot of talk in recent weeks about the best public cloud architecture and the viability of OpenStack as a "virally growing open software movement” and this came under further discussion at the Jefferies technology conference in New York held between 7-10th May. OpenStack was dreamed ... 

Google have integrated an automatic translator into Gmail, which allows users to receive and read email in any language. The new feature has been available through Google Labs since 2009 and will now be rolled out to all Gmail users over the course of the next few days. The new public version of ... 

The European cloud strategy is to be presented by European Commissioner Megan Richards at this year’s Cloud Computing World Forum, which will be held at Earl’s Court, London on 12th and 13th June 2012. It’s thought that the Commissioner will present the findings of its Digital Agenda for Europe con ... 

HP and Microsoft have joined forces in order to offer a private cloud solution suitable for even the largest enterprises. The news comes in the wake of Microsoft's recent announcement of their cloud strategy and the release of licensing for System Center 2012, which has now become generally availa ... 

Gartner have identified five key cloud computing "subtrends” which businesses must factor into their planning in order to avoid expensive mistakes such as missed market opportunities in the run up to 2015. The research company point out that continual monitoring of the trends will need to be carr ... 

A new study carried out by IT recruitment agency CV Screen has found that IT professionals have seen an increase in salaries by 2% over the last 12 months. This puts the average wage at just under £40,000 for IT workers in the UK. The research looked at 50 different IT roles and monitored m ... 

Rackspace is to begin rolling out its public cloud, the first to appear which is based on the new Essex release of OpenStack. The move pips HP at the post; they are planning to release the Essex code as public beta on May 10th 2012. It's thought that Rackspace has already carried out the necessar ... 

Cloud computing stocks fell last week by a miniscule 0.55%, according to figures released by the Talkin'Cloud Stock Index, a dedicated cloud stock index which keeps tabs on performance in cloud trends. CommVault proved to be the week's biggest winner, with its stocks gaining 4.48%, whilst Carboni ... 

Whilst demand for IT professionals skilled in cloud computing is growing at an incredible pace, there remains a lack of talented IT individuals who can help a company implement cloud, or provide support once they have. This has led to employers competing fiercely for suitably qualified candidates ... 

Proposed changes to the EU’s data privacy directives may make things easier for regulation across Europe, but US experts have criticised the move and implied that the new regulations would be nothing more than an attempt by European states to promote their own cloud services, citing US data centre ... 

Gartner has said that it has revised its 2012 world IT spending forecasts to increase by just 2.5% this year, as opposed to the original prediction that it would increase by 3.7%. This represents a total of $3.7 trillion now predicted to be spent on IT globally. The reduction is a reflection of the ... 

Hewlett-Packard has announced its intention to provide cloud computing services in a bid to take advantage of the growing cloud trend. The new public cloud service is expected to launch in May and is thought to target start-ups and large concerns, as well as the consumer storage market. HP alread ... 

Following the launch of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 beta, Red Hat has talked about an idea which they call "Ease into the Cloud” and say that their new software will help companies to do this. JBoss is suitable for use with a variety of cloud architectures, and it is this versatility th ... 

A study funded by Microsoft has found that cloud computing will create 9.62 million jobs in Asia Pacific alone by 2015. The research also estimates that the technology will create 14 million new jobs internationally by the same year, which is good news for the global economy. The study was carrie ... 

Irish Jobs and Enterprise Minister Richard Bruton has announced plans to build a €1.2m research program in a bid to push the country forward and make it a world leader in cloud computing. The investment will be made into a Cloud Computing Technology Research Centre which will focus its r ... 

Red Hat have issued a thank you to the open source community following the news last week that they are the first open source company to reach the $1bn mark. To celebrate, Red Hat will make a donation of $100,000 to an open source organisation as a "donation to the future of open source”. To ... 

Companies join forces to modernise data centres with converged infrastructure. Leading converged infrastructure provider Egenera has teamed up with Fujitsu Technology Solutions who will resell and support Egenera's PAN Manager on the Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900 blade server platform. The agreement is i ... 

Cloud take-up is proving to be a little slower than expected; there appears to be concern about virtualization amongst CEOs surrounding what effect moving will have on existing IT infrastructures. The benefits of cloud services remain clear, there is little doubt that not only can virtualization st ... 

Open source enterprise software provider Red Hat has announced that they will release their Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) solution, OpenShift at this year's Open Cloud Conference on April 30 to May 3 2012. The event, taking place in Sunnyvale, California, will hold an Open Cloud day and an Open Paa ... 

Cloud computing’s many advantages are often talked of, but not as widely implemented as one might think. InformationWeek Reports’ annual cloud survey shows that the cloud adoption is nowhere near that of virtualisation. The survey does show increased growth in the cloud, with 16% of respondents in ... 

A webcast on what small businesses could expect in 2012 was recently hosted by ZDNET.  A theme of the webcast was that, “we no longer live in one environment,” and the panel agreed that data and communications should be easily moved across platforms, applications and devices.    Two ... 

Virtualisation benefits are clear, but the march towards implementation has not been as fast as one might expect.  The attractive benefits include the ability to consolidate to 20% of existing hardware, which of course leads to a reduced need for data centre space. Add to that reduce energy bil ... 

At the Gartner Datacentre and IT Operations Summit in November 2011, Gartner research vice-president Rakesh Kumar asserted that pressure to cut costs was driving an increase in new datacentre projects.  “People are finding the capital to build 30,000 square foot plus datacentres,” stated Kumar. ... 

Latest research published in a Science issue by Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ) at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) has demonstrated that cloud computing can deliver secure cloud computation and ensure data privacy. ... 

It has become generally accepted that cloud based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the most cost effective option for companies seeking to develop or augment business intelligence (BI) functions.  Faced with demands for increased computing power and the challenges of constructing their own analy ... 

The London School of Economics and Political Science conducted a study on cloud computing in the smart phone and aerospace services industries in Germany, Italy, the UK, and U.S. from 2010 to 2014.  The results indicate that adoption of cloud computing in both industries creates significant emp ... 

In the course of a few years, the term “cloud computing” has become a part of the everyday language of business in the UK.  Cloud hosting and virtualisation were among the top priorities of CIOs in 2011, and it is anticipated that this will remain true for 2012 as well.  According to John ... 

The PCI Security Standards Council’s recent virtualization guidance document has indicated that merchants who choose cloud providers for payment processing, rather than the cloud providers themselves, maintain responsibility for safeguarding information and complying with PCI DSS. While it is possib ... 

There is no denying that 2011 was boom time for ‘Platform-as-a-service’ (Paas), as the industry saw new Paas products debut through the year. Additionally, it was also the year Salesforce.com acquired Paas industry-leader Heroku in a US$250million deal indicating the maturing of the segment with the ... 

A leading SMB security services provider recently survey by a to understand how their clients deploy email archival technology to extract useful business intelligence from their email-histories, revealed the lack-lustre of optimisation of this useful technology in 200 businesses located in US and UK ... 

In a recent publication, the Greater London Authority (GLA) issued a brief guide for organisations to help maintain business continuity despite disasters or major disruptions. This provides a timely reminder to all businesses that may be affected by the impact of the London Olympics this summer ... 

Flexibility is one of the key benefits of cloud computing, allowing businesses to adapt quickly and easily to unexpected challenges. According to the founder of cloudonomics.com, Joe Weinman, increasing capacity fourfold at the drop of a hat is now possible with the pay-as-you-go service model offer ... 

Internet giant Google is predicting rapid growth in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) cloud computing sector - suggesting that uptake of the IT infrastructure solution will be "huge" in 2012. And when Google makes a prediction about the future of IT, it is difficult to dismiss it as an off-t ... 

Hillingdon Council is hoping to slash £3 million off its budget over the next four years by migrating its office software to the cloud and adopting Google Apps for Enterprises. The local authority is set to shift to the cloud-based solution in February of next year - a move that will affect 3,500 st ... 

Data centre automation is quickly becoming the cornerstone of modern IT infrastructure and more than a third of the businesses that Information Week recently surveyed claimed they are already using automation technology. The news provider also found that of the 345 companies it quizzed about virtual ... 

The majority of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can no longer justify building their own data centres, so migration to the cloud is the only option for firms that want the trappings of modern IT - such as high performance and scalability. Michael Stonebraker, a database expert and co-found ... 

Cloud computing and virtualization technology have had the biggest positive impact on UK companies in 2011, according to the majority of surveyed chief information officers (CIOs). A new study commissioned by BT Engage IT has indicated that 70 per cent of CIOs felt these developments were the most i ... 

Application developers are increasingly relying on the cost and scalability benefits of cloud computing - particularly as the infrastructure solution becomes a mainstream technology. As a result, according to Datapipe, cloud computing is a vital part of enterprise IT strategic planning and software ... 

Centrally managed virtual desktop infrastructure can be improved if the VDI is executed on the end-user's PC rather than being delivered over the internet, according to virtualization expert John Glendenning. He claimed that central execution means 20 times the amount of equipment is needed to deliv ... 

An alliance of top software developers - including Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat and SUSE - has been created to champion the development of open source virtualization platforms. The oVirt project has the core aim of creating an openly governed virtualization stack that would allow fo ... 

IT infrastructure has been evolving over the past two decades but the next five years are going to be crucial to its development - particularly when it comes to cloud computing and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).According to Gartner's Lydia Leong, a research vice president at the firm, the chang ... 

IT analyst Gartner has predicted that low-cost cloud computing is set grow in popularity over the next three-to-five years. The firm believes that the transition will reset businesses' perceptions of pricing and value in the marketplace.Gartner believes that IT infrastructure outsourcing revenues wi ... 

A former Citrix employee has claimed that desktop virtualization is still some way off maturity and requires a certain level of technical expertise if it is to be implemented effectively. This could point to an increasing demand for outsourced infrastructure solutions that leave management and maint ... 

The majority of cloud computing end-users polled by Rackspace recently claimed that they did not entirely trust their service provider - showing that businesses need to do more if they are to boost confidence in the technology. Many of the concerns raised by the early adopters of cloud computing sur ... 

Most businesses are adopting private cloud computing infrastructure because of legacy security issues, but hybrid technologies are making headway because of improvements to cloud security solutions. According to Iain Stephen, HP UK and Ireland's vice president of enterprise storage, servers and netw ... 

The growing demand for multi-device access to data is the main reason that firms are adopting cloud computing. According to new research conducted by TNS on behalf of CSC, a third of IT decision makers are pushing the technology for that very reason.According to the firm, cloud adoption also helps b ... 

One of the key benefits of cloud computing adoption is the fact that firms can shift their focus away from IT infrastructure management and toward their core business aims - i.e. their bottom lines. According to EuroCloud, businesses benefit by overcoming implementation and maintenance hurdles that ... 

European businesses adopting cloud computing infrastructure solutions - like cloud-based storage - have been urged to make sure their data is kept on the continent and not overseas. According to legal expert Theo Bosboom, of Dirkzager Lawyers, shipping data overseas during IT infrastructure overhaul ... 

Businesses are struggling to stay on top of the latest advances in the IT industry - including cloud computing and video conferencing - according to new research from the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM). As a result organisations are seeing staff put in longer hours and more than half ... 

Businesses are talking to the experts before adopting cloud computing solutions and are finding out which apps, services and tools they should migrate first. According to Bill McCarthy, senior vice president of Cloud Services for Insight North America, businesses want help when it comes to transferr ... 

German investment bank Deutsche Bank has completed the first phase of its migration to the cloud. The firm decided to adopt the new technology as a way of streamlining internal application development.It is hoped that the cloud computing infrastructure will help the bank's developers boost the turna ... 

Microsoft believes that firms are not being flexible enough when it comes to the adoption of cloud computing solutions and thinks employers are missing an opportunity to boost mobile working as a result. Martin Cullen, sales director of Microsoft Ireland, claimed that flexible working technology is ... 

Cisco has predicted a huge growth in cloud computing in the coming years, with traffic tripling between 2010 and 2015. According to the firm's Global Cloud Index (2010-15) report, the amount of data being shifted to and from cloud systems will rise 12-fold and the total amount transmitted during 201 ... 

Virtualization underpins a huge number of exciting new technologies that have transformed the way in which companies operate - including virtual desktop infrastructure, disaster recovery and cloud computing. According to Kenneth van Surksum, chief editor of virtualization.info, the technology has co ... 

Birmingham's NHS trust has adopted a new cloud computing solution that will streamline its finance and procurement processes. The move will change the way the authority interacts with its thousands of suppliers. The decision to outsource invoice management to Tradeshift was taken by the Birmingham P ... 

The use of unified storage solutions will increase as cloud computing infrastructure becomes the norm - allowing for converged, dynamic and virtualised data hosting. Greg Schulz, founder of StorageIO.com, claimed that cloud computing is a major factor affecting the data storage market at the moment. ... 

The private cloud computing platform will soon be the future of IT infrastructure as the technology can be easily deployed in existing data centres. According to cloud specialist Opsview, the benefits of the platform are numerous, but many firms are still getting to grips with exactly what the techn ... 

BT Conferencing has announced it will expand its cloud-based videoconferencing service so that a greater number of devices can be used by global businesses. More than 50,000 conferencing sites around the world are expected to benefit from full global interoperability, bosses at the firm have said. O ... 

The US government is forging ahead with cloud computing adoption, with almost a third of federal departments now using the technology. According to InformationWeek, this is a marked increase on the ten per cent that were using the technology a year ago. And the technology has just received the thumb ... 

IBM has claimed that the reason so many businesses are adopting cloud computing solutions is because the technology allows them to do more for less. The firm has shown that 75 per cent of organisations are expecting to adopt cloud computing infrastructure during the next two years. Uptake of the tec ... 

An increasing number of law firms are adopting mobile working technology - such as smartphones and tablets. But legal representatives are adamant that mobile device security should be made a top priority, so that client confidentiality is not compromised. Speaking to Legal Week, Berwin Leighton Pais ... 

The number of businesses adopting cloud computing-based disaster recovery solutions is increasing and, according to Gartner, 30 per cent of mid-sized enterprises will be using the technology by 2014. Recovery-as-a-service (RaaS), as it is known, is a top performing market partly because of the incre ... 

Tech giant Fujitsu has entered the cloud computing battle with two products aimed at enterprises with their sights set on the deployment of private cloud computing solutions. The firm has placed the products in its Business Solutions Store, which allows companies to browse through various cloud comp ... 

Vidyo has launched a new virtualized video conferencing solution that will allow businesses to run the technology on virtual servers - reducing the need for capital to invest in unified communications and boosting return-on-investment. According to the firm's chief executive officer Ofer Shapiro, th ... 

Hosted environments are becoming increasingly popular and migration toward cloud computing-based infrastructure is helping to reduce the number of servers and switches companies require. As a result, vendors are expected to consolidate their offerings in the coming five years as they battle for supr ... 

Leading IT analyst Gartner has claimed that chief information officers (CIOs) are expecting a second recession in the sector thanks to growing turmoil in the eurozone. The company claims that, as a result, IT budgeting in 2012 will be even more important than it has been this year. Speaking at its a ... 

The adoption of cutting-edge cloud computing technologies can help businesses slash their carbon footprints by as much as 50 per cent, according to research from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) in London. The study showed that cloud migration at lager firms can also result in vast cost savings a ... 

Cloud computing presents a huge array of opportunities to businesses and governments, but organisations need to be acutely aware of the risks as well, it has been claimed. According to Dr Steve Hodgkinson, an Ovum research director, organisations need to look past the hype surrounding the technology ... 

Fixed standards for cloud computing security and management are progressing rapidly as more organisations adopt the technology, it has been claimed. IT infrastructure specialist Terremark recently suggested that many large cloud computing adopters are to be found in the Open Data Centre Alliance (OD ... 

Businesses are increasingly focusing their IT infrastructure purchasing strategies on server virtualization technologies. According to new research from Veeam Software, organisations are pushing forward with virtualization and some 86.5 per cent of those quizzed are using the technology to some degr ... 

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is vying to reduce the carbon footprint, complexity and cost of its enterprise server technology by encouraging firms to adopt converged infrastructure - which allows for the effective sharing of resources. Dubbed Project Moonshot, the new drive to make IT infrastructure more en ... 

Researchers in Germany have highlighted a cloud security flaw that affects Amazon Web Services (AWS), but they fear the problem could undermine other cloud computing service providers' solutions as well. The Horst Goertz Institute (HGI), which is based at Ruhr University Bochum, claims that the atta ... 

IBM's new chief executive officer Virginia Rometty has a huge task ahead of her overhauling the company's IT outsourcing model as it shifts towards a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model. Speaking at the Best of Breed conference in California at the start of this week, vice president of outsourcing a ... 

The UK government's G-Cloud will present a number of difficult challenges and Whitehall will have to work hard to extract the biggest cost savings it can from its cloud computing strategy. Leading IT infrastructure analyst Accenture claims that ministers need to convince Whitehall that IT is a commo ... 

UK businesses are more interested in private cloud computing than their European counterparts, with adoption rates in the nation soaring. According to Dave Wright, VMware's vice president of technology services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, some British firms have now virtualised between 70 ... 

HP has launched a new cloud computing finance package that aims to tempt small and medium-sized enterprises to adopt the new technology. The move shows that the push for cloud computing has entered a new phase as service providers compete for custom in practically every industry sector. According to ... 

IT heavyweights Cisco and Citrix have formed a new desktop virtualization alliance that is expected to improve the deployment of large IT infrastructure solutions. The firms are also hoping that the partnership will result in significant virtualization optimisation - particularly when it comes to vi ... 

An aggressive recruitment strategy is seen as the key to Intact Software's rapid expansion plans. The firm is looking for ten new partners that will help the business management solutions provider target the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market. The firms will be used to boost sales of ... 

Almost three-quarters of call centres in the UK are either using - or planning to use - cloud computing solutions, according to new research released at the Call Centre Expo 2011. According to Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEC), 71 per cent of the 103 IT directors the firm quizzed said that the ... 

Business execution suite specialist SuccessFactors has signed a deal with VMware to make data from business planning software available to third-party apps via the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The partnership is expected to streamline both the development and deployment of software-as ... 

The Guardian News & Media group has adopted 12 Google Chromebooks as it trials cloud computing among its staff on a hardware-as-a-service model. The devices have been issued to editorial staff - including journalists - as a means of accessing and filing news stories through the Google Apps cloud ... 

A third of business managers polled by PC World have claimed that most of their servers are running on virtual machines - showing that adoption of virtualization is on the rise. The survey also showed that virtualization appears to be maturing, but there are still big gaps in uptake. According to t ... 

Virtualization technologies are helping firms to use their infrastructure more effectively, according to Gartner research director Jon Hardcastle. The IT infrastructure expert believes that virtualization is allowing businesses to achieve their aims while limiting overall system growth. He claimed ... 

The benefits of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions do not end at cost savings, according to IBM's vice president of cloud services Ric Telford. According to the cloud computing expert, companies do not always want the cheapest possible IT solution, they want to be able to utilise their infra ... 

Businesses need to be clear about what they require from a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider before signing up to a contract. According to ELC Technologies' chief technology officer Dylan Stamat, some PaaS solutions are perfect but others leave a lot to be desired - and this is usually depen ... 

Software developer Red Bend is focusing its efforts on creating a mobile virtualization solution that will allow users to store multiple profiles - for both business and personal use - on a single device. The new software is a type 1 hypervisor and at the moment it is unclear which chip manufacturer ... 

Virtualization optimisation specialist Virtual Instruments has launched a new channel partner programme that it hopes will provide resellers with the expertise to cope with the ever-changing optimisation marketplace. The firm claims that optimisation of mission-critical applications is increasingly ... 

The first book to be published covering the concrete benefits of data virtualization was released yesterday (October 11th) - proving that the technology has finally become a mainstream alternative to traditional data storage models. Virtualization: Going Beyond Traditional Data Integration to Achiev ... 

A major outage at BlackBerry has highlighted the business world's reliance on mobile computing technologies as disconnected users vent their anger. The company has already apologised to millions of users worldwide after a server outage in Slough brought down the firm's email and Messenger se ... 

Server virtualization specialist Citrix has overhauled its flagship XenServer 6 product, boosting both scalability and performance in the process. A number of improvements, including the integration of the firm's Open vSwitch technology, are aimed at optimising cloud service delivery. XenServer ... 

Scalability is the biggest benefit of cloud computing, according London member of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) Mike Small. The IT infrastructure expert told the Guardian that, as a result of this scalability, businesses can benefit from cost savings while still havin ... 

Businesses still using traditional models of software procurement may find that their applications are getting a little "long in the tooth". According to EuroCloud, an organisation dedicated to promoting software-as-a-service (SaaS) on the continent, businesses that stick with tried-and-te ... 

The global platform-as-a-service (PaaS) sector is expected to undergo a massive transformation in the coming years - with adoption rates more than doubling in the next four years. Gartner believes that PaaS is one of the three pillars of modern cloud computing. Fabrizio Biscotti, research director ... 

If ever proof was needed that smartphone adoption is unstoppable, new research has shown that the number of mobile apps downloaded between 2010 and 2015 is expected to reach 98 billion - growing at an annual compound rate of 56.6 per cent. According to new projections from Berg Insight, revenues fr ... 

Hewlett-Packard (HP) claims that businesses need access to simpler networking infrastructure that is both scalable and flexible. The firm's FlexNetwork architecture aims to keep pace with global demands for increased IT flexibility by leveraging the key benefits of both virtualization and smartp ... 

Storage-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions are set to grow in popularity as public cloud computing adoption increases. According to new figures from research analyst Gartner, companies selling either private or public cloud storage solutions have witnessed their revenue grow by 56 per cent during the fir ... 

Cisco has added more social functionality to its video conferencing solutions in the hope of making collaboration a key selling point for the technology. The sharing of video content - including previous video conferencing sessions - is expected to transform online training and customer service, Cis ... 

Server virtualization is critical to cloud computing of any kind, according to Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison. Mr Ellison, speaking at the SuperCluster launch event, claimed that the new technologies were now inextricable, reports Information Week. "Virtualization is critical to ... 

Cloud security is not a concern for the US's Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as it adopts the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model for its public-facing websites. The DHS has become the first federal organisation in the US to sign up to a General Services Administration's (GSA) Ia ... 

The biggest workplace irritation for many IT end-users is slow, unresponsive computing systems - an issue that is being addressed by an increased uptake of mobile working practices. According to a recent survey conducted by the Work Foundation at Samsung, a poll that covered some 1,500 employees, sl ...