The secret to success

What’s the secret to success with the cloud? Don’t look at the cloud to do just the same old thing, but with new technology. Rather, use it to expand your existing infrastructure and enable new processes, gain new insights, and drive entirely new engagement models with your customers, your employees, your supply chain, and your partners. Make sure you select a provider that can grow with your business, whether you intend to grow globally or just need to scale quickly, while expanding into new markets, with new products and across new industries. Don’t be forced to rip and replace. Invest in a cloud solution that can interoperate with – and expand upon – your existing infrastructure. More on >> The Forecast For Business: Cloudy With An Increasing Chance Of Simplicity

The Real Benefits of Cloud Computing

"Cloud computing is changing the way recruitment companies are delivering IT resources to their staff. A lot of the benefits have been well documented by all and sundry, but there are some key initiatives that are being lost in translation. Cloud is delivering more choice and, at last, real IT cost transparency, and these benefits are changing the way business leaders engage with technology. To understand what these benefits represent we need to acknowledge where enterprise IT has come from. Traditionally most businesses invested heavily in hardware, software and expertise to build, operate and maintain their technology services. The businesses had to purchase for peak usage and there had to be regular investment to keep the environment fit for purpose. This led to a bloated, inefficient IT and performance, and reliability differed between organisations. This model also meant the business was locked into the technology they invested in. Generally all business applications such as messaging, CV parsing and job posting tools were hosted on a single, logical data centre environment. Applications depended and competed for the same infrastructure resources (server, storage and network). If there was an upgrade or a change to an application that required more performance or capacity from your infrastructure, then further investment was required. This made it difficult to identify and calculate the real value of investing in new technology to drive efficiencies and business growth.  Low latency network, increased resilience, and server virtualisation led to a series of innovations that have been termed as Cloud. These innovations allowed businesses to procure and utilise IT services that are delivered from the vendor’s data centre. Essentially businesses are now able to buy the solution, not the underlying technology. Paying for these solutions as a utility in a number of different charging models has brought about a flexibility that hadn’t been previously available. The industry is now treating IT applications and infrastructure as a common utility, albeit a complicated one.  So how does choice and IT cost transparency fit into the new world of IT?"  READ MORE >> ADVERTORIAL: The Real Benefits of Cloud Computing | Business intelligence for recruitment and resourcing professionals

Test your knowledge on IBM Cloud Quiz

"IT leaders, managers, technicians, peers and cloud enthusiasts—we’ve got a challenge for you. We usually serve up knowledge here on Thoughts on Cloud. Today we’re switching it up and testing yours. With cloud on the rise—and showing no sign of stopping—it’s important to keep up with the constant influx of information on the subject. Is your cloud computing knowledge up to date? Are you a cloud expert? Or might you even be—gasp—a cloud genius? Take our quiz to determine your C.Q.: your cloud (intelligence) quotient. Do you have your own way of testing cloud expertise? Got a genius insight of your own? Share it in the comments. And don’t forget to share your score. Good luck!" Take the quiz on >>>>

Google "Cloud Trace" is out for developers

Product manager, Pratul Dublish, wrote in a blog post: "Here at Google, we understand the importance of having applications run at optimal speed. Awesome performance of your application is critical for end user satisfaction and retention. User expectations for application performance are already high and applications with poor performance risk losing users. For example, 25% of users abandon a web page if its load time is more than four seconds and 86% of users delete an application after poor performance. Ask any developer who has experienced the stress of diagnosing performance issues in production and you will find that it is extremely difficult to isolate the root cause of poor performance when it happens. This is especially true when the sluggish behavior is only seen by a small fraction of your users.  We introduced Google Cloud Trace at Google I/O 2014 and gave an in-depth talk and demo at Google Cloud Platform Live back in November. Today, we’re announcing the beta release of Google Cloud Trace which is now available to all Google Cloud Platform customers.  With Google Cloud Trace, you can diagnose performance issues in your production application by quickly finding the traces for slow requests and viewing a detailed report of where time is spent in your application while processing these requests. Its trace analysis feature allows you to see the latency distribution for your application, and find the painfully slow requests that may be affecting only a small number of your users. You can also use the trace analysis feature to check if the performance of a new release is better than the previous release. " Read source at >>