Cloud adoption benefits and problems for the enterprise

Australian organisations moving to a private cloud are expecting return on investment in less than two years, while those enterprises plumping for public clouds expect 20 per cent annual savings on their IT bills. While it’s business agility that large organisations claim they want from the cloud – the hip pocket benefits aren’t being sneezed at.

Written by: Beverley Head | Published in: Cloud ServicesAny lingering scepticism about cloud computing has evaporated with almost six out of ten local organisations now using cloud services in some form or another, and almost two out of three organisations recognising that to ignore cloud services is to risk competitive disadvantage.

Growth in cloud services is surging around the world as cloud computing rapidly outstrips the projected growth rate for traditional IT products. Forecasts predict that global revenues from cloud services will reach $55.5 billion by for for 2014, up from more than $16 billion last year.

HP is having another crack at cloud computing, announcing that from May 10th it will progressively roll out an infrastructure, then platform as a service public cloud. It will couple this with tools to allow enterprises to build their own internal clouds, and offer a range of managed cloud services.

Written by: Peter Dinham | Published in: Cloud ComputingWorldwide IT spending is on track to reach US$3.6 trillion this year with a modest three percent increase from 2011 spending of $3.5 trillion, and with enterprise spending on public cloud services one significant growth area in what analyst firm, Gartner, describes as a “lacklustre growth outlook” for the global IT market.

VMware (NYSE: VMW) and the Cloud Foundry Community have kicked off Cloud Foundry Core, a program aimed to ease cloud portability by providing a common capabilities baseline and an open mechanism to validate application portability.

Written by: Stephen Withers | Published in: Cloud ServicesLarger organisations in Australia and New Zealand favour a blended public/private cloud strategy, but there still seems to be some confusion about the definition of 'cloud'.

Zenoss released a new report this week that predicts more than 50 percent open source cloud adoption among enterprises within five years.  In other open source cloud news, Rackspace has a new training and certification program for OpenStack, Citrix is building its IaaS platform and CloudStack is looking for speakers at its November conference in Las Vegas.

The Open Data Centre Alliance – formed of 280 end user organisations with a combined annual IT spend of $100 billion – has today unveiled the first eight “usage models” or draft standards that it hopes will lead to a rapid acceleration in the adoption of cloud services leading to end user savings of up to $25 billion within five years.