Do you store all your personal documents on a personal computer or through a personal cloud? According to Gartner, Inc., by 2014, most of us will be utilizing such cloud-based platforms as Dropbox and other applications to store our documents and access them across a range of devices. While this may not be news to many of our tech savvy readers, Gartner’s report, “The New PC Era: The Personal Cloud,” has broken down five of the “megatrends” that have led to consumers moving from a culture tethered to a personal computer to a culture of mobile personal cloud users.
Megatrend 1: Consumerization
As technology has changed, so have consumers. In short, users have become more technologically savvy, and this has resulted in people who expect very different things out of their technology, says Gartner’s report. The rise of social media has given consumers a platform to make their thoughts and wishes known, and consumers themselves have, in some cases, become the innovators in the technology world.
The federal government is closing nearly 800 of its 2000 data centers in the next four years, according to the
New York Times. Over four years, the government will swap its sprawl of data centers in favor of cloud computing technology.
The federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, says “Tapping cloud computing services could save the government an additional $5 billion a year, reducing the need for individual government agencies to buy their own software and hardware.” By switching to a cloud-based email solution alone, the General Services Administration and Department of Agriculture have saved $42 million.
In a recent blog post, we explained on a base level what server virtualization is and its benefit for a cloud computing environment. But because virtualization has such a significant impact on IT infrastructure and business information technology, we found it appropriate to explain it more in depth.
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With the growth of data centers and the cloud, the concern of power usage comes into question. Energy consumption becomes a strategic factor in effective hardware utilization, especially in a traditional hosted environment where virtualization is not in place.
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By now, most of us have heard of cloud computing. Talk about a buzzword – it’s easy to get caught up in the term and not know what it actually does. Is there any clarity about what cloud computing is? Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and countless others offer the cloud with lots of claims associated with it: it saves money, it boosts efficiency, it does email, hosting, backups, and so on.
So what is cloud computing?
In short, cloud computing is the future of technology for business. Traditionally, businesses have managed their own infrastructure and IT resources themselves...
This in-house management requires high overheads, specialized staff, capital expenditures, and honestly – going in to work some mornings wondering if IT would work that day.
Do you ever wonder if the lights will work when you wake up in the morning? Unless you’re in the middle of a blizzard, probably not. Further, you probably don’t manage your own generators, substations, transformers and so on.
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