Cloud computing architecture service providers are constantly modernizing their service structure to make it more secured, efficient and responsive to user demands.

According to experts, small businesses in particular can derive immense benefit from transferring their IT requirements to the cloud. In this post we will discuss the many-faceted benefits that cloud offers to an enterprise environment.

Meet changing business requirements: Cloud can help you in meeting escalated business demands without making additional investments in your organization’s IT infrastructure. Cloud offers scalability that allows users to easily expand their IT capacity in the virtual environment. The process can also be fully automated which frees the IT department from manually monitoring changing capacity requirements. Most cloud services offered now are provision-based implying that the IT capacity is elastic and can be adjusted to the change in demand.

Easy deployment: You can start using the cloud almost immediately. Unless you plan to implement private cloud environment, you don’t need to build the infrastructure required to support virtualization. Infrastructure can also be deployed over the cloud upon which you can develop and host your set of applications. This helps you enjoy a competitive edge over your competitors.

Easy administration: Outsourcing your IT requirements frees you from a lot of headache. Deploying your business to cloud makes IT administration easier and hassle free. It reduces dependency on IT staff and infrastructure. Applications running on the cloud are easier to manage and data is backed up in data centers secured and monitored by a Cloud service provider. Cloud solutions thus make IT administration and compliance easier.

Better control: Some may argue otherwise, but cloud offers you better control over your network. Your cloud administrator will have full access to monitor the systems in the network no matter where they are located. He can further control IT resource provisioning, data movement and accessibility in a cloud environment.

Re-utilize your resources: Cloud helps you free up the resources previously engaged in managing the IT environment. It frees up space, releases capital investment and helps you reduce dependency on IT department. As a result, the resources can be used for business growth and expansion. Cloud computing services are usually charged on a per user subscription model and hence, do not require investment towards licensing, purchasing applications or servers.

Make collaboration easier: Cloud has made it easier to connect with your remotely located teams to create a collaborative platform of operation. Ubiquitous cloud has made it possible for teams located at different geographies and time-zones to work on a single platform without entering into complexities of building a complex network. All the data is stored in the cloud and when one team updates something the results are immediately available to the others across the network.

Create integrated platform: Earlier enterprises were siloed which restricted the flow of information across the organization. But the cloud has made it possible to create a unified platform where knowledge can be disseminated across the organizational structure. Unified data helps with decision making and builds forward-looking enterprises.

Become innovative: Freed up resources allow you to be more innovative enabling you to concentrate on your main operation. Cloud platform allows you to develop, test and host applications for your enterprise. Further, you can create a collaborative platform by transferring your legacy applications to virtualized environment.

About the author: 

Rebekah Henderson is an IT consultant who is associated with Cloud computing providers developing Cloud-based applications. Nowadays, she is working on cloud CRM and writing contents about cloud apps.

Ann left the job in 1975 and co-founded a software company Open Systems, Inc. the following year with a colleague she worked with at the bank. Open Systems Inc. successfully developed and sold accounting software and was profitable for six years before Ann and her partners sold it for more than $15 million. Ann was one of the first and most-influential woman entrepreneurs developing software products and she went on to start and direct numerous software and technology companies. Before co-founding Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Ann served as a strategy consultant for companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Price Waterhouse.

Ann has encouraged many women to pursue careers in technology. Earlier this month she gave a keynote speech at the TechWomen Canada, an event focused on supporting Canadian women in technology and providing them with an opportunity to connect with their peers in Silicon Valley. The program run by the Canadian Consulate brings Canadian technology companies together with tech leaders, VC firms and potential strategic partners to help enhance their growth.

At the event BizCloud’s Vahid Razavi had the pleasure of speaking to Ann Winblad about the TechWomen Canada initiative and the role of women in the Silicon Valley. When asked to give advice to the next generation of women tech entrepreneurs, Ann suggested that in the powerful entrepreneurial environment that is Silicon Valley, women entrepreneurs need to become a part of a virtuous circle of people and find support for their business. She added that it is not about them individually, women need to be fierce competitors, find support, have great ideas that they can communicate, and have the ability to attract talent in order to get the money they need to build a big business in the Silicon Valley.

Women who want careers in B2B tech and don’t have the necessary technical skills should take programming classes, join Girls Who Code for example, and learn how engineers think because they will be working with them and recruiting them, Winblad suggests.

If you want to learn firsthand about how Hummer Winblad Venture Partners evaluate Big Data and Cloud Computing ventures that they invest in, and hear Ann’s opinion about the possibility of another bubble happening in the Big Data and Cloud space, make sure to watch BizCloud Session with Ann Winblad.

The 2013 StartFast teams are:

• Glyphr (Syracuse, NY) Glyphr’s 3D augmented reality application turns mobile ads into meaningful engagement and enables brands to give their audience an immersive interactive experience.  (http://www.glyphr.cc)
• WedWu (Fort Lauderdale, FL) A priceline-like service for brides and grooms. Focused on saving money on your wedding services, while ensuring you get professional quality. (http://www.wedwu.com/)
• Falcon (Los Angeles, CA) The Falcon app lets you navigate off-grid with personalized, shared maps.  (http:\\www.thefalconapp.com)
  
• Symcircle (San Francisco, CA) Symcircle is the easiest way to keep up with everything going on in your organization worldwide. Catch up with old friends or meet new ones, the possibilities are endless.(http://www.symcircle.com)
• Calester (Hamilton, Ontario) Calester makes sharing, finding and recalling events simple, fun and social.

According to StartFast managing director Chuck Stormon, “StartFast is all about building great companies and great companies make great investment opportunities. We are really excited about this years team and look forward to showcasing them in August.”

About StartFast

StartFast Venture Accelerator is a private investor backed program modeled on the highly successful TechStars program that started in Boulder, Colorado four years ago and has since spread to Boston, Seattle and New York City.  StartFast provides early funding for high-potential startup teams from around the world and invites them to Syracuse, NY each summer for an intensive 100-day program.  Mentors and investors affiliated with the program have the opportunity to work closely with the companies and make follow-on investments at the end of the program.   StartFast 2013 is supported by Manning & Napier, Ernst & Young, Upstate Venture Connect, Cayuga Venture Fund, Seed Capital Fund of CNY, and Upstate Venture Association of New York.

For more information about the program, see http://startfast.net.

Contacts

Nasir Ali
Managing Director
nasir@startfast.net 

Chuck Stormon
Managing Director
chuck@startfast.net

Eucalyptus provides a standardized and consistent environment across private and public clouds which can help streamline app development and testing. It enables dev teams to test their applications built for AWS on their internal private clouds so they can be more easily moved into production on Amazon’s cloud. With the addition of new scalable web application features, Eucalyptus 3.3 may be an ideal platform for developing, testing and deploying cloud apps.

The first of the three new features of Eucalyptus 3.3 is auto-scaling, which can automatically add virtual machines when the workload increases and release them when the workload subsides. Additionally, Eucalyptus customers are now able to scale workloads automatically to AWS. The second new feature is elastic load balancing, an AWS-compatible service that distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Eucalyptus instances to provide greater fault tolerance for apps. Last of the newly introduced features is CloudWatch, a service that monitors cloud resources and applications running on Eucalyptus clouds. It enables developers to programmatically collect metrics, set alarms, identify trends, and take action to ensure applications run smoothly. Eucalyptus 3.3 also comes with a maintenance mode that allows cloud administrators to perform maintenance on their private cloud without any downtime to applications running on the cloud.

Eucalyptus’ main competitors are OpenStack based products, such as Citrix’s CloudStack. The company says that even though there is a lot of interest in the industry for OpenStack, Eucalyptus stands out from the competition due to AWS compatibility. Eucalyptus customers include MemSQL, AppDynamics, and Nokia Siemens Networks who are using Eucalyptus private clouds for testing of their applications built for AWS. Eucalyptus 3.3 will be available in June 2013.

The main challenge for organizations, regardless of the type or size of their big data projects, is developing a comprehensive data management approach that includes not only implementing the right tools, technologies and processes, but also having the right people with the right skills to properly plan and execute the project.

Determine the Business Requirements

Without determining specific business objectives and requirements any big data project is bound to fail. This seems obvious as business leaders know exactly what their organizational goals are, but quite often they are not very clear on how big data can advance those goals. Business and IT leaders need to collaborate to identify the goal of their big data project prior to investing in new data architectures and tools.

Make Sure you Have the Right Talent in Place to Handle Big Data

Success of a Big Data project depends heavily on the people in your organization and their ability to develop and maintain the project. To take on big data, your current IT team has to include talent with a particular mix of capabilities. Big data analytics, for example, requires skilled data specialists and many companies lack that kind of in-house talent. You need to make sure that your existing IT staff is properly trained and educated to implement and use new technologies and tools, such as NoSQL databases, big data analytics software, and data visualization tools.

Clean Your Data

Data quality is essential to getting meaningful insights from big data analytics. To effectively analyze your data and avoid spending extra time and money in the process you first need to make sure that your data is clean. Check the accuracy of your current data, assess volumes of duplicate records, remove inconsistencies and perform any transformations needed to improve the quality of your data across different source systems.

Create Data Governance Policies

Data governance should be addressed at the outset of your Big Data project, and this process includes creating policies for the collection, identification, processing requirements, security, storage and use of big data.

Choose the Right Tools and Technologies

In order to produce valuable business benefits which come out of structuring and analyzing Big Data you need to carefully choose tools and technologies to match your specific requirements. Selecting systems and tools that can cater to both your current and future needs is imperative, as one thing that you can count on is that your data will grow in time and so will your needs for a system that can handle change. You may want to look into cloud-based solutions for big data storage, warehousing, and analytics as the inherently scalable nature of the cloud makes it a perfect computing environment for big data.

Entrepreneurship education is the fundamental tool for creating an ongoing cycle of learning and innovation that will bring sustainable job creation and re-creation. Young people face historic increases in joblessness, an unemployment rate that is three times higher than that of adults, and a rapidly shifting economy.

Technology and capital are driving this economic change. As a result, the global economic crisis itself is driving change. Success is increasingly defined as the ability to build, scale and adapt a business quickly in the digital world. Entrepreneurship education is a tool that can equip young people to not only start businesses and create jobs, but also to be opportunity-focused, flexible employees ready to fill existing jobs.

NFTE fosters the creation of businesses and the development of a adaptable, driven and opportunity-focused workforce that ultimately promotes economic stability.  External research has shown that NFTE graduates start and maintain businesses at substantially higher rates than their peers. Other research findings indicate the following trends:

Increased interest in attending college
Greater occupational aspirations
Improved scores in independent reading

“Not every young person wants to work for a big business, so we need a systemic approach to teach them entrepreneurship, and NFTE has the best program in the country,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

NFTE helps young people see their futures in a different, positive way. Read how business leaders, educators, and policymakers each have a role in creating the framework for young people to discover the entrepreneurial mindset and thrive.

Read more about NFTE research results.

No Instant Gratification

Virtual desktops are an investment, and infrastructure costs may outweigh any potential savings in operational and maintenance expenses, especially at first.

• How to get over it – VDI does have a number of impressive benefits that can move your organization forward, including increased data security, simplified management, and a more mobile and productive workforce. Talk with an expert about a custom VDI solution that minimizes expenditures and maximizes your potential to gain from the technology.

Complex to Set Up

Some small business owners may feel that VDI isn’t feasible because of the complexity of implementation.

• How to get over it – Opt for a dedicated, pre-integrated solution that simplifies configuration.

Steep Upfront Costs

In many instances, making the move to VDI is not cheap. The high price tag may discourage some organizations that could otherwise benefit from the technology.

• How to get over it – You don’t need to buy or maintain the infrastructure yourself if you opt for a cloud-based subscription service. With this model, you pay only for the service you need, thereby reducing implementation costs.

Return on Investment May Not Be Immediate

While virtual desktops have the potential to be a cost-saver in the long run, many organizations do not see an immediate return on their money.

• How to get over it – Talk to VDI vendors that offer a solution that fits both your needs and your budget.

Are you planning to implement VDI in your organization? How are you dealing with the barriers?

 About The Author:

Ann Newman writes content for BYOD, desktop virtualization, Windows 8, and mobility on Dell.com

New platform is custom built for midsize organizations and completely eliminates the cost and complexity of VMware from virtualized environments

The two day conference will provide answers to some of the key questions regarding enterprise cloud deployments. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear about the impact that cloud computing can have on their company’s bottom line, why it is a necessity for today’s enterprises, what are the cost benefits, as well as how they can secure their Cloud Deployments. Now in its third year, CloudCon Expo and Conference 2013 will gather top rank speakers and cloud industry vendors and provide attendees with a great platform for networking with IT Executives, CTOs, VCs, Directors, and Managers.

Conference attendees will hear from industry thought leaders, including keynote speakers Richard McDougall, Application Infrastructure CTO at VMware, Rod Smith Vice President, Emerging Internet Technologies at IBM, and Lucas Carlson Founder and CEO, AppFog. Full list of conference speakers can be found here. In his keynote address titled “Delivering Big Data,” IBM’s Rod Smith will talk about how the explosive growth in the amount of data being generated affected companies and how their need to efficiently analyze that data in order to achieve enhanced insights drove the emergence of new, sophisticated software for data analytics.

Here is our pick for top 3 sessions to attend at CloudCon Expo and Conference 2013:

Cloud Based Deployment of Enterprise Applications and Monetizing Cloud Based Services. This session will be moderated by Erica Brescia, Co-Founder and COO at BitNami, and it starts at 11:30 am on May 15. It will focus on the important question of how organizations can monetize cloud based services for enterprise class business applications such as sales, Marketing, Collaborative, Data and Financial services. Among the session speakers are Uri Budnik, Cloud Evangelist at Rightscale, and Sahil Sarosh, Senior Director, Salesforce.

Managing Big Data in Cloud. This session is a must-attend for anyone interested in learning more about the role of Cloud Computing in adoption of Big Data. It will focus on the many advantages of managing big data in cloud: Agility & Big data Analytics. The session starts at 11:30 on Wednesday and will be moderated by Greg Caressi, Senior Vice President, Frost & Sullivan.

Challenges of Cloud Computing in Highly Scalable and Secure Enterprises. This session is scheduled for Wednesday, May 15, at 3:30pm. Session speakers, including Saran Mandair, Sr. Director, Infrastructure Engineering at PayPal, and Kevin Nikkhoo, CEO & Founder, CloudAccess, will discuss the challenges and the opportunities of Cloud Computing in a highly scalable and secure enterprise.

For more info on conference sessions, check out the CloudCon Expo & Conference 2013 schedule.

Numerous exhibitors will participate in this year’s CloudCon Expo, including Citrix, IBM, VMware, Nebula, CA Technologies, and MapR Technologies.

Several registration packages are available allowing different levels of access to the event. Prices range from $20 for Expo Pass, to $599 for a Full Conference Pass which includes access to both days (expo area, all sessions and meals). Register now and get a 15% discount on full registration.

Citrix has announced that its enterprise mobility management solution, XenMobile, has been selected as the winner of Best of Interop for the Wireless, Mobility and BYOD Support award category. In addition, Citrix received the Audience Choice award. The Best of Interop winners were announced on Tuesday, May 7 at 5:30 pm at the Interop Theater on the Expo Floor during Interop Las Vegas, happening May 6-10, 2013 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. For more information visit: http://www.bestofinterop.com/.

The Citrix enterprise mobility management solution, comprised of XenMobile MDM™ and Citrix CloudGateway™, is a complete solution that balances IT’s need to manage and secure devices, apps and data, with users’ desire to access any app from any device and experience work and life their way. Users gain single-click access to all of their mobile, SaaS and Windows apps from a unified app store, including seamlessly-integrated email and browser apps. IT gains control over mobile access based on users’ identities, including scenario-based app access, automatic account de-provisioning and selective wipe for lost or stolen devices.

“Enterprises require a solution that addresses employee demands to use their own devices, choose any app and get access to their email and documents from anywhere,” said Ahmed Datoo, vice president of product marketing, Mobile Platforms group at Citrix. “The Best of Interop award is a testament that Citrix is fulfilling enterprise needs for a comprehensive solution to manage and secure all devices, apps and data. It is gratifying to be recognized as an innovator driving advancements in enterprise mobility.”

Citrix showcased its enterprise mobility management solution at Interop Las Vegas, the industry’s premier technology event enabling IT professionals and technology solution providers to leverage technology to power their business. The Best of Interop Judging Committee, comprised of 16 award-winning IT editors and analysts, reviewed nearly 150 entries and selected winners based on the products with a significant technical impact with the most potential of advancing the business technology market.

“The Best of Interop Awards showcases IT vendors pushing the boundaries of technology,” said Andrew Conry-Murray, editor of Network Computing. “Citrix, and each category winner, demonstrates a commitment to innovation and has a compelling offering deserving of recognition.”

The category areas that Best of Interop winners were selected for include:

• Cloud Computing & Virtualization
• Data Center & Storage
• Management & Monitoring
• Networking
• Performance Optimization & Testing
• Security
• Wireless, Mobility & BYOD Support