(The Hosting News) – Mimecast® today announced the results of its Cloud Computing Adoption Survey, which examined the perception and adoption of cloud computing solutions among 565 respondents responsible for managing their organization’s IT operations and budget across the U.S. and Canada in the Fall of 2009.

Data from the recently completed online survey highlights the complex, often contrasting, thought process of IT decision makers regarding cloud computing. While security and integration issues are clearly users’ biggest fears about cloud computing, these concerns have not dissuaded companies from implementing cloud-based applications within their corporate infrastructure. The well-known fears with cloud computing appear to be at odds with reality, as the survey findings suggest strong satisfaction with cloud computing once it is installed. 70 percent of IT decision makers already using cloud computing are planning to move additional solutions to the cloud—most within the next 12 months—indicating that those respondents have come to quickly recognize the inherent ease of implementation, robust security features and cost-savings of cloud computing.

Survey Results

Those That Have Used Cloud-Based Services are Coming Back for More

• 70 percent of companies already using cloud computing solutions are planning on moving additional applications to the cloud—and a majority of them are looking to do so in the next 12 months.  This shows that respondents that have used cloud-based solutions have seen their business and operational value and want to expand that success to other application areas.

Companies’ Cloud Fears are Waning…

• 62 percent of all respondents have considered or are considering cloud computing.
• When asked what would change their minds about cloud computing, respondents ranked more mature solutions and better integration with existing systems as their top two needs (33 percent for maturity, 32 percent for integration).

… but Security Concerns and Existing Investments Remain Biggest Roadblocks to Further Adoption

• Companies remain hesitant because of perceived security issues. The findings show that security concerns were the leading reason given by respondents in all categories for not moving forward with cloud-based applications. 46 percent of respondents that had considered cloud-based applications chose security as the main reason for not moving forward. This was also true across a majority of industries, including financial services (76 percent), energy (75 percent), government (67 percent), retail (61 percent) and technology (40 percent).
• The investments made in current IT infrastructure and worries about integration also prevented companies from taking the next step toward cloud computing. 32 percent of respondents that had considered cloud-based applications named existing infrastructure investments as the reason for not moving to the cloud; while 26 percent said that legacy/integration worries had stopped them from going any further. Between the time and effort spent building their current infrastructure and fears around integrating existing systems into the cloud, respondents and their companies have been afraid to abandon what they know for what they don’t.
• Cost also continued to be a concern for those considering cloud computing, especially among government (67 percent), healthcare (52 percent) and legal (40 percent) respondents. This may have more to do with this year’s decreased IT budgets than the expense of cloud services.
• However, of those that have already implemented the cloud, 81 percent of legal, 77 percent of retail, 75 percent of government, 74 percent of technology, 72 percent of healthcare and 68 percent of financial services respondents were planning on moving additional applications to it in the future—showing that these fears can be overcome.

Certain Industries are Moving Faster than Others

• The top three industries adopting cloud computing solutions are technology (with 53 percent), financial services (40 percent) and legal (37 percent). This statistic shows that respondents within heavily-regulated markets such as legal and financial services do not share the belief that cloud-based services make it harder to prove compliance with industry regulations.
• Government has the smallest adoption, with only 19 percent using cloud-based solutions.

Email and CRM Applications Add the Most Value

• Among the respondents already using cloud computing solutions, email (23 percent) and CRM (18 percent) proved to be the most valuable.
• 33 percent of this group have moved email management to the cloud, 26 percent deployed cloud-based CRM systems, 26 percent moved email archiving and 22 percent have moved storage functions.

Cost is Still the Primary Motivation for Moving to the Cloud, but Agility is Gaining

• Cost savings (54 percent) are still the primary motivation behind the adoption of cloud-based services. However, there is evidence that the other business benefits of cloud computing are gaining ground. One of the major benefits of the cloud is its ability to make an enterprise better prepared to react and respond to unexpected changes—or to easily add-on new services as needed. The findings show that 49 percent of respondents support this idea, indicating agility/scalability as a main reason for moving services to the cloud. In addition, respondents also rated efficiency (39 percent) and streamlined administration (36 percent) as key reasons. As the adoption of cloud-based services grows, so does the understanding of its value.

“This research shows that once enterprises experience cloud-based applications, their fears about integration, reliability and costs are immediately alleviated,” said Mimecast Chief Executive Officer, Peter Bauer. “The survey’s results point to a bright future ahead for cloud computing as more and more companies look to the cloud to create an efficient and agile organization.”

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(The Hosting News) – The Planet today formally announced it’s plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. Also planned are capacity and functionality upgrades to meet the unprecedented traffic utilization demands of its colocation and managed hosting customers.

The Planet operates seven data centers – two in Houston and five in Dallas – with 179,000 square feet of raised floor, and additional capacity in London for virtual rack customers. Approximately 44 percent of the company’s business originates from outside of North America, and it operates network points of presence on the East and West Coasts to enhance network performance and reduce latency.
“Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “Even with these investments, our growth has outpaced requirements as customers place more demands on our network. Ultimately we’ll deliver improvements in orders of magnitude that offer increased capacity, and even more resilience and fault tolerance.”

The upgrades will be completed in phases, beginning in March, with completion expected by year-end 2010.

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(The Hosting News) - Microsoft Corporation officially announced today that they will be hosting a workshop presentation on their cloud platform offering ‘Windows Azure’ at the Cloud Computing Congress (www.cloudcomputingcongress.com). This event will be taking place on the 16th March at Olympia, London.

Eric Nelson, Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist will be giving an introduction to one of the leading cloud platforms that is at the cutting edge of the Cloud Computing Age. Attendees will learn what Windows Azure is capable of doing and why, how and when you should adopt the Azure platform that went into production on the 4th January 2010.

The free to attend workshop session is a must attend for resellers, developers, the IT community and independent software vendors (ISV) who can explore the potential to increase revenues and decrease its costs.

The session will demonstrate Windows Azure PaaS offering that enables applications built in .NET, Java, Ruby, PhP, SQL Server, MySQL and more to be run on Microsoft Data Centers.

“For the past decade we have relied on Microsoft for underpinning technologies in our foundational SaaS, infrastructure services and innovations in the Media & Entertainment and Enterprise markets’’, said Darcy Lorincz, CEO of Origin Digital. “Integration with the Windows Azure platform is another market leading, evolutionary step for our company and we expect that Origin Digital and our customers will benefit from performance and cost benefits for years to come.’’

“The Cloud Computing Congress is an event designed for building partnerships across the board, and providing a good networking environment for those to communicate and take the cloud debate forward.” commented Ian Johnson, Managing Director, Six Degrees Events. “I’m especially interested in heading the latest in the demand for mobile devices and mobile cloud computing, and the challenges this presents.”

The Cloud Computing Congress will run simultaneously with other conferences including; Enterprise Social Media www.enterprisesocialmedia.net, Social Media World Forum www.socialmedia-forum.com, Mobile Social Media – www.mobilesocial-networking.com.

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(The Hosting News) – IBM ( IBM) today announced the opening of a new data center designed to support new compute models like cloud computing, in order to help clients from around the world operate smarter businesses, organizations and cities.

The new data center reduces technology infrastructure costs and complexity for clients while improving quality and speeding the deployment of services – using only half the energy required of a similar facility its size. The data center will ultimately total 100,000 square feet at IBM’s Research Triangle Park (RTP) campus and is part of a $362 million investment by the corporation to build the new data center in North Carolina. IBM owns or operates more than 450 data centers worldwide.

Data centers are the backbone of information technology (IT) infrastructure delivery for businesses and other organizations, with powerful servers and storage systems running business-critical technology including software applications, email and web sites. IBM has engineered the data center to help its clients use new Internet technologies and services to meet the business challenges of an environment marked by an exponential rise in computational power, a proliferation of connected devices and an imperative to manage energy costs.

The data center uses advanced software virtualization technologies that enable access to information and services from any device with extremely high levels of availability and quality of experience.  The facility aggressively conserves energy resources; saving cost and speeding services deployment through a smart management approach that links equipment, building systems and data center operations.

“I thank IBM for its continued commitment to North Carolina. This facility promises to be one of IBM’s greenest data centers in the world, proving once again that green is gold for North Carolina,” Gov. Bev Perdue said. “Growing North Carolina’s green economy plays a critical role in my mission to create jobs and to ensure our state’s economy is poised to be globally competitive in the long term.”

The data center is showcasing a cloud computing solution in partnership with North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and NC State University that enables Hillside New Tech High School students in Durham, NC to access educational materials and software applications for the classroom over the Internet from the high school’s computer lab, as well as from any networked device.  This means that the learning environment can be extended to nearly any place at any time without the restrictions many schools face such as limited support, hardware resources and lack of access. The Hillside outreach project with NCCU, using cloud computing as a vehicle in support of education, is one of several such K-12 projects that IBM supports. The new data center also currently hosts IBM’s global web site, ibm.com, and the IT operations of strategic outsourcing clients such as the United States Golf Association (USGA).

“Data centers have always been a critical part of IBM’s global technology services – and they will be even more important as the processes, infrastructure, and systems that define business today become increasingly connected and intelligent,” said Pat Kerin, general manager, IBM North America.  “This new facility not only sets new standards for energy efficiency, but provides the flexible capacity that allows IBM to deliver services that enable clients to reduce costs, improve productivity, and gain competitive advantage in their markets.”

Alex Withers, managing director of Digital Media for the United States Golf Association, said, “The migration of our USOPEN.com operations to IBM’s new data center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina reduced our energy consumption by 38 percent and floor space requirements by 54 percent. We count on IBM to deliver a cost effective, reliable and scalable hosting environment that supports the presentation of our world-class championships to players and fans.”

Key attributes of the new data center include:

* Smarter data center management: Thousands of sensors, connecting IT equipment, data center and building automation systems, provide data that can be analyzed to plan future capacity planning, conserve energy and maintain operations in the event of a power outage.
* Energy efficiency: The data center uses half the energy cost to operate compared to data centers of similar size by taking advantage of free cooling – using the outside air to cool the data center.  Intelligent systems use sensors to continuously read temperature and relative humidity throughout the data center and dynamically adjust cooling in response to changes in demand.
* Cloud computing capability: Support for cloud computing workloads allow clients to use only the resources necessary to support their IT operations at any given moment – eliminating the need for up to 70 percent of the hardware resource that might have been previously needed to perform the same task. The data center also hosts recently announced “Smart Business” cloud computing offerings – each of these solutions can significantly reduce a client’s total cost of ownership by up to 40 percent.
* Built for expansion: Due to an innovative modular design method, IBM will be able to add significant future capacity in nearly half the time it would take traditional data centers to expand. This design/build method – called IBM Enterprise Modular Data Center (IBM EMDC) – also enables IBM to rapidly scale capacity to meet demand by adding future space, power, and cooling to the data center with no disruption to existing operations. This means up to 40 percent of capital costs and up to 50 percent of operational costs may be deferred until client demand necessitates expansion. The new data center can also quickly and seamlessly expand its power and cooling capacity.
* New building standards: IBM started building the data center in August 2008 and it began to support client operations within 15 months compared to the industry benchmark of 18-24 months.

In constructing the new data center, IBM renovated an existing building on its Research Triangle Park campus by reusing 95 percent of the original building’s shell, recycling 90 percent of the materials from the original building and ensuring that 20 percent of newly purchased material came from recycled products The result lowered costs and reduced the carbon footprint associated with building by nearly 50 percent allowing IBM to apply for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification. LEED is a third-party certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.

Factors key to IBM’s selection of RTP as the site for the new facility include North Carolina’s robust network infrastructure, its leadership approach to energy efficiency, information technology security and geographic elements such as the low risk for natural disasters.

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