When it comes to picking a hotel for your business trip, if all your choices are similar in pricing and quality, but one has attentive concierge service, wouldn't it make sense to choose that one?

Maybe you'll need help picking the best nearby restaurant, or want to score tickets to a basketball game in town at the last minute. That's when you really appreciate the value of a concierge. More...

Call it the eight-step plan. Eight steps that move you from “that cloud sure sounds like a good idea” to true cloud readiness.

A new Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan paper available here (registration required) spells out the eight steps. The paper bills itself as a “practical guide” to a successful cloud strategy, and we have to say that the steps they describe definitely seem practical and sensible. More...

As the “cloud” concept arose, there was a lot of debate about whether cloud computing would really replace the client-server architectures of today’s enterprises. Now it’s clear that the answer is both “yes” and “no.”

Cloud computing isn’t an “either/or” proposition. What will happen at first is that CD and DVD-ROM drives on computers will start to disappear. “App stores” and the like are nothing more than cloud-based software management systems -- but they work really, really well. Few of the “apps” one downloads to a device or PC are actually cloud-based apps -- but as more and more applications are developed for cloud-based distribution, more and more cloud-based functionality is being written into these apps. More...

We talked the other day about the cloud and compliance issues, and after writing that, we came across an item that drives that point home.

According to this article at the Bank Info Security website, the Federal Financial Information Examination Council is casting a wary eye at the cloud model, in light of past and potential data breaches. It has produced a four-page resource document designed to help financial institutions "better understand and address (the) unique risks posed by outsourced cloud-based services." More...

Are CIOs and top IT executives hopping on the cloud bandwagon even more enthusiastically than their IT staffs? That appears to be what one of the latest surveys about cloud attitudes reveals.

In the survey, summarized in a CIO.com article, 92 percent of responding top IT decision makers (CIOs and other top IT execs) said they believe cloud technology is good for business. That's an impressive result, but even more so when you see that the same attitude was shared by just 81 percent of IT managers. In our experience, the CIOs usually require convincing by their managers and staffs when it comes to the newest technology approaches, so this is an interesting finding. More...

Maybe it's time to finally retire the term "dumb pipes" to describe the public network. In our business, as you can imagine, we aren't particularly fond of it.

But in the cloud era, it's such an inaccurate description that it's like calling something that you like "groovy." Unless you're Austin Powers, that just won't fly. More...

One of the most expensive budget items in IT is the need to support a full-blown operating system on each and every desktop PC. Because every application installed on a given desktop can have a unique, unanticipated effect on that one device, the havoc that can be unleashed across the whole of the enterprise can sprout in an almost random, chaotic fashion. More...

To cloud – or not to cloud – may be an easy decision at times, depending on your preferences, the enterprise’s culture, and the applications in question. For a business, Unified Communications (UC) is ideal candidate for a first move into the cloud. However, the decision-making process could be time consuming due to the nature and importance of UC.

To me, nothing beats a handy chart which lays out the pros and cons of each approach, without biases. Gary Audin’s latest TechNote, Deploying UC Apps: CPE or Cloud, provides such a chart, comparing two obvious choices to delivering the features and benefits of UC. It’s a quick read, comparing the two alternatives side-by-side. More...

At the recent Interop trade show, according to news reports, security was a big topic, including cloud-centric security.

That’s a good thing, and it shows that the market is working as it is supposed to. There’s no doubt that enterprises are interested in taking advantage of what the cloud can offer in terms of hosting data, applications, and infrastructure. But they have to be sure that everything “out there” in the cloud is as safe as it would be if it was under their roof, in that locked room, with people whose job it is to ensure authorized access of the data. More...

When we first saw ABI Research’s latest projection of cloud migration trends, our first thought was that their numbers were a bit conservative. The headline was that 41 percent of all enterprise communications applications users worldwide would migrate to the cloud within five years, by 2016. More...