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...

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...

Cisco recently announced its Open Network Environment, or Cisco ONE, strategy. The new architecture is the foundation by which Cisco networks will eventually be provisioned entirely through software APIs, otherwise known as cloudbursting, which I have discussed  before. 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...

Enterprise network experts are familiar with the term Virtual Private Networks, but that term refers to the concept of making non-private networks seem “virtually” private. Now, we are seeing a new kind of virtual network, which is truly virtual as it is created entirely within software. More...