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...

If you had any doubts about whether interest in the cloud is real, a fresh survey of IT professionals should dispel them.

Detailed in a new Webtorials paper (registration required, but it’s free), the survey asked 164 IT pros how likely it was that their companies would leverage the cloud for a variety of uses within the next year. The numbers are surprisingly promising for cloud adoption. 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...

There’s a school of thought out there that cloud transport can and should be just a commodity. A dumb pipe that gets you to your data or app destination. Then, inside that destination, all the intelligence resides in the software, along with the security and reliability. More...

When it comes to the highway to the cloud, it will be paved with partnerships, between ASPs (and other solutions providers) and carriers. Sprint, preferably, but there’s probably room for other carriers, I suppose.

We’re not the only ones with this partnership perspective. This article from CRN makes the point that while there has been a traditional divide between solution providers and carriers, that divide is no longer practical in a world where enterprises simply want to be cloud-connected in the most effective and reliable way possible. Increasingly, this is what customers want and demand. More...

Despite growing usage of, and interest in, the cloud, enterprises and even providers are still feeling their way around in this relatively new technology environment. Like explorers in a new and largely unexplored frontier territory, we’re learning as we go, and dispelling mistaken perceptions along the way. More...

A newsworthy insight that was highlighted in a survey of CEOs  unfortunately got little attention due to the recent holidays. The findings show that by a landslide, enterprises would prefer that a traditional carrier or hosted VAR provide their access to the cloud. More...

It seems like every mid-to-large business is doing something in the cloud. If these companies don’t offer a cloud service, they have migrated to the cloud, or are talking about doing so. That is, except for the telcos, who some believe are overlooking the cloud. More...