Hybrid Cloud News & Articles

Choice is a big word in IT today and though it’s commonly used in conversations that center around end-user interfaces, mobile devices and the Cloud, Enterprises need flexible file storage options too.

This week in document management we heard how SpringCM has upgraded its content security to enable safer mobile computing. OpenText was also busy this week with not one, or two, but four different upgrades and releases, while Ademero upgraded Content Central to v6.5. Meanwhile, we sat down with Alfresco to find out about the future of cloud computing.

While many enterprises are still wrestling with the problems of cloud computing and whether they should make the jump, a small number of companies are providing stepping stones to the cloud that can make the transition less painful -- Alfresco and its hybrid model is one of them. Alfresoco’s Director of Cloud Services David Gildeh sat down with us last week to explain what this is all about.

Earlier in the month former Alfresco CEO John Powell outlined a change in the business direction of Alfresco that will take it to and IPO in US and a wider global presence. Today, Doug Dennerline announced the acquisition of Germany-based WeWebU that will expand its enterprise portfolio for content management.

It occurred to me recently that people are talking about “the cloud” these days almost as much as they talk about the weather. Need to reduce spending on IT infrastructure? Move to the cloud! Want to increase accessibility? Move to the cloud! Hoping to streamline processes? Move to the cloud!

In the last few years, the nature of content in the workplace, and therefore enterprise content management, has transformed in several powerful and important ways. 

With broad adoption of SharePoint 2010 coupled with the business need to drive down costs and management overhead of information technology, many organizations are looking more closely at hosted versions of SharePoint -- both private and public cloud offerings, as well as Office365.

Today was the second and final day of Lucid Imagination’s annual Lucene love fest, Apache Lucene EuroCon, in Barcelona, Spain. The information exchange, networking and new ideas continued to flow in sessions, halls and over the free wine at lunch.

Security and integration are two of the biggest challenges of cloud computing. They drive many enterprises to manage their most sensitive assets internally -- creating a complex portfolio of systems spanning public and private clouds. IBM wants to make the complexity a little easier to manage.

Think you’re ready for the cloud? Think that the cloud will magically solve your company’s storage problems? For some, the cloud will be a great technological advancement. For others, it won’t be the right fit.

At Forrester’s Content and Collaboration Forum this afternoon, Forrester principal analyst Rob Koplowitz debriefed us about the Current State of Collaboration in the Cloud. Here’s what we learned.

Here’s some food for thought: A recent Cloud Development Survey reported that 61% of the developers in Evans Data Corp (news, site) believe that a portion of their IT resources will move to the public cloud within the next year.

But how much of those IT resources exactly? The portion size is up for debate, as over 87% of the 400 developers surveyed in November and December of 2009 believe that only half or less than half of their resources will move.

Meaning? The hybrid cloud is what you might want to watch out for.

“The hybrid Cloud presents a very reasonable model, which is easy to assimilate and provides a gateway to Cloud computing without the need to commit all resources or surrender all control and security to an outside vendor, "said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data."Security and government compliance are primary obstacles to public Cloud adoption, but a hybrid model allows for selective implementation so these barriers can be avoided."

Some other tidbits from the survey to think about:

• MySQL is the preferred database for use in the public cloud cited by over 55% of the developers
• Almost two-thirds (64%) expect their cloud apps to extend to mobile devices
• VMWare is the favorite hypervisor vendor or user in a virtualized private cloud (28.6%) followed by Microsoft and IBM

For a preview of the 113 page report, head on over to EDC's site.