Cloud Management

June 23, 2015

CLOUD

How Do You Protect Your Business If Your Cloud Service Provider Fails?

3 min read

By the end of this year, Gartner predicts 1 of 4 cloud service providers (CSPs) will no longer be in business due to consolidation or lack of funding. Based on the explosive growth of cloud use, you are likely using SaaS to support business critical functions and IaaS compute or storage services from the cloud. […]

May 27, 2015

DATA CENTER

Deliver Infrastructure at the Speed of Need

2 min read

Smart devices give us access to information and services at the speed of need. But they have conditioned us to expect anything and everything faster — and that includes IT services. This expectation for speed coupled with modern technology is driving IT innovation.  Yet, in most organizations, delivery of consistent infrastructure to application or business […]

May 19, 2015

DATA CENTER

TechWiseTV: Cloud Agility through Smarter Automation

1 min read

Agility is highly sought after in today’s business environment.   It allows your business to rapidly adapt to market changes or competitive pressures.  It enables your business to capture new opportunities and customers without expanding your staff or increasing costs.  To accomplish these objectives you need one thing:  automation.  Automation delivers the key element for business […]

March 24, 2015

DATA CENTER

Deliver Services at Internet Speed

2 min read

How quickly can your organization stand-up a new application or deploy new services?  Most customers tell me, “not fast enough!”   I am clearly hearing from them that the new standard expectation across the organization is to receive precise data center resources in “internet time,” easily and definitely on-demand. But customers are not the only […]

January 28, 2015

DATA CENTER

Introducing Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite

2 min read

Forrester research indicates that private cloud has entered into the formal IT portfolio by becoming a core part of data center strategy.   I have been writing about the sea change underway in private cloud.  This sea change means that automating the provisioning of virtual machines and their infrastructure is inadequate in a world where your […]

January 20, 2015

DATA CENTER

Do You Know How Much You Are Spending On Cloud? Hidden Costs of Public Cloud Can be 4-8 Times Higher than Visible Costs

2 min read

Reducing costs remains amongst the top reasons why organizations use public cloud services. However, when calculating the costs of public cloud services organizations need to look well beyond the license fees and billed costs. With Cisco Cloud Consumption Services, we have worked with numerous customers to discover their public cloud usage and analyze cloud spend. […]

December 8, 2014

DATA CENTER

The Journey to Becoming an Enterprise Cloud Service Brokerage: From Shadow IT to Hybrid IT

3 min read

As enterprise cloud use extends to public, private, and hybrid clouds, CIOs and IT leaders are realizing the need to evolve their IT business model to become enterprise cloud service brokerage (CSBs). Cisco’s Scott Clark recently discussed the value of this new business approach for IT and highlighted that by adopting this approach IT can “provide the […]

December 2, 2014

DATA CENTER

Pros and Cons: Do-It-Yourself Approaches to Monitoring Shadow IT & Cloud Services

2 min read

Shadow IT is estimated to be 20-40 percent beyond the traditional IT budget. The ease by which organizations can purchase apps and services from cloud service providers (CSP) contributes significantly to this spending. This is an eye-catching number worthy of investigation—not only to identify and reduce costs, but to discover business risks. So, it is […]

April 9, 2014

DATA CENTER

Open Source Acceleration for Applications

3 min read

In previous blogs I have described how organizations are maturing beyond provisioning of individual servers to provisioning of richer cloud-based application stacks.  Known as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), this capability takes cloud technology beyond infrastructure to automate the application life cycle.  PaaS allows developers and IT operations to collaborate and ensure that application stacks are consistent and […]