CloudAudit Gets Real

For enterprises, one of the biggest challenges with cloud computing include transparency into the operational, policy and regulatory, and security controls of cloud providers. For cloud providers, one of their pressing challenges is answering all of the audit and information gathering requests from customers and prospects. CloudAudit aims to change that.

The Rise — and Risk — of the Composite Clouds

Many cloud providers are learning to eat their own dog food, and they’re leveraging other clouds to augment missing pieces of their offerings. As a result, you may find that a cloud provider offering software as a service (SaaS) is actually leveraging another cloud for storage, another cloud for compute, and perhaps other components as well.

As cloud computing evolves — and providers try to get the market quickly — we could find that offerings appearing to be from a single provider are actually a composite of various cloud providers brought together to form a solution. I’ve found myself in briefing after briefing where this is the case. But should you care?

The Danger of Cloud Silos

Many consider cloud computing a revolution in how we do computing. However, we could find we’re falling back into very familiar and unproductive patterns.

Although clouds can become more effective and efficient ways of using applications, computing, and storage, many clouds are becoming just another set of silos that the enterprises must deal with. But it does not have to be that way — if you learn to recognize the pattern.

The (Better) Future of Tech Support

Right now, getting help when something unusual goes wrong is a frustrating experience for customers. They’ve come to stereotype the experience as waiting endlessly on hold, deciphering strangely cheerful foreign accents, humoring technicians who are incapable of understanding — let alone answering — their questions, and taking time off to wait for a tech who doesn’t show.

Thin Client Computing: Central Management, Anywhere Access

Few IT duties are as universal as the care and feeding of the corporate desktop. While other aspects of IT get easier thanks to new technologies like server virtualization, there’s still no magic pill to alleviate the day-to-day drudgery of maintaining and securing hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of desktop systems.

The drawbacks of desktops go beyond the burdens of management and maintenance. They involve employee mobility, client hardware refreshes, data security, and, under certain conditions, even power consumption and cooling.

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