(The Hosting News) – Mimecast® today announced the results of its Cloud Computing Adoption Survey, which examined the perception and adoption of cloud computing solutions among 565 respondents responsible for managing their organization’s IT operations and budget across the U.S. and Canada in the Fall of 2009.

Data from the recently completed online survey highlights the complex, often contrasting, thought process of IT decision makers regarding cloud computing. While security and integration issues are clearly users’ biggest fears about cloud computing, these concerns have not dissuaded companies from implementing cloud-based applications within their corporate infrastructure. The well-known fears with cloud computing appear to be at odds with reality, as the survey findings suggest strong satisfaction with cloud computing once it is installed. 70 percent of IT decision makers already using cloud computing are planning to move additional solutions to the cloud—most within the next 12 months—indicating that those respondents have come to quickly recognize the inherent ease of implementation, robust security features and cost-savings of cloud computing.

Survey Results

Those That Have Used Cloud-Based Services are Coming Back for More

• 70 percent of companies already using cloud computing solutions are planning on moving additional applications to the cloud—and a majority of them are looking to do so in the next 12 months.  This shows that respondents that have used cloud-based solutions have seen their business and operational value and want to expand that success to other application areas.

Companies’ Cloud Fears are Waning…

• 62 percent of all respondents have considered or are considering cloud computing.
• When asked what would change their minds about cloud computing, respondents ranked more mature solutions and better integration with existing systems as their top two needs (33 percent for maturity, 32 percent for integration).

… but Security Concerns and Existing Investments Remain Biggest Roadblocks to Further Adoption

• Companies remain hesitant because of perceived security issues. The findings show that security concerns were the leading reason given by respondents in all categories for not moving forward with cloud-based applications. 46 percent of respondents that had considered cloud-based applications chose security as the main reason for not moving forward. This was also true across a majority of industries, including financial services (76 percent), energy (75 percent), government (67 percent), retail (61 percent) and technology (40 percent).
• The investments made in current IT infrastructure and worries about integration also prevented companies from taking the next step toward cloud computing. 32 percent of respondents that had considered cloud-based applications named existing infrastructure investments as the reason for not moving to the cloud; while 26 percent said that legacy/integration worries had stopped them from going any further. Between the time and effort spent building their current infrastructure and fears around integrating existing systems into the cloud, respondents and their companies have been afraid to abandon what they know for what they don’t.
• Cost also continued to be a concern for those considering cloud computing, especially among government (67 percent), healthcare (52 percent) and legal (40 percent) respondents. This may have more to do with this year’s decreased IT budgets than the expense of cloud services.
• However, of those that have already implemented the cloud, 81 percent of legal, 77 percent of retail, 75 percent of government, 74 percent of technology, 72 percent of healthcare and 68 percent of financial services respondents were planning on moving additional applications to it in the future—showing that these fears can be overcome.

Certain Industries are Moving Faster than Others

• The top three industries adopting cloud computing solutions are technology (with 53 percent), financial services (40 percent) and legal (37 percent). This statistic shows that respondents within heavily-regulated markets such as legal and financial services do not share the belief that cloud-based services make it harder to prove compliance with industry regulations.
• Government has the smallest adoption, with only 19 percent using cloud-based solutions.

Email and CRM Applications Add the Most Value

• Among the respondents already using cloud computing solutions, email (23 percent) and CRM (18 percent) proved to be the most valuable.
• 33 percent of this group have moved email management to the cloud, 26 percent deployed cloud-based CRM systems, 26 percent moved email archiving and 22 percent have moved storage functions.

Cost is Still the Primary Motivation for Moving to the Cloud, but Agility is Gaining

• Cost savings (54 percent) are still the primary motivation behind the adoption of cloud-based services. However, there is evidence that the other business benefits of cloud computing are gaining ground. One of the major benefits of the cloud is its ability to make an enterprise better prepared to react and respond to unexpected changes—or to easily add-on new services as needed. The findings show that 49 percent of respondents support this idea, indicating agility/scalability as a main reason for moving services to the cloud. In addition, respondents also rated efficiency (39 percent) and streamlined administration (36 percent) as key reasons. As the adoption of cloud-based services grows, so does the understanding of its value.

“This research shows that once enterprises experience cloud-based applications, their fears about integration, reliability and costs are immediately alleviated,” said Mimecast Chief Executive Officer, Peter Bauer. “The survey’s results point to a bright future ahead for cloud computing as more and more companies look to the cloud to create an efficient and agile organization.”

Cloud Computing Adoption Survey Results Released is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

(The Hosting News) – The Planet today formally announced it’s plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. Also planned are capacity and functionality upgrades to meet the unprecedented traffic utilization demands of its colocation and managed hosting customers.

The Planet operates seven data centers – two in Houston and five in Dallas – with 179,000 square feet of raised floor, and additional capacity in London for virtual rack customers. Approximately 44 percent of the company’s business originates from outside of North America, and it operates network points of presence on the East and West Coasts to enhance network performance and reduce latency.
“Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “Even with these investments, our growth has outpaced requirements as customers place more demands on our network. Ultimately we’ll deliver improvements in orders of magnitude that offer increased capacity, and even more resilience and fault tolerance.”

The upgrades will be completed in phases, beginning in March, with completion expected by year-end 2010.

The Planet Releases Announcement of $7 Million Network Investment is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

(The Hosting News) - Microsoft Corporation officially announced today that they will be hosting a workshop presentation on their cloud platform offering ‘Windows Azure’ at the Cloud Computing Congress (www.cloudcomputingcongress.com). This event will be taking place on the 16th March at Olympia, London.

Eric Nelson, Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist will be giving an introduction to one of the leading cloud platforms that is at the cutting edge of the Cloud Computing Age. Attendees will learn what Windows Azure is capable of doing and why, how and when you should adopt the Azure platform that went into production on the 4th January 2010.

The free to attend workshop session is a must attend for resellers, developers, the IT community and independent software vendors (ISV) who can explore the potential to increase revenues and decrease its costs.

The session will demonstrate Windows Azure PaaS offering that enables applications built in .NET, Java, Ruby, PhP, SQL Server, MySQL and more to be run on Microsoft Data Centers.

“For the past decade we have relied on Microsoft for underpinning technologies in our foundational SaaS, infrastructure services and innovations in the Media & Entertainment and Enterprise markets’’, said Darcy Lorincz, CEO of Origin Digital. “Integration with the Windows Azure platform is another market leading, evolutionary step for our company and we expect that Origin Digital and our customers will benefit from performance and cost benefits for years to come.’’

“The Cloud Computing Congress is an event designed for building partnerships across the board, and providing a good networking environment for those to communicate and take the cloud debate forward.” commented Ian Johnson, Managing Director, Six Degrees Events. “I’m especially interested in heading the latest in the demand for mobile devices and mobile cloud computing, and the challenges this presents.”

The Cloud Computing Congress will run simultaneously with other conferences including; Enterprise Social Media www.enterprisesocialmedia.net, Social Media World Forum www.socialmedia-forum.com, Mobile Social Media – www.mobilesocial-networking.com.

Microsoft ‘Windows Azure’ Workshop to Appear at Cloud Computing Congress 2010 is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

A web hosting service can be considered as the gateway to having your web site published over the internet. Since there are a wide range of web hosting companies available in the market, it becomes fairly easy to possess a website if you like.

The market for web hosting is changing with the times. Once primarily a platform for distributing text and pictures, websites have evolved into full-fledged applications or media distribution platforms with large disk space and bandwidth requirements. While many web hosts commoditise both, some are beginning to remove limits entirely. If you’re wondering why you may wish to opt for such a host, here are a few points to consider.