Gartner: IT spending up 3%, Olympic cloud, CloudViews Unplugged, Cloud-based EHR. And more...

Cloud News

• IT spending is on the rise, according to this New York Times article. Recent figures published by Gartner state that IT spending will increase by 3% from 2011, more than was previously predicted. Cloud computing is one of the main contributors to the increased spending as more companies start to adopt the technology. Spending on public cloud services is predicted to rise from $91b in 2011 to $109b in 2012. Still, cloud services represent only a fraction of the $3.6 trillion that is predicted to be spent on IT in 2012.
• The Olympics may be the perfect event to showcase the power and scalability of cloud computing, but unfortunately, that won't be happening in London this year, according to this ZDnet blog. CIO for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, Gerry Pennell, revealed that cloud infrastructure isn't mature enough to support the games, but he predicts that we'll see cloud computing being utilized in future events.
• Microsoft announced a pre-beta version of the Service Management Portal which provides a Windows Azure-like Infrastructure-as-a-Service experience for users, whether they are using Microsoft's cloud or not, according to this GigaOM article. 
• Cloud computing may add as many as 14 million new jobs worldwide by 2015, according to this Forbes.com article.

Featured Content on Cloud Commons

Gartner Report: Cloud Sourcing: Lessons Learned from Early Adopters

Cloud offerings continue to grow in maturity and volume. CIOs look at them as an alternative in their IT value chain. Gartner recently assesses organizations that purchased cloud-based service offerings. This report by Gartner (compliments of Cloud Commons® Ecosystem) shares some early lessons from their experiences.

Feature article

 Survey Says - We're More Comfortable with Cloud, Yet Same Worries Persist

By George Hulme, Independent Writer

A survey released just prior to the 2012 GigaOM Structure Conference had a number of interesting results about cloud services adoption. It seems organizations are concerned about security, compliance, and cloud lock-in, but certainly not enough to curb adoption.

785 respondents including industry experts, users and vendors participated in the survey. Respondents were asked about such cloud issues as business drivers, objections, and its business impact. One potential ding of the survey is that 65 percent of respondents were vendors, and only 35 percent were classified as customers. So the results make skew heavily toward what vendors would like to see market realities to be, rather than what they are. Plus, cloud vendors are certain to be cloud champions (one would certainly hope so, anyway).

Here are a number of the headline findings from the survey I found interesting. Read the full article.

Cloud Views

• In the July episode of CloudViews Unplugged, Andi Mann and George Watt of CA Technologies wrap up the month's cloud news in 10 minutes. This month's episode topics include Europe's cloud, Oracle's cloud, Google Coordinate and IaaS, Facebook and more!  
• Is cloud-based EHR taking the healthcare industry by storm? In this Cloud Commons blog, George Hulme discusses a recent article which declared that cloud-based EHR is having a huge impact on the health industry, but the data may not be there to back the claim.
• Should you design your cloud for failure? In this Forbes blog, Reuven Cohen discusses the recent outage of Amazon Web Services due to a lightning storm on the east coast that brought down popular websites including Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram. Reuven suggests that businesses should rely on more than one cloud provider and an automated fail-over process to ensure business continuity. 
• A recent survey conducted by Rackspace revealed that 91% of IT decision makers think cloud computing is a positive thing, according to this ZDNet blog. The survey also revealed some of the top concerns when it comes to cloud including adding additional computing power and vendor lock-in. 

MSP Corner

• A recent report from AMI Partners reveals that US SMBs will invest $34 billion in cloud services in 2012, according to this MSPmentor article. This article takes a look out how MSPs should be positioning themselves to take advantage of the increased interest in cloud among SMBs.
• With HostingCon just around the corner, many MSPs that are evaluating cloud services and strategies will be heading to the event in Boston, according to this Talkin' Cloud blog. The blog also details some of the current trends for MSPs and their involvement with cloud.

Upcoming Cloud Events

• HostingCon 2012: July 16-18, Boston, MA
• Cloud Identity Summit 2012: July 16 - 19, Vail, CO
• Cloud Computing World Forum: August 22 - 23, Sao Paulo, Brazil
• VMWorld 2012: August 26-30, San Francisco, CA

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