7 Habits of Highly Effective Cloud Architects – Part Three

Lat week we posted part two of our series: 7 Habits of Highly Effective Cloud Architects. This week we will cover habits 6 and 7. Habit #6: Let your users share IT environments; be sure to manage user roles A big part of being agile in software development is the ability for developers, test engineers and support

7 Habits of Highly Effective Cloud Architects – Part Two

Lat week we posted part one of our series: 7 Habits of Highly Effective Cloud Architects. This week we will cover habits 3 through 5. Habit #3: Empower your users with self-service & create internal evangelists As an IT architect, teams count on you to drive rapid innovation within your organization.  Cloud computing promises to

7 Habits of Highly Effective Cloud Architects – Part One

In today’s ever changing IT organization, many IT Architects are evaluating popular cloud services to manage their dynamic workloads. All too often they quickly discover that most popular cloud services present a thorny dilemma: Commodity infrastructure services offer scalability and low cost resources, but they require applications to be rewritten to proprietary formats and APIs

Skytap Wins ‘Best of VMworld’ Award for Self-Service Hybrid Cloud Solution

A panel of experts at VMworld 2011 has awarded top honors to Skytap for innovation, performance and value. Skytap was selected by TechTarget’s SearchServerVirtualization as a “Best of VMworld 2011” award winner in the public and hybrid cloud computing technologies category. The “Best of VMworld” awards program recognizes outstanding cloud computing and virtualization products and solutions released

Skytap Cloud: Inter-Configuration Network Routing (ICNR)

Did you know that Skytap now allows you to provision complex environments in the cloud to develop and test multi-machine, multi-tier applications? You can also provision multiple configurations for your development and test teams so that each team can work in isolated environments in parallel and collaborate with each other globally. These teams often need

Skytap Announces Cloud Orchestration

Written by David Strom, Read Write Cloud Cloud provider Skytap announced today that they have beefed up their service to enable more complex virtual environments. The enhancements are significant and represent a new moment in cloud computing to deliver complex computing services without requiring specialized IT knowledge to set them up. They have added two

Business Technology Optimization (BTO) and the Hybrid Cloud

When I was a pre-sales engineer at Mercury (before the HP acquisition), we had coined an acronym called BTO, or Business Technology Optimization. BTO essentially defined a new category of products and services that helped align IT and IT Operations with the needs of the business. Mercury got acquired by HP soon after, which caused

Why You Need to Transition Your IT Sandbox Environments to the Cloud

Today’s IT managers are facing a classic conundrum. On the one hand, we all recognize that IT sandbox environments are an emerging necessity. Companies increasingly need a place for dynamic workloads, such as migration and software evaluations, security testing, pre-production test beds, training sessions and IT labs.  And yet, these IT sandbox environments typically aren’t

Top 5 Reasons to Have a Cloud Strategist on Staff

The Cloud Strategist is a relatively new role with many companies that I have seen act as a pivotal piece in contemporary IT departments. This position will continue to play significant roles in mid to large IT Organizations in the years to come as more companies adopt the cloud for various areas of their business.

3 Cool Use Cases For The Cloud

There are many use cases for the cloud and often times starting small is the best way to ensure success when transitioning projects to the cloud. Over the past several months, I have seen the cloud used to address some interesting IT and business challenges. The use cases below are small in comparison to the

Five Steps to Agile Development in the Cloud

Development and test teams are crunched for time just as much as they are crunched for resources. According to a recent survey, ‘developing applications faster’ is a top application delivery priority. The need for speed is amplified when employing an Agile cloud development methodology, as the approach calls for shorter release cycles focused on specific

Keeping the Cloud Under Control

It’s no surprise that enterprises are continuing to increase their reliance on cloud computing. Users are ripe to take advantage of the cloud’s undeniable benefits including self-service freedom, flexibility, availability, scalability, and the simple joy of not having challenges related to hardware and software deployments. However, many business leaders have expressed concern about the security

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