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

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

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

Skytap to Deliver Cloud-Enabled Application Lifecycle Management With HP

Are you attending HP Discover 2011 in Las Vegas? If so, be sure to swing by the Skytap booth (#531) and learn how companies like HP, Google, Ellie Mae, Double-Take, LANDesk, Calypso, and hundreds more are using Skytap to move development and test projects to the cloud. With Skytap you can provide cloud testing capabilities that

Skytap to Deliver Cloud-Enabled Application Lifecycle Management With HP

Are you attending HP Discover 2011 in Las Vegas? If so, be sure to swing by the Skytap booth (#531) and learn how companies like HP, Google, Ellie Mae, Double-Take, LANDesk, Calypso, and hundreds more are using Skytap to move development and test projects to the cloud. With Skytap you can provide cloud testing capabilities that

Three Reasons Why DevOps and the Cloud are Perfect for Business Success

Original Post Can be found on ReadWriteWeb.Com here. Night and day. Science and art. 1s and 0s.  For years now, software development teams and operations/system administrators have maintained this kind of yin and yang duality, pushing each other in opposing, but complementary, directions.  We’re all familiar with the dynamic of the IT department. Typically, the