(Original Article posted by Cloud Business Review)

Cloud computing takes over the IT and business world by storm, and cloud computing adoption is on fast-forward, as businesses are finding ways to benefit from the cloud. Without further ado, here are the 5 emerging cloud computing trends to follow entering the year of 2012:

1. Private cloud adoption is on the rise – rapidly

Businesses’ CIOs want to take advantage of the tools and technologies available on the market today for private cloud.

2. Hybrid cloud is here to stay!

Seeing the hybrid cloud adoption across the mid and large businesses, it is apparent that hybrid cloud is here to stay. Hybrid cloud combines two or more clouds – private, public or community – and it is said to offer more flexibility and security for businesses.

3. Inevitable consolidation

Businesses are demanding flexibility from the cloud – thus there is a rising trend for cloud delivery model consolidation. SaaS, PaaS and IaaS will dissolve into a unified stack as a service delivery model.

4. Application-specific cloud communities are on the rise

Particularly in public cloud, application-specific cloud communities are starting to take form in 3 major areas: Application performance communities, regulatory communities and location-based services communities.

5. Managed services are back on demand – with new flavor: Cloud computing

Managed services is on the rise again as cloud computing has re-fueled interest in outsourcing, as businesses want to benefit from cloud computing and need help in the process. Clients are now demanding infrastructure management services, as well as any other implementation of cloud-based services

So, there you go – 5 trends to watch in cloud computing to help your business in getting ready for 2012.

Absolute Performance provides innovative monitoring solutions for monitoring cloud environments.  

So you've determined that deploying your application in the Amazon cloud environment provides you with substantial advantages over traditional deployment approaches.

First off - you've made a good decision - scalability is easy, cost is flexible, based on what you consume. In addition, you no longer need to pay people to maintain the hardware you once used.  Now it's time to get down to brass tacks and move your application to the cloud...  It seems so easy but there are some important challenges to address.  This post will attempt to help you with a few of the application profiles and challenges we see commonly from our customers.

Written By: Julie Bort, (Network World)
(Original Article)

Despite fears over reliability and·security, enterprises are slowly but steadily moving their·applications to the cloud, and the migration is going to change those companies in profound ways.

Some 80% of new enterprise apps will be developed for the cloud in 2011, and in the past year, adoption has moved into the "early majority" phase, says Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst for IDC.

Gens was part of a four-analyst panel that discussed the promises and gotchas of the cloud Monday at the Cloud Leadership Forum conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Each IDC analyst offered his thoughts on how enterprises can prepare for what they viewed as a massively disruptive technology.

Written By: Michele Nachum
(Original Article)

SMBs are turning to cloud applications in greater numbers than ever before. After all, cloud computing applications can lower IT costs, increase productivity and even offer a more secure solution for storing mission-critical work product.

Cloud computing has truly been a blessing for the SMB market as it has opened up doors to applications that were once only used by the enterprise market with deeper pockets and larger IT departments.

Written by: Jeffrey Kaplan
(Original Article)

Timothy Chou did a great job in his column entitled Cloud computing is not just another name for outsourcing", identifying the unique benefits that make today's cloud computing phenomenon different than yesterday's outsourcing deals. For those readers who might still be trying to grasp the significance of this new form of 'shared services', I'd like to lend my own point of view.

I refer to cloud computing as the latest method of 'out-tasking' specific aspects of your IT and/or business operations to a specialized third-party to gain greater functionality at a lower cost with far less risk. Unlike the all or nothing wholesales outsourcing deals of the past that forced organizations to relinquish control of their IT operations to a third-party, cloud computing permits you to parcel off, or out-task, particular parts of your application, infrastructure or development requirements to a service provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Absolute Performance was featured in ToolsJournal - Tools in and for the cloud. Below is a snippet of the article with a link to the full text.

Find out more about Absolute Performance's Cloud Monitoring Solutions.

Cloud Computing is Internet based computing, where by shared resources, software and information are proviced to computers and other devices on-demand, like a public utility. While cloud computing has been around for over a decade and that we comprehend it by a variety of labels like "Utility Computing", "SaaS", "Distributed or Hosted Computing" and like, we have been now seeing a healthy advancement of the extensive adoption of virtualization, service-oriented architecture and utility computing. This advancement is dependant on the fact that substantial bandwidth accessibility is currently available in a lot of regions and also the software is significantly superior when it comes to security and usablility. The best bit is lots of  running overheads(e.g. licenses, hardware, maintenance etc.) are merged in one managable overhead as Cloud providers take care of providing service.

(Full Article)

Written By: Kathleen Hickey
(Original Article)

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s recently released Federal Cloud Computing Strategy calls for about a quarter of federal IT spending to be committed to cloud systems.

Additionally, under the Cloud First program, agencies will be required to move three services to the cloud within 18 months, adopt a cloud model wherever feasible and evaluate cloud options before making investments.

An estimated $20 billion of the federal government’s $80 billion in IT spending could be used for cloud computing, Kundra said in the report. The agencies expected to spend the most on cloud technology are the Homeland Security and Treasury departments, at approximately $2.4 billion apiece, followed by the Defense, Veterans Affairs and Transportation departments.

Written By: Russell Rothstein,
(Original Article)

Many companies are developing their strategy for migration of business applications to private and public clouds. During this critical stage, it is vital to ensure that service levels are not impacted by migrating the application from dedicated to shared IT resources. It’s no wonder that according to analyst firm IDC, two of the top three concerns that CIO’s have about private clouds are performance and availability.

We see in the market that enterprises are forming new cloud teams and internal committees, with a diverse set of skills, to plan for an effective organizational cloud strategy. One of their mandates in the organization’s journey to cloud is to plan for how to monitor and manage the performance and behavior of applications after deployment. These organizations undoubtedly have a range of infrastructure monitors in the data center. And most cloud service providers, whether internal or external, will provide services for monitoring cloud resources. Yet these tools typically do not provide an accurate picture of what end users are truly experiencing and how to quickly isolate and fix performance issues in application components located inside and/or outside the cloud.

This blog entry points out a few of the key application performance challenges that you are likely to encounter when pursuing a cloud strategy, so that you can address them proactively. I hope that during my session in the Cloud Performance Summit at CloudConnect (Instrumenting Applications When Access Goes Away on Monday March 7) the esteemed panel will address some of these challenges with a variety of perspectives – it should be informative and thought-provoking!

Written By: Beth Schultz (NetworkWorld)
(Original Article)

As Bojan Simic, president of IT analyst firm Trac Research, points out in new research note, “application performance management” (APM) has generated a ton of buzz over the last couple of years. Numerous vendors, be they providing APM specifically or wrapping APM functions into traditional management platforms, have glommed onto the term, promising value propositions such as end-to-end visibility and improved IT-business alignment.

“APM has gotten to the point where the term doesn't mean a whole lot anymore – when you see demos and talk to customers, it’s obvious that many ‘APM’ vendors really shouldn’t be competing against each other. People have got to understand that the APM bucket really consists of five or six different classes of technologies,” Simic says.

Written By: Michael Biddick, InformationWeek
(Original Article)

Just because you're using software as a service or hosting systems with a public cloud provider doesn't mean you're off the hook for performance problems. On the contrary: A critical application is a critical application, whether it lives on your own servers or in a mega data center in Singapore. It's a conundrum your security group is likely also coming to grips with: How do you guarantee highly functional, regulatory compliant computing when the infrastructure is entirely out of your control?

The security guys are on their own. For application performance management (APM) suite jockeys, what will change as applications that impact the bottom line move into the cloud is the set of metrics to be monitored. You'll need to transition from twisting dials to working closely with your cloud provider to aggregate data and give the business a real-time view of what matters. You'll also need the grit to abandon APM systems that just aren't working. Throwing good money after bad will only reinforce business leaders' tendency to see internal IT as hidebound, behind the times, and replaceable.