Overcome them to reduce outage and downtime risks and realize virtualization efficiencies
 
The savings from moving to virtualization may be considerably less than expected if you don’t address some major hurdles. And making things worst: poorly managed virtual environment can risk the performance and availability of your business application, and that’s something you really can’t tolerate – can you?

Many people bemoan the lack of a simple definition of cloud computing, and some even call it "the latest hype." In many ways, "cloud" is like "open source" -- more of a method than a tangible thing, and the definition varies depending on your place in the IT universe.

Some try to make "cloud computing" intelligible to a broad audience, but end up being so vague as to have no technical value. A good example is the basic definition in the Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing: "Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like electricity."

 For years corporate IT drove technological innovation - and had the huge budgets to prove it. Those days are largely over and now innovation is coming from the consumer market in the form of new devices, applications and means of access. Are IT departments ready for this change or are they in danger of staying behind their firewalls and becoming dinosaurs, unable to serve the needs of their employees?

 

According to four Booz & Co. authors, in an article ("Friendly Takeover: The Consumerization of Corporate IT") in the Booz publication Information Technology Foresight, "The dikes built by corporate IT departments to protect their companies from the outside world...and to restrict employees from the distractions of the Internet are springing ever-larger leaks." Employees, especially younger, Web savvy ones, are demanding the right to use new devices to do their jobs. Refusing to do so, the authors say, "is not a winning strategy," since it can lead to a loss of employee morale, loyalty and innovation.