CIOs will need to judiciously assess private cloud vendors, just as they would a public provider.
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Crenshaw predicts that CloudForms will eventually support OpenStack as one of the cloud vendors its customers can select.
This approach also enables business owners to switch cloud vendors without worrying about many of the operational details.
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In fact, it seems many leading cloud vendors are happy to still maintain a place for on-premises software.
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For more information on the competitive landscape of this market, please see my previous post, Demystifying Cloud Vendors.
In other words, if you choose to change cloud vendors or move to an offline system how do you get your data back?
Indeed, times have never been better for companies evaluating CRM choices, especially those provided by software-as-a-service, or as they say now, cloud vendors.
It's easy to say that outsourcing applications to cloud vendors is "cheaper, " but many companies have already invested heavily in expensive infrastructure and software.
Today's IT leaders are rethinking issues of cost, security and control, and rewriting the IT job description by outsourcing contextual processes to reliable cloud vendors.
With competition heating up from cloud vendors, including Salesforce, Netsuite, and recently-IPOed Workday, customers do have a better case to make that they have options.
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Cutting through the hype of cloud vendors starts by evaluating how ready their Cloud Services, enabling technologies and Professional Services are to serve customers today.
Data portability is a crucial consideration when considering cloud vendors.
So what happens to the role of the IT department when a large percentage of contextual functions can be outsourced to cloud vendors, without the need for onsite infrastructure?
Citrix, one of the primary cloud vendors, has discontinued contributing software projects to OpenStack, the open-source software foundation for cloud development, of which it had been one of the founding partners.
In an article in IEEE Internet Computing, Cloud Computing: The Limits of Public Clouds for Business Applications, I point out several problems the public cloud vendors will have to solve to support business computing.
In essence, a company can change cloud storage vendors easily and is not dependent on a single vendor.
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Sure, cloud platform vendors will argue that their software, if run properly, isolates all user data and setting info from each other.
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In theory, that approach sounds great: buy point-solution apps from a variety of cloud-application vendors in the hopes of obtaining attractive pricing along with perhaps some best of breed technologies.
Whitehurst is discouraged as he sees an increasing number of cloud offerings on the market through which vendors attempt to offer their own unique, differentiated cloud products.
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Then, a few years later, incumbent IT vendors introduced private cloud offerings.
Ensure privacy and security requirements for all vendors (especially cloud providers).
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Enterprises with large incumbent vendors are introducing cloud-based infrastructure and platform alternatives to provide new options, increase competitive pressures, and successfully shift vendor negotiating leverage to their favor.
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Cloud-based e-discovery vendors offer numerous benefits for the corporations and law firms that partner with them.
The results are not surprising, and should counsel corporations and law firms, which are much less likely to have adequate internal infrastructure, to partner with cloud-based e-discovery vendors.
SMEs will be more likely candidates for mass migration to cloud services, although CSPs and vendors often do a poor job of crafting solutions that are appropriate for SMEs at a reasonable price.
As the CEO of a cloud service that helps businesses exchange files with clients and vendors, I am here to tell you that you are justified in having some concerns about cloud computing.
As corporation and their law firms produce ever-increasing amounts of electronically stored information, or ESI, e-discovery vendors must move to the cloud in order to realize and pass along to their clients the benefits of that migration.
As vendors continue to move to the cloud, so too will they avoid permutations of their core offering.
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This is hardly surprising when one considers the client-focused benefits of cloud computing and the extraordinary market opportunities for vendors.
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