The recent outage of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has reopened a persistent question about the reliability of Cloud services.

Microsoft’s most recent service disruption is just the latest evidence that Cloud alternatives are not immune to problems. Last year’s Amazon Web Services debacle was far worse and lasted much longer.

Yet, overall the uptime record of all the major Cloud service providers is far greater than most enterprise data centers. And, the leading Cloud vendors are generally better at keeping their customers informed about the status of their services than inhouse IT departments have been.

But, no service provider can achieve 100% uptime. Therefore, it is important for IT and corporate decision-makers to fully understand the potential pitfalls and put in place a series of back-up and recovery capabilities to minimize the short-term and long-term impact on their business.

The vulnerabilities associated with … Read More »

For years, I’ve been pointing to ADP payroll services as a model for successfully delivering data-sensitive, shared services that should give corporate decision-makers in small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) greater confidence in the new generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions emerging in the market.

For a while, ADP was hesitant to assume the mantle of major SaaS vendor. But, it has recently embraced the concept of the Cloud and is actively promoting its Cloud-based services. In fact, ADP is now happy to use the growth of its Cloud-based services as an important indicator of the growing acceptance and adoption of a widening array of ‘on-demand’, business service alternatives.

Last week, ADP announced that over 3,600 organizations are now using ADP’s Workforce Now® Express Payroll service which was introduced only 12 months ago. The company said it has seen nearly 50 percent sales growth … Read More »

I had an opportunity to speak to the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum at Towson University last week about new strategies and tactics for fully capitalizing on today’s Cloud alternatives. Because the group is composed of CIOs primarily from mid-size and large-scale enterprises with a lot of custom built applications and systems already in place, their biggest challenge is determining how to integrate the latest Cloud services into their legacy operations. Managing ‘hybrid’ Clouds is becoming a common challenge.

I had spoken to this group a couple of years ago when the concept of Cloud computing was just emerging. At that time, they were primarily interested in better understanding what the concept meant and why they should consider it. Like many CIOs, the attendees of this session are now trying to determine where, when and how to deploy Cloud services to meet their … Read More »

Despite some skepticism from industry analysts about the ability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors to deliver viable business intelligence (BI) solutions a few years ago, today’s Cloud-based analytic tools are increasingly demonstrating that they can quickly generate tangible benefits to organizations of all sizes, especially mid-market companies.

The growing interest in Cloud-based analytics is easy to understand given the escalating pressures facing businesses contending with rising customer expectations and intensifying competitive. Businesses not only have to synthesize a widening array of internal and external data sources, they must also make timely and useful analysis available to an increasingly dispersed workforce so they can make better day-to-day business decisions.

The Cloud is the perfect enablement platform for analytic tools to respond to these demands. THINKstrategies sees the Cloud responding in three ways.

First, every leading Cloud solution includes a basic set of analytic tools to satisfy … Read More »