Cel mai deschis blog despre afaceri și tehnologie

We’ve all been frustrated by technology that gets slower, less reliable and less useful over time. But Google Apps is different. It actually gets better week after week, without patches or updates to manage. People can absorb this stream of innovation without being distracted from their workflow.

Earlier this month, Google Docs received a number of updates and new features to help improve user experience. Now Google has focused its attention on Presentations and introduced a new feature called Discussions for easy collaboration with others, and more than 50 new features.

 Desktop calendar applications are great if you're always at your desk or if you're diligent about synchronizing with your tablet or smartphone. But if you like to travel light, it may be time for you to switch to a calendar that you can access from any Internet terminal. Also, you have a club, team or company and you want to be sure that everyone knows about upcoming events or everyone is available in a specific day and hour for an important business meeting.

Google has added a new Research bar to Google Docs to help users browse Google for information while working on an article or paper. Google Docs' new sidebar appears along the right-hand side of your document and will show you different types of results: web results, images, quotations, maps, reviews, and more.

Technology inevitably gets more complicated as it gets older. Therefore, upgrading platforms and adding more features will make your systems increasingly difficult to manage and complex to use. So, at times like these, your company needs an approach based on entirely modern technologies, designed for today’s world. Your company needs Google Apps.

Companies that are buying Google Apps for Bus

iness from BITSoftware, until June 30, 2012, will receive free Google account installation and activation support and free DNS hosting. For more information please send an email at alexandru.enache@bitsoftware.ro or call at 0368.412121.

Part of Google Apps, Google Sites makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites you can build any website (intranet, corporate website, team, project, department, wikis and more) and share rich content (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, video documents, forms, images, etc) without having to write code. But you don't want that everything you displayed on those sites to be seen by everyone. Or you want that certain people in your company have access to a limited number of documents posted on the Google Sites, but not all. With page-level permissions, you will be able to control who can view and edit your Google Site on a page by page basis.

There may be times when you don’t have an Internet connection, like on an airplane or train without wireless Internet, but you still want access to a file you’ve saved in Google Docs. Now, Google made it possible. So, you can select any file in Google Docs to make it available offline. So regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet, you’re always connected to those files. And this option is available for PC, Notebook, Smartphone or Tablet.

 

From Government departments through small local companies, information can be extremely valuable to organizations. However, this useful information often ends up trapped in files or databases, inaccessible to the average employee or user. Also, the explosion of information stored in multiple formats that needs to be accessed by both internal staff and a distributed workforce (dealers, vendors, etc) only complicates the problem. The need for organizations to quickly respond to market changes, innovate, and accelerate their time to market increased in direct proportion to their structural complexity. So, it’s no wonder that 39% of a knowledge worker’s time is wasted on searching for information or recreating existing content.

Businesses of all sizes need to be prepared for the unexpected. In legal actions, a business can be required to turn over all emails on a topic, or between certain employees. It's a huge and expensive headache to hunt down these emails, especially for smaller businesses who don't have dedicated IT staff. Even then, there's no guarantee they'll really get everything relevant.

When it comes to the cost of the cloud, it is important to analyze all cloud`s models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Those three different service models for the delivery of cloud computing provide companies with the ability to mix and match the best service model to the business needs of their organization, based on requirements and payment options and depending on the vertical industry and specific applications portfolio.

Then choose the model or combination of models that offers you the most benefits at the lowest cost. Because each model has its own costs, based on a various factors, from storage space needed to monthly traffic. To arrive at a total pricing for a cloud service, user organizations must take note of individual service elements that a provider bills for and how these are calculated. For instance, does the provider bill based on within server traffic, storage space needed, server CPU time or a combination of these factors along with other elements?

Another important factor in determining the total cost is the type of service required: dedicated server to running applications in the cloud, cloud-based backup or basic hosted storage. The easiest way to break down pricing is to focus on the primary services offered, because most cloud providers split their services into three areas: servers in the cloud, storage in the cloud, sites and applications in the cloud.

You must know that there are two pricing models for cloud computing services: pay as you use or subscription based pricing. Under first pricing model, customers are charged based on their usage and consumption of a service. This pricing structure makes users fully aware of the cost of doing business and consuming a resource, since the cost comes out of their pockets, or, in the enterprise world, their own budgets. The second model is the simplest pricing option, where the customer is billed on a fixed monthly basis. For example, a virtual machine can be offered at a fixed cost per month. The consumer is billed the same amount every month without consideration for actual usage.

To determine a pricing model that provides profit to a company that uses cloud services, it is necessary to know the direct and indirect costs of providing these services. Costs can be initial or ongoing. Initial costs, also known as capital expenditures, or CapEx, include the costs to acquire assets such as hardware and facilities (power and cooling infrastructure, server, network, and storage hardware, software licenses, including operating system and application software, cables, etc). Ongoing costs (OpEx) include all costs for keeping the business or facility running, such as: payroll, facilities, hardware and software maintenance, backend cost, etc.

When you calculate the monthly cost for cloud computing deployment, you must take into account both capital and operational expenditures. For capital expense cost items, the cost of each item needs to be amortized over the life of the item. By combining the OpEx with CapEx, the total monthly costs of the cloud deployment can be determined.

If you have a limited budget, work with projects or cannot predict which resources you'll need over a longer period, then you choose “the pay as you use” pricing model. If you require more control over the hosting budget and want to use the cloud for a longer period, you must choose the subscription based pricing.

 

Sources: Cloud Spend Management, Google Tools, ComputerWorld, PC World, Cloud Tweak, Cisco Systems

As I already said in a previous post, there are a number of questions that show up frequently enough regarding the cloud computing and the switch to cloud. And the decision to migrate or not to cloud solutions hangs often by the answers to those questions.

The first question is „What is the true meaning of the Cloud?”. As with any major technology transformation, there are many definitions of cloud computing. In very simple terms, cloud computing is a new consumption and delivery model for information technology (IT) and business services that is characterized by: on-demand self-service, location independent resource pooling, rapid horizontal and vertical scaling, pay-per-use. And the exciting impact comes from enabling new service consumption and delivery models that support business model innovation.

The second is „What applications should I move to the cloud and what changes to my network do I have to make to use Cloud?” A wide variety of applications are good candidates to be moved to the cloud. Legacy applications are certainly great candidates for offloading from your internal data centers. Web servers and web applications like SharePoint, .NET, Drupal, Wordpress, Blogspot, Wikis, corporate intranets are all good candidates. As most cloud`experts said, when selecting applications for the cloud you need to be aware of the distance between the data center and the cloud region you’ve selected. According to Forrester Research, the changes to a company network are minimals. Because we taking about an outbound traffic only, nothing inbound. Therefore are no changes to your network configurations.

„How can I implement the Cloud computing security?” is the third question that show up frequently. When an organization decides to move to the cloud, it must first determine its foundational controls which form the backbone of the company’s security principles. Plans must be laid out in order to secure the company’s assets so that when the company subscribes to cloud computing, all the needed security controls must already be in place. Also, the company will have to be workload-focused instead of cloud-focused. When moving to the cloud, the organization must take into consideration each workload, so that it will be able to enforce a security program which is focused on the workload with a possibility to implement non-traditional security measures.

Now, having the answers for the most important questions asked before switching to the cloud, your decision related to adopting or not adopting cloud computing technology can be easily taken.

Sources: educause.eu, infoworld.com, ComputerWorld, Forrester Research