So the cloud hype train rolls on and we’re all constantly being told how the cloud can help cut costs, increase agility and reduce time to market. The cloud certainly has its advantages and for SMB’s and start ups with little or no ‘IT baggage’ the cloud is an attractive proposition. However,...

Applications and the information they hold are increasingly the lifeblood of many organisations. In my experience, many businesses which have encountered major loss of data are never able to reopen; some attempt to but do not succeed and only a handful survive. This just goes to show the long-term importance...

Disaster recovery (DR) is, by its very nature, difficult to plan for. But we’re all well aware of the problems associated with insufficient DR processes, policies and procedures. If a business’ IT infrastructure cannot recover from a ‘disaster’ quickly the implications can be extremely costly. Recovery...

If one was to believe the statistics presented by some vendors, you’d be forgiven for thinking the vast majority of organisations are already running extensive levels of virtualisation across their production environments. In reality, however, many organisations have actually only virtualised the...

With tightened budgets, businesses are constantly looking for way to see a rapid return on investment (ROI). This has increased interest in the adoption of pay-as-you-go cloud services and virtualisation technologies where the ROI can be very attractive. In recent months, Tom Brand, virtualisation practice...

One of the lingering concerns about cloud computing is determining when it does or doesn’t make economic sense. There is certainly a crossover point at which either the requirements of scale or level of service are such that the cost of the cloud exceeds that of a more traditional approach. However,...