Posts tagged Here’s
Want To Speak @ SMX Toronto? Here’s How
Feb 6th
The agenda is live, and we’re now accepting submissions to speak at SMX Toronto 2012, on April 25-26. To increase the odds of being selected, be sure to read the agenda. Understand what the sessions are about. Ensure that your pitch is on target to the show’s audience and the session. Please also…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Here’s How to Win $5k For Your Favorite Non-profit
Jan 21st
Wanna win $5000 for your favorite non-profit? All it takes is to post a slide deck on Sliderocket for this contest called Make an Impact. Your presentation needs to be posted before March 28, and probably as soon as possible so you can begin promoting it and get some views. The four presentations with the most unique presentation views and judged to have the best storyline, composition and compelling cause will each win a $5,000 donation to their non-profit.
You don’t have to be employed by the non-profit to enter: just designate who is going to get the dough if you win. The winning entries will be based on the strength of your story, presentation composition, and your non-profit’s potential to make an impact.
Good luck! It is a great idea, and showcase’s SlideRocket’s process to collaborate too.
Sponsor
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Mozilla: We’re About to Grab More Data About You, But Here’s How We’ll Keep It Safe
Jan 13th
Mozilla has some big plans up its sleeve in 2012. The non-profit open source foundation is planning some features for its Firefox Web browser and beyond that will require greater access to user data. In a blog post, the organization explains exactly how it intends to use and handle that data. In short, very carefully.
Some of Mozilla’s initiatives for this year include an HTML5 Web app store, a mobile operating system and perhaps most intensive of all, a decentralized system for user identification and authentication at the browser level. In other words, a browser-based replacement for usernames and passwords.
Sponsor
Historically, Mozilla has thoroughly encrypted the data utilized for things like Firefox Sync, which allows users to sync bookmarks, passwords and other data across devices. That encryption, says Mozilla is even more solid that the type used by banks.
Secure as it may be, application-level encryption won’t be practical for some of the things Mozilla is working on, a few of which will naturally require that more data points about users are collected. This is a big deal to consumers and legislators alike, as issues like user tracking and online privacy receive more attention in the press and the halls of the U.S. Congress.
A Five-Point Plan For Data Security & Privacy
So how will Mozilla secure your data in the future? They’ve proposed a five-point set of guidelines to govern their development moving forward. Data should be collected only when doing so presents an obvious benefit to the user, and the vendor (in this case, Mozilla) should always be aware of what data is being stored, as well as how, where and why.
Mozilla also promises to do its best to minimize how long any given data point is stored on its own servers. If data is not needed for an extended period of time, it shouldn’t be stored for long, if at all. That data should also be invisible to the server whenever possible. “If we can implement a given feature by never sending data to the server, or by using application-level encryption, then we will,” Mozilla said.
Finally, if it’s possible to use anonymized, aggregate data rather than individually identifiable information, Mozilla’s engineering team will strive to do it.
Before SOPA exploded as one of the biggest tech news stories in recent memory, there was a growing amount of focus being put on online privacy and related issues. User data tracking and retention have caught the attention of U.S. legislators, who have demanded answers from Amazon over the user privacy afforded by its Silk browser and expressed concern about online user tracking in general. This level of transparency on Mozilla’s part is probably no coincidence in light of these issues and the microscope they will continue to be placed under in the near future.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Yes Klout Is Flawed, But Here’s Why You Should Give It a Chance
Nov 22nd
MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson used to be known as “MySpace Tom,” because newly created Myspace accounts automatically included him as a default friend. Nowadays, he may as well be known as “Klout Tom,” because of his usage of and influence on the leading social networks of this era: Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
Klout is a tool that measures your influence online. It puts a number on your ability to influence other people using social media. Tom’s Klout score is 77, which is relatively high. If your work in any way involves social media, it’s good to be influential in whatever your niche is. But is Klout really a meaningful way to track your influence? Should you be using it to help you in your career or life?
Sponsor
Ranking people on the Web has always been difficult and is often viewed as a form of elitism. There are other issues too. Social media is ripe with gaming, therefore how can anybody trust a ranking mechanism for social media? Also people have questioned the company’s motives – is Klout merely a front to farm influence metrics out to marketers?
Those are all valid concerns, but let’s focus on what value – if any – Klout provides to you, dear Reader.
Klout in a Nutshell
Klout aims to measure influence “based on your ability to drive action.” It relies on data from social networks, so when you first join you’re prompted to connect your social networks to Klout. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (as of today) and other popular services. It’s by no means a comprehensive list of social networks, but with today’s addition of Google+ it now includes all of the biggies.
Once you’ve hooked up all of your social networks, Klout assigns you a “Klout score.” It also gives you three other measurements:
- True Reach: How many people you influence
- Amplification: How much you influence them
- Network Impact: The influence of your network
Klout Tom
As mentioned above, Tom Anderson‘s Klout score is 77. He’s a power user of social networks. I guess he has the time to be, as his byline states “enjoying being retired” (and why not!).
Anderson currently has a True Reach of 49K, amplification of 22 and a network of 59. He’s influential, says Klout, in topics such as Social Media, Entrepreneurship and (ironically) Facebook.
Anderson’s Klout score recently jumped as a result of Klout adding Google+ to its rank (aside: my own Klout account hasn’t yet indexed Google+, so it doesn’t look like Google+ integration has rolled out to everybody yet).
Klout defines Anderson as a “Thought Leader” in his industry: “Your followers rely on you, not only to share the relevant news, but to give your opinion on the issues. People look to you to help them understand the day’s developments. You understand what’s important and your audience values that.”
Questions Over Data Accuracy
So how good is Klout at measuring the influence of Tom, not to mention the rest of us? That’s another contentious thing about Klout. Anderson himself, writing on his Google+, noted one possible issue:
“…they [Klout] don’t seem to be taking into account the new “subscriber” model on Facebook. I converted my personal Facebook account to allow subscribers about a month ago, and I now have near 900,000 subscribers.”
Anderson also noted that “Klout seems to be very Twitter-heavy in its scoring mechanism.” However, that was contradicted by the analysis of another social media influencer, Kim Sherrell (Klout score 67). According to Sherrell, Klout is now Facebook-heavy:
“This happened about the time Twitter power users saw significant drops, but [Facebook founding president] Sean Parker’s score was through the roof. At that point, he had been Tweeting for five minutes. There is no way [Parker] could have earned that score on Twitter. The data had to be coming from Facebook.”
Black Box
Klout’s main issue right now is that nobody can figure it out. It’s at best opaque, at worst gibberish. Uber-photographer Trey Ratcliff (Klout score 84) commented in my Google+ stream:
“I log in there every week or so to see if I can figure it out – I can’t! And it must be a little off because my score is higher than Tom Anderson’s — that doesn’t seem right.”
I know my Klout score (currently 60) is off, because it hasn’t accounted for Google+ yet.
But while data accuracy and believability is a problem for Klout, we should cut them some slack. They only just added Google+ and they’re probably continually tweaking their algorithms. We’ve seen over 2011 how fast changing the social networking landscape has become – Google+ launched in late June, Facebook has morphed and added new features at an impressive pace, and Twitter has continued to change things up.
So Should You Use Klout?
Klout’s business plan is undoubtedly geared towards giving its influence data to marketers. Even so, I think it’s useful to have a personal Klout score and to track it. There will continue to be inconsistencies and complaints, about Klout scores and what they mean. But if your work involves social media, then influence is a key metric. Also it’s worth heeding the advice of Kim Sherrell, who discovered that “the real benefit [in Klout] is the valuable professional contacts.”
Yes Klout is flawed, but currently it’s the only real contender offering influence metrics. It will likely get better over time. So I’d advise to run with it and see how useful it is for you. If you’re a regular Klout user, or if you tried it but didn’t like it, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Here’s How Google Music Plans to Compete So Late in the Game
Nov 16th
The world’s biggest search engine company turned its music initiative up a notch today. Google Music now includes an MP3 store, in addition to the cloud-based music storage that launched into beta in May. At the company’s event in Los Angeles today, they removed the “beta” label from Google Music and made it available to all U.S. users, but kept the “free” price tag they originally launched with.
Rather than charging for storage, as Apple and Amazon do, Google is allowing users to store up to 20,000 tracks for free. So how will they make money? They’ve partnered with three of the four major music labels (Warner Music didn’t sign on) and several independent ones to sell high-quality, 328 kbps MP3 files to users. Google will take a 30% revenue share on each track sold.
Sponsor
Google has an uphill battle in front of it when it comes to competing with Apple in this space, which is currently dominated by iTunes. To do that, Google is throwing in some extra features and exclusive content, which it hopes will draw people to Google Music and at the same time, help bolster both Android and Google+.
The new music store, which is now live in the Android Market, already has 8 million songs in it, and that number will rise to 13 million in the coming weeks. Still, that puts it about 7 million songs behind iTunes, which has deals in with all four major labels, most indie labels, and even convinced The Beatles to get on board two years ago. That said, the iTunes Store has been live since 2003 and it’s had all that time to build up its catalog. For only being live less than hour, Google Music is catching up to the likes of Apple and Amazon pretty fast.
Google Throws in a Few Perks
To help draw listeners in, Google is offering high-quality audio, free storage, some unique social features and artist exclusivity.
As expected, Google Music is integrated with Google+, the young social network that is increasingly at the heart of Google’s product strategy. When users share music on Google+, those tracks are available to their friends for free for up to one listen. This is also true of entire albums shared on Google+.
To make the product more appealing at launch, Google named several artists that are releasing new material exclusively Google Music. The new studio album by rapper Busta Rhymes is being released exclusively on Google Music, and several other artists, such as Pearl Jam and the Rolling Stones, are releasing exclusive live alums through the new service. Notably, another artist on the list is Coldplay, who recently pulled their catalog from Spotify over concerns about low royalty payments.
Devoted users of Apple products may still be lured by iTunes Match, which doesn’t require a lengthy bulk file upload. Still, for the price (free), Google Music can probably convince a lot of people to sit and wait for their files to transfer.
A Leg Up For Independent Artists
Although Google has partnered with most of the major labels, it’s hard to miss that part of what they’re launching could serve to further undermine the importance of record labels and other twentieth century relics of the music industry.
Through its Artist Hub, Google Music is giving artists tools to market themselves and sell their music directly to fans. For a one-time fee of $25, any artist can set up a profile, upload an unlimited amount of their music, manage photos and even set their own prices.
If Google Music takes off, this may well prove to be a viable source of revenue for emerging artists, many of whom are wary of the low royalty payments offered by streaming services like Rdio and Spotify. Artists can also sell tracks directly through YouTube, which is already a prominent source for music discovery.
Just as with signed artists, independent artists who upload their music to Google’s storefront will get a 70% cut of all revenue generated by MP3 sales.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Most Don’t Password Protect Their Smartphones – Here’s Why You Should
Oct 6th
If your smartphone fell into the wrong hands right this very moment, imagine the types of information that person would have instant access to.
If you’re like me, that unthinkable list includes things like your personal email, work email, Mint.com account, Google Docs, and all of the data you have stored in Evernote and Dropbox. If they were feeling particularly mischievous, they could post embarrassing updates to Facebook and Twitter under my name and avatar, and even publish something wildly inappropriate on ReadWriteWeb.
Sponsor
Fortunately, I keep my phone locked with a four-digit PIN number. Thus, in the rare event that my iPhone ever leaves my sight, it can’t be accessed should somebody else pick it up. While this may sound like common sense, I’m actually not in the majority in this case, according to a recent survey conducted by Confident Technologies.
More than half of consumers do not lock their smartphones, the survey found. Of those, 44% said it was “too cumbersome” to bother with. Thirty percent say they’re not concerned about the security risk. All of this is despite the fact that about half of them use their smartphones for banking or some other financial purpose.
This has risky implications not just for individuals and their private data, but for the companies those people work for. As smartphones become more popular among consumers, people are increasingly using them to access work email and networks, even in cases when the device is not company-owned or administered by the corporate IT department.
Mobile security will only get more important moving forward, as the line between our work and personal lives continues to blur and as the eventual mainstream adoption of NFC turns our phones into a substitute for our wallets, our keys and much else. If you think the idea of losing your phone is nightmarish now, just wait a few years.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Here’s What Spotify’s New Facebook Integration Looks Like
Sep 23rd
The deep integration with Facebook that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced at the f8 conference yesterday is now live and we’ve taken some time to explore how it works and where on Facebook you can expect your Spotify activity to pop up.
The new integration can be activated from within the Spotify desktop client. We were prompted to opt into it from the right column of the service, but if you’re not seeing a similar call to action, you can go into your accounts settings where a new option will appear: “Get personal recommendations by sending music you play to Facebook’s Open Graph.”
Sponsor
Once this box is checked and your Facbeook account is connected to Spotify, every song you listen to will be displayed on Facebook. Yes, even guilty pleasures, songs you may be checking out for the first time and those 1980s pop hits you occasionally put on for purely nostalgic reasons. This is something that might not be immediately clear when you first activate the integration.
Where Your Music Activity Shows Up on Facebook
The first place your friends will start to see your music pop up is in the site’s new real-time news ticker. As each track begins to play, an update will pop up in the news ticker telling everybody which song you’re listening to at that exact moment. They can click on the update and check the song out for themselves if they so desire.
One thing that wasn’t made entirely clear in the company’s initial announcement was whether or not this on-site playback will work independently of the Spotify desktop client. It does not. You have to have Spotify running to listen to tracks. That’s not a huge deal, because Spotify is now open to everybody (no invites required) and the basic service is free.
Your music-listening activity will also be published to your own news feed. If you’re listening to lots of tracks, the text will read something like “John listened to Whoomp! (There It Is) and 17 other songs on Spotify.” That can be expanded to reveal all 18 songs, each one of which can be clicked on and played. If you click on a song listed on a friend’s profile and other friends of yours have listened to that same song, Facebook will tell you that.
From this point forward, Facebook will keep a record of every song you listen to on Spotify. Those songs will be listed in condensed form on your profile as “Recent Activity.” If you have the new Timeline profile activated, your top artists and top albums will be broken down into monthly increments alongside all your wall posts, photos and other activity.
Implicit Social Recommendations: Who’s Listening to What?
Of course, Facebook will also show you what other friends are listening to, so long as those people have Spotify connected to Facebook. This is where things start to get a little more interesting. Say my friend Stephanie is listening to an album, and that fact is posted on her Facebook wall. Then our mutual friend Sarah clicks on one of those tracks and starts listening too. What I’ll see in my news feed is a notification that both Sarah and Stephanie are listening to the same album right now.
This adds a new social layer to the music listening experience that didn’t exist before. It’s something we’ve started to see with group listening services like Turntable.fm, but this is baked right into Facebook’s social graph. It’s also different because the music being played is explicitly chosen, not curated by others as is done in the group-listening apps.
The Music Dashboard: A Centralized Hub For Social Music Activity
As announced yesterday, Facebook has also gone live with a new Music dashboard. This is where all of the music-related activity in your social network is aggregated. It filters the status updates from your friends and only shows the posts pertaining to who is listening to what music. Again, if multiple friends put on the same album, you’ll see that here.
Off to the right, the page displays the most listened-to songs across your whole network. This is likely to be much more meaningful to you than Billboard charts or even what the most popular tracks on Spotify in general are.
As of right now, only a handful of people in our network have activated the new integration, so there isn’t a ton of data yet. But we can imagine this becoming a much more interesting place if more people begin to participate.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Ning Acquired: Here’s How it Evolved Over 6 Years
Sep 20th
Today Ning chairman and co-founder Marc Andreessen announced the "merger" of his company with a larger company, Glam Media. In other words, Glam acquired Ning. It’s interesting to look back at the history of Ning, a DIY social networking service that launched in 2005 when the Web 2.0 tech boom was in full flow. I wrote about the launch of Ning in October 2005, here on ReadWriteWeb, nearly 6 years ago.
Since that time Ning has negotiated the often rocky terrain of changing web trends. In 2005, mash-ups were all the rage and so Ning started out as a way to help you blend different web services together to create a "social application." This was the era when MySpace was the leading social network (it was acquired in July 2005 by News Corp.). Ning ultimately evolved to become a fully fledged social website builder. The history of Ning neatly explains how it fits into Glam Media’s business, so let’s take a closer look.
Sponsor
Back in October 2005, Ning co-founder and former CEO Gina Bianchini excitedly described Ning as a "Playground" for people to build social apps. In a comment on the launch post, Bianchini stated that "our ultimate goal with this Playground is for [sic] enable me or someone like me to create something small, but social without having to know Ruby or PHP or how to set up web hosting, ops, etc."
One of my favorite niche social networks created on Ning, Tu Diabetes.
To its credit, Ning has stayed true to its original mission and indeed expanded on it. Ning became not just a service to create social apps, but social networks.
Its biggest challenge has undoubtedly been adjusting to the mammoth success of Facebook, which considerably reduced the demand for DIY social networks. Why create your own social network when you could create a Facebook Page and tap into Facebook’s network effects (i.e. its massive user base)? This caused Ning a lot of grief and the company experimented with various business models in order to survive. Which ultimately led it into the arms of Glam Media.
Glam Media was also founded in 2005, as a "social blog community." It now specializes in niche websites across many verticals, with brand advertising the business model. Glam particularly targets brand advertising for women. The network has more than 2,500 publishers.
Unlike Ning, Glam Media has enjoyed steady growth over the years. It’s currently one of comScore’s top 10 Web properties in the U.S., with over 80 million monthly unique visitors from the USA. Glam puts the worldwide figure at over 200 million unique visitors.
However, Glam Media’s U.S. traffic has declined by about 10 million uniques per month over the past year, according to comScore. So the acquisition of Ning will help in that regard. Andreessen stated that Ning will add 40 million global unique visitors to Glam’s 200 million.
Overall, this seems like a great deal for both parties. In terms of product, it is a close fit: Glam’s vast network of niche vertical websites, together with Ning’s 100,000 niche social networks. While it may not have been a dream financial outcome for Ning – given the amount of funding it ate through over 6 years – as a product it evolved well. The existence of niche social networks like Tu Diabetes has benefited me over the years, so the demand for a service like Ning won’t go away.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
TechCrunch is Wrong: Here’s the Real Location Opportunity for Quora
Aug 25th
I don’t think TechCrunch’s M.G. Siegler cares about location in the same way I do. Maybe it’s because he lives in the heart of the tech scene of San Francisco; which is both the center of the world and a kind of history-less-nowhere. It’s more fun to know where you are and what has happened there before when you’re not in a place that’s all about planned obsolescence.
Either way, Siegler was told by the startup Quora today that Topics (collections of questions and answers on Quora) will soon have locations associated with them. (The feature is live now.) He makes a case that it’s a bigger deal than it might seem, but the way he explains it makes me wonder whether he was even able to convince himself. I’ll tell you why adding location data to Quora could be a big deal. I think it’s because of the pseudo-secret Quora iPhone app that’s about to launch.
Sponsor
Above: The Quora map of Portland, Oregon – where tech bloggers come from to challenge other tech bloggers who seem like they want to retire. 
To be honest, I think location is going to need to be rolled out to a broader range of topics than it is today on Quora and probably to individual questions too before it proves as useful as it ought to.
How to Hold a Map Upside Down & Backwards
Siegler says that dropping a pin on a map to associate a Quora Topic with a place means that people looking at the Quora page for the Topic will know what place the content is related to. I don’t think that’s terribly interesting, myself.
He then mentions something brief about mobile phones making location more relevant and concludes with a line about how if you were planning a vacation someplace, you could use Quora to find unique and interesting information about the place you’re going to go.
Sure. Undoubtedly a few people will appreciate the opportunity to look at a topic page on Quora.com about the Taj Mahal and say “well I’ll be darned, there it is on a map.” And udoubtedly some people will take a detour past quora when planning a vacation. Not very many though and if I were Quora I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.
I imagine Quora’s vision for location probably extends far beyond these limited scenarios. Their PR strategy regarding the feature may have been woefully unimaginative (and have correspondingly dissapointing results, I’d think, though they’re not unique in that) – but I bet the feature itself is going to aim high.
What Location Offers Quora
Take a look at the Quora thread asking what the most beautiful buildings in the world are. It’s a commonly referenced part of the site and it really shows what Quora can do. It’s beautiful, mind-expanding and compelling for visitors.
Other parts of Quora are just waiting for their elements of location to be leveraged as well. What are the best places to rent a startup company office in SOMA? What are the best restaurants in Portland, Oregon and why? Where can I find an open wifi connection with power after mindnight in Arcata, California?
Those are the location-based questions people want to know…when they are out on location and have location exposed to apps on their phone.
Like the forthcoming iPhone app that Quora is building, testing and going to launch sometime very soon. Why will you have that app running in the background on your phone when there’s already really good HTML5 mobile web app Quora has had forever? Because, one might assume given all this “lets add location” stuff because that app will quietly track your location if you let it and then ping you when it can drop some awesome Quora knowledge about the place you’re in.
This isn’t about people planning vacations to the Taj Majal but unclear on where it is on a map.
This is about a big bold move to make Quora, the potentially lovable but potentially pedantic, nichey and forgettable Question and Answer network into something that will stick with users, that will be passed around through word of mouth and thus will grow outside of the Silicon Valley startup and VC clique that…put it on the map.
It sounds great to me. I love those evenings when I remember to go browse the Quora, to find upvoted answers to in-depth questions on topics of interest to me. Tech, location technologies, art, Portland, Oregon, personal hygiene or odd intimate proclivities – there’s a Topic on Quora for everyone.
And sometime soon I’m going to guess that you’re going to get a push notification sent to your phone reminding you about all that collective knowledge, when you’re in a real-world place that it references.
Specifically, you won’t just get push notifications when Quora has something to say about the place you’re at. You’ll get push notifications when you and your phone are in a place that is related to a Topic you are following on Quora. That sounds to me like something that could be awesome.
Where are the best places to go to find UI designers? Let’s say you’re following that question and then you find yourself in one of those places. Ding, ding, ding says your phone! That would be super cool!
That’s what I think is going to happen – and I think it could be way cooler than M.G. Siegler makes it sound. Maybe I just find online location data more exciting than other people, though.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Sponsor Post: Here’s Why You Need to Transition Your IT Sandbox Environments to the Cloud
Jul 5th
Editor’s note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.
Today’s IT managers are facing a classic conundrum.
On the one hand, we all recognize that IT sandbox environments are an emerging necessity. Companies increasingly need a place for dynamic workloads, such as migration and software evaluations, security testing, pre-production test beds, training sessions and IT labs.
And yet these IT sandbox environments typically aren’t compatible with the capital-intensive in-house data center resources we’re accustomed to utilizing. Unlike well-planned data center workloads, sandbox workloads are characterized by fluctuating capacity needs and other rapid changes, and they often require intensive tactical IT support – none of which is well-suited to the traditional data center model.
Sponsor
Essentially, it boils down to “what we need” vs. “what we have,” a debate that’s now commonplace in IT shops around the globe. Is there a solution to this puzzle? How can organizations take advantage of all the benefits IT sandbox environments offer if these dynamic workloads don’t fit conventional IT ecosystems?
At Skytap, we believe we have found an answer to the conundrum. The solution, as we see it, is in the cloud.
In fact, in many ways, IT sandbox environments are ideal candidates for transition to the cloud. Think about it. First, sandbox environments offer a low-risk adoption path to cloud computing. Plus, they also can provide high ROI, since resource utilization can be aligned with demand and users can be empowered with self-service -both of which can significantly reduce costs and IT support burden.
Need more proof? Let us walk you through three of our top ten reasons why it makes sense for you to rethink the way you’re managing your IT sandbox environments. For example, if you transition your IT sandbox environments to the cloud, you can:
- Eliminate infrastructure constraints on the business. A cloud service enables infrastructure capacity to be added quickly – often in less than a day! – to meet business demand. What’s more, costs go down because cloud services are provided using a utility billing model, so you only pay for what you use.
- Avoid expensive application rewrites. Ensure your cloud provider supports a wide variety of operating systems, databases, application servers and infrastructure tools so that your machines can keep the same networking settings and host names and connect to onsite infrastructure as required. The goal is for your IT and development teams to use a cloud service as an extension of their on-site IT environment and to run existing applications, virtual machines and systems unchanged in the cloud.
- Reduce data center cost and complexity. Why use costly in-house data centers to support dynamic workloads? By contrast, cloud services are generally billed on a variable, pay-as-you-use model, so an organization can convert large upfront capital expenditures into needs-based operational expenses. Savings can be immediate. In addition, aligning computing capacity with demand helps minimize ongoing support costs, and you can apply quotas to individuals and organizations to cap usage and/or hard budgets. Skytap’s solution even enables virtual data center environments to be automatically suspended when not in use to avoid unnecessary charges.
. . . and that’s just the start of our list!
Want to learn even more? For additional information, please download this white paper:
Top Ten Reasons to Transition Your IT Sandbox Environments to the Cloud.
We’re convinced that it’s time for you to rethink the way you manage your IT sandbox environments. By transitioning these dynamic workloads to the cloud, you can start reaping a wide range of significant IT benefits, including lower costs, enhanced agility and improved productivity.
Photo by trublueboy.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
