Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

For many organizations, the move to a hybrid cloud has become a question of when, not if. Hybrid clouds provide users the unique benefit of on demand access to IT resources for the development of new applications, and as well as the ability to easily manage existing ones all in one place.

The vCloud Hybrid Service, built on proven VMware technology that many organizations are already familiar with in their existing virtual environments, provides a secure, dedicated infrastructure-as-a-service hybrid cloud that makes moving applications to the cloud easy for even new cloud adopters.

Transitioning to hybrid cloud depends on the specific requirements of your workload. However, to help get your organization into the mindset of hybrid cloud, we wanted to share the top 5 uses cases for moving to the hybrid cloud:

Use Case #1: Packaged Applications

A common source of frustration from IT departments is the inability to quickly add capacity on-demand to meet business changes. This challenge can be solved by moving packaged applications, such as email or collaborative software, to the hybrid cloud. The vCloud Hybrid Service supports thousands of applications and dozens of operating systems certified to run on vSphere, so users can run existing applications in the cloud with no changes required! Furthermore, this enables users to transfer applications without the need for re-coding or reconfiguration, and with no loss in the level of security, availability, or performance users are already familiar with in their internal data center.

More of the VMware post

Accelerate consultants are fortunate to work with a wide variety of IT organizations. Our clients vary by industry, global footprint, size, and competitive landscape. But one common theme among IT leaders has been that true IT transformation involves much more than just updating the technology. In fact, technology consistently ranks low for the challenges IT executives brace for as they push their organizations to modernize and shift toward ITaaS.

With ITaaS, the expectations and ground rules for IT are rapidly changing from “internal shared service” to “quality services at a competitive price.” As IT, our customers are no longer captive; they can easily work directly with public clouds and SaaS vendors. This conjures up a new meaning to “rogue IT.”

More of the VMware Accelerate post

Over the last several weeks this blog has featured a series of posts about the benefits of the Hybrid Cloud – and today marks a major Hybrid Cloud milestone.

I am excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager service.

Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Service protects your on-prem applications by orchestrating the protection and recovery of Hyper-V Virtual Machines running in a private cloud (i.e. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1) to a secondary location.

Over the years, as I have spoken with the VMWare community, I have heard things like this: “Well, with Windows Server 2008 you did not have Live Migration; let me know when you have that.” Recently, that one missing scenario has been SRM. Well here it is! And I want to emphasize that this solution is so much easier to use and the way we have architected it is a much more modern, cloud-centric way of doing things.

Hyper-V Recovery Manager assembles some core elements of our Cloud OS strategy (Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and Windows Azure) to deliver a cloud integrated Disaster Recovery Solution. Reaching GA means that the service is now backed by support and SLA assurance, and IT administrators can use it in production environments. We have had a number of customers running this in production in preview, and their feedback has been straightforward: The solution is incredible and it is ready for general availability.

More of the Technet post by Brad Anderson

More than 80 per cent of employees admit to using non-approved software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in their jobs, a new survey has found.

The survey was carried out by Stratecast, a branch of analysts Frost & Sullivan, and commissioned by McAfee. It asked 300 IT staff and 300 “line-of-business” employees of businesses that employ 1,000 staff or more for their views on “shadow IT” – SaaS applications used by employees for business, which have not been approved by the IT department or obtained according to IT policies. The employees represented different industries, and came from North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Only 19 per cent of line-of-business employees and 17 per cent of IT employees said that they did not use any non-approved SaaS applications. According to respondents, the average company uses about 20 SaaS applications, seven of which are non-approved.

“That means you can expect that upwards of 35 per cent of all SaaS apps in your company are purchased and used without oversight,” CEOs and CIOs were warned by Stratecast.

More of the Computing.co.uk post

The way we deploy software is changing. Our research and others shows that enterprises are moving away from on-premise apps. and moving to private and public cloud offerings. But here is the basic question that is seldom asked. When a company deploys to the cloud does that boost revenue and returns to stockholders? Are high performing companies separating from low performers by their knowledge of and use of cloud technologies? Our recent Business Agility study says clearly that they are not.

Let me give some context for this statement. Forrester is putting significant effort into Business Agility – what it is, how it relates to the success of companies within industries, and what foundations business agility is built on. We’ve identified the three types of agility that companies must develop — Market, Organizational, and Process agility – and evaluate ten separate dimensions that make them up. We found out which of the ten dimensions were the most important, defined as driving growth in revenue and profit (see the Agility Performancereport).

And here’s the point. Infrastructure Elasticity – which is our agility dimension for all things cloud, accounted for almost no difference in enterprise performance. Enterprises aggressively embracing cloud solutions did not perform better than their peers. In fact in some industries, they performed worse.

More of the Forrester post by Craig Le Clair