Gartner forecasts 30% of WW midsize companies will adopt recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) to support IT disaster recovery by 2014-- up from the the current figure of around 1%.

RaaS involves the replication of VMs and production data on the cloud, together with means for VM activation supporting either recovery testing or actual recovery operations. 

Midsize businesses make the best RaaS customers, according to Gartner-- larger companies are more likely to have recovery management facilities and infrastructures too complex to move to the cloud, while Read more...

Attitudes in the Financial Services (FS) industry are shifting towards the cloud, Gartner reports-- with 44% of EMEA FS CIOs expecting cloud-based infrastructure to support over 50% of bank transactions by 2015.

"Early cloud adoption, especially in the FS sectors...  is set to go mainstream, moving the heart of the business, transaction origination and processing," Gartner says as 33% of EMEA FS CIOs expect SaaS will handle the majority of transactions by 2015.

Cloud banking will allow the economically feasible deployment of "champion-challenger" Read more...

IBM expands its SmartCloud public and private cloud offerings with new services-- including IBM SmartCloud Application Services, the company's first PaaS.

SmartCloud Application Services will offer open Java and cross-platform support (with no vendor lock-in), with a comprehensive set of application infrastructure and managed services. 

It will run on SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+-- IBM's first enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Platform, designed to handle enterprise workloads. 

IBM says SmartCloud will also include services automating the most common labour intensive tasks associated with SAP environment management over the cloud.

The company also announces SmartCloud Foundation-- a portfolio of private cloud solutions for SMBs aiming to quickly design and deploy private cloud environments. 

Citrix purchases cloud-based storage, sharing and collaboration provider ShareFile for an undisclosed sum, in a move Citrix says will fortify its personal cloud roadmap. 

The announcement follows a Forbes report revealing Citrix failed to take over Box.net earlier this year, even after offering the hefty sum of $600M.

ShareFile aims at business users, with centralised online storage capability allowing clients to store, sync and share documents across multiple devices and locations. It also provides online folder creation, the sending of large files Read more...