One of the most challenging aspects of any cloud or virtualization strategy is how to handle the migration of business-critical legacy applications from their old, familiar environments to a virtual and/or cloud environment. I've spoken to many Windows IT Pro readers that are reluctant to migrate from Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 due to application compatibility issues, and moving those same brittle applications to a private cloud creates yet another challenge for the harried IT administrator....Read the rest of entry >>

Interest in (and adoption of) private clouds is on the rise, fueled by the need for more elastic and agile IT resources, improved ROI, and a demand for keeping business-critical applications and data under the control of in-house IT staff....Read the rest of entry >>

While the real world adoption of cloud computing in still in its infancy the technologies that enable cloud computing are evolving rapidly. Traditionally the cloud has been viewed as hosted services. However, that is what is now known as the public cloud. In contrast, the private cloud is built using the same type of computing paradigm as the public cloud but the private cloud is comprised of your own organization’s resources. To get a better understanding of the private cloud let’s dig a little deeper into the different types of public cloud offerings and the then see how they relate to the private cloud....Read the rest of entry >>

So you think you want (or you’ve been told) to build a private cloud. Where do you start? Heed the items in this private cloud checklist to greatly increase your cloud project’s chance of success....Read the rest of entry >>

There have been several highly-publicized outages of cloud services over the last few months, ranging from Amazon's cloud collapse to Microsoft's Office 365 failures. While the track record for the public cloud hasn't been spotless, it's important to remember that internal IT resources -- and by extension, private cloud deployments -- aren't always infallible either. ...Read the rest of entry >>

Virtualization has become a critical component in all sizes of IT infrastructures, from SMBs to the enterprise. Not so long ago businesses were reluctant to virtualize mission-critical applications and servers like SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint; however that has now changed....Read the rest of entry >>