Interesting Snippets

For three days now, players have complained of issues connecting with SimCity’s servers. … Some players who managed to get online have lost progress in the game due to connectivity issues… Players have also been kicked out of their games, and have been forced to wait 20 minutes after each failed connection…. Keep in mind that these issues are not limited to people who want to play online with friends. In the new SimCity, all players are required to stay connected to Electronic Arts’s servers, even if they want to play alone

AVG Technologies conducted research among more than 1,000 SMBs in the UK and US to gain insights into their understanding and attitudes towards cloud services and IT security. The study found just a quarter of SMBs had adopted some form of cloud services, while a similar proportion (22% in the UK and 17% in the US) thought cloud services were only for large companies. One-in-three SMBs (31% in the UK and 28% in the US) said they did not understand cloud services at all.

The number of personal subscriptions to online storage services is set to surpass previous projections. The number of subscriptions worldwide already toppled 375 million within the first half of 2012. The original forecast for the entire calendar year was just 500 million.
Subscriptions to cloud services — free or paid — are expected to jump even higher to 625 million globally in 2013.

private cloud models are playing an increasingly pivotal role in core banking activities… One example is Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based bank, which touts the advantages of using cloudlike technologies to help steer the company through a three-year integration project following the $15bn acquisition of Wachovia…
Wells Fargo began by “virtualising” its servers – running software that enables multiple applications to run on the same server and still be managed as though each has its own dedicated server.
The advantages of this are much greater flexibility – you can add a virtual server for a new application almost instantly – and much more efficient use of the physical hardware. For example, 80 per cent usage of a server’s capacity instead of 15 per cent.
Additionally, by moving to standardised software – programs used by everyone – it effectively made a private cloud inside its own firewalls. This enabled the bank to reduce its number of data centres dramatically, cut the number of applications it was running by 25 per cent to 3,000 and decreased the time needed for starting up a new application server from months to 10 days.
By the end of last year, almost two-thirds of the bank’s servers were virtualised and 80 per cent standardised.
As a result, Wells Fargo achieved $1bn in savings with a significant portion attributed to its infrastructure efficiency effort.

Some US banks, including Atlanta-based SunTrust, are using the Varolii pay-as-you-go cloud-based voice dialler to call customers to remind them to make payments and prompt them to do so.
SunTrust says it has reduced the number of inbound calls to its call-centre, saved between $8 and $25 per call, and cut first payment defaults by more than 60 per cent.

In a given week, SMBs in Asia that use the cloud spend on average 57% less time managing security than SMBs that don’t use the cloud
Over the last three years, SMBs in Asia that use the cloud are 3x more likely to have decreased what they spend on managing security as a percentage of overall budget for information technology, compared to SMBs that do not use the cloud
When asked to choose from a drop down list of specific cloud benefits:
54% of SMBs said their business was more secure as a result of moving to the cloud
48% said they worried less about the threat of cyber-attack
47% said it was easier to integrate systems

pharmaceutical companies are saving money by renting only the computing power they need, and paying for it by the hour.

“We have customers that are running very large-scale drug discovery pipelines,” Wood says.

One customer, for example, wanted to run a virtual screening of 21 million chemical compounds.

“So you can imagine 50,000 laptops running this experiment. They didn’t have to buy or provision or manage or cool or power any of those laptops, or set them up….

The entire experiment took about three hours, and the cost was less than $15,000. In contrast, Wood says, if the company had tried to do this in-house, it would have had to spend millions on computers, and the job might have taken years to complete.

G-Cloud programme director, Denise McDonagh, has issued a robust rebuttal to criticism of the programme’s progress. Reiterating that 75% of the spend to date via the framework has been with SMEs, she says: “Since we launched it in February, over a million pounds of purchases have been made through the first G-Cloud framework. Some people who don’t really understand the landscape we’re working in may well look at that figure and assume that has had very little impact on the estimated sixteen billion pounds a year that government spends on IT.

“This simply highlights that what they don’t understand is the relationship between £1 spent with a G-Cloud supplier, and £1 spent with one of the 20 corporations responsible for delivering 90% of government IT at present.

“That is why the fact that after only four months of completed data we can clearly see the shift away from the traditional suppliers to the SME’s is such a good thing.”

(Navint Partners) convened a roundtable with 20 CIOs from Fortune 500 companies to discuss their progress and concerns about cloud computing. Nine out of 10 respondents, for example, say they have received 100% of the savings they expected from their cloud computing projects. In addition, four out of five say their cloud efforts have helped their organizations achieve some sort of competitive advantage, and two-thirds say cloud has helped their organization’s efficiency and effectiveness.

When companies start relying on cloud-based services, they no longer need complex disaster recovery plans. Cloud computing providers take care of most issues, and they do it faster. Aberdeen Group found that businesses which used the cloud were able to resolve issues in an average of 2.1 hours, nearly four times faster than businesses that didn’t use the cloud (8 hours)

In the past, it had been difficult for city staff to prepare the annual budget with a five year projection in a timely manner… This year the City Manager and our new Finance Director challenged staff to improve …
documents previously managed in different formats were uploaded to Google Docs. That enabled multiple editors to update information simultaneously with version control… To bring all the documents together I created a Google Site … As a result, we delivered the budget to City Council for review two weeks early.

the global executive team, including the Group CEO, recently held a meeting via a Google Hangout. This spanned multiple time zones and three continents. Cutting back on using a third party video conferencing service and associated data comms circuits will save BBH approximately £100,000 a year