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Global IT service providers have an understanding of disparate, multi-technology, multi-geography IT environments that are strategic in delivering cloud IT on a worldwide scale.

Gartner's most recent Magic Quadrant for the public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) sector clearly shows that IT service providers are moving into a space currently owned by pure-play cloud and data center service providers. This trend is sure to ramp up this coming year.

As an option for enterprises considering cloud services, IT service providers deliver a complete mix of strategic planning, solutions/services and support. As a result, enterprises' immediate demands for cloud architectures can be met and extended in the areas of virtualization, data center and storage, managed services and hosting, and IT outsourcing.

More specifically, global IT service providers have an understanding of disparate, multi-technology, multi-geography IT environments that are strategic in delivering cloud IT on a worldwide scale—something in which pure-play cloud providers do not specialize.

As enterprises look at engaging IT platforms as a service; set cloud, hosting and networking strategies; and reduce the number of providers with whom they work to meet all their needs, IT service providers will become increasingly strategic to enterprise buying decisions.

Decoding cloud buzzwords could easily become a full-time job -- hopefully one that has excellent mental health coverage, as attempting to translate all that marketing babble for too long is likely to cause brain damage.

In light of this public health threat, we've offered some alternative definitions for a few of SearchCloudProvider.com's most popular cloud terms of 2012. Take with plenty of water, avoid operating heavy machinery and call us in the morning.

Cisco Cloud Partner Program: Many Cisco Systems partners couldn't imagine four sweeter words when Cisco launched this program in 2011. We disagree. We're sure phrases like, "You won the lottery," "New Star Wars movie" and "Drinks are on me" evoke equally warm and fuzzy feelings. Well, partners, Santa was extra good to you this year. In early December, Cisco merged its Managed Services Channel program with its Cloud Provider and Cloud Services Reseller program to create the Cloud and Managed Services Program, or CMSP. Doesn't roll off the tongue as elegantly as "CCIE," but you can always just tell your friends it stands for "Conquers Mighty Super-villains Promptly."

User self-provisioning: Some people want things done the old-fashioned way. They wait in line at the grocery store instead of using the self-checkout. They stand in the frighteningly long check-in lines at the airport rather than use the self-service kiosk. They do laps around the aisles of the video store for an hour, as opposed to reserving a movie with a smartphone app and picking it up at a Redbox kiosk. These people either have a lot of time or they're admirably dedicated to supporting customer service jobs. Whatever the reason, they probably don't enjoy shopping for cloud services. As for the rest of us? Let's just say that although there's no "How are you?" or "Have a nice day!" in user self-provisioning, it leaves a lot of extra time for the truly rewarding stuff in life, like watching Gangnam Style again. No, really. Just one more time, and then we're done. Honest.

White-label cloud service: We're not ones for designer labels, so "white label" sounds pretty good to us -- as long as the hipsters don't find out and ruin it. Hey, it's a distinct possibility since white-label cloud was all the rage this year, with trendsetters like Microsoft, Dimension Data and ElasticHosts sporting it on the runway. Do we even have to say it? White label is the new black.

Global ICT solutions and service provider, Dimension Data, has released to the market a new network assessment service that it says helps organisations review traffic patterns, flows and volumes they have running across their networks, and also improves visibility to accelerate business performance.

Dimension Data has made its Network Optimisation Assessment solution available globally, with the solution involving technical interviews, and deploying of an appliance on client networks for a defined period of time - typically seven to 14 days - to collect data and a wide variety of information about the network.

According to Dimension Data’s National Manager, Network Integration, Gregg Sultana, in addition to the dramatic growth in traffic volumes on networks, the type of traffic is changing, and the number of networked devices is exploding.

“This is making high end-to-end performance difficult to achieve, given changes to underlying ICT infrastructure such as mobility, virtualisation, consolidation, and cloud.

“With our Network Optimisation Assessment, we’re able to provide clients with a detailed traffic discovery of all voice, video and application traffic flowing over the network, as well as all information relating to protocols, ports, VLANs, traffic direction, and active hosts.

“Our experts in protocols, networking, data centres and applications provide a detailed report and are able to make recommendations on how the network performance can be improved. This is critical as organisations ready their networks for the emerging trends of video, mobility and particularly cloud.”

According to Sultana, cloud computing is the most network-centric computing paradigm and it would “simply not be a proposition without a resilient, stable, high performance network underpinning it.”

While 2013 will present an array of interesting IT challenges and opportunities, Australian businesses will continue to grapple with security issues and concerns but begin to do more with enterprise mobility and Cloud technologies, according to Dimension Data solutions director, Neil Campbell.

Security is layered among all elements of a business, and Campbell expects it to be one of the biggest risks for businesses as the new year rolls in.

“I think we could see a ‘Code Red’ incident for at least one of the mobile device platforms in 2013,” he said.

Security will maintain much of it prevalence on the back of the growth of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) as the trend complicates security for businesses.

“[Businesses] are racing to support a wide variety of consumer devices in the workplace, and that will inevitably increase security incidents because of poorly controlled user-owned devices connected to the network,” Campbell said.

He said that it is harder to manage data loss and leakage prevention in the BYOD environment, and as such, both malicious and unintentional data loss incidents will increase.

Enterprise mobility will continue as a key focus area for business, and there will be priority places on reducing operational costs. Campbell said that this can be achieved by reducing carrier costs with telecommunications expense management. In addition, he advises businesses to reduce real estate and develop a well-equipped mobile workforce to shrink cost while delivering productivity benefits.

“It is important that users have positive experiences with enterprise mobility, and that end-user devices and applications are well supported,” he said. “Expect to also see an explosion in form factors next year, as key players continue to innovate to create new niches.”

Cloud will present businesses with interesting questions. Campbell expects to see the Cloud battleground move from infrastructure-style applications to Cloud development platforms for custom applications.

This is because businesses are seeing through the Cloud hype, and as a result are beginning to understand the difference between true Cloud and hosted technology.

Social media has undoubtedly gained traction in 2012 moreso than previously, and 2013 will see a further defining of its use and market.

“Social media is under used now but likely to be over used in the near future,” Campbell said. “In a year or two it will settle between where it is now and where the hype thinks it will get to. There will be a clarification of the definition of external social and internal social, even if those are not the names that will be used.”

“Internal social is being more and more coupled with the traditional definition of UC&C as PBX get replaced by IPTel, email traffic decreases and social activity streams increase, and the demand increases for analytics around social media usage patterns and employee behaviour.”

Businesses has been warned that security will be one of the biggest risks they confront in the coming year, and that Australia could see a ‘Code Red’ incident for at least one of the mobile device platforms in 2013.

The warning comes from ICT solutions and services provider, Dimension Data, with Director of Solutions, Neil Campbell, saying that security will remain an important issue for businesses, as the number of people taking advantage of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) grows.

“BYOD complicates security for businesses. They are racing to support a wide variety of consumer devices in the workplace, and that will inevitably increase security incidents because of poorly controlled user-owned devices connected to the network.

“It’s harder to manage data loss and leakage prevention in this type of environment, so we can expect to see an increase in both malicious and unintentional data loss incidents.”

“I think we could see a ‘Code Red’ incident for at least one of the mobile device platforms in 2013,” Campbell said.

According to Dimension Data, enterprise mobility will continue to be a key focus for businesses, with the priority to reduce operational costs.

Campbell says that businesses must control and reduce carrier costs through telecommunications expense management, which is a major operational cost.

“Reducing real estate and developing a well-equipped mobile workforce will also shrink these costs while delivering productivity benefits. It is important that users have positive experiences with enterprise mobility, and that end-user devices and applications are well supported.

Expect to also see an explosion in form factors next year, as key players continue to innovate to create new niches,” Campbell said.

Dimension Data forecasts that the race to adopt cloud technology will also pose some interesting questions for businesses, and Campbell expects to see the so-called cloud battleground move from infrastructure style applications to cloud development platforms for custom applications.

“Businesses are getting smarter – they can see through the hype surrounding cloud technology. The term ‘cloud’ is being generalised – simple hosted offerings are being called could technology – and I think we’ll see more businesses start to understand the difference between true cloud and hosted technology.

“We also expect to see the trend of pushing commodity infrastructure into IT Outsourcing or cloud continuing, with ITO becoming more commonplace for mid-sized businesses.”

And, for 2013 Dimension data expects to see a further “defining of use and defining of market for social media.”

ICT services and solutions provider Dimension Data announced it has achieved Cisco Cloud Provider Certification with a Cisco Powered Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) designation.

The Cisco Cloud Provider Certification recognizes Dimension Data's investment in operating its data centers to offer cloud IaaS services in a multi-tenant environment to end clients.

Cisco as core networking technology

As part of the certification process, Cisco audited Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), providing the assurance that the architecture fully supports the deployment of cloud services across public and private cloud environments leveraging Cisco as the core networking technology.

Announced in February this year, Dimension Data offers public and private cloud compute-as-a-Service (CaaS), a cloud IaaS that provides self-service, on-demand, provisioning of cloud-based compute, storage and networking resources on a global basis.

In the Asia Pacific, Dimension Data has data center facilities in Sydney, Australia.

Network World - Amazon Web Services, which Gartner recently named a market-leader in infrastructure as a service cloud computing, has the "dubious status of 'worst SLA (service level agreement) of any major cloud provider'" analyst Lydia Leong blogged today, but HP's newly available public cloud service could be even worse..

HP launched the general availability of its HP Compute Cloud on Wednesday along with an SLA. Both AWS and HP impose strict guidelines in how users must architect their cloud systems for the SLAs to apply in the case of service disruptions, leading to increased costs for users.

AWS's, for example, requires customers to have their applications run across at least two availability zones (AZ), which are physically separate data centers that host the company's cloud services. Both AZs must be unavailable for the SLA to kick in. HP's SLA, Leong reports, only applies if customers cannot access any AZs. That means customers have to potentially architect their applications to span three or more AZs, each one imposing additional costs on the business. "Amazon's SLA gives enterprises heartburn. HP had the opportunity to do significantly better here, and hasn't. To me, it's a toss-up which SLA is worse,"Leong writes.

IT BEGS THE QUESTION: Are enterprises ready for the cloud? 

CLOUD SHOWDOWN: Amazon vs. Rackspace (OpenStack) vs. Microsoft vs. Google 

ADVICE: 5 Tips to make your cloud SLA air-tight 

Cloud SLAs are an important topic, as recent outages from providers like AWS have shown. AWS has experienced three major outages in the past two years, including a recent one that took down sites such as Reddit, Imgur and AirBNB. Each of AWS's outages have been limited in scope, however, and have mostly centered around the company's Northern Virginia US-East region.

AWS's policy of requiring users to run services across multiple AZs costs users more money than if applications are running in a single AZ. "Every AZ that a customer chooses to run in effectively imposes a cost," Leong writes. HP's SLA, which requires all of the AZs to be down before the SLA applies leaves customers vulnerable, she says. "Most people are reasonably familiar with the architectural patterns for two data centers; once you add a third and more, you're further departing from people's comfort zones, and all HP has to do is to decide they want to add another AZ in order to essentially force you to do another bit of storage replication if you want to have an SLA."

The SLA requirements basically render the agreements useless. "Customers should expect that the likelihood of a meaningful giveback is basically nil," she says. If users are truly interested in protecting their systems and received financial compensation for downtime events, she recommends investigating cyber risk insurance, which will protect cloud-based assets. AWS has recently allowed insurance inspectors into its facilities to inspect its data centers for such insurance claims, she notes.

A strict requirement of service architecture isn't the only aspect of the SLAs Leong takes issue with. They're unnecessarily complex, calling them "word salads," and limited in scope. For example, both AWS and HP SLAs cover virtual machine instances, not block storage services, which are popular features used by enterprise customers. AWS's most recent outage impacted its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service specifically, which is not covered by the SLA. "If the storage isn't available, it doesn't matter if the virtual machine is happily up and running — it can't do anything useful," Leong writes.

As a mere fact, the emergence of impactful business brings highly critical data in the scenario. It is an unavoidable fact that evolution of efficient computer systems and increasing demands of globalized clients stay constant irrespective of size or nature of the business. As far as backup and safety of integral data is concerned, it is really hard to say that any other service apart from cloud based backup solutions can help you to accomplish your aim. However, there are many backup means ranging from Blu-ray discs to tape drives but none of them can compete well with this highly advanced technology solution.

What is dimension data cloud?

The increased popularity of cloud based backup solution has introduced itself to most of the users and technology professionals. Generally, cloud computing is referred to the web-based set of applications and tools designed for delivering data recovery methods on the data hosting server. It eliminates the use of vulnerable choices for obtaining reliable data backup services. Most of the organizations adopt these powerful methodologies and give added advantages to their employees to make best of available solutions.

In place of presenting seamless solutions to create backup of important data of the organizations, the dimension data cloud allows the users to use affordable solutions for safeguarding data. This progressive technique is quite different from what is proposed by conventional backup solutions. It saves you from making huge investments for creating IT infrastructure for using these services. In spite, cloud computing installs necessary applications on the client's web based server.

Companies in Singapore are the most confident of their knowledge about cloud computing across the Asia-Pacific region, thanks to the strong push and lead by the government for enterprise cloud adoption and national efforts to attract service providers to make datacenter investments in the country.

According to the VMware Cloud Index 2012 report, 82 percent of Singapore respondents said they believed they had a strong understanding of cloud computing, higher than the regional average of 75 percent, said Michael Barnes, vice president and research director of Forrester Research, which conducted the study.

Bluelock - The VMware public cloud

Bluelock is about the closest thing you'll get to a VMware public cloud. The company is part of VMware's vCloud Data Center Service, meaning it leverages VMware tools to power its offering. It is one of the first to roll out new VMware features and its product roadmap is aligned with that of VMware's, Gartner says. As a member of the VMware public cloud ecosystem, it allows customers to federate workloads with other vCloud Data Center service providers as well. It has a "Portfolio" service, which provides monitoring of IaaS resources and advises customers on how to optimize workloads.

MORE VMWARE: VMware CTO: Adapt, and enable choice, or die

Despite its small size, it targets mid-market and enterprise clients, but its size makes it a candidate for potential acquisition, Gartner suggests. And the location of its data centers in Indiana and Utah can create some Internet performance latency issues compared to providers that have data center hubs in major metropolitan areas, Gartner says.

A MAJOR technology company has urged the Namibian business community to move to Cloud services.

Managing Director of Dimension Data Namibia Rowan Kleintjes and Solutions Executive at Dimension Data Africa Tony Munro made the appeal in an interview with the Windhoek Observer this week.

According to Wikipedia, Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the internet).

The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user’s data, software and computation.

Munro said the main implication of Cloud services in Namibia will be the ability for businesses in Namibia to leapfrog technology instead of having to invest in heavy infrastructure.

“Cloud is an incredible way of managing IT infrastructure in an efficient way,” Munro said and added that operators can set the service up either as a public or private system.

“Private gives you the autonomy to keep workload local,” he said.

“In our view it’s not a matter of if we will move to Cloud, it’s a matter of when. Cloud is an IT response to businesses that want to become more efficient, so we don’t think it’s a trend or fad.”

According to Munro and Kleintjes, Dimension Data is the only firm in Africa with the ability to provide public Cloud services.

Munro said Cloud is generally cheaper because you only pay for the hardware and software that you actually use.

This is a contrast from having a network of computers that have to be procured and installed after a long period of time.

In many cases, the companies do not use some of the hardware and software after certain projects, meaning companies end up with products they do not need.

Commenting on skills availability in the IT sector, Kleintjes said Dimension Data together with other private companies are helping the University of Namibia and the Polytechnic of Namibia to improve IT training.

“Currently they are producing very good theoretical people but we are looking for people, who can hit the ground running when they are employed by the industry,” Kleintjes said.

“Cloud is growing in popularity; we like to refer to it as a journey. The most important thing is education [getting to know Cloud],” Munro added.

He said companies can start adapting in small ways with things like email.

“Africa has a greater opportunity to leverage Cloud and enjoy its benefits than most other continents or countries. The reason for that is that we have fresh cables on the East and Western parts, which will bring down pricing,” he noted.

Kleintjes also expects pricing to come down with the undersea cables in place and that low internet prices will make people explore more and come to know Cloud services.

4:00 AM -- Having already heard about the finalists in the Best Telecom, Cable and Mobile product categories, it's time to take a closer look at Light Reading's 2012 Leading Lights Best New Service or Application (Telecom) shortlist.

Before we get into the profiles, just a reminder that you can see the full list of Leading Lights finalists here (free registration required).

The Leading Lights Awards and Light Reading Hall of Fame winners will be revealed on Wednesday, Nov. 7 at the Manhattan Penthouse in New York City.

So, in no particular order, let's look at the seven finalists for Best New Service or Application (Telecom).

Juniper Networks' Junosphere Lab
This is the hosted (oh, sorry: "cloud") service that enables service providers and enterprises to build networks in a virtual environment and then use them for proof of concept, testing, training or, well, pretty much anything they want.

It's a compelling service for many: Indeed, Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) claims it has been used by more than 500 companies. Word is that Junosphere Lab is delivering on its promises and is being used by a number of operators to model entire new networks. This is never going to make Juniper a lot of money directly, but the benefits for all are pretty clear.

• Juniper Boasts Junosphere Traction
• Juniper Opens Its Junosphere Lab

XO Communications' 100G service
As much as anything, XO Communications Inc. (OTC: XOHO) is shortlisted for its commitment to building a nationwide commercial 100Gbit/s service across the U.S.

But it's more than that. This is a groundbreaking move that will give greater impetus to the 100Gbit/s ecosystem and hasten the availability of competitive, high-capacity services on key routes for enterprise and wholesale users. It's also a development that is putting a sparkle in the eyes of even the most cynical industry analysts and observers.

• XO Deploys First Nationwide 100G Network
• XO Adds Ciena to 100G Roster
• XO's Not Done Yet With 100G