CyberSecurity Institute

During the snow earlier this year, workplace assessment solutions provider SHL Group, which uses NewVoiceMedia’s cloud-based telephony system, was able to quickly and easily reconfigure its services so that its staff could work from home or wherever they happened to find themselves.

Says NewVoiceMedia CEO Jonathan Grant, “In traditional call centres, human beings went to the technology, now with the help of cloud computing, the technology goes to the people.”
Marketing Director Amanda Fennell adds, “Everybody wants that accessibility via the internet and the resilience that it also affords.”

Running processes in the cloud means call centres can make significant cost savings, as they are able to reduce the amount they spend on maintenance and upgrades of traditional IT systems. Cloud applications can also be rolled out quickly, a crucial benefit given the fast-paced nature of the call centre industry where speed is a key performance indicator.

If payment is by subscription, firms only pay for what they use and there is no large upfront expenditure.

Plus, as agents have secure access to all the information they require irrespective of the computer they are working on or where they are physically, relocation or expansion becomes more of a seamless experience.

A case in point is when SHL Group moved its operation from Colorado to the UK, which it did without even having to contact NewVoiceMedia. This has created the power of “crowd sourcing”, where enthusiasts rather than salaried staff proffer information online.

A number of applications have emerged, such as Salesforce’s Service Cloud 2, where all channels of communication, including social media, are consolidated together.

This means that you can highlight a customer complaint on Twitter in the same way as a telephone query.

Utilising lower-cost interaction channels, such as email, plus chat, web self-service knowledge base, Twitter and Facebook, can result in significant cost savings.

Hosted contact centres, delivered from the network, are one the quickest, most cost-efficient ways for a business to virtualise resources and improve service quality by connecting the best person with the right skill to the right enquiry every time, wherever they may be located.

http://www.callcentrehelper.com/how-cloud-computing-is-affecting-call-centres-10947.htm

While one cloud provider might offer cheap computing or storage resources they may make up for it by charging an arm-and-a-leg for bandwidth. Also, businesses should be aware of higher costs from some cloud providers that offer storage intensive applications.

Performance Cloud providers deliver different application performance results based on geographic location and cloud platform architecture. What’s not so clear, however, is that storage IO can really vary from one cloud provider to another.

Security & Assurance. Your future cloud provider might host your data in a SAS70 Type II data center facility, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that provider has any safeguards in place to protect your data. You may need to roll your own security infrastructure to firewall off your applications or encrypt your data.

Service Level Agreements. A service level agreement (SLA) is one way to gauge a cloud provider’s comfort level with its service delivery platform.

Support. At this point in the game, cloud providers aren’t known to offer great support, but that is starting to change. Today, enterprise officers need to know they can contact someone at their cloud provider when they experience problems.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/06/01/how-to-evaluate-cloud-computing-providers/

In the original UCS partnership scheme, BMC provided the provisioning, change management and configuration software in the stack. Cisco, of course, provided the networking and a new central server. EMC and NetApp provided the storage capacity, VMware and Microsoft added their virtualization layers—depending upon the choice of the customer—and Accenture shaped the individual product deployments for customers.

Since then, UCS has added vBlocks, smaller modules of some of the aforementioned components, which can be integrated on a smaller scale and are not as daunting as a full-blown forklift overhaul to existing midrange and enterprise IT systems.

“This is a completely new product featuring a user self-service portal that people expect in private or public cloud environments,” Herb VanHook, vice president of strategy in the office of the CTO at BMC Software, told eWEEK. “It’s a bunch of out-of-the-box workflows to basically address one of the common use cases around setting up private or public clouds, and it’s also a lot of function extensions to existing products.”

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/BMC-Software-Comes-Out-with-Its-Own-CloudBuilding-Toolkit-142120/

But Bryan Byun, general manager of cloud applications at Palo Alto, Calif.-based software company VMWare (VMW), says there’s something to the concept, at least for enterprises. “For a large company, we do see this as being different,” he said on May 25, where he, Stevens and other software executives convened for the Morgan Stanley Cloud Computing Symposium.

Software companies, which have focused most of their cloud computing efforts on public applications such as messaging and media, see increasing opportunity in the corporate world. “You may be more familiar with [Akamai] in the media and entertainment spaces, but you should become increasingly familiar with us in the commerce, the retail, the enterprise business-to-business portal,” said Chris Schoettle, executive vice president for products at Akamai Technologies (AKAM), the Cambridge, Mass.-based Internet infrastructure company that serves customers such as Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes.

For now, though, big companies are going to spend a lot of money building their own private clouds because the comfort level with public clouds isn’t high enough.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/private-cloud-computing-companies-not-sharing/19494957/

Along with various vendors betting on cloud computing, Microsoft is also betting heavily on the segment.

Mr. Ballmer further emphasized on the importance of its cloud computing platform, Azure.

http://www.itvoir.com/portal/news/Corporate-News/India-to-emerge-as-central-hub-for-cloud-computing-7-513.asp