Building a Better Cloud

Businesses are increasingly relying on public cloud solutions. Nearly 50% of companies are using the cloud for revenue-generating or product development activities, and up to 85% of companies plan to move some amount of processing to the cloud within the next two years. According to research firm IDC, public IT cloud services are growing at five times the rate of the IT industry as a whole. As CIOs and other IT leaders look to the cloud to improve competitiveness, they want and expect leadership from their suppliers in critical areas. These include price/performance, security and a development platform that supports speed and innovation. In this special sponsored section, we closely examine some of these key challenges and explore how IT can collaborate with SoftLayer to build a better cloud.

Competitive Insights

When it comes to price/performance in the cloud, not all solutions are created equal. Research shows that bare-metal services can deliver better price/performance in the cloud by reducing software licensing fees, lowering data transfer costs and enabling better overall performance. This section compares the price/performance of bare-metal servers versus virtualized servers in cloud environments, and details a specific use case that shows what kind of an advantage an organization can achieve by utilizing a bare-metal approach. Continue Reading

Increased Security with Intel

Despite the significant growth in usage of public cloud services, IT and business leaders still consider security their main concern. Leading cloud providers have gone a long way to alleviate these concerns, and some platforms have security controls that go beyond what is available in most enterprise data centers. Among the important solutions to reach the cloud is Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT), which provides an extra level of protection down to the chip level. In this section, we look at the advantages of using a cloud service that supports Intel TXT, with a separate focus on how geolocation tagging can improve security and compliance. Continue Reading