There's no such thing as "the cloud", says this Frost & Sullivan executive brief. It's more useful to think of the cloud as shorthand for a range of service and deployment models. This practical guide offers steps for moving your company into the cloud, at whatever pace you prefer, with a focus on the SmartCloud Services portfolio offered by IBM and its partners. Read the executive brief for usable advice on selecting the right cloud computing vendor to maximize your chance for success–one that allows you to build on your cloud strategy as your company grows.

This white paper discusses the ongoing challenges of cloud, the issues to consider before migrating to it, and the benefits that a migration can bring. The white paper also describes what to look for in a managed third-party cloud: Automation/standardization capabilities Configuration options Security levels Client control features Management features Ability to fulfill client organization's business needs

"Businesses that depend on web applications are constantly looking for ways to increase the efficiency of developing new applications and reduce the complexity of administering the environment. But many of the tasks required for application development, configuration and deployment are time consuming and expensive. IT is under pressure to control these costs while ensuring that applications will run smoothly and web-based interactions will be fast, responsive and secure. The complementary capabilities of IBM® WebSphere® Application Server and IBM PureApplication™ System can help address these challenges. This paper describes how organizations can save time and money through consolidation and acceleration of applications onto a flexible IBM PureApplication System environment with built-in expertise."

The skills needed to quickly design, test, configure and integrate solutions into today’s complex IT environments can be costly and scarce. IT managers may find themselves unable to develop and deploy applications and supporting systems as quickly and efficiently as they would like, even in virtual and cloud environments. As a result, businesses may lack the agility needed to be successful in a fast-paced, competitive environment. To address these challenges, IBM® PureSystems™ offerings provide patterns of expertise designed to deliver: Faster time-to-value; reduced costs and resources; lower risk and reduced errors; Essentially, a pattern is a recurring solution to a standard problem. This paper is intended to give business decision makers and IT executives an understanding of IBM PureSystems patterns—what they are, how they work and why they can provide exceptional value to an organization.

Data workloads are rapidly evolving and changing. Today's enterprises have many different types of applications, with different usage patterns, all constantly accessing data. As a result, data services need to be more robust and scalable. IBM PureApplication System and IBM PureData ™ System for Transactions are designed to meet these needs. This paper shows how the latest technology and expertise built into these systems gives businesses an innovative approach to rapidly create and manage highly scalable data services, without the complexity of traditional approaches.

Data growth continues to be a major problem in the business world, and many small and medium businesses have just as hard a time responding to the challenge as large enterprises do. Although smaller organizations generally have less data to store, they also have fewer IT resources to work with. As a result, smaller companies are often the ones that are most harmed by rapid data growth. In order to get the data protection and recovery functionalities they need while staying within their budgets, small and medium businesses need a solution that takes a creative approach to data protection. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery gives small and medium businesses the opportunity to start out with only the individual solutions they need, and add new functionalities as they grow. In addition, TSM SUR only requires businesses to pay for the amount of data they store after compression and deduplication.

The continuous growth of information means data protection is not only more important than ever before, it is also more expensive, time consuming and complex. And the historical tendency to use specific point solutions for backup and restore only makes matters worse. To meet these challenges organizations will need to modernize their backup and restore operations with a complete view of their backup environment and a comprehensive plan for migrating to optimized operations. They need to consolidate backup systems to address more complex recovery scenarios. Read the following analysis to better understand data and storage issues and demonstrate the value of deploying a modern data protection solution.