Cloud services, be they private clouds, public clouds, or even traditional hosted services are themselves just as vulnerable as ordinary data centers to infrastructure problems of water, power, access, and adequate disaster backup.  Hurricane Sandy has taken an unexpected toll on Cloud services, highlighting the importance of picking the physical location of the underlying assets.

(This is part 1 of a complete series on Budget Planning in 2011 and beyond)
With a new calendar year comes a new fiscal year, a new set of goals and budget challenges for every department in your organization. While CTOs, CIOs, CFOs, and other c-level executives are working together to maintain or improve vital business services, many of the executives focusing on IT budgets make the understandable mistake of limiting their analysis to capital investments and purchasing decisions. However, more progressive professionals, those looking to get more control over their costs in the long term, are looking to other expenses to keep matters under control.

IT operating budgets continue to stagnate or shrink, decisions makers in the IT world are looking at independent IT dealers as a way to cut both investment and maintenance costs. They’re continuing to find that OEM solutions, while robust, are often cumbersome and expensive. But, as purchasers and managers begin to survey the independent IT dealer market, their commitment to third party or alternative vendors can begin to waver. Letting go of brand loyalties can be difficult, even if you know that it is holding your organization back. There are excellent alternatives for the more expensive brands including: IBM, HP, Sun, SGi, Cisco equipment and others.