Universities to share cloud services

According to an article on information-age.com, The Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) has allocated £12.5million to a new cloud computing shared services initiative for universities in order to ensure they're saving money and resources.

This move could see Universities using Online Backup by Redstor, Cloud Storage and CentraStage to reduce costs but retain enterprise class IT services in line with their business requirements.

City University of London's CIO, Andrew Abboud, said "We all have Data Centre requirements, so we've agreed to sit down to understand what those needs are and see if we can work together, whether it is to build our own facility or use our procurement power to get a cheaper price from someone else's facility".

Cloud Computing "could boost EU Economy"

A recent news story on the BBC website has outlined that the growth of the cloud computing industry within the EU could give the economies within a much needed growth injection over the next five years. It's anticipated that 466,000 net new jobs would be created each year as well as providing an additional €177bn per year. Of the 5 major economies in the EU, only Germany is expected to see more dividends from this than the UK.

This will come off the back of organisations moving from a 'classic' environment of having local solutions and the necessity to maintain and support those to having business agile, cloud services on a pay as you use model.

Through moving to an environment compromising of cloud services, organisations can completely scale their IT to their business requirements rapidly. Instead of making purchases for large scale solutions out of capital expenditure, organisations can now treat IT as a utility much in the same way as they would consume Energy and Communications.

If you wish to increase the flexibility of your IT services and look to the cloud then Redstor are well placed to assist you as we have been offering cloud services since 2005; amassing 800TB+ of data and in excess of 15,000 end user customers of these services in that time. The next cloud service we'll be launching is Cloud Storage in 28 days time in conjuction with EMC which enable organisations to scale up their storage capacity in line with their business/project demands. Please feel free to call our Reading office on 0118 9515 200 for further details.

Redstor at IP Expo 2010

Redstor spent this Wednesday and Thursday at IP Expo in Earls Court, London with EMC. We were invited to talk to their customers as well as press and analysts about our cloud storage services.

In January we’ll be launching a range of additional cloud storage and online backup services based on EMC Atmos and it was a great opportunity to spread the message and gain some great feedback. We spent time talking about the practical applications for these new services- such as cloud archiving and online NAS. The show was an interesting mix of infrastructure suppliers selling the latest technology as well as a few true cloud suppliers.

Without doubt next year we’ll see more cloud providers and more emphasis from the traditional vendors on their cloud offerings. We left the show with some great new ideas and business opportunities. Watch this blog for updates on the new cloud services.