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Measurements and metrics provide a view into every aspect of an organization. From resource availability to necessary improvements, measurements are the key to successfully understanding how your organization is performing. This paper will give you guidance on why measuring is important, how to get started, what types of metrics are available, what should be measured, and how to go about initiating improvements.

There are many questions you should ask before selecting your PaaS provider. Learn what you need to know in order to compare and contrast PaaS with the other offerings like IaaS and SaaS, and what they require in terms of setup and configuration. As with any decision involving IT infrastructure there are many variables that should be considered to ensure you find a solution that will fit your current and future needs, budget and support requirements.

The advantage—and disadvantage—of IaaS cloud computing is complete control. The user is responsible for sizing, installing, and maintaining operating systems and applications, backing up the systems, etc. This enables the user to configure everything in an optimal way for the workloads that need to be accomplished, but it requires time and effort to determine how it should be set up, secured, etc. With the goal of providing a good place for you to start your IaaS implementation and highlighting some areas that you should plan for and design for, Global Knowledge instructor John Hales provides a review of IaaS, as well as insight into what you need to know before implementing IaaS. He also shares a laundry list of things to consider when implementing IaaS, including questions to ask yourself, your company and your potential cloud provider.

The cloud revolution is truly a revolution - the way we work, learn and even play is very different now than it was just 10 or 15 years and will probably be a lot more different in 10 or 15 years. With this in mind, let's look at 10 ways the cloud will (and to a large degree already has) changed the world.

Cloud computing is a big force in IT today, and it isn't going away. In fact, cloud adoption is going up geometrically, both for end users (think apps on your phone or tablet) as well as for organizations of all sizes. In fact, many smaller organizations may not have any on-premises infrastructure at all, other than networking infrastructure to get connected to the cloud. With this transformation in IT, it behooves all of us in the industry to understand it and adapt or risk being out of a job, like punch card operators.

Microsoft Office 365 has a vast array of features to explore. A rich administration interface, streamlined security, and versatile migration options make this one of the most interesting products when it comes to an SaaS public cloud solution.

AWS is an incredibly rich ecosystem of services and tools, some of which have security aspects baked in (like S3 SSE), and others that provide overarching security capabilities (like IAM and VPC) that apply to many services. With regard to data storage, operating system, and applications, security functions largely the same in the cloud or on-premises software. Customers can and should continue to follow best practices that have served them well in their own data centers.

Learn the ITIL® concepts of accountability, boundaries, and consistency (the ABCs) and discover how ITIL helps establish, manage, and maintain the ABCs.

Discover how the enhanced performance and reliability of Amazon Aurora will help AWS customers reduce performance bottlenecks in their applications. The relatively low cost of Aurora will tempt many customers to migrate workloads to this implementation of RDS.

Amazon Redshift opens up enterprise data warehouse (EDW) capabilities to even the smallest of businesses, yet its costs, security, and flexibility also make it appealing to the largest of enterprises. It allows companies to easily and conveniently scale their EDW needs both up and down, and as a managed service, it allows your team to offload all of the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of building and maintaining an EDW. Its raw storage costs are about one-fifth to one-tenth of traditional in-house EDW, and AWS has taken great care to ensure its performance is still competitive with those in-house solutions. Before deciding to use Amazon Redshift, however, it's important to understand what it is and is not.