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Cloud Computing

The Call Center Blues

frustrated man male call center helpdesk operator

Have you ever had a frustrating experiencing when calling your local pharmacy, bank, pizza delivery or home improvement store?  I have. Just yesterday, I called my local pharmacy to find out if they had a certain over-the-counter medicine I read about in a wellness magazine. This is how it went down: ::Ring Ring:: “Hello, this [...]

Are We Back to the Dumb Terminal Days?

cathoderaytube

I’m writing this in Microsoft Word on an iPad. I have a Bluetooth keyboard and am using Word 2010. You might be asking how I’m doing that. Welcome to the Cloud. Without realizing it I’ve got to a place where much of what I now do is dependent as much on things happening in some [...]

Help Wanted: WAN Health Checkup Tool Beta Testers

checkuptool

If the anecdotal stories we have been hearing are any indication, most enterprises are not as prepared as they should be for Big Data and the increased traffic that their WAN is being asked to handle. For some organizations, a rigid architecture and lack of network visibility or resources are making it difficult to scale [...]

Enhance Your Cloud Fu With Self-Bootstrapping Deployments

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Is Cloud Fu strong with you and your development teams? Do you and your development teams have Cloud Fu skills worthy to defend your app when moving to the cloud? Historically server/environment configuration has been treated as a manual, one time setup done by sysadmins. Reversing this paradigm and instead bringing the server/environment setup into [...]

Cloudy Analogies with a Chance of Illusion

electrician

Some cloud computing analogies are about as helpful as a nutrition label on a Halloween candy bar. For instance, did you know there are twelve servings of only 150 calories each in a 2 oz. Big Stuff Peanut Butter bar? (OK, I made that name up, but it does sound kind of good.) Now I [...]

Gartner IT Expo: Cloud Brokers, Cloud Fatigue and Rethinking IT

skyscrapers

Reimagine IT is the theme for Gartner IT Expo down here in Orlando.  It’s good timing for the new Level 3, and the Gartner sessions are interesting both from being a tech company trying to understand customers’ hot issues, and from looking at my own company internally. Similar to last year, key technologies are Cloud [...]

The Healthcare Cloud Confusion: 3 Reasons Why You Should or Shouldn’t Adopt the Cloud

doctorlaptop

I am very much a list person. I love just about any Yahoo or Forbes Top 10 article and Trip Advisor is my favorite travel planning website (which if you don’t use it you really should!). So while doing my homework for a cloud computing in healthcare presentation, I started making my own lists – [...]

Howdy Partner: Introducing Strategic Alliances

cowboy

By way of a quick intro, my name is Justin Cooper or as my 11 plus years at Level 3 has afforded me:  Coop. I am part of our strategic alliances team that works on developing and delivering “best of breed” solutions to the enterprise market with industry partners that complement our own services.  How’s [...]

Connecting with Level 3 and Amazon Web Services

cloudsbridge

In a previous blog post I talked about the role of the network in supporting cloud applications. In that message, I touched upon Saas desktop productivity software and some options for pairing the network and the application for optimal performance.  Further proof of the growing need to match your cloud services with the correct network technology [...]

When to Bundle the Network in Cloud Services

buildingclouds

So we recently surveyed our enterprise customers and found that when it comes to advice about implementing the cloud, they want to hear from 1. Third party consultants 2. Systems integrators 3. Application vendors Which got us thinking about something – that is, if you are a local system integrator or VAR you may find [...]