About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Lauren E. Nelson, Forrester's private infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud lead, is an analyst based in Cambridge, Mass., serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals. Her coverage area spans the IaaS space with extensive knowledge of solutions (including internal private, hosted private, and public IaaS), enterprise adoption trends, the current state of cloud standardization, and cloud metrics creation. Her coverage also includes strategic rightsourcing of applications, cloud strategy development, customer use cases, cloud adoption trends, cloud economics, and the green implications of cloud computing. Lauren has advised hundreds of enterprises on these topics through speeches, workshops, webinars, inquiries, advisory, and reports.
Previously, Lauren was a researcher on Forrester's infrastructure and operations team. She interviewed hundreds of I&O Professionals and technology vendors while conducting primary and secondary research for reports and consulting engagements. Prior to her time at Forrester, Lauren worked in environmental economics research, focusing on temperature change and racial diversity near SuperFund sites.
Lauren graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in economics.
Five Solution Types To Choose From For Advancing Virtualization Maturity
Over the past year, client inquiry questions have evolved from "What is cloud?" to "What vendors should I consider?" This market overview examines the landscape of vendors providing solutions...

Road Map: The Cloud Computing Playbook
Early in 2011, Forrester made a series of predictions about the future of cloud computing for that year. With 2012 now upon us, it's time to evaluate last year's predictions and introduce new...

Empowered Users, HPC, And Business Intelligence Will Drive Adoption
IaaS is undoubtedly one of your top priorities, but will you craft a plan for success? Many enterprises are headed toward a number of cloud pitfalls, such as misunderstanding the makeup, benefits,...
How To Sift Through The Cloud Washing And Uncover True Value
While cloud computing is still in the early adopter phase, you're under executive pressure to develop a cloud strategy. And it's up to you to sort through the cloud washing and not only understand...

AWS Leads A Rapidly Growing Field
For many I&O professionals, developing a cloud strategy is a top priority for 2011 and 2012. After strategically selecting certain workloads fit for public IaaS, it's now time for selecting your...
Cloud adoption, particularly of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), is still in the early-adopter phase, and as a result there are no set industry standards. For IT infrastructure and operations...

Cloud Economics Makes HPC Projects More Attainable For The Masses
It's one thing to say infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals need to invest in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing for their high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. It's...
Cloud Platforms: Foundational Systems Could Strengthen Your Preferred Service Providers
A growing number of public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds are coming to market that share the same underlying capabilities, technologies, and interfaces. Rather than build their clouds...

No Dominant Market Leaders Today, But Front-Runners Are CSC And Rackspace
Forrester's Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2012 showed that 46% of enterprises are prioritizing investments in private clouds in 2013. While slightly more than half plan to build a private cloud in...

You Must Include These Services In Your Five-Year Road Map
Historically, disaster recovery (DR) preparedness required substantial time and financial investment. For many, DR was out of reach, and for others, it was a burdensome task that often felt like an...

Performance Management: The Cloud Computing Playbook
This report outlines the performance management of Forrester's solution for CIOs working on developing effective objectives and metrics for their organization's cloud strategy. Crafting and measuring...
Take Advantage Of Public And Private Cloud To Deliver Energy, Carbon, And E-Waste Efficiencies
Cloud-based server, storage, and network infrastructure — also called infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) — will inherently deliver green IT benefits: lower energy costs, carbon emissions,...
And No, It's Not Your Virtualization Manager
Nearly half of all enterprise IT shops claim to be prioritizing private cloud investments in 2013, but both in the largest enterprises and those firms that are most aggressively investing in public...

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is built around four dimensions that we have adjusted for use in information technology: the value perspective, the customer orientation perspective, the operational...
Secrets To Success: Designed With The Customer And Inspired By Public Cloud
By building a private cloud the right way, Waste Management (WM) reduced resource deployment time from two and a half months to around 20 minutes and gave existing public cloud users a satisfactory...