IT pros will take a harder look at cloud computing in 2012
Despite slow adoption by enterprise IT in the years since cloud computing emerged, 2012 may turn out to be the year when cloud technologies finally begin to gain parity with more traditional data center staples such as virtualization and tape libraries.
TechTarget’s 2012 IT Priorities Survey found that a growing number of enterprises — some 24.1% — plan to grow their expenditures for cloud services over the next year. In fact, 27% of respondents said that cloud computing initiatives were viewed with high importance at their companies. Another 53% rated the importance of their cloud projects as medium…
4 security questions you should ask your cloud services provider
Cloud Computing is definitely the biggest trend in the market. However, the transition to cloud computing won’t realize its full potential until more vendors and buyers fully understand security requirements in the cloud. If you’re overseeing your company’s migration to the cloud, you need to ask some tough questions and consider getting an assessment done by a third-party before committing to the migration.
The questions can be broadly classified in one of the following categories –
1. Can you ensure segregation of my data from that of your other customers?…
New DoD Plan Could Be Big Boost for Clouds
When Congress passed the fiscal 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week, it may have done more for cloud computing than any other organization to date.
Now that his objections have been addressed, President Obama is expected to sign the final version of the NDAA (HR1540) into law. The majority of news coverage of the act has focused on controversial provisions for the indefinite detention of US citizens who are suspected of terrorism, but the cloud computing industry and IT departments should focus on “Section 2867: Data Servers and Centers.”…
Cloud storage sites by Amazon, Google, Apple, Carbonite compared
If you’ve ever had your laptop stolen, watched your toddler baptize your PC with Pepsi, or had your MacBook come to a cold, dead stop, you know that the digital memories we store on our home computers are anything but indelible.
But now there’s a special place coalescing where data never dies: It’s called the cloud.
Internet giants Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. have relied for years on cloud computing, where information is split up and stored across large networks of remote servers, rather than all in one place. When storing a holiday dinner photo, for instance, Google slices it into many shreds of data that are then duplicated and sent to dozens of data centers all over the world. That way, if one data center melts down or has a long power outage, your family portrait can be reassembled from the pieces still stored in the center’s surviving peers…
The Economics of Cloud Hosting
One of the primary reasons a company might turn to cloud hosting is the perception that it will save money. With rising energy costs, the demands for faster and more powerful hardware, and the cost of maintaining in-house servers, cloud computing seems like an economical choice. That perception may or may not be reality, and that largely depends on the business.
Over the course of five years, you may spend several thousand dollars on new server hardware and also have to pay for power and bandwidth. Still, you could conceivably end up paying more over the course of five years, even with low fees from a cloud hosting provider. That may make you wonder why so many people are moving to the cloud to save money…
Why Amazon.com Is the Cloud-Computing King
42.
I’m not referring to the meaning of life, mind you. I’m talking about the annual list of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. When you look at that list, Amazon.com‘s (Nasdaq: AMZN ) virtual supercomputer built using its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, ranks No. 42, according to a recent Wired report.
The reason that’s such a feat is that Amazon’s virtual powerhouse is in the clouds and its raw processing power is decentralized and spread throughout its global network of data centers. This contrasts with the old-school approach of calling up Cray (Nasdaq: CRAY ) or Penguin Computing and ordering a multimillion-dollar machine, similar to what the feds just ordered sporting NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA ) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD ) chips or this one using only ARM Holdings (Nasdaq: ARMH ) -based NVIDIA chips…
What is cloud computing and is it right for me?
The term “cloud computing” is everywhere these days. It’s not a new phenomenon, but rather it is continuing to evolve.
The simplest, nontechnical definition of cloud computing is using an Internet browser to access software applications over the Internet. People who use Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com or free email services are using a form of cloud computing.
The recent surge in popularity in cloud computing is driven by the fact that businesses do not need to make a large capital investment in servers or licensing fees. In other words, the future of computing becomes subscription-based, and not ownership-based…
CA Technologies, ECS Technology to Drive Cloud Adoption in China
Cloud services provider CA Technologies announced on Wednesday it has partnered with ECS Technology to promote cloud adoption in the commercial, retail, government, finance, insurance and manufacturing industries.
The companies will provide technical support for cloud adoption in China and help deliver Business Service Innovation by enabling new levels of speed, innovation, performance and cost/risk efficiencies.
This support will allow local firms to benefit from cloud computing and accelerate time to market with agile business services that deliver innovation, business value and competitive advantage…
Price Spikes Impact Amazon Spot Cloud Market
Bidding for unused capacity on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform has become more competitive, causing periodic price spikes in the spot market Amazon has created. Prices for virtual machine deployments that normally cost less than a dollar an hour to have risen to $5 to $10 an hour, and sometimes even as high as $999 per hour.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) says the price spikes are caused by periods of “constrained capacity” in particular availability zones and customer bidding strategies that employ above-market bids to prevent interruptions of their computing jobs. Amazon says these strategies result from confusion about how spot pricing works, and has posted a video outlining effective approaches to spot bidding…
VA Plans Cloud Telephony Pilot
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) wants to migrate its in-house telephony infrastructure to the cloud in yet another move supporting the federal government’s push to decrease costs and increase efficiencies through cloud computing.
The VA is seeking proposals for a voice-as-a-service (VaaS) system that will integrate with a unified communications system–including Internet chat, video, Internet voice, and traditional voice services–to replace its existing department-wide telephony service and reduce its overall communications footprint, according to a request for information (RFI) on FedBizOpps.gov…