Author: David

July 16, 2012 Off

Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Cloud on Your Business

By David

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Celina Conner.

If you have an ongoing business or you’re about to start one, one of the more important decisions you have to make is do I or do I not use cloud computing for my business processes?

Cloud ComputingCloud computing allows businesses to be mobile, doing work whenever and wherever they need to, which is the growing trend these days. It allows a company’s employees to work with their files no matter where they are at the moment. But if you come from the thinking that I need an onsite server for my business needs, then you most probably have dozens of questions before you dive into this thing they call cloud computing.

First, let’s define what Cloud computing is. Cloud computing is using the Internet to store, manage, and process data from anywhere with a computer, tablet, phone, or similar devices. This makes it possible for users to access, collect, and manage data from anywhere with internet connection…

July 16, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Disaster recovery plans get new urgency

By David

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Lucas Mearian.

Increasing numbers of weather-related disasters — violent storms, wildfires that have ravaged more than 2 million acres in the Rocky Mountains, and drought conditions affecting some two-thirds of the United States — should have IT executives scurrying to update their disaster recovery plans.

The message to IT managers from business continuity experts is a familiar one: Put backup data centers in diverse, far-flung locations, and make sure your cloud service providers maintain geographically dispersed hosting facilities.

Those calls have been largely ignored in the past, and it’s unclear whether the changing weather patterns will spur corporate executives to take more notice now…

July 16, 2012 Off

Article 29 Working Party cloud computing opinion: Blow to Safe Harbor?

By David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Francoise Gilbert.

The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party — which includes representatives of the data protection authorities of each of the European Union member states — recently issued an opinion on cloud computing that could impact U.S. cloud providers. The opinion, published July 2 as Document WP 196, analyzes the applicable data protection laws and obligations for companies providing, or using cloud computing services in the European Economic Area (EEA). It identifies data protection risks that are likely to result from the use of cloud computing services, and provides guidance on how to manage a cloud computing contract.

The most significant aspect of the opinion is its negative evaluation of the ability of Safe Harbor self-certification to meet the requirement of national laws implementing the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive…

July 16, 2012 Off

Why cloud computing is important

By David

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Graeme Philipson

The IT industry is as given to fashion and fad as any other part of business. Probably more so – we are constantly bombarded with new technologies and new words and phrases to describe them.

Very few of these terms have a precise definition. Many of them originate in the marketing departments of the major vendors, others are invented by journalists or analysts. By the time they reach the user community they have usually become loose code words to describe a group of technologies or practices.

So it is with cloud computing. It is the hottest buzzword in IT today. But, unlike many shooting stars, cloud computing is important, and it is here to stay…

July 15, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: OpenStack faces the terrible twos

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

OpenStack turns two this week. That means the open-source project — which fancies itself the Linux of the cloud — is entering a critical stage of its development process.

Rackspace(a rax) — which helped give birth to OpenStack in July 2010 — rolled out some stats to show OpenStack momentum and to push its OpenStack-as-Linux comparision. For example,  in the 84th week of the project, there were 166 entities contributing to the effort whereas it took Linux 828 weeks to hit 180 active contributors, according to Rackspace’s tally…
 

July 15, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Better medicine, brought to you by big data

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning, natural-language processing or some other technique, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that new types of data analysis are the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.

Here are some of the interesting use cases we’ve written about over the past year or so, and a few others I’ve just come across recently. If you have a cool one — or a suggestion for a new use of big data within the healthcare space — share it in the comments:..

July 15, 2012 Off

The CCSR: Canadian Cloud Security Rating

By David
Grazed from CloudBestPractices.net.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Canada has a notorious ‘Innovation Gap’, that is seeing the country slip further and further behind the rest of the world embracing the new technology-enabled Knowledge Economy.

They are scoring a ‘D for Innovation‘, which is no surprise given they are also scoring a D for openness to new IT models like Cloud Computing, as Telus reports in this press release.

The principle business benefit of Cloud Computing is that it provides a platform for encouraging and enabling more innovation – More prototyping, faster product development cycles, lower risk for trialling new ideas, and so on…

July 15, 2012 Off

45% of Networks Will be Obsolete in Next 5 Years

By David
Grazed from CloudTimes.org.  Author: Saroj Kar.

According to information released by Dimension Data, 45 percent of network structures of some 300 companies audited by the service provider during the year 2011 will be totally obsolete in next five years.

As per the Dimension Data’s Network Barometer Report 2012, a key factor for this massive jump in the initial stage of obsolescence is that suppliers of equipment are moving more products to the end line, aimed at the arrival of new technologies.

The data represents an increase of 38 percent over the previous year. In addition, all equipment that is in the cycle of obsolescence, the percentage that is out of line increased exponentially from 4.2 percent to 70 percent in calendar year 2011. At the same time, the percentage of stage equipment which is of maximum risk to contract renewal (EoCR) and end engineering (EOE) dropped sharply from 86.2 percent to 20.8 percent…

July 14, 2012 Off

What WORA can tell us about the future of the cloud

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author:  Gaurav Pal, Smartronix.

Sun Microsystems’ slogan, “Write once, run anywhere,” (WORA) was hot stuff in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, a new technology wave is forming, “Deploy once, scale anywhere,” or DOSA. So why should we care about WORA now? By understanding the evolution of Java and the emergence of WORA, we may discover insights into how the various cloud computing paradigms will evolve in the coming years.

As an enterprise architect with multiple large Java and cloud deployments, I have been intimately involved in both technology waves. Based on this experience, I can see the parallels and I believe that the various cloud platforms will ultimately provide the equivalent of the Java virtual machine (JVM) and create infrastructure independence that will enable new architectures…

July 14, 2012 Off

Gartner Study says Cloud i scutting traditional software, hardware sales

By David
Grazed from ITWorldCanada.  Author:  Brandon Butler.

Enterprise spending on cloud computing growing at a faster rate than overall IT spending will pose a challenge to legacy hardware and software vendors, Gartner cloud forecaster Ed Anderson says.
 
Cloud computing is expected to grow 19 per cent in 2012, becoming a US$109 billion industry compared to a US$91 billion market last year. By 2016, it’s expected to be a US$207 billion industry, according to Anderson’s latest findings. That compares to the 3% growth expected in the overall global IT market. While it’s true that the US$109 billion cloud market represents just a 3 per cent chunk of the overall US$3.6 trillion spent on IT globally, Anderson says it’s still responsible, in part, for a slowdown in growth for traditional on-premise hardware and software sales.
 
Software delivery is shifting from a traditional license sale to install an application on-premise, to a per-user cloud-based software-as-a-services (SaaS) model. Meanwhile, hardware is shifting from on-premise capital expenditures to off-premise operational expenditures…