Author: David

Amazon Web Services’ cloud-computing infrastructure experienced a brief network outage this evening that knocked offline popular sites such as Netflix, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare.

The network connectivity issues struck Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at Amazon’s northern Virginia site, which handles AWS operations for the U.S. East Coast at 7:39 p.m. PDT and were resolved about 25 minutes later, according to the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard…

Cloud computing seems simple in concept, and indeed, simplicity of operation, deployment and licensing are its most appealing assets. But when it comes to questions of compliance, once you scratch the surface you’ll find more questions than you asked in the first place, and more to think about than ever before.

Compliance covers a lot of ground, from government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the European Union Data Protection Act, to industry regulations such as PCI DSS for payment cards and HIPAA for health data. You may have internal controls in place, but moving to a public-cloud infrastructure platform, a cloud-based application suite or something in between will mean giving up some controls to the cloud vendor…

I wrote earlier about an IDC report that mentioned Cloud server revenue will grow to $9.4 billion in the US by 2015. This is up from a little more an estimated $4 billion this year.

What if companies were to be issued a 100% tax credit for such a purchase?

To be sure, purchase of these servers would already be included as a capital expenditure, to be deducted from profits over a period of years. A million dollars worth of hardware, depreciated over five years, means that $200,000 per year is not subject to taxes…

As health care companies grapple with whether to adopt cloud computing platforms to store patient data, providers face many choices on which services to choose and how to keep data secure.

A recent report by CDW found that health care companies are hesitant to adopt cloud services due to privacy concerns.

To get some insight on the state of cloud computing trends in the health care industry, eWEEK spoke with Chris Witt, president and co-founder of Wake Technology Services, an IT services company based in West Chester, Pa., that serves the health care, government and education sectors…

Okta, a San Francisco-based startup specializing in on-demand identity and access management service for enterprises using cloud computing, has closed a $16.5 million round of venture financing.

Founded by former Salesforce.com executive Tom McKinnon and launched in January, Okta now has raised more than $26 million in financing. New investors Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures contributed to the latest round, joining previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and FLOODGATE…

Everyone talks about "the cloud" as if it rains cash from a single source. In the cloud-computing era, there’s more than one way to make money in cloud services and more than one cloud to sell.

There’s no escaping the cloud-computing hype. If you believed all the buzz, cloud computing will eliminate the need for IT, solve all business problems, reduce operating costs, feed your children and cure cancer. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the point is clear – so much is attributed to “the cloud" that what the cloud is sometimes gets lost in the fog…

To some, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes might appear to be a foe of Web distribution.

Remember, he was the guy who last year compared Netflix with the Albanian army–the view that the popular company would remake film distribution was a little like saying the tiny country’s army would conquer the world. Time Warner has also made it clear Netflix subscribers won’t be streaming episodes of HBO hit shows, such as "True Blood" or "The Sopranos," anytime soon…

When demand for an application suddenly spikes, IT folks make a mad dash to optimize resources, balance loads and add more hardware. And now, they’re considering another option — the cloud.

The marshalling of public cloud resources in response to usage spikes is a practice sometimes referred to as "cloud bursting." In this scenario, organizations pay only for the resources they use and forestall additional infrastructure purchases. But with most applications firmly ensconced on internal infrastructure, how does one even get there?…

A lightning strike in Dublin on Sunday caused a power failure in data centers belonging to Amazon and Microsoft, causing the companies’ cloud services to go offline.

lightning struck a transformer, sparking an explosion and fire which caused the power outage at 10:41 AM PDT, according to preliminary information, Amazon wrote on its Service Health Dashboard. Under normal circumstances, backup generators would seamlessly kick in, but the explosion also managed to knock out some of those generators…