New Amazon Service Stores Music, Files in the ‘Cloud’
Cloud Computing – The IT force that can’t be stopped
Cloud computing is like a force of nature that cannot be stopped, even if there is a change in the White House in two years, according to panelists at a cloud computing briefing today at the National Press Building in Washington, D.C.
Like open-source software, cloud computing will grow whether people want it to or not, said Bob Gourley founder of CTO Vision and former chief technology officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Amazon leads the way on multi-media storage in the cloud
Amazon has stolen a march on Apple and Google with two services that enable users to store multi-media files in the cloud and stream them to computers and smartphones.
Google and Apple are working on similar services, according to AP reports.
Amazon Cloud Drive is for storing music, images, video and documents, while Amazon Cloud Player enables users to access stored media on any PC, Mac or Android smartphone.
The Cloud Drive service allows users to upload content from PC, Mac and iTunes, but not from mobile phones. Songs with Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions are also not allowed, and Cloud drive supports only MP3 or AAC file formats.
Maintaining App Performance in the Cloud
To read the headlines of late, it would seem that virtualization and cloud alone are the keys to IT nirvana.
But now that the enterprise industry is gaining some practical experience with these new technologies, it’s obvious that things aren’t quite so simple.
For one thing, things like application performance and general data flexibility are still subject to the same old traffic jams that plague traditional infrastructure. The most scalable set of resources in the world won’t be of much use if data can’t get from one place to another.
Cloud Cost Analyses and ‘Inherent Conflict of Interest’
IT Business Edge blogger Art Cole recently wrote that "the simple economics behind cloud computing is enough to foretell its imminent rise to data center dominance," citing data from Quest Software’s Dmitry Sotnikov that shows many popular cloud services are bargains based solely on the energy needed to run a typical in-house server — never mind cooling, maintenance, security and backup costs.
Security zone: Extending compliance to the cloud
Most security and compliance mandates were simply not designed with cloud environments in mind – an unfortunate state of affairs as a huge amount of our data is about to go "cloudwards".
Even recent updates to common compliance mandates such as PCI DSS 2.0 do not adequately address compliance issues when using cloud services. The key benefits of cost saving, agility, collaboration and availability often overshadow the implications of expanding your audit scope to include your chosen cloud provider. How do you guarantee your compliance when moving to the different forms of cloud services?
Data quality responsibilities ‘should be made clear’
Companies often struggle to determine what department is responsible when it comes to the issue of data quality.
This is according to Rob Karel, a Forrester analyst who has recently written a report on the topic of process data headaches for the organisation, reports Information Week.
In his study, it is pointed out that business departments often believe data quality to be the concern of IT teams.
Why high-performance clouds are best kept in-house
Most commercial entities don’t have the infrastructure to handle the intensive workloads of high-performance computing, And, if they do, it will probably be more expensive – in one case, 10 times more expensive – for them to run dedicated services than for some agencies to run their own private clouds.
At least that’s the case for officials from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who spoke at a recent symposium on high-performance computing.
What is cloud computing? A quick guide to the subject
There’s been plenty of talk about cloud computing ,widely being seen as the ‘next big thing’ in the IT world, but what’s it all about?
The fundamental idea behind the concept is to rent the provision of a service from another company, and for that service provision to be out on the Internet. Defining what we mean by “provision of service” is not easy, because different vendors mean different things. But the essential core idea is that you do not run central services inside your organisation, but push them out to these third party suppliers. Think of it as “outsourcing your servers” and you are mostly there.
Three steps towards drawing up ideal cloud computing contract
Once you’ve made the decision to move away from an IT environment that is physically located within your organisation, there’s another problem to solve.
One of the crucial elements of moving to the cloud is the type of contract that you have with the cloud provider (or a reseller of the cloud provider’s service). Get this part wrong and your business could be looking at some very serious financial consequences.
There are three main areas to concentrate on: reliability, security and liability and all customers should be paying keen attention to what a cloud providers’ policy in these three areas is.