Do cloud developers need to go back to school?
I spent this weekend writing up some opinions from a bunch of academics and recruitment specialists on the subject of whether cloud computing focused developers have enough skills to cut the new (cloudy) mustard.
It seems that opinions are mostly in line with a consensus which agrees that we have a skills issue to address. New languages and new software methodologies are at work inside the cloud paradigm and not every programmer has the skills base to cope.
The jump to cloud (and the news skills it will require) has even been likened to the new skills shift that programmers have had to embrace to cope with the new world of mobile apps.
The Costs of Bad Security
Keeping up: The Enterprise Strategy Group, a consulting firm, asked 308 IT professionals in large companies what factors motivated their decisions to improve data security. Regulatory compliance topped the list
Credit: Credit: ESG Research Report, Protecting Confidential Data Revisited, April 2009
G-Cloud Open Data Platform
A key challenge in IT is dealing with all the different ‘camps’ of different makes and types of technologies.
In Government this is particularly challenging right now, because simultaneously Government agencies are meant to embrace, adopt and master a variety of new technologies, including Web 2.0 social media, Cloud Computing, Open standards, Open software and Open Data.
How to Cope With Cloud Crashes
The folks at LearnBoost, a free classroom management suite of online tools, have blogged last month about how they use MongoDB among other things to help them replicate in the cloud to prevent exactly the same sorts of outages that hit Quora and others when Amazon’s Web Services went offline.
Guillermo Rauch writes that LearnBoost didn’t suffer any downtime, largely because they took some care to build in redundancy to their apps and cleverly
replicated their data across different Amazon regions and data centers…
Small business risks getting lost in the cloud
A survey released this week paints an interesting picture of small businesses working in the cloud, and that picture is one of uncertainty.
"The cloud", essentially outsourcing computing tasks of any number of varieties, has been the hot button topic of the technology industry over the last couple of years, and it’s often suggested that the cloud is a natural fit for SMB organisations, which have greater agility and less existing legacy architecture than their enterprise peers.
Global Cloud Computing Adoption: Transformation is in the Air
HP, Sir Paul ‘All Together Now’ on Cloud Archive
Eight months after it began an ambitious project to digitize a lifetime worth of music, artwork, photos and various other property of one of the world’s most renowned musicians, Hewlett-Packard revealed May 26 that Sir Paul McCartney’s new cloud storage/access system has launched and is open for business.
McCartney’s publishing company, MPL Communications, is handling the day-to-day business of using the cloud-stored content for publishing, licensing, sales–and even giveaways, if McCartney so chooses.
World’s largest hybrid cloud powers popular games
Game provider Zynga has more than 250 million users, and signs up five new players every second. Company officials claim 10% of the world’s Internet population plays a Zynga game once a month.
With six of the top 10 Facebook games, Zynga has a serious business. But have you ever wondered where the games actually run?
Apache provides cloud console with Libcloud project
Recognising the growing need for vendor neutral standards in the cloud computing field, the Apache Software Foundation has prioritised development of its Libcloud unified cloud interface as a top level project, the organisation announced.
Apache Libcloud provides a single interface to more than 20 cloud services, including Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute), Rackspace Cloud, Terremark’s cloud service, IBM Cloud, GoGrid’s infrastructure service and the Xen-based Linode service.
Most businesses shun public cloud but consider private cloud
UK businesses are considering the introduction of private cloud platforms while waiting for the public cloud market to mature, according to research from analyst firm Quocirca.
The survey of almost 1,000 organisations, including 101 UK companies, shows that almost half are positive about using the cloud as part of their IT platform, compared with 10% which consider cloud as a "passing fad".