Category: News

April 1, 2011 Off

Why Hollywood isn’t afraid of Amazon’s cloud

By David
Grazed from ZDNet.  Author:  Greg Sandoval.

On Monday evening, Amazon announced the Cloud Drive, which enables users to upload e-books, songs, films, and any other digital media to Amazon’s servers. Users can then access their content from any Web-connected devices. Among the major Internet companies delivering digital entertainment, Amazon is first to make good on the promise of ubiquitous access to content.

April 1, 2011 Off

Five Tips for Effective Backup and Recovery in Virtual Environments

By David
Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Virtualisation is being rapidly adopted, particularly in small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) where time and money are always at a premium. It brings significant time, money and labour savings in a variety of areas, including procurement, administration, deployment, operation, reliability and recoverability. Virtualisation can radically simplify management of the entire environment and enable the SMB administrator to – do more with less.

Moreover, disaster recovery becomes significantly easier once a business has virtualized, provided the administrator adopts newer, more efficient technologies that are designed to work with the virtual infrastructure.

March 31, 2011 Off

Cloud computing is an evolution not a revolution

By David
Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author:   Adrian Bridgwater.

OK so the cloud is a revolution right? This is the most revolutionary computing delivery model to ever hit the planet and some of the most recent developments are truly astounding. Rackspace has launched a UK cloud data centre to address European compliance issues, Salesforce.com is leading a successful charge on the market — and the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk is the most creatively branded piece of technology since the ‘Game and Watch’ edition of Donkey Kong.

Well, not quite.

March 31, 2011 Off

How do I understand the true cost of putting IT in the cloud?

By David
Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Karl Flinders.

Cloud computing seems to be on every IT director’s shopping list, but do they really understand the costs of moving in-house resources into the cloud.

IT service providers are the companies doing cloud implementations. Not many businesses will build their own cloud infrastructures.

So the service providers need to be able to show CIOs how much it will cost to move systems to the cloud and how much it will cost to keep it in-house. But this information is not easy to gather.

But there are start up companies that are building businesses around this gap and they appear to be winning big customers.

March 31, 2011 Off

When Is a Tech Company Dead?

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Om Malik.

Last week, I had the chance to interview Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and many other game-changing companies. Whether it was time spent with him, or the news that Oracle was shutting down Sun.com, I’ve been dwelling on a morbid thought: the death of a technology company.

Not a day goes by when I don’t say or hear the following:

March 30, 2011 Off

Data quality errors ‘can have a heavy cost’

By David
Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: Neil Hill.

Data quality errors affecting customer information can potentially have serious consequences for businesses.

This is according to a warning from Rick Sherman, founder of consultancy Athena IT Solutions, who told the Smart Data Collective website the issue is one that affects many organisations, including those in the financial and retail sectors.

He went on to point out some of the problems that can occur when data quality standards are not up to scratch at companies.

March 30, 2011 Off

Salesforce.com application ‘a software-as-a-service pioneer’

By David
Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: James Glass.

Salesforce.com has been highlighted as one of the pioneering companies in the field of software-as-a-service solutions.

In an article on the Business Insider website, columnist Matt Rosoff said the technology is often included under the umbrella of cloud computing products.

"These are end-user applications, like productivity or business management software, that run on a set of pooled hardware resources and are accessed over a network," he said of software-as-a-service tools.