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Maintaining Strategic Control over Cloud Computing

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

Theoretically at least, there’s no way an internal IT organization building out its own private cloud could be as cost competitive as a public cloud computing service. After all, the economies of scale vastly favor the public cloud service.

But to maintain strategic control over their IT resources, many IT organizations will still need to build out some private cloud platform.

What Insurers Need to Know to Develop a Cloud Computing Strategy

Grazed from Insurance and Technology. Author: Jeurgen Weiss.

Cloud computing has gained a lot of awareness lately. In fact, cloud computing was ranked as the top technology priority by a sample of 76 insurance CIOs who participated in Gartner’s annual CIO survey.

Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet technologies to multiple customers. "Scalable and elastic" means that the cloud services scale on demand to add or remove resources as needed. The service — including software and data — resides on hardware that the customer doesn’t own.

5 Critical Cloud Components

Grazed from Insurance and Technology. Author: Mike Sciole.

While I’m not sure any core application could be sourced externally without segmentation — which defeats the purpose of cloud computing — there are a number of variables that insurers need to contemplate in the design of an internal cloud or for the use of external clouds. The internal or external cloud must possess the following components in order to function as desired:

1. Availability. The internal or external cloud must achieve a Data Center Tier 4 availability rating as specified by either the Uptime Institute or by TIA-942 standards.

Not Ready for Prime Time

Grazed from Insurance and Technology. Author: Gary Plotkin.

In some ways, cloud computing is somewhat immature. It’s a bit of a solution looking for a problem. In general, the property and casualty industry is underserved by software.

The benefits of cloud are about ease of use, quick rollout and ubiquity around the world. There’s a physical advantage. And if I’m using someone else’s hardware and software, there’s a nice capital relief for me.

Why does broadband speed vary so much?

Grazed from BBC. Author: Jane Wakefield.

If you are a night owl who enjoys surfing between the hours of 4am and 6am and are fortunate enough to live on top of a telephone exchange then you are probably very happy with your broadband speeds.

But the majority of people in the UK are not getting the broadband services they signed up for, according to a comprehensive speed report by regulator Ofcom.

The survey found that for DSL services advertised as being "up to" 20Mbps, only 2% of customers got speeds in the range of 14-20Mbps. Of the others, 32% were getting a 8-14Mbps service and 65%, 8Mbps or less.

How Fast Can a Cloud Run?

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Ashlee Vance.

The cloud has been put on notice: It’s being watched.

A new graphical tool from Compuware, CloudSleuth, has arrived, in beta form, to measure and display the speeds at which cloud computing services run. The CloudSleuth tool already tracks Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and a couple of other cloud providers. And it demonstrates that response times do indeed vary from operator to operator. It displays these results on a map that gives people an idea for the worldwide performance of different data centers at a quick glance.

AT&T taps NewBay to power Mobile Share cloud service

Grazed from FierceMobileContent. Author: Jason Ankeny.

Digital lifestyle services provider NewBay Software announced its LifeCache rich media solutions suite will power AT&T’s new Mobile Share media management initiative. LifeCache–which offers integrated services including photo and video albums/blogs, social networking, digital vault, handset and desktop clients, messaging and contacts synchronization–will enable AT&T Mobile Share users to upload, manage, store and share user-generated videos and images across multiple screens, connecting consumers with their contact lists, personal computers, the online AT&T Locker media storage hub and social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Photobucket.

Category: News