Jeff Bezos owns the Web in more ways than you think – Steven Levy, Wired, Nov 2011
Cloud Computing in Plain English
Cloud storage and who owns your files – lilputing, Jul 2011
…what do we mean by “cloud?” In this case, we basically mean someone else’s servers.
…your data is all sitting on someone else’s servers. And that’s where things start to get complicated, because the only thing really determining who owns those files at that point is the Terms of Service that you agree to when you sign up for the service. (And you can’t ask for a modified version…)
How to ensure business continuity in the cloud – Michael Crandell, GigaOm, May 2011
Cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: Everything fails sooner or later… [but] public clouds now provide organizations with an impressively wide array of options to implement business continuity at a level of affordability that simply did not exist a few years ago…. The key is to design your infrastructures for the possibility of failure.
The Mobile Cloud: What it is and why it matters – Data Center Knowledge, May 2011
From a simple perspective, mobile cloud computing can be thought of as infrastructure where data and processing could happen outside of the mobile device, enabling new types of applications such as context-aware mobile social networks
Microsoft BPOS cloud customers hit by multi-day email outage – Mary-Jo Foley, May 2011
Microsoft officials warned customers of its BPOS bundle of hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync on Monday, May 10, that an upgrade of Exchange Online was slated to begin on May 12. Microsoft didn’t tell users to expect any downtime as a result of the upgrade. But it seems something went wrong before May 12’s upgrade ever began.
The Business Market Plays Cloud Computing Catch-up – Apr 11 – NYTimes
Vivek Kundra, the White House chief information officer, wrote a “Federal Cloud Computing Strategy” report, and identified $20 billion, or one quarter of the government’s total spending on information technology, as “a potential target” for migration to the cloud. By 2014, IDC estimates that 30 percent of total spending on software applications in the corporate market will be for cloud applications.
2011: The Enterprise Resets – Jan 11 – Aaron Levie, TechCrunch
Mobility is creating major demand for cloud offerings today, and is a disruptive force on its own. In last year’s summer earnings call, “…in the first 90 days, we already have 50% of the Fortune 500 that are deploying or testing the iPad.” – Apple COO Tim Cook shared.
Gmail ditched by major university – May 10 – University of California ended evaluation, citing privacy concerns (Information Week)
The UC Davis IT leaders’ letter stated that “outsourcing e-mail may not be in compliance with the University of California Electronic Communications Policy.” The policy forbids the university from disclosing or examining the contents of e-mails without the account holder’s consent, and from distributing e-mails to third parties.
Does the Fourth Amendment cover the Cloud? – CNet News, Jan 2010
One of the biggest issues facing individuals and corporations choosing to adopt public cloud computing (or any Internet service, for that matter) is the relative lack of clarity with respect to legal rights over data stored online.
You say you want a cloud revolution? – Michael Crandell, GigaOM, Jun 2009
At this stage in the development of the cloud computing market, the biggest opportunity lies in helping companies make evolutionary shifts to cloud architectures. That’s the low-hanging fruit for both customers and vendors alike. Relatively quick, easy success stories are the ones that stand out in the cloud market today, and are driving the business. The reason is simple: If you can take existing IT requirements and fulfill them with a system that is both more agile and less expensive but doesn’t require major changes to your applications, that’s revolutionary.
Clouds over the Ivory Tower – Stephen O’Grady, Redmonk, May 2009
Similar to studies that “prove” how much more productive, maintainable or secure Java is to PHP, it ignores the most important feature of cloud computing: a low barrier to entry.
What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing – Official Google Enterprise Blog, Apr 2009
There’s quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a “private cloud” with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.
[In short], we manage this entire infrastructure such that they don’t have to. According to Gartner, a typical IT department spends 80% of their budget keeping the lights on, and this hampers their ability to drive change and growth in their business.
The Anti Cloud – Mar 08 – blog post here
‘We actually own our servers, which means we decide what stays up. That’s why we didn’t have to remove the Tom Cruise video. There’s no service provider telling us what to do.’ – Ted Plunkett, Gawker <- who decides the response to a DMCA?
Green Clouds – Jan 08 – blog post here
At some point, ‘green computing’ is going to become popular, and switching your resources to a more efficient ‘cloud’ is going to carry favour (see below)
IM the Cloud – Jan 08 – blog post here
XMPP and the need for web services to switch from one-way polling mechanisms to two-way synchronisation to achieve scalability and more efficient use of resources (see above)
Change is coming – Jan 07 – blog post here
A bigger reason than money for switching from traditional software to web-based alternatives has to do with the pace and trajectory of technological change… Mr Sanner says it is “absolutely inconceivable” that he and his staff could roll out improvements at this speed in the traditional way – by buying software and installing it on the university’s own computers.
Storm warning for cloud computing – Bill Thompson, BBC News, May 2008
Those of us who use the cloud just need to be clear about the realities of the situation – and not send or store anything on GoogleMail or HotMail that the US government might want to use against us. The physical location of our online services still matter a great deal.
More links
- The Evolution of a small business (mobile and cloud) – Microsoft video promoting Office 365 – Apr 2011
- Amazon: Some data won’t be recovered from cloud outage – The Register, Apr 2011
- Sony PlayStation Network Data Breach compromises 77 million user accounts – eWeek, Apr 2011
- How Cloud Computing will change business – BusinessWeek special report, May 2009
