A video tour of two of AT&T’s cloud computing centers that operate in secret locations in the North Texas/Dallas area. Source
Cloud Computing
607 posts
In more than a decade of talking about cloud computing, I have found the principle of ownership has been a recurring theme. People feel comfortable owning their computing. They know where they stand. Since cloud computing means giving up ownership, it makes people uncomfortable, uncertain of their ground. But while there’s comfort in ownership, it’s not of itself a guarantee of security or certainty. People often talk of the risks of trusting computing that lies […]
By 2020, businesses that fail to pare their legacy architecture may find their core businesses disrupted by smaller, nimbler companies who have built on SaaS and cloud computing from the ground up. “They will be unencumbered by a legacy of complexity and costly solutions and will be narrowly focused on their core competencies,” said Frank Wander, senior vice president and CIO at Guardian Life Insurance Co. And there you’ll be with your client/server architectures and […]
Diane Darling flies around the country, speaking on “Effective Networking” – not coincidentally her company’s name. But this column isn’t about her networking tips. This is about Darling’s born-of-experience advice to entrepreneurs whose laptops hold their work. And it’s particularly about those who schlep their laptops from place to place. At a recent speaking engagement, Darling returned to the car – where her laptop had been hidden under the car seat – and found the […]
IT professionals looking to place data in the Cloud should be aware of three major risks, including data leakage, the loss of visibility or control of the data, and unauthorised access to data, according to global services firm Ernst and Young. The firm’s senior manager, Pieter Danhieux, told attendees of IDC’s Cloud for Business Conference 2011 that while Cloud service providers are often talking about scalability, availability, cost reductions, efficiency and effectiveness, they had not […]
One of the challenges of evaluating cloud computing and the use of hosted desktops in the small business enterprise is understanding not only the business case ROI, but the operational impact. Here are 30 questions to assist you in thinking through the issues associated with deploying hosted desktops. First some definitions: VDI, Virtual Desktop infrastructure = Dedicated Virtual Desktop (hosted desktop) There are two kinds of VDI: server-hosted and client-side. A Server-Hosted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure […]
Back in April 2009, McKinsey set the cloud computing community afire with a presentation arguing that corporate cloud computing adopters might expend more money using cloud versus traditional data center resources. As reported by Steve Lohr in the NYTimes Bits blog: “The McKinsey study, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” concludes that outsourcing a typical corporate data center to a cloud service would more than double the cost.” Many in the cloud computing space, including […]
If—and it certainly appears to be the case—cloud-based computing, software as a service (SaaS) and mobile are the next wave of technology, it would make sense that venture capital orientates itself along similar lines. That is certainly the view of Notion Capital. Jos White, one of the two founding brothers was in London recently and spoke to The Wall Street Journal, Europe. Mr. White, and his brother Ben, were the people behind MessageLabs, a cloud-based […]
Small business (SME) are increasingly acknowledging the power of working in the cloud. At a time of ongoing economic uncertainty, cloud computing technology has the great benefit of being low-cost; easy to implement and use; flexible and scalable. Today, many of these businesses are actively developing their own cloud applications and tailoring them to their precise needs. Indeed, cloud-based application development is particularly well suited to the SME community for which time and resources are […]
Dallas based meshIP is a Thinkgrid partner for cloud computing services. This article from Rob Lovell, CEO of ThinkGrid, speaks to the value that only a local partner with experience in vendor-neutral platforms, expertise in vertical market applications and strong customer relationships can bring to craft real solutions for your business. The cloud computing market boomed during 2010 with more and more organisations adopting cloud services. As a cloud provider, customers are coming to us […]
In my last post, I gave you an outline of what I see as the three biggest “killer apps” of cloud computing. There is, however, another facet to the cloud story that I think is very exciting right now: innovation on the core technical and operational models that form the basis of distributed computing. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) What I mean by that is this: cloud has made new ways of acquiring and consuming infrastructure, platforms, […]
Regular attendees of the Enterprise Connect conference (formerly VoiceCon) couldn’t help but notice that this year everyone was talking — and talking more seriously — about implementing session initiated protocol (SIP) trunking. Although other conference topics such as Unified Communications and mobility may have been more glamorous, SIP trunking was often in the background as an enabling technology that can make those things work, or work better. SIP is an Internet standard for establishing and […]
The desktop virtualization market was chugging along at a decent albeit unspectacular pace before Apple’s iPad arrived and helped crystallize the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept. Since then, the iPad has become the main onramp for companies looking to mobilize their work forces through the use of virtualization. Executives were the first to bring the iPad into the workplace, but before long all types of employees were clamoring for the ability to access corporate […]
Cloud computing adoption is being driven by the desire to innovate rather than save money. That was the message sent out during IBM’s Pulse 2011 event this week in Las Vegas as the man in charge of the cloud for Lockheed Martin and Big Blue’s cloud champion talked up the benefits on offer. Cloud computing marks a turning point in the “industrialisation” of the IT industry, according to Ric Telford, Tivoli’s vice president of autonomic […]
We’ve learned a lot about mobility since the early days of this decade when businesses and consumers alike got their first taste of 3G networks. The shift from 2G voice-centric networks to 3G data-driven networks has made it clear that the real “killer apps” are mobile applications – transforming mobile devices into extensions of ourselves and our day-to-day lives. Consumers and enterprise alike are starting to see the incredible potential for combining mobile applications with […]
Cloud computing is all the rage. In its simplest terms, it means outsourcing your company’s information technology (IT) needs, from data and storage to software. All the servers and applications sit elsewhere in the Internet “cloud,” but more literally in a data center or centers. A recent study from Microsoft (with Accenture and WSP), “Cloud Computing and Sustainability”, compared the environmental footprint of running business software internally or with an outsourced provider (in this case, […]
Under the administration’s “Cloud First” policy, federal information technology managers have been directed to consider cloud solutions as their first option in expanding or upgrading their IT capabilities. Each agency has been required to identify three ‘must move’ services and create a project plan for migrating each of them to cloud solutions and retiring the associated legacy systems. Technology leaders in the White House have promoted greater use of cloud technology at the federal level […]
The last 24 months have brought an explosion of new devices, web applications, and social media platforms. With every new product release or social network launch, CIOs are getting pressure from their employees, including senior executives, to open the corporate network to consumer devices and allow access to more of the Web. This migration of consumer devices like smartphones and tablets into enterprise computing is making CIOs very nervous. The risks to data security are […]
Want to know if your organization has the right characteristics and culture to successfully adopt cloud computing? I recently ran across a new cloud computing study that might provide the answer. “Our approach was to try to look into the future and determine what capabilities and kinds of organizations are necessary for a successful migration to the cloud,” co-author Arun Sundararajan told me. Sundararajan (associate professor of Information, Operations and Management Services at the NYU […]
CFOs have high hopes for cloud computing, even though they don’t appear to know much about it. Such are the findings from two recent surveys conducted by CFO. Asked about their current use of cloud-computing services, a majority of senior finance executives either have no plans to pursue it in the short term, or are doing so very tentatively. Nearly a third admit that they aren’t even sure what “cloud computing” really means. Yet, when […]
More companies are taking advantage of cloud computing and virtualization technologies to streamline their network operations, but significant management challenges remain, according to Network Instruments’ State of the Network Global Study. The company’s fourth annual study surveyed 265 network engineers, IT directors and CIOs, located in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. Respondents were asked about the extent to which their companies take advantage of cloud computing, video conferencing and virtualization technologies, […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) plans to move 600,000 of its employees to a cloud-based email and collaboration system in a comprehensive migration project it’s calling the “Big 4.” The department is looking for a contractor to help it migrate its entire backend email system — comprised of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint servers, an e-mail archive system, BlackBerry software, and storage and back-up systems — to a hosted cloud environment, according to a request […]
A lack of understanding about security risks is one of the key factors holding back cloud computing. Report after report after report harps on security as the main speed bump slowing the pace of cloud adoption. But what tends to be overlooked, even by cloud advocates, is that overall security threats are changing as organizations move from physical environments to virtual ones and on to cloud-based ones. Viruses, malware and phishing are still concerns, but […]
It’s hard to imagine, but roughly 10 years ago as VoIP was being rolled out corporate networkers were quite concerned about the security of VoIP. As we faced a move from voice going over a traditional (and, by the way, unencrypted) network, there was concern that VoIP would be much too easy to eavesdrop on – especially if it traversed the Internet. We’ll leave the question of whether “legal intercepts” as a political and civil […]
UT Dallas researchers have released software tools intended to help make cloud computing the standard way much computing is done. Cloud computing is a model for providing on-demand Internet-based access to a shared pool of computing resources, including networks, storage and applications. It’s meant to make it as simple to obtain an array of electronic data resources as it is to get electricity itself. “In order to use electricity, we do not maintain electricity generators […]
The last blocks of IPv4 addresses were distributed in a widely viewed ceremony of sorts. While the distribution of these blocks to regional registries does not mean that there are no more IPv4 addresses available, it does point to a time when all addresses will be depleted. What does the prospect of the depletion of IPv4 addresses mean for organisations? Not much for those who already have blocks of addresses reserved for their use. But […]
While smaller companies may adopt virtual machines in greater numbers in 2011, they may not necessarily adapt their backup plans to match the changes in their environments. That’s a problem, says backup and recovery vendor Acronis, which recently took a deeper dive into the data from its January study on small and midsize business (SMB) disaster preparedness. The report found that SMBs will increase their deployments of virtual servers in 2011, with adoption jumping from […]
iTunes music streaming has been rumored for a long while, but has never actually surfaced… But if you read between the lines of two pieces of news at the moment, it seems the time is finally ripe. Apple settles record industry nerves We think, from previous inside information leaks, that one of the big hold-ups to a streaming iTunes music service was the recording industry–it had been caught on the hop when Apple revolutionized the […]
If you haven’t tried virtualization yet–or don’t even know what it means–it’s about time you did. Here are 10 reasons to tempt you into the virtualization waters. Virtualization isn’t just for geeks or those who run enormously powerful servers. It offers something for everybody, and if you haven’t yet dipped your toe into the virtualization ocean, then you’re at serious risk of being left behind. In its strictest sense, virtualization refers to running two or […]
Cloud computing is a boon, but its vectors need to be kept on a short leash, says Mushegh Hakhinian, security architect at IntraLinks. The pace of business today requires that critical information be accessible anywhere, anytime, often among both internal and external parties. Hosted services are an important tool to enable this, but while the tools facilitate communication, they bring additional risk and challenges to the firms that use them. Technology is rapidly evolving to […]