I can’t help but take notice of the recent string of cloud failures we’ve been hearing about this year. Blogger went down for about 20 hours last month and Microsoft’s BPOS hosted bundle also reported a significant amount of downtime. Perhaps the most notable was when Amazon’s cloud was overloaded with Lady Gaga fans clamoring to get her album for 99 cents. All of this talk of cloud failure has once again called into question […]
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A cloud computing service is like an airliner – even though it can experience devastating crashes that affect many people, like Amazon’s crash last month, it’s still safer than driving your own car … or IT infrastructure. That’s the rationale provided by Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, during a panel discussion on cloud computing during a keynote address at Interop 2011. Also on the panel were Randy Rowland, senior vice-president of product development at Terremark; […]
Amazon doesn’t have paperwork from the music industry approving its new cloud music service. Does it need it? “Not at all!” says the e-commerce giant. “Maybe?” Says the music industry. Adding: “We sure we wish they would have asked.” We’re probably going to dive deeper into the legal intricacies of music licensing and cloud storage in the next couple days. For now, we can say that: * Lots of people think a version of cloud-based […]
With Apple up until now, really taking the number one spot for content streaming with their iTunes service, it has been announced that Amazon are now too joining the competition. Bring on Amazon’s new Cloud Drive with their streaming service Cloud Player, for web and Android experience, with the peace of mind that your music collection will never be lost to the hard drive crashing. Amazon’s new Simple Storage Service (S3) has made this possible […]
2010 was the year “cloud computing” became colloquialized to just “cloud,” and everyone realized “cloud,” “SAAS” and all the other xAAS’s (PAAS, IAAS, DAAS) were all different implementations of the same idea — a set of computing services available online that can expand or contract according to need. Not all the confusion has been cleared up, of course. But seeing specific services offered by Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix, VMware and a host of other companies […]
Cloud computing has been making headlines and generating buzz for the past several years. Companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all placed big bets on public clouds, while traditional enterprise companies such as IBM, HP and EMC are pushing private clouds. The future may involve more than one cloud model, even for some of the largest and most staid corporations, but being able to juggle the advantages of each while minimizing risks such […]
Citrix CTO Simon Crosby looks back at 2010 in the cloud computing sector–and ahead at what 2011 may bring–and isn’t very comfortable with a number of things emerging on the security side of that very hot business. Crosby has become a go-to resource for knowledge in virtualization, cloud computing and data security. He was founder and CTO of XenSource prior to its acquisition by Citrix for $500 million in 2007. Previously, Simon was a principal […]
If data is sitting in three jurisdictions, what laws apply to it? Dubai: Tighter budgets, less capital investment and fewer IT staff in the corporate world are expected to boost cloud computing storage demands past $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion) per year in the Middle East in a third-party global storage market worth $68 billion annually. As the global number grows to $150 billion a year by 2014, some observers warn the amount of money saved […]
Even a business operating in the clouds needs someone on the ground. In Alaska, Nate Gates is aiming to be what he called that “local throat to choke.” Gates founded Cloud 49 in July after four years as chief information officer for Chenga Corp., an Alaska Native village corporation, and his preliminary expectations have been exceeded as state companies explore and embrace cloud computing technology. “We thought it would be a slow road the first […]
When we first heard about cloud computing, public clouds got most of the attention. But as IT managers looked at the security risks of having data outside the corporate firewall, they turned their attention to private clouds, which analysts and various surveys suggest will get more enterprise investment in the next few years. But private clouds have their share of challenges too. There are management issues and operational processes to figure out. And, of course, […]
Cloud computing is all the rage. “It’s become the phrase du jour,” says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition. As a metaphor for the Internet, “the cloud” is a familiar cliché, but when combined with “computing,” the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility […]
Cloud computing could be over hyped today, but more than half of large enterprises will rely on public clouds by 2015. According to Gartner, the industry analysts, cloud computing is currently still at the “peak of inflated expectations”, with users’ belief in the technology outstripping its ability to deliver. But within the next five years, half of the world’s 1000 largest enterprises will be using external cloud services for their “top 10 revenue generating processes,” […]