Those in the know say that cloud computing will fundamentally change the way we office creatures work. “I am slightly too young to remember the workplace before the arrival of the PC,” says Jacqui Thomas, director of Comms at the UK and Ireland chapter of the Cloud Security Alliance. “But cloud is the same kind of game changer.” Adrian Steel, head of infrastructure at the Royal Mail, also sees big changes ahead, especially once cloud […]
CTO
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Two recent events reminded us this spring that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: everything fails, sooner or later. The failure modes of cloud vs. traditional data center architectures may differ in nature and frequency, but the threat is the same – outages, downtime, lost revenues and damaged customer trust. Ironically, these same recent events also highlight how cloud infrastructures, when managed correctly, actually […]
Lately we’re talking to CIOs and IT managers who feel more like referees. It used to be, we just had to moderate between end users and security or the helpdesk. But now, as the data center evolves to include pervasive virtualization and a mix of in-house and cloud IT assets, the internal turf battles are threatening to KO agility advances. It’s unarguable that virtualization–on premises or in the cloud–has increased flexibility exponentially. Getting a new […]
Forbes this week published an interesting article written by Ed Sperling titled “CIOs: Be Careful What You Wish For.” In it, Sperling posits that virtualization will cause a shift for IT leadership from technology to data. He writes: “The virtualization being implemented everywhere will give way to cloud computing, and cloud computing will unclutter technology to the point where the focus will migrate from technology to data.” He goes on to say: “IT is still […]
A few weeks back, I was on a panel of media pundits asked to make predictions about what might happen in the technology business in 2011. One prominent member of our group, seeking to stake out a bold, contrarian position, asserted that 2011 would be the year that “cloud computing” would be revealed to be a big nothing, an over-hyped concept that in the end is more about marketing than actual technology. He’s so, so […]