Many small-business owners may not realize that the cloud plays a big role in their business operations, and its importance is growing every day. I’m often asked, “What exactly is the cloud, and why does my company need it?” Simply put, the cloud hosts resources and applications that are accessed through the Internet, and it now offers small businesses access to powerful capabilities that once were only within reach of larger corporations. From a small-business […]
protection
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Crummy cloud computing SLAs, assuming cloud computing is bad and you’ll lose all control in moving to the cloud, are among the mistakes companies should avoid making in cloud security, a security consultant said Wednesday at Cornerstones of Trust 2011. Eugene Schultz, chief technology officer at Emagined Security, a consulting firm based in San Carlos, Calif., ticked off a list of cloud mistakes at the one-day security conference held in Foster City, Calif. The annual […]
US ambassador to the EU calls for solidarity. The EU and the US must work together to offer a credible response to the emergence of cloud computing, the US ambassador to the EU told a conference this week. William Kennard, a former head of the Federal Communications Commission, said that there was a “new sense of urgency” to debates about privacy, intellectual property rights (IPR) and data protection, because of the increasingly rapid move towards […]
The benefits of cloud services are often cited. They’re low-cost. They’re scalable. They’re permanently state-of-the-art. However, at least with traditional IT outsourcing, the customer can negotiate a balanced, even a customer-friendly contract. Cloud customers usually have little option but to accept standard T&Cs. It is a utility model, where multiple users each buy a slice of the same pre-existing service. Providers tend to have the “take it or leave it” mentality of a gas or […]