technology

22 posts

A close up of a small green plant in dirt, illustrating how cloud computing helps a business grow

How Cloud Computing Helps a Business Grow

If you came here for the article with the title, “How Cloud Computing Helps a Business Grow”, unfortunately, it has been removed at the request of the publisher of the website from which it was obtained. Asking me to remove it was within their rights, but I believe it was a shortsighted decision based on old media ideas about the copyright “protection” of assets and the imagined potential loss of ad revenue. I am not […]

New york stock exchange building with american flags, illustrating cloud computing and the US economy

Can Cloud Computing Save The American Economy?

The American dream is in peril from the confluence of sky rocketing deficits, high unemployment, and the ticking time bomb of an aging baby boomer generation, with its coincident increase in the burden of entitlements as a percentage of GDP. For the first time, the next generation of Americans, our grandchildren, risk having a lower standard of living than we enjoyed. It is not a problem that can be remedied with tax increases and budget […]

Two cafe workers standing behind a counter, illustrating small businesses working in the cloud

How Small Business Benefit from Life in the Clouds

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 […]

A bar chart of rising wealth made from US dollar bills, illustrating cloud raising total IT expenditure

Cloud Computing Raises Total IT Expenditure: Why That’s a Good Thing

For years we’ve heard cloud computing vendors pushing the message that cloud computing will reduce IT expenditure. It’s not a surprising tactic, as vendors often aim their pitches at the area most important to organizations: expenditure. But, as Knowledge Center analyst Ben Kepes discusses here, by focusing only on the cost side of the equation, we miss so much of what cloud computing can truly offer. I recently wrote a paper looking at the economics […]

Red flowers on green grass field under white clouds and blue sky, illustrating the proliferation of cloud offerings

Let A Thousand ‘Clouds’ Bloom

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 […]

A row of newspapers sitting on top of a shelf, illustrating cloud computing as newsmaker of the year

Newsmaker of the Year: Cloud Computing

One would think that for something with so much activity around it and so talked about that there would be a concrete definition of what cloud computing is. Instead, depending on who you ask, everyone seems to have their own definition of what cloud computing means. CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA ) vice-president and country manager for Canada, Jimmy Fulton, summed it up best by saying “there hasn’t been a more ambiguous term in the IT […]

Tiny model construction workers working on a mobile phone screen, illustrating IT managers predicting cloud adoption

Information Technology Managers Predict Widespread Private and Public Cloud Adoption

Cisco announced today the final installment of the Cisco® Connected World Report, an international study about the behavioral trends of workers in accessing information anywhere, with any device, and the ability of information technology (IT) professionals to address their needs. The latest results focus on data center, virtualization, and cloud computing trends, and evolving IT roles, in the context of increasingly mobile and distributed workforces. The study found that global IT professionals are creating new […]

A scale with a bowl on top of it, illustrating the risks and benefits of cloud life

Life in The Cloud: The Risks and Benefits

A short summary of the benefits of the cloud for organizations from here. A key point is to pick a professional and fully redundant supplier. meshIP has redundant systems, data centers and fully backs up your data each day. ‘Cloud computing’ sounds like a complicated idea, but if you use Flickr to store your photos, or Hotmail to keep in touch with friends and family, or stream music over Spotify, then you are, in effect, […]

A path in a park, illustrating hybrid clouds as a path to cloud nirvana

Are Hybrid Clouds the Path to Cloud-Computing Nirvana?

The New York Times has an interesting article about hybrid clouds: If you’re tackling your company’s computing needs, you’re going to have to get your head in the clouds. But which ones? You’ve likely heard of cloud computing – shared computing resources available over the “cloud,” or the Internet. But it turns out there’s more than one way to cloud. When most people talk about the cloud, they mean a public cloud — big server […]

A man sitting at a desk talking on a phone, illustrating the virtues of hosted VoIP

The Virtues Of Hosted VoIP

Today Forbes had a great article on hosted voice: One of the virtues of Voice over Internet Protocol is that your business can have a sophisticated phone system without installing a phone system. With a VoIP system hosted on the Internet, all you need are the phones. One situation where this particularly makes sense is if you run a relatively small (or lean) business with lots of locations. Rather than have each office install its […]