When the Cloud Meets Mobility: Heaven or Headache? The cloud and mobile computing have made an awful lot of promises to enterprise IT: reduced costs, higher productivity, jaw-dropping data analytics, rapid rollout, granular control over the IT solution stack. But have they delivered? Unfortunately, that’s not easy to answer. In a recent Gartner survey of over 2,000 top CIOs, analytics and business intelligence, mobile technologies, and cloud computing ranked as their first three priorities (in the order). These CIOs have high hopes for the next wave of cloud technologies. Their ultimate goals include: Allowing anywhere, anytime access to cloud-hosted data and applications on any device regardless of
Robert
Virtualization Spells “Money” for SMB IT Consultants in 2013 Listen up, SMB IT guys. Consider this: The typical small and medium business server uses about 10% of its computing power. But small businesses continue to segment their servers—one server per core function—as companies like Microsoft, Dell, and HP have recommended for years. And while that’s definitely a best practice from a technical perspective, it’s a horrible waste of resources from a financial one. Enter Virtualization Ask any 10 small business owners about whether they have dedicated or virtualized IT infrastructure, and at least nine of them are likely to blink stupidly at you. That’s why
Will The Cloud Ever Stop Being The Cloud? Cloud computing wasn’t always cloud computing. Depending on who you ask, first it was either time sharing or grid computing. Strangely, nobody actually claims to know how cloud computing got its name. To this day, no one claims credit for coining the phrase. (Maybe I shouldn’t have said that…) The phrase “cloud computing” is rather poetic for a field that’s not known for its literary devices. It’s certainly not typical of utilitarian terms like social networking, Internet, voice over IP, and distributed computing.Perhaps that’s why marketing pros love it so much —
Cloud Predictions for the New Year Making predictions for the coming year has become a time-honored tradition in the tech field, so I thought we’d have a little fun with it here at CloudTweaks by predicting what’s not going to happen. 1. Amazon won’t continue to be synonymous with the cloud. EC2 and S3 are popular and established, but they’re seeing mounting competition from Microsoft, Google, HP, IBM, telcoms, and a number of smaller providers. Plus, Amazon seems far more interested in devices and apps lately — as it should be. 2. Apple won’t be successful in the cloud. The
Will Cloud Computing Be To Labor What The Internet Was To Capital? In 1992, the CME Group launched the first electronic trading platform, which heralded a completely new age for anyone with capital to spare. Electronic trading and money transfers meant a whole new world of opportunity for potential investors. In essence, the Internet freed wealthy (and even not-so-wealthy) investors to move their money wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, at a negligible cost. The result has been hedge funds, day traders, a huge uptick in emerging market investments, and a veritable explosion of highly complex “financial instruments.” (Plus, grandpa gets to trade stocks at
Can Natural Disasters Doom The Future Of Cloud Computing? In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, many people are asking whether cloud computing can withstand nature’s wrath. The storm took several major cloud computing companies offline, including Amazon Web Services (at least on the East Coast), and left thousands of websites and online services down for hours—and in some cases days. Hurricane Sandy has definitely proved that the cloud is vulnerable to natural disasters and extreme weather patterns, but that hardly presages the death of cloud computing. All computers and electronic systems are equally susceptible to the same events. Millions of
