Is Your Company Ready For A Cloud Service Outage? If you are using one of the major CSPs (cloud service providers) you may already be used to major service outages. Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Google Apps and Microsoft Azure have all had their fair share of outages in the past 18 months, and some of them have been huge failures (Amazon’s April 2011 outage lasted 47 hours for some customers), which have brought down sites such as Reddit. However, companies such as Netflix have been able to survive the outages well. In this post, I will cover details on how you
Cloud Computing
Nicira Virtualizes The Network For Offshore Cloud Specialist Calligo UK Channel Islands Cloud Provider Achieves a World First by Creating a Single Virtual Data Center Across Two Island Facilities Palo Alto, Calif., May 16, 2012 – Nicira, the network virtualization company, today announced that Calligo, a full-service cloud service provider based in the Channel Islands, has adopted Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) to support its customers in the offshore industries in the region. Calligo is using NVP to make two data centers – one in Jersey and one in Guernsey – operate as a single facility, with computing capabilities and
Accounting Software As Software-As-A-Service In the mid-80s, accounting software became very popular with midmarket companies. Personalized accounting became an indispensable tool for businesses as personal computers became cheaper. Users took advantage of computer technology because financial report preparation was easier with the help of accounting software. Automated accounting also began to attract users who had previously shied away from inflexible and restrictive time-sharing computer systems. Now, a majority of companies are still using accounting software installed on computers at the office. With technological improvements and the opening of branch offices in various parts of the country, users are becoming increasingly
The Top Five Threats To Cloud Computing With hundreds of enterprises migrating to cloud services every day, it looks like the march to cloud everything is inevitable and unstoppable. However, cloud computing is not without its risks, and in this post, I will cover the top five issues that pose a threat to increased cloud adoption by enterprises. Highly fragmented market In most areas of computing, it is a winner-take-all market. Whether it is Facebook or Google search, or Windows or iPhone, most markets in our world face either a monopoly or a duopoly. While such markets pose their own
Taiwan’s Cloud Trinity – Medicine, Tourism and Culture Innovation Over the last year, Taiwan has become synonymous with cloud computing development. From government support (See: Cloud Computing: Taiwan’s Next Trillion Dollar Industry) to international acclaim (See: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the Taiwanese Clouds), everyone seems to repose faith in the Taiwanese cloud. Now, the government has decided to increase the stakes. Taiwanese Minister and deputy convener of the Board of Science and Technology in the Cabinet (Executive Yuan), Cyrus Chu, has announced the government’s intention to complete three major plans for a medical cloud, a tourism cloud, and a
The Delphix Agile Data Management Platform Nearly every business process in the modern enterprise is powered by database driven applications. As result, maximizing the agility and availability of application environments while minimizing associated costs has become a top priority for CIOs across the globe. A few weeks ago I wrote a blog article about The Benefits of Data Center Virtualization for Businesses and referred to data virtualization as layered in order to manage huge data volumes from disparate sources. Now I would like to talk about Delphix, an additional method which is not a virtual integration layer over the top
Be a Cloud Executive Officer Chief executive officers of the 2010s ignore the cloud at their peril. As we at CloudTweaks know better than most, cloud computing has become an indelible centerpiece of the national conversation on all things technology. Few developments since the arrival of the Internet have ignited such discourse or stood to offer so much change to our relationship with computers. A refusal to acknowledge cloud, then, is essentially an admission of irrelevance in virtually every industry that involves either computer-borne data, the Internet, or a combination thereof. Employees in such industries, now more self-sufficient and enterprising
Is The Federal Government Moving Fast Enough On Cloud Computing? At a time when the Federal Government is being congratulated for saving billions by moving to the cloud (See: Research Report: Feds Rejoice the Cloud Way, with $5 bn In Annual Savings), the title of this article may seem somewhat incongruous. Before I delve into the reasons, let me bring up the topic of variance analysis. According to Wikipedia, “In budgeting (or management accounting in general), a variance is the difference between a budgeted, planned or standard amount and the actual amount incurred/sold….. The concept of variance is intrinsically connected
