Is Microsoft Taking A Risk By Putting All Its Eggs In The Cloud Computing Basket? “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” – William Shedd (1820-1894), American Presbyterian Theologian. Risk-taking is a requirement for business; unless, a business takes risks, it cannot sustain its competitive advantage, and without a competitive advantage, it will soon fall by the wayside. History is witness to several companies that were once stalwarts in their field but are now limping, or have dropped out of the race completely. Therefore, Microsoft’s decision to invest in cloud computing, in spite of
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Test Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud For Free Users can now try Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and storage resources for seven days absolutely free of cost thanks to Gluster, a provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for public and private clouds. Gluster claims that it offers the only high-availability storage for AWS EC2 – across availability zones and AWS regions. A $100 AWS credit from the company allows users to test the Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS) free for up to seven days. Those interested to sign up for the free trial can do so
The Amazon Cloud Drive – A Quick CloudTweaks Overview The buzz around free online storage started way back in 2006 with Google’s Gdrive but it did not materialized into anything important except as a feature in Google Docs that gives free 1 Gig of storage. A year later, Microsoft launched its very own SkyDrive with a whopping 25 Gig of storage free. Now, Amazon launches its very own Amazon Cloud Drive that gives the first 5 Gig of web storage free and requires only a $1 fee for every Gigabyte of storage each year. The Cloud Drive is a support
Manage Cloud Storage with Google Glide New browser toolbars from Google allows users to control and manage their personal hard drives, cloud storage, applications and web services directly from their browser toolbar. Launched by Glide, the new toolbars can work with Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari browsers. Those interested to benefit from these new services can visit GlideOS to install their very own Glide Browser Plugins. Google claims that its unique services provide cross platform compatibility for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, Android Honeycomb, BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry Tablet OS (QNX), iOS, webOS, and Symbian. This
Google Jumps In Line To Compete With Amazon and Netflix Two weeks ago Amazon announced the launch of a new Prime members: unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of more than 5,000 movies and TV shows. And now it sounds like Google with be revising their YouTube service: Based on a WSJ Report: “Google Inc. is working on a major overhaul of YouTube as it tries to position itself for the rise of televisions that let people watch online video in their living rooms, according to people familiar with the matter. YouTube is looking to compete with broadcast and cable television, some
Global Business and the Cloud Computing Collide This new SandHill Group white paper explores the powerful advantages of SaaS technologies in addressing the challenges of a global market, virtual teams and an ever-changing business climate. In today’s increasingly global business climate, companies are expanding operations to many parts of the world in order to secure and optimize talent where it lives. This trend is leading to an explosion of geographically distributed virtual teams. Companies have turned to technology to improve collaborative efforts. While traditional, pre-Internet technologies were cumbersome, expensive and complex, today’s cloud computing technologies, on-demand applications, ubiquitous broadband access,
Cisco, EMC, VMware Evolve Australian Data Centre to Private Cloud Cisco, EMC and VMware have teamed on helping KPMG Australia, part of a global network of firms providing audit, tax and advisory services, to evolve its data centre to a private cloud with a Vblock infrastructure platform. The companies claim that this platform successfully blends cloud computing with integrated, consistent enterprise security and compliance. This blending enables KPMG to easily meet or exceed all security and regulatory requirements. The Australian firm is already using IT to boost its business and with this Vblock deployment it expects to grow even further.
YubiKey Authenticates Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform Yubico has announced the availability of its authentication token YubiKey to increase security for Microsoft Cloud Platform Windows Azure platform applications. Yubico specializes in providing easy and secure login solutions and the scalable and cost-effective Windows Azure Platform enables customers to build, host and dynamically scale applications and services through the Microsoft data centers around the world. The collaboration between two companies will increase security in a very cost-effective and flexible manner thanks to the integration between Windows Azure based solutions and the YubiKey two-factor authentication service. “Being able to integrate solutions for two-factor
