The Storage Wars: Google and Amazon Battle It Out, Microsoft Turns Turtle The past week witnessed Google and Amazon slashing the price tag associated with their respective cloud storage services one after the other. Interestingly, the price lowering spree from both the giants seems more like an immediate business reflex rather than a thoroughly chalked out pricing plan. Google started the sequel by introducing to the world a novel storage form, the Durable Reduced Availability, priced at a mere $ 0.7 per gigabyte per month. This translated to a price reduction as significant as 20 percent on Google’s storage solutions, setting off shockwaves at the Amazon
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Could Google Become The New Microsoft Of Cloud IT? For the past 15 years, Microsoft has been the unquestionable king of business IT. As the market leader in both workstation and server operating systems, Microsoft set the standard and controlled the experience for a generation of both IT professionals and general computer users. Today, even with explosive growth of tech companies like Apple, Citrix, Red Hat, IBM, and VMware, Microsoft maintains a ridiculously large share of the worldwide PC OS market (92%), approximately four fifths of the enterprise office productivity market, and a healthy plurality of server OS sales (48%). No other company has ever
Stuck In The Clouds: The Issue Of Data Ownership While the immediate benefits of cloud services are typically clear to new users, individuals and businesses alike are becoming increasingly aware of a looming issue: vendor lock-in. As these users amass large amounts of data in their cloud-based accounts, from email to pictures and everything in between, they are learning that exporting that data can pose a significant challenge. Vendors often rely on the fact that once you are comfortable using their services it is difficult to leave and move that data out or to another service. For individuals, this can mean
How To Prevent Google Apps Data Loss According to Google, more than 4 million businesses use Google Apps. It provides core collaboration and communication tools like Gmail, Calendar, Contacts and Drive. In this context, it is obvious that business users trust Google’s cloud to run critical parts of their data and systems. Google Apps includes critical security features and disaster recovery capabilities specifically designed to keep data safe and secure. But I want to make it clear that all these features are created to recover from the disasters that affect data from system failures, not from those that affect your business, like human error. If one
The Sky is Infinite: Storage in the Cloud In the early age of computers, storage was a precious commodity. Programs were written with such tight coding so as to take as little memory and storage as possible. As technology advanced, storage and memory expanded, with the option for additional memory to be connected physically. Even this solution had limits and it requires carrying around USB memory sticks or portable hard drives. Imagine being able to save terabytes of data and have it available anywhere. Welcome to the age of cloud storage. File hosting used to be viable option only for
Clean Energy, Google Is Ready To Take The Plunge. Are You? As Google has moved a step ahead towards clean and green energy by purchasing wind power for its Oklahoma data center, the IT world is standing again in front of a question. A question which has been here for a long time, but in a muted mode, has again hit the news headlines. It’s about the IT world vs. clean energy. Since the adverse effect of using too much of fuel or coal energy is bare to all and sundry, the Information Technology industry often comes under the scrutiny.
Can The Security Models Of Google And IBM Combine To Improve Cloud Security? People know Google as a consumer-savvy multinational while they see IBM as a product-oriented company. While the former is famous for its rollercoaster of search services and e-mail hosting platforms, the latter is the mind behind many applications and devices the IT community uses now. It is worthwhile to know that four years ago, the two Internet and electronic giants agreed to lock heads on what many deem to be the blooming trend of the tender century—cloud computing. The question is: will they manage to create a
