SaaS Business Apps Drive SMB Cloud Computing Adoption Much of cloud computing’s infancy was fueled by software development firms, enterprise tech companies, and large financial institutions. IBM sparked the trend in 2003 with its on-demand computing initiative. By late 2005, Amazon recognized the potential market for IaaS and PaaS solutions and launched its EC2 service less than a year later. Fast forward five years, and almost every tech startup relies in some way on EC2, Windows Azure, Google Apps Engine, or similar IaaS and PaaS services. But it’s SaaS solutions—and their popularity with SMBs—that have driven cloud computing adoption and
SaaS
The LG Cloud Service: LG’s Take On Cloud Storage Come Streaming South Korean giant LG electronics has just spilled the beans over its native Cloud-based streaming service bearing the simplistic (and rather unimaginative) name LG Cloud. The service, still in its beta mode of operation, is set to empower users with the provision to share and stream content effortlessly across a multitude of (supposedly LG) devices. The service design philosophy is centered around what LG describes as the “three screens approach”. The terminology is a vivid indicator of the fact that the service has been tailored to encompass the three
Are You Using The Right Cloud Providers For Your Business? Do you know where the users of your services are? Are some of your customers complaining about slower load times, while you are noticing no performance issues at all in your country? Depending on the providers used, you could have wide differences in performance among different regions of the world. For instance, an Amazon EC2 in Singapore has the fastest response time in Singapore (115 ms), while the same instance might have the slowest response time for US visitors (450 ms). The former is lighting fast, while the latter is
Four Reasons Why Google Drive Will Not Kill Dropbox Now that Google has entered the cloud storage market with the long-awaited Google Drive, will it kill Dropbox and other cloud computing services? This is a hot topic in Dropbox forums and elsewhere in the cloud computing world. Here is what one forum poster said, as quoted in CIO magazine: “Google Drive is going to devastate Dropbox. I hate to say it, Google being the big, bad corporate machine and all, but Dropbox is going to [hemorrhage] users unless they dramatically lower their prices (which could even require being bought up).”
Emerging Markets: Emerge Leaders in Cloud Computing Adoption – II This is the second part of a two-part article. To read the first part, see: Emerging Markets: Emerging Leaders in Cloud Computing Adoption – I The TCS report, which was produced after surveying 606 companies across 16 industries, followed by in-depth studies of six – CTB/McGraw Hill, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Dell, AOL, an unnamed telecom major and an unnamed CPG company with $5 billion in revenue – provided some interesting results. The biggest driver of cloud applications is not to cut IT costs. Perhaps the most important finding of this
Cloud Computing Startups Raise Big Money: UPDATE 12 This is the thirteenth in a continuing series on startups raising funding. You can read the latest in the series at: Cloud Computing Startups Raise Big Money: UPDATE 11. For previous updates, please click on relevant links in the aforementioned article. Today, there are two startups in focus – CloudPassage and Opscode. CloudPassage CloudPassage, a San Francisco-based cloud security startup that advertises its services as “Everything you need to secure your cloud servers,” has raised $14 million in second-round funding, bringing total funds raised to $21 million. The B round was led by Tenaya
Adobe and Sears Aim for Cloud Prominence When it rains, it pours. On the coattails of Google’s Drive cloud announcement rides word that two other companies, one predictable and the other mildly surprisingly, have made up their minds to clear their own cloud computing pathways. Is this sudden urge to jump on cloud’s bandwagon indicative of its newly cemented position as “relevant and here to stay,” or merely a maneuver by financially rather flaccid groups to make a quick payday? Your answer to this is as good as mine. Vanguard software company Adobe is finally, finally making a move on
Cloud Anti-spam as an Alternative Anti-spam Technology Organizations with the flexibility to take advantage of cloud-based technologies, and without any legal or policy requirements to keep their email servers in-house, can find that cloud anti-spam solutions are a great fit for their messaging hygiene. Spam, phishing, and malware can consume significant resources when it comes to the bandwidth to transfer them, the disk space to store them, and the CPU and RAM required to scan them, and ultimately you are going to delete almost all of that junk. With cloud anti-spam, you can keep all that digital trash as far
