There’s no question that the cloud is the future of IT. But making that transition isn’t always easy – especially if your company has been purchasing PCs, servers, and software for the past few decades. I have already discussed some of the ways that cloud computing is influencing the IT industry. Of particular importance among the many changes in the IT industry, and the need for professionals to adapt, is that cloud providers are starting to massively affect the ways traditional hardware and software companies sell and get paid for their products. In my company’s experience, the shift from owning our
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Cloud Hosting – Infrastructure as a Service As the fiercely competitive modern business environment continues to evolve, companies of every size are becoming increasingly aware of the many benefits presented by cloud computing. Just as mainframes eventually evolved into the current sever environment, the image of a roomful of computers in a large building will soon begin to fade. The speed, flexibility and reduced cost of cloud hosting have begun to trigger the next evolution in the IT industry. Defining IaaS IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is one of the three primary applications of cloud hosting. Along with Software as
Your Data in Australia is subject to the US Patriot Act One of the great advantages of cloud computing is the ability to compute across borders, thereby insulating a business from any localized issue that can potentially disrupt work (Earthquakes and Cloud Computing ). However, this necessarily means that business data is scattered across the globe, leading to possible legal and political complications (Computing Without Borders – What Works, What Doesn’t ). Some time back I had written about a potential threat to consumer rights under the US PATRIOT Act, a threat that is somewhat protected against by the Fourth
Zynga, the Latest Cloud Computing Success The business world is abuzz with the upcoming Zynga IPO which is expected to raise $1 billion from investors and value the gaming company as high as $20 billion. Just for the record, Zynga is a California-based game developer that made FarmVille and CityVille, two of its most popular products, part of the popular lexicon. From modest beginnings in 2007, Zynga now has more than 2,000 employees across the world, annual revenues of $850 million, and a whopping 250 million daily online users. In fact, its meteoric growth has far surpassed expectations, even of
Auto scaling strategies for Windows Azure, Amazon’s EC2 and other cloud platforms The strategies discussed in this article can be applied to any cloud platform that has an ability to dynamically provision compute resources, even though I rely on examples from AzureWatch auto scaling and monitoring service for Windows Azure The topic of auto scaling is an extremely important one when it comes to architecting cloud-based systems. The major premise of cloud computing is its utility based approach to on-demand provisioning and de-provisioning of resources while paying only for what has been consumed. It only makes sense to give the matter of
LastPass Possibly Hacked, Cloud Security Concerns on the Rise Conspiracy theory admirers will be happy to hear the news that today, following Amazon’s outage and recent security breaches at Sony, cloud-based password storage and management company LastPass announced a possible successful hacker’s attack against its servers. “If you have a strong, non-dictionary-based password or pass phrase, this shouldn’t impact you – the potential threat here is brute-forcing your master password using dictionary words, then going to LastPass with that password to get your data. Unfortunately not everyone picks a master password that’s immune to brute-forcing,” the company wrote in a
Practically Speaking About Cloud Computing: Email in the Cloud. Email communication is taking a heavy beating, both in our personal life and in work, as alternate real time Web2.0 communication methods have started occupying the space. Though Email is not dead yet, the prominence of Email communication is diminishing in both worlds. In this scenario, as long as Email is used as one of the prime communication tools in corporate, there is no doubt that IT operations are concerned about it. Not only SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses), but also some large enterprises, including Government organizations in the USA are
Cloud computing is the technology of today and tomorrow. People, companies, businesses, and organizations are fast shifting to cloud computing from client-server model. It is very hard to guess what cloud computing will exactly look like in the future or how it will bring changes in IT. However, we can see some trends, IT and business world are setting in cloud computing. Following are the top 10 trends observed in cloud-computing; Building Private Clouds Larger organizations and enterprises are building their own private computing cloud. IBM’s “Blue Cloud” is such an example. Microsoft introduced its private cloud just last month.
