Moving to the Cloud, Pros and Cons There is no doubt that the future of application consumption will be done through the cloud, but like everything else in this world there will be pros and cons. Change is always a daunting opponent, and for a business that have already established standards and processes, changing them will be daunting and if done wrong will be costly. The cloud computing paradigm has made it easy to transition business processes into the cloud, and have made it especially easy and cheap because the expertise requirement will no longer be the burden of the
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Putting A Figure On Cloud Failures: $71 Million Since 2007 As supporters of cloud computing, it’s expected of us to report on all the positive developments in this field, and as is obvious, there was, is and will be many of those. At the same time, as commentators with integrity, it is our duty to present to our readers negative news about cloud failures as well. As long time followers of this site will attest, we have done that consistently, some of my relevant articles (in chronological order) being: 1. Gmail Outage – Is Cloud Computing To Blame? 2. What
Microsoft’s Strategy In The Private-Cloud Computing World The private-cloud computing world has been bombarded with a barrage of service providers. In the thick of this barrage, Microsoft has emerged with innovative and accessible ideas. To start off, Microsoft’s private-cloud platform includes the general purpose windows server and the system center, which is optimized for top management. The thing which makes Microsoft different from other private-cloud service providers is that they have come up with a fourfold strategy that easily surpasses any other competitor in the market. The first fundamental of their strategy revolves around the notion that all the infrastructure
Unified Storage for the Cloud Means Higher-Level Interfaces In common use, the term “unified storage” means providing block-level and file-level access to the same storage system with a single management and control interface. Traditionally, block-level access is via fiber channel or iSCSI, and file-level access is via NFS or CIFS protocol. Recently, storage vendors are also adding _object_-level storage where the objects are entities with metadata like type, access control policies. Objects are read and written by applications using REST HTTP or SOAP and used directly at the application level. The most popular API is Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service). With the higher-abstraction level of objects, the underlying implementation (e.g.,
Should Cloud Computing Service Providers Screen Potential Customers? The World Wide Web is full of articles advising consumers on what they should look for when choosing a cloud provider, how they should negotiate contracts with providers, what danger signs they should be aware of and a plethora of other advice. However, an extremely illuminating article that I read recently on IT World (See: What should cloud providers know about their customers?) made me think from the other side of the fence – “Should cloud computing service providers screen potential customers?” Many would consider this line of thinking ludicrous. After all,
Go Away – You’re Not Serious about the Cloud Quit reading this. Move on. Your business has no chance of cloud prosperity. You’ve chosen to ignore several key tenets of successful integration into the cloud computing sphere, and you now find your business in an IT rut. Should you still continue to be reading this, pat yourself on the back. You’re at least willing to entertain the idea that your cloud acumen could improve. I’ll keep it simple. If you can’t shape up in at least one of these three vital areas to cloud success, you ought to ship out.
Grow Your Business By Moving To The Clouds Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular in business due to the practical solutions it offers to many business problems. Many of these problems include inhibition, security concerns, and space restrictions. Cloud computing aims to provide a solution to such business dilemmas, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. One of the primary benefits of cloud computing is its portability. Users can use a basic personal computer as in lieu of a more powerful PC. The personal computer becomes a virtual computer that can access the Internet and be seen on
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
