Microsoft Steps Up to the Ring with Windows Azure in Direct Competition with Amazon Web Service The land of Infrastructure -as-a-service (IaaS) shook a little bit more this week as another titan rose in competition for the enterprise’s bustling pot of gold. Microsoft has finally delivered their promised revamp on the Windows Azure services which also serves as a direct reply to the already in-motion Amazon Web Service (AWS). AWS, with its long head start dominates the IaaS market with an estimated $1.8 billion in revenues for cloud services alone in 2012. It is projected to skyrocket to $20 billion by 2020
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Cloud Computing Is Getting Cheaper, The Beauty Of Competition The biggest selling point of cloud computing is its affordability and accessibility to small and medium organizations; it can even be free for personal use. This means that anyone can harness the power of cloud computing to little or no cost. Google, Amazon and other players within that space offer free versions of their services but for more functions and resource capacity, the pay-per-use model takes over. The barrier of entry on the cloud is steadily decreasing. On the 4th of April, Google announced that the Google Compute Engine (GCE) cloud service, an on-demand VM service
Heroes Of The Cloud – Part 6 (Google and VMware) If there is one company that defines the growth and importance of the Internet, the company would have to be Google. Google did not invent everything that it does on the ‘net, and to be sure, some of the things that the company is attempting to do are in arenas where Google is playing catch-up. There is no denying that in Google’s core business, search, they are still the “go-to” application for most users. Google’s power and influence make them a contender in almost any field they choose to operate
Key Differences Between Server and Desktop Online Storage Many people are saying that 2013 will be the “break-out” year for cloud storage. A number of factors are pushing online data storage offerings – including file sharing, backup, archiving and more – beyond the consumer and small business market and into big business datacenters. Below, I’d like to highlight some of the key differences which set server and desktop/laptop online backup and storage services apart, in hopes that this might give you some insight into how the space has developed and evolved over the years. Desktop Online Backup In the past, most work
Putting the Service Back in “as-a-Service” The future of cloud computing has often been framed as being a debate between private vs. public clouds, with each model having its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of cost-effectiveness, control and security. The debate should instead focus on what each model can borrow from the other to deliver the most efficient, scalable and flexible service possible. When deploying a private cloud, system administrators should take a page from public clouds by focusing on the overall services their private cloud is providing. When designing and implementing a private cloud, enterprises need to focus
Disaster Recovery In The Cloud, Or DRaaS: Revisited The idea of offering Disaster Recovery services has been around as long as SunGard or IBM BCRS (Business Continuity & Resiliency Services). Disclaimer: I worked for the company that became IBM Information Protection Services in 2008, a part of BCRS. It seems inevitable that Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage should have an impact on the kinds of solutions that small, medium and large companies would find attractive and would fit their requirements. Those cloud-based DR services are not taking the world by storm, however. Why is that? Cloud infrastructure seems perfectly suited for economical
Towards Intelligent Cloud Diagnostics: Well Researched Software Marvel A devoted group of researchers at North Carolina State University have painstakingly developed a novel software tool aimed at addressing performance disarrays in cloud computing systems. The tool functions to automatically classify and respond to potential network disruptions before they actually occur. Cloud computing provides the freedom of creating numerous virtual machines provided to the end-users across a single computing platform – all that functions autonomously. Performance issues with such an approach are bound to occur. In case of a software glitch or a closely related hiccup, problems arising across a single
