November 9th, 2011
One of the biggest changes in the last year to come to cloud computing is Big Data. Any company that is considering moving to cloud computing has probably seen it around; every other vendor is claiming it. But what is it? And why should you be paying attention to it?
Forrester, one of the leading researchers in the cloud computing industry explains big data as techniques and technologies that make it affordable for business to handle data at extreme scale. Things like customer call records and medical equipment monitoring data need to be constantly captured at an enormous rate and the better you do it the more valuable your data.
Forrester’s Brian Hopkins thinks that Big Data is where the biggest breakthroughs in cloud computing will come from and where individual markets will find their next big winners. So understanding what it is and how it pertains to your individual market could be crucial in any business that is looking to grow with cloud computing as a major tool in their arsenal. This article introduces the idea and also leads to a link to his recent report “Expand Your Digital Horizon with Big Data”. To read Brian Hopkins comments and report, be sure to read Big Data Will Help Shape Your Market’s Next Big Winners.
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November 8th, 2011
Cloud Computing Journal is the bible for anyone who needs to know the latest in cloud technology. Every year before the Cloud Expo they ask a handful of experts what they see as the major trends for cloud computing in the next year. This year they talked to several leading members of the cloud community for their take on everything from AWS to Street Commerce.
The discussions were wide ranging and covered the following territory and more:
These are just a few of the things that these and other experts talk about regarding changes to come in cloud computing. Some of the predictions include some pretty dire futures for anyone not paying attention in this time of change. For a look at what they and others are saying when it comes to the new directions in cloud computing in the business community, read The Future of Cloud Computing: Industry Predictions for 2012 at Cloud Computing Journal.
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November 7th, 2011
If you are the guy who is considered the godfather of cloud computing, you believe in it. Marc Benioff shares with Technology Review his views on not only why cloud computing is so important in business today, but where it is going. A few years ago he declared that software was dead, and it now appears that his prediction is coming true. With over $150 billion spent on cloud computing in the past year, more businesses are embracing his vision of an office where hardware and software are immaterial and Software-as-a-Service is delivering timely up to date applications.
In the interview he discusses a number of important topics such as:
As usual, Marc Benioff pulls no punches and says it the way he sees it. For a look at what one of the pioneers of cloud has to say about why every business needs to be looking at making cloud computing an integral part of their business plan, read more at Technology Review.
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November 4th, 2011
Federal Government Defines Roadmap for Cloud Services
A basic plan that defines the government’s top priorities for standards as well as defining the government’s requirements for future cloud services was revealed this week. Although still a draft version, it will serve to speed the rate at which agencies can adapt cloud computing services and provide action plans for meeting standards. The aim is to make it easier for government to purchase and implement cloud computing solutions and should also make it easier for anyone considering doing cloud business with any government agency to create cloud computing solutions that can be readily adapted.
What every Business Should Know About Cloud
Forbes magazine takes a look at what has been developing in the cloud computing world for the last year. Why executives need to consider it and where it makes sense is examined in a closer look at what kinds of questions a CEO should be asking when considering a move to the cloud. A link to a webinar discusses how to evaluate a business case for the cloud for your business.
Vendor Neutral Platform for Financial Services Industry Debuts
The announcement of NYSE Technologies release of an open source code that will sit between operating systems and applications could be a big boon to a wide variety of financial systems. They are donating the piece of code to allow trading, the development of market data and other financial services to be openly created at minimum costs. By turning over this piece of code to the Middleware Agnostic Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAMA) with the Linux Foundation, the non-profit consortium can make it available to be downloaded for free.
Gartner Symposium Points to Cloud Brokerage
The recent Gartner Symposium was a huge success by all the numbers, with vendors, deals and attendance all up from last year. A topic that surfaced was the emergence of Cloud Brokers who help businesses by customizing cloud services to fit the needs of the consumers. This move reflects the changing role of IT and the re-imagining of various roles with it. Gartner looks at how these changes brought about by the cloud revolution will affect the post-modern business.
New Service Tracks Cloud Spending
With new cloud services becoming easier than ever for employees to turn on and off with a credit care, how do you control the costs? Up until now, it was difficult to impossible. A new offering called Cloudability may be just the answer for many businesses who want to give their employees the flexibility to call up services as needed but still control the costs.
November 3rd, 2011
When you download a piece of music from the cloud, who owns it and who is due the payment for the copyright of that material? With the introduction of the cloud into the complex world of copyright issues for music, the creation of various ways to develop electronic content and deliver it has once again begun to muddy the waters.
There has been tremendous growth in the business of cloud-based distribution systems to the point that the industry has begun to rely upon them for a larger share of their business models. This unexpected turn has led to some unusual and, what was bound to be unclear, copyright issues. The end result has been a twofold need for balance. The first is for copyright holders who need and have a right to create and control ownership and distribution of their work. The second is the desire of the general public who consumes and, in fact, creates the demand for that work to use it and access it through service providers of the various platforms available. All of this needs to be able to continue to grow without consumers infringing on the copyright ownership of the artists and companies who own these copyrights or companies denying consumers access to content they desire.
At the center of this controversy is the ability of virtual servers in the cloud to deliver content anytime, anywhere to an ever-growing audience. It is this unprecedented growth and the proliferation of devices that can access virtual servers and the content they deliver that has turned content on the go into such a huge commodity. Everyone wants in on the deal, and that content access model creates issues through the act of copyrights being “transferred, transmitted and distributed” according to Barry Slotnick, Chair of the Intellectual Property and Entertainment Litigation Practice Group at Loeb & Loeb, New York.
“We are in a perilous time for copyright owners,” comments Slotnick. “The decisions are not looking good for owners, to say the least.” He points to Napster and admits that the new world of cloud hosting service providers and cloud servers “are legitimate businesses arguably willing to comply with the law.” And in fact the majority of cloud servers are more than willing to ensure they do not run up against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in their efforts to deliver the benefits of the cloud to an every growing and hungry consumer.
For many involved in the legal aspects, the key feature is the intended audience. The question soon revolves around two ways of looking at a cloud-based service provider’s role. Are they simply a passive neutral conduit of content or do you consider them to be basically an electronic locker holding that content and then distributing it?
Can you characterize the cloud server deliver system as nothing more than another version of the thumb drive, simply a more efficient model of that concept? At what point do we need to balance the ability of technology to deliver in amazing new ways against the need to compensate the creators of the content who hold the copyright?
Legislation has been used in the past to regulate this balance of need versus ownership, and the DMCA was supposed to address that for the new delivery of content. But already the changes in technology have begun to make those laws outdated. “The law will always be behind the technology,” commented Slotnick. He pointed out that the DMCA “was useful about a year into the millennium.”
Other changes in technology have run into this problem before, and have found some unexpected results of the rapid changes from new technological delivery systems. The videocassette recorder (VCR) is a good example of this. When the VCR was first established, there were fears that the devices would cut into sales of entertainment. Instead it opened up totally new markets for delivery of entertainment. As opposed to cutting entertainment copyright holders out of old business, suddenly the market for redistribution of material previously available for free on your television could be purchased or rented for multiple viewing at home on your VCR player. This created a whole new revenue stream for many.
The channel for distribution has now changed to cloud servers that make this same material available across a multitude of devices. The same need to compensate copyright holders for that material will need to be satisfied, and those who look to enter into this brave new world will need to be aware of this.
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November 2nd, 2011
CMSWire recently published an article that looks at open source cloud computing and its possible future direction. One of the biggest problems with open source cloud computing today is the lack of standards across the board. Taking a closer look at why standards are important and why they don’t yet exist is important to the growth of open source. Some of the reasons for standardization are:
The article goes in to greater detail on these reasons as well as listing a few more. But if standards are so important, why are we so slow in finding it? One solution for open source cloud computing is to create an open platform and that is what Open Stack claims to be. If it is such a great solution, then why is Red Hat not a part of the stampede towards OpenStack? For more on this discussion and a look at the answers to some of these cloud computing questions, read more at CMSWire.
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November 1st, 2011
There are many government agencies that have moved to the cloud in recent years. This site has listed the case studies of many of the agencies who now use software-as-a-service or have implemented cloud hosting and shows where the cost savings were realized. These case studies include:
Although not a very detailed presentation, it does give anyone looking for examples of solutions in cloud hosting some ideas on what has worked. Many of the departments have numerous citations in this blog, so a wide range of solutions are presented.
Both federal and State government agencies are represented, and the names of specific programs are given when applicable. Both solutions using software-as-a-service and cloud hosting are represented, along with other cloud computing solutions. For presenting to decision makers or considering the scope of a change, the information is valuable for anyone looking at the possibility of moving to the cloud soon. Government studies can be accessed here.
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October 31st, 2011
With the advantages of cloud computing stated loudly all over the web, is it any surprise that Business Intelligence (BI) should be moving to the cloud as well? With its need for reporting and analysis and an ability to control costs, cloud computing has the flexibility to provide just what BI needs.
With the ability to provide customers with a platform that can deliver standalone internally facing reporting and analysis, as well as providing an application framework for reporting and a development platform for function-specific data analysis the cloud-based BI tools are ideal for SMBs.
There are a number of types of analytics and statistics that are typically serviced by BI systems. Some of these that might be considered for Cloud BI are:
For a more detailed analysis on cost/operating models, architectural models and business models of cloud computing tools for BI, be sure to read the entire article here.
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October 28th, 2011
Obama’s New CIO Looking for Cloud Innovation
In his first talk since taking office, U.S. CIO Steven Van Roekel said that he is intending to go beyond what his predecessor did and look for innovative uses of cloud technology in government agencies. While still building on previous directions, the former Microsoft executive saw plenty of opportunities for the U.S. government to become technology-centric in its approach to solutions within agencies and between agencies.
His call to the private sector to be not only a part of the “Future First” movement but to help the government define it will give many industries a chance to implement and direct the kind of technology they want to see, and even perhaps be a part of it.
Dropbox Announces New Security Measures
DropBox, the cloud-based file sharing system that many SMB businesses have used recently announced a new service for more confidential files called DropBox for Teams. With enhanced encryption and two-level security, DropBox sees this as an answer to many corporation’s qualms about using the service for more confidential files. Seen as primarily a system for individuals or SMBs, DropBox is working on increasing security to attract larger businesses to it service.
Cloud Based Mergers – Who Benefits?
A recent look at the flurry of activity in the Mergers and Acquisitions side of technology shows a possible future direction for the cloud. But how does that affect your business? This article looks at what kinds of changes can be forecast and how many of the SMBs are going to be affected.
Symantec is Taking to the Cloud
Wireless carriers will be able to start providing businesses with options for controlling mobile access to their sites soon through a new Symantec offering. It will begin by having the initial product hosted in the TekMark data centers and begin selling the service in the following year. The application will be provided by a third partner that will run on a mobile device and communicate with Tekmark’s data centers.
October 27th, 2011
This past week at EuroGame Expo, Founder and CEO of OnLive Steve Perlman gave an interesting talk about the future of cloud-based video games and how the development and rollout of games on platforms such as OnLive may be the way all videogames are played in the future.
The OnLive service delivers over one hundred different video games to PCs, Macs, tablets and even to smartphones through high-powered custom servers that stream the video to your device. In other words, this is true cloud-powered video gaming. The input that the user makes during the game is registered on the device and fed back to the servers that control the gaming session.
The true test, of course, is the question of latency. This is critical for video games and with OnLive it was pre-tested on over ten million different Internet connections in order to refine a new video codec to create streaming of 720p video at 60FPS with latencies of 50-133 milliseconds. In other words, exactly what you would get if you were using an Xbox or PS3 at home for a video game.
Another side result of the game being a video stream and not local game play is that piracy will be close to impossible to do as the user will never actually own a game, but simply accesses the video stream from the site’s servers. In addition to game play, the site allows users to see a live feed of what other games are currently being played, creating an arena where fellow gamers can be spectators as well as players. Viewers of these live clips can even “cheer” or “jeer” players as the game is played live to encourage combatants.
Another social aspect of the game that is unique to a cloud-based platform such as OnLive is offering is the ability to create “Brag Clips”. These are short ten-second clips of game play that users can post on Facebook or in the OnLive network to show off a particularly smart bit of play or an achievement. The game site NowGamer.com calls these clips “the YouTube of gaming” and this could easily develop into one of the hot items for this company. Because these clips, as well as the live action, are always available on the site, players interested in a game can preview highlights before making a commitment to a game.
Pricing is an interesting setup for the company as users can access social sections of the site (live games, brag shots) and guests can try out a thirty-minute demo of any game offered, both for free. Some games can be “purchased” in a range of time-for-use models. But the service most gamers will want is a monthly membership that allows a member unlimited access to all 100+ games. This “PlayPack” option gives users the true advantages of cloud video playing at any time from any of the supported consoles or devices they register with the site.
Although the company has some improvement to be made when it comes to video quality (mentioned in just about every review read) the concept is so powerful that many feel this may be a whole new model for online entertainment. While the die-hard PC gamers may not be ready to give up their higher quality video, a whole new generation of gamers may build around the fact that one can jump on any time, not pay for a single piece of hardware or software and not have to invest in a whole library of games. Just as music entertainment is seeing mainstream adoption with cloud-based streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, the next level of cloud-based gaming may not be far behind.
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