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Cloud Computing presents unique opportunities to companies to reduce costs, outsource non-core functions and scale costs to match demand. However, the Cloud also presents a new level of complexity that makes ensuring application performance in the Cloud a unique challenge, in particula...May. 7, 2009 09:51 AM EDT Reads: 1,249
An entire ecosystem is evolving around cloud computing. Interface standardization efforts, commercial products, cloud infrastructure and management services, virtual appliance providers and open-source solutions are filling niches in the cloud ecosystem. The role and position of a comp...
Some time ago I wrote an article about Windows Azure. The reaction to the article was mixed - some agree with the “cloud” confusion and the lack of release dates, others (mostly Microsoft guys) asking for more time so the technologies will evolve; and last but not least people trying t...
Late last year I received a phone call from McKinsey & Co in regards to helping provide some insights into the cost benefits of moving to a cloud computing environment. For one reason or another we were not able to connect to complete the discussion, which after the last couple days se...
"At Sun, we're planning on maintaining Java's ubiquity as the number one runtime environment, backed by the world's most price performant datacenter infrastructure, all powered by Sun's cloud." That, in no uncertain terms, is Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's vision for Java and stresses the...
Despite the gloom and doom in the news, no one seems to be predicting that the spread of TCP/IP will be slowed by a global recession. Most analysts are more concerned with how the network will be monetized and the role it will play in new virtualization and cloud computing initiatives....
It is the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world, but how is it best defined? I refer of course to 'Cloud Computing' - the phenomenon that has as many definitions as there are squares on a chess-board. To try and narrow it down we bring here a ro...
We asked a selection of the industry's brightest minds what their own advice would be in these troubled times, and assembled it into a ten-point guide for software vendors, entrepreneurs, and startups to riding out a recession.
What are the benefits from using Cloud Computing services or platforms? Cost efficiency, shorter innovation cycles and scalability are frequently mentioned promises. However, the value proposition of Cloud Computing obviously depends on the corresponding business scenario. You cannot p...
Is Web-based cloud computing the wave of the future, or should we stick to the devil we know? The big player in cloud computing is Google, the online search, advertising, email, mapping and video behemoth, whose cumulative dominance of the Internet rivals Microsoft’s dominance in opera...
Am I the only one who has trouble understanding Cloud Computing? Is Instant Messenger considered cloud computing? Is my company's enterprise deployment of XenApp on XenServer considered Cloud Computing? Is the iTunes store considered Cloud Computing? Why is Cloud Computing so hard to ...
In the next few years the a key opportunity for the emerging cloud industry will be on defining a federated cloud ecosystem by connecting multiple cloud computing providers using an agreeing upon standard or interface. There are a number of organizations looking into solving the proble...
From Amazon EC2 and App Engine from Google to Utility Computing, Virtualization, and Walled Gardens - there's no aspect of Cloud Computing that hasn't already been addressed at some level of detail in SYS-CON Media's Cloud Computing Journal (www.cloudcomputing.sys-con.com). Here's a ro...
Cloud computing has the power to revolutionize non-information "soft" product sectors. We haven’t seen too much clear synergistic benefits between mobile apps PLUS cloud computing/SaaS yet, but I sense that we can expect to see more good things out of the intersection of these two. I’l...
There is a myth going around about virtualization and cloud computing. It’s expressed in a variety of ways, but the takeaway is always the same: “Public clouds are big virtual server clouds.” Sounds good, but untrue once you look under the covers. For good reason, since virtualization ...
Comparisons between Scale-Out and Enterprise clouds, while sometimes tempting (especially in the Google vs. Microsoft case), are rather useless. They serve different purposes, often for completely different audiences, and enterprise IT organizations would do better to focus their effor...
I see this whole cloud computing movement as nothing more than a reincarnation of the classic mainframe client-server model. People want painless access to their data and applications from wherever they are, from whatever electronic gizmo they happen to be using.
IaaS standards will enable a market place in which workloads can be moved from cloud to cloud according to price, capacity, and feature criteria. A few companies are jockeying for the pole position in the race to provide the arbitrage for this meta cloud.
There have been multiple white papers and articles written by analysts - Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise? The question is asked so many times now - Is Cloud Computing ready for the enterprise? So, I have to ask - Is the enterprise ready for Cloud Computing? I’ll start this...
Recessions are about as appealing as a root canal; but they do force us to think differently. Now that the recession is official, it's an ideal time to explore how virtualization and cloud computing can help "recession-proof" IT by transforming yesterday’s costly and rigid computing mo...
Although cloud computing vendors are not explicitly trying to lock-in customers to their platform, the fact is that today if a customer has heavily invested in either platform then there isn't a straightforward way for customers to extricate themselves from the platform and switch to a...
First there was the service bureau, then the application service providers (ASP), after that came software as a service (SaaS) and now its time for Cloud Computing. Basically we have one single concept which is as old as IBM Mainframes. Every generation seems to rediscover it, and crea...
How do you make money as a datacenter-focused cloud computing company? Aside from the sale of compute capacity (a la Amazon or Rackspace), what are the other revenue opportunities available? Here are some thoughts...
My impression of ‘free’ as a business model supported by advertising is perhaps already out of date as the successful players have used ‘free’ to reach either ‘freemium’ or ‘complementary’ models. Even more interesting it would seem that the ‘complementary’ models are an integral part ...
For too long, the emphasis in Cloud Computing circles has been almost exclusively upon provision of rapidly scalable and ad hoc remote computing on top of cost-effective commodity hardware. The Cloud play from Salesforce, Amazon’s EC2 and the rest has been dominated by the implicit ass...
It's been an interesting week for Salesforce.com Chief executive Marc Benioff. The Salesforce chief called for the creation of cloud interoperability standards for moving data between applications in rival clouds. Which on the surface appears to great step forward. Problem is he was ve...
Saying that your business should never, never, never use cloud-based applications instead of desktop or network/server based ones is about as ridiculous as saying that cloud-based applications will eventually replace IT completely. Mostly cloud computing is a way to provide an applicat...
What sort of cloud computer(s) should we be building or expecting from vendors? Are there issues of lock-in that should concern customers of either SaaS clouds or PaaS clouds? I've been thinking about this problem as the CEO of a PaaS cloud computing company for some time. Clouds shoul...
Cloud computing is custom made for Silicon Valley - it is poorly defined, seemingly vast and has the potential to change human life as we know it (at least for those of us who live in Silicon Valley). Since so many people are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, I thought it would be useful...
The Guardian recently posted an article quoting Richard Stallman on cloud computing. If a user wants to use network applications in freedom, they can do their own computing on their own computer with their copy of a freedom-respecting network-accessed program if their computer is a net...
Castro continued: "In Cuba we provide free health care, free food coupons, free housing and if we had any computers on the island, we would provide free laptops and Internet too. So, I agree with Richard Stallman that Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and all American companies pushing this new ...
On the face of it, the apparent hacking of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo mail account may have hurt the cloud’s onward march into enterprise credibility. By using services in the cloud to hold corporate data, as opposed to within our corporate walls, the concern is we are automatically exposing ...
Cloud computing is real. Cloud computing is changing how we in the software world work. But it is not everything to everyone and it is definitely not the second coming that will change how we all interact on the Internet. While I respect Stephen Fry hugely, I find myself a little disap...
We need services like Feedburner and Yahoo Pipes to provide the service they say they will. I know they’re not bound by the kind of service level agreements that would be in place if we were actually paying them, but they surely have to operate within the bounds of, well, operability. ...
What will Business Intelligence be like in the future? "BI in the Cloud" architecture is only going to be feasible when most of your source data lives in the cloud already, possibly in something something like SQL Server Data Services or Amazon Simple DB or Google BigTable; or possibly...
Jeff Barr from Amazon Web services has come up with a great new term to describe the need to handle sudden and extreme spikes in demand by enabling a hybrid cloud computing model which combines both private data center resources and remote cloud resources such as Amazon EC2. He called ...
I have followed with interest a number of comments about the reliability of Cloud Computing, based on the actual, or perceived, problems with service from Google and Amazon. Of course there are some real incidents that have caused "out-rage" (my definition of the rage one experiences f...
Why are Hollywood blockbusters so expensive to produce? Hollywood studios often have to create everything from scratch, and most of the time, have to recreate entire worlds for every different movie. That might work in the entertainment industry or in art, but if IT services outside co...
