Business Week notes how tapping into web-based applications represents a significant change in the way that businesses obtain software and computing power. It draws upon the example of a $11 billion electronics manufacturing company called Sanmina-SCI which is using Google Apps for email, document sharing and diary planning. Merrill Lynch suggests that such ‘cloud computing’ will expand into a global market of $95 billion over the next 5 years.
The Financial Times describes the example of 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment which has saved over $200,000 by switching its email system from Microsoft Exchange to Google’s Gmail. In a worsening economic climate, cost savings like these are not to be sneezed at for those companies prepared to take a chance with Cloud Computing. The risks, of course, concern the reliability and security of cloud-based systems. As Broadstuff shows there have been a number of high profile ‘outages’ already this year by providers such as Amazon S3, Google Docs, MobileMe and Twitter.
The above examples show that proactive companies are dipping their toes cautiously into the Cloud – using it mainly for non-essential applications at the moment, but with a view to extending their commitments if their experience is positive. For the new business ventures of our Gifted Amateurs, the trade off between the cost savings of Cloud Computing and the occasional reliability glitch is definitely worth it.








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Apache Deltacloud, the Red Hat-contributed ReSTful API that abstracts differences between clouds so services on any cloud can be managed – provided of course there’s a driver – has graduated from the Apache Foundation’s incubator and is now a full-fledged Top-Level Project (TLP).
The...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and st...
AMD said late Tuesday that its chief sales officer Emilio Ghilardi had left the company and that CEO and president Rory Read is going to do his job while a replacement is sought.
AMD didn’t say why Ghilardi left but it’s assumed Read wants his own people. Read is relatively new to th...
During the lifespan of M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) there has always been something lacking – timers.
M3 execution procedure was outlined in this previous article.
The execution mentioned in the latter was a one-time-execution, whereas server monitoring requires periodic invocati...
Red Hat is putting its bought-in Gluster scale-out NAS storage technology,
acquired in October, on the Amazon cloud.
It’s styled Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services and
other clouds are supposed to follow in short order.
A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube Channel.
This screencast demonstrates the new easily-customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers. Its aim is to offer a simplified access to shared infrastructure for non-IT end users. The scree...










