How do Salesforce.com, Workday, NetSuite and others respond to unplanned outages? With the type of honesty and transparency that is critical to the future of cloud computing. Watch and learn, Big ERP.
Thanks to the rise of Cloud Computing, CIOs are increasingly being confronted with service agreements that relate to abstract concepts like software functionality or remote hardware capacity. Here's how to structure a service agreement that best suits your organisation's needs.
As companies of all sizes consider what portion of their IT infrastructure and business applications to move to the cloud, Microsoft has one word of advice: Balance.
There's been a lot of discussion the past couple of days about an analysis by Guy Rosen, in which he estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provisioning 50K EC2 server instances per day. He created this estimate by examining EC2 resource IDs and doing a time-series analysis on how much the IDs are incremented per hour.
An IBM survey of 2500 international and 129 local CIOs suggests business intelligence and centralisation of IT systems through virtualisation and cloud computing will be crucial to remaining competitive in the coming months.
Cloud computing: The very definition of cloud computing remains controversial. Consulting firm Accenture has crafted a useful, concise definition: the dynamic provisioning of IT capabilities (hardware, software, or services) from third parties over a network.
Public. Private. Hybrid. Cloudburst. Much of the discussion about cloud computing focuses on deployment options and choices, with a surprisingly large number of enterprises inclining toward internal private clouds-that is, a cloud-capable infrastructure residing within a company's own data center.
The talk of CloudWorld this week was VMware's acquisition of SpringSource. The top-of-mind chatter focused on the price: US$400 million plus, a very large sum for a company doing perhaps US$25 million in revenues. Certainly there was a good bit of envy in this type of conversation. And, of course, the fact that SpringSource is an open source company further makes the number even more eye-watering.
There's no question that cloud-computing infrastructures will become a significant part the IT plans of large corporations, according to analysts. The question, at least right now, is how well those hybrid internal/external infrastructures will be managed.
Wondering why your company's staffers are using only a fraction of the software features and functionality that your bounteous enterprise software offers?
Australian engineering, project management and operations company Ausenco has undertaken a major virtualisation and disaster recovery (DR) upgrade as a foundation to developing a private cloud for its core enterprise applications.
While many companies are considering moving applications to the cloud, the security of the third-party services still leaves much to be desired, security experts warned attendees at last week's Black Hat Security Conference.
Consultant Bernard Golden has some intense reactions to my recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20zittrain.html?_r=2">piece in the New York Times on cloud computing. In it I shared some basic worries-and one advanced worry-to be dealt with. I'll boil them down a little further here.
Last week I attended the <a href="http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09">GigaOM Structure 09 Conference</a>, which is an innovation-oriented cloud computing conference. One of the interesting things about the Silicon Valley-based event: it brought together a mix of different types of companies, emerging technology products and services, and people with cloud challenges:
Signifying a formless haze of computing power and storage that is somewhere "out there," computerdom's current buzzword is as difficult to get one's arms around as a real cloud. A seemingly limitless pool of processors and memory and disk space, and you just scoop out what you need. Sounds great, doesn't it?