Has the Time Come for Cloud Insurance?
In the enterprise market much of the adoption for public cloud IaaS services so far has been driven by innovators and early adopters. One of the defining characteristics of these early adopters is their willingness to accept and manage risk. These risks can come in many forms, including technological, organizational, operational and financial. Financial risk [...]
Enterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem
While investing in building new data centers all over the world and creating the management overlay in order to be able to sell their hardware, IaaS operators are also relying on their ecosystem to support the evolving enterprises that go to the cloud (e.g. the “Enterprise Grade Cloud”). API First – The move to the [...]
Xeround, and a tale of evolving business models
Cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon, Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,” with the [...]
Disaster Recovery for Amazon EC2 in a Single Click
In my journey through the cloud I often come across great new initiatives. The interesting fact is that although the cloud is a pure revolution terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI remain valid, new methodologies and techniques are presented to support them in the cloud. I recently met Uri Wolloch, the founder of N2W [...]
Using Route 53 Amazon’s DNS Service for the Cloud
Using Route 53 Amazon’s DNS Service for the Cloud Route 53 is Amazon’s answer to a high availability and scalable DNS (Domain Name System) web based service. While there is no DaaS (Domains as a Service) in the formal cloud nomenclature it makes sense to have a globally distributed Domain Name Service that can work [...]
HP’s Cloud: The Giant Ship Lost its Way
HP stands still, not taking the initiatives and real risks expected of a true industry leader. At the Discover conference, I learned why some companies don’t last and why this IT giant is at risk of losing in this new era IT battle.
[Some of] what you need to know about the cloud for 2013
Towards the end of last year, David Linthicum and I joined GigaOM’s Adam Lesser on a skype chat to take a look back at cloud successes and failures in 2012, and forward to cloud opportunities in 2013. GigaOM released the conversation as a podcast this morning. Amazon, Rackspace, Google, OpenStack, DropBox, and more get a [...]
Three Cloud Visionaries in 2012
2012 is over and blogosphere is buzz with post-mortem and predictions. I thought I will jump in and write about three people in the cloud computing space who inspired me with the work they are doing. Let me make it clear that there are many others who had an impact in the space but these [...]
AWS, Redshift and Co-Opetition
Long time technology commentators understand the tensions between platform companies, intent on both growing their business and creating a healthy ecosystem, and ecosystem partners who leverage what the platform brings, but remain apprehensive about the long term intensions of the platform vendor. Case in point – the growing number of services offered by Amazon Web [...]
HP Discover Europe and the Viability of HP’s Cloud Play
I’m heading to Europe for HP’s Discover event and the conference has me thinking about the last Discover event I attended in Las Vegas earlier his year and HP’s awful few weeks around the Autonomy debacle. Alongside my theme du jour of traditional enterprises (and traditional vendors) being disrupted by new, more flexible and adaptable [...]
Re:Invent Announcements–Boundary Introduces Pre-Emptive Monitoring
This week marks the first Amazon Web Services user conference. The AWS event, re:Invent, is being held in Las Vegas and given the massive awareness that AWS and its ecosystem has, we should see lots of product announcements from both Amazon themselves and ecosystem companies. First up is Boundary who is today releasing a new [...]
Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive; maybe they’re not apples after all?
Cloud storage product Dropbox is one of those tools that users tend to rave about. It’s deceptively simple. It’s pretty reliable. The value proposition is immediately apparent. It has paid tiers of usage that bring additional storage but (like other freemium beacons such as Evernote) the free offering is rich enough to be compelling, engaging, [...]
In the Quest for TCO, We Lose Sight of the Real Issue–Part One
While it is undeniable that in the majority of cases cloud will be cheaper than traditional models of delivery. The benefits that cloud brings in terms of agility and flexibility far outweigh the cost benefits – looking at TCO alone is a race to the bottom of the cost-cutting hill.
Amazon Cloud and the Enterprise – Is it a love story? (Free Infographic Included)
As befitting any great online vendor, Amazon cloud product guys listen carefully to their market targets and ensure fast implementation and delivery to satisfy their needs. It is clear that Amazon cloud is eager to conquer the enterprise market, as I already mentioned in my past post, “Amazon AWS is the Cloud (for now anyway)“. [...]
How to Synch S3 Buckets in AWS and design for failover
News of Friday’s problems with the Virginia Data Centers power system taking down sites like Netflix and Pinterestshows that sometimes not programming for fail over or data center failure is a pretty foolish thing to do. Especially with costs somewhat reasonable per gigabyte in Amazon’s S3 system. Anyone who does not program for fail over [...]
