Cloud, DevOps and Herding Cats
The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is that year that enterprise IT finally “rolls up the sleeves” and gets serious about cloud adoption. But what does this really mean? Basically we’re seeing the era of cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts in the enterprise drawing to close, especially around IaaS and to a certain extent PaaS. CIOs […]
Cloud Model 2014: Hybrid, Google, Brokerage, Startups and The Enterprise
2013 has been incredibly eventful for the cloud industry, mostly for making itself an eminent presence in the mainstream IT market. Businesses of all sizes have made their ways to the cloud, confirming my 2013 predictions. Government agencies worldwide take the cloud seriously, as demonstrated by the CIA’s contract switch over to Amazon from IBM. […]
Cloud Marketing, IBM Does it Wrong (personal letter attached)
The 102 year old veteran IT company seems to have taken countless steps toward the development of CloudSmart, the IT giant’s proprietary cloud that, despite its large investments, has not demonstrated any sort of progress… until now, that is. In July, IBM upped its game by announcing its acquisition of Softlayer, an open cloud platform […]
5 Recommended AWS re:Invent Breakout Sessions for Scalability and Optimization
I’m OnDemand is heading to Las Vegas for Amazon’s official cloud show – AWS re:Invent. In my honest opinion, the show is the most significant conference in the cloud and IT industries, and includes a number of fantastic educational sessions. To navigate the sessions, Amazon has provided conference attendees with a great tool that helps […]
Dome9 Clarity: Think Street View for AWS Cloud Security
Confidence is key when it comes to managing large IT systems. The tricky part is when a CIO tries to generate the trust and confidence of a company’s IT environment. Complete transparency is the answer. As you may recall, I’ve written about the need for transparency concerning Newvem’s services in the past. As the cloud industry […]
Is that Service Level Agreement in your cloud services agreement giving you more than what you bargained for?
It is pretty well-established that users can expect public cloud service vendors to provide some form of service credits in the event of system downtime. “Downtime” may be classified as time that critical infrastructure, network, and/or server hosts are unavailable. In the event the vendor fails to meet certain uptime guarantees, users may be entitled […]
Rethinking IT Transformation for the Cloud
As cloud computing matures and success models emerge, enterprises are now getting serious about using cloud to drive IT transformation. JP Morgan Chase, Toyota, GE and other leading organizations are moving beyond incremental costs savings and are using cloud and next generation platforms to drive innovation, growth and competitive advantage. Unfortunately many CIOs and their […]
Amazon, Microsoft and Google: The Cloud Leading Trio
Following several discussions with fellow bloggers and industry executives, I found it quite fitting that the natural cloud leaders are the top software and web giants: Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While Amazon’s AWS is The public cloud today Google recently reported that it is doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, […]
Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch :: Opening, Setup and Failure
Yesterday I received my X1 Carbon Touch from Amazon. First part of this whole adventure is that I sent it to my old address in one part of town so that led to a little sleuth action to track it down. After a short bike ride up the street I arrived and the office staff …
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 […]
Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may […]
Best of Breed versus Polyglot Revisited
If you feel that PaaS is a new-age devops/application management tool, like any management tool user or vendor, you’ll want maximum breadth of coverage. Nobody wants multiple monitoring, backup, deployment or configuration management solutions for each platform or application in their environment. Heterogeneous breadth coverage with the ever elusive “single pane of glass” is the […]
Why Silicon Valley and Hollywood Don’t Get Each Other and Who Will Win the Future
For the past three years I have been pounding the table as loud as I can about the future opportunities in digital video. The concise guide is here. My narrative has stayed pretty simple: People in the US watch 5.3 hours of TV per day People read for less than 30 minutes You will not […]
What Really Happened at Apple Around the Maps Scandal
One of our readers sent us secretly recorded snippets of the full inside story of the Maps scandal at Apple. While we cannot disclose the identity of this tipster, we can confirm the story is 100% true and validated, at
Why Startup Entrepreneurs Need to Communicate More Like George Bush Than Al Gore
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. It is election season. So it’s tempting to think this is going to be a partisan post – it is not. I use George Bush vs. Al Gore as allegory and I’ve been using it with entrepreneurs for years to sink in a simple point about how to communicate […]
