Top 10 cloud computing stories of 2012. 2012 was the year cloud computing hit the mainstream.
More users started adopting cloud-based services and vendors intensified competition by launching aggressive price wars for market share. Infographic: Security and the Cloud 2012. Weather Channel forecasts heavier reliance on cloud computing. During Hurricane Sandy this fall, The Weather Channel experienced its highest traffic ever. Normally the media company -- which spans television, desktop and mobile platforms -- supports about 90 million Web and mobile users a month. During Sandy, that jumped to 450 million -- nearly double the company's previous high for Web traffic.
Fortunately, The Weather Channel was prepared for the traffic surge. Fortune 500 Weighs In On The Cloud - Atum. The Cloud has been a ‘Hot Topic’ consistently now for a few years- and not just for technology geeks!
There were early adopters that championed the movement to go Virtual – but this was no small flash in the pan. Cloud adoption from small business owners to large-scale enterprise corporations has grown exponentially in recent years – there has been a lot of buzz and discussion about the benefits to business. We know what the major benefits are by now… right? Cost savings, energy savings, efficiency and scalability. In a recent study of CIOs from Fortune 500 companies, the feedback was staggering: Big Data Meets Cloud. The Internet of Things: how it'll revolutionise your devices.
Forget the cliché idea of fridge that sends you a text when you run out of milk.
Try one that senses what's inside, chooses your next fortnight's meal plans, order what it needs via an online supermarket, and syncs a delivery slot with your Gmail calendar. You might have a smart TV and you've almost certainly got a smartphone, perhaps even one that syncs content to an iPad, but such 'smart' devices are just the beginning of what's loosely termed the 'Internet of Things', or IoT for short. Also (perhaps more correctly) called 'machine to machine', the IoT isn't owned or controlled by any one group or company, comprises no single idea, and it certainly isn't on any of our gadget wishlists. But it will change all of our lives. Surprising Trends in IT Outsourcing CIO.com. CIO — The latest Strategic Guide from CIO.com examines the fact that IT outsourcing is undergoing some surprising shifts.
CIOs are having second thoughts about offshoring. CIOs frustrated by 'fake' cloud services. Do vendors think enterprise IT professionals are stupid?
Print Pro. US regulators warn on outsourced cloud risks. US financial services regulators have warned banks that they need to put in more robust controls if they plan to use third party cloud services. With banks increasingly attracted to outsourced cloud computing as a way to cut costs and improve flexibility and scalability, the Federal Financial Institution Examination Council Agencies (FFIEC) has issued a statement stressing that the associated risks of the technology need to be considered. Use of third parties does not diminish the responsibility of firms to make sure that the outsourced work is "conducted in a safe and sound manner and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations". This means carrying out full due diligence and risk assessment, covering things such as vendor management, information security, audits, legal and regulatory compliance, and business continuity planning.
Read the full statement here:» Download the document now 56 kb (PDF File) Why too many cloud relationships turn sour. Are customers asking the right questions of their cloud providers? A conversation I had recently with managed services firm Star's chief customer officer, Martino Corbelli, suggests they are not. According to Corbelli, the UK's mid-sized companies — the bulk of his customers have between 100 and 1,000 employees — are getting stuck in what he calls bad relationships with their cloud services provider because they lack either the management and negotiation skills to handle problems with the relationship, or enough money to cover the cost of getting out.
The reason for their predicament is often because customers fail to do enough due diligence before awarding a contract, Corbelli said. Soft issues He discussed the amount of work that potential cloud customers ask Star to do before awarding a contract. Cloud computing spending: Miniscule, but fast growing. Despite the hype, cloud computing is still a tiny proportion of overall IT spending, although it is likely to grow fast.
According to analysts TechMarketView, the UK market for cloud computing reached £1.2bn in 2011, 38 percent higher than the previous year. The analysts expect cloud-computing revenues to grow by 35 percent each year to reach £3.9bn by 2015. That sounds like a lot of money, until you realise this means that cloud accounted for a mere two percent of the UK software and IT services market in 2011. Rapid growth will see cloud build to nine percent of the market in 2015, however. In its report, UK Software and IT Services Market Trends & Forecast 2012, the analyst house defines the cloud-computing market as composed of software, infrastructure and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), as well as application provisioning and business process-as-a-service. The vast majority of cloud computing revenues derive from SaaS — 72 percent in 2011, according to TechMarketView. US regulators warn on outsourced cloud risks.
New European Guidelines to Address Cloud Computing. What is the Cloud? - Cloud Insights. As with many new and hyped IT concepts, many people define cloud in many different ways.
At its simplest, “the cloud” is the umbrella term that describes a means of computing whereby you utilize someone else’s infrastructure to access and consume all facets of IT. However, the details make all the difference, as the way in which a cloud solution gets built, delivered, maintained, purchased, sold, supported, etc. is critical to achieve the true value promised from cloud computing. Not following several key principles in these areas will at best minimize the value possible from the cloud, and at worst leave us in the same mess we are in now with legacy IT.
Categories of Cloud As defined above, cloud is a broad, all-encompassing term. IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service: This consists of 2 primary areas, Public Clouds and Private Clouds. AWS Outage Takes Down Netflix, Instagram and More. A sizable outage of Amazon’s various web services caused many major web services to crumble on Friday evening.
The issues stem from power loss and extend across Amazon’s database, cloud and Elastic Compute services, as indicated by Amazon’s status page. The outages began around 10:45 am EST with outages affecting EC2 instances and EBS volumes, but have certainly gotten worse as the day has gone on. They are currently affecting many services that utilize Amazon’s cloud offerings for various portions of their business.
This includes popular cloud service Heroku, which says that it has lost some connectivity to its Virginia architecture. We’re currently experiencing technical difficulties and we’re working to correct the issues.