Wherever you turn, someone's ready to tell (or sell) you something related to cloud computing. Cutting through the myths is essential to deciding whether, when, and how the cloud is right for you. Here's our top list of myths; we welcome your suggestions and feedback in our cloud myths discussion area**URL TK**:
CIOs looking to find a reliable cloud provider should seek one whose service has already fallen over, according to Dan Foody, vice president at Web services management provider Progress Actional.
Verizon has rolled out its first cloud-computing service aimed at giving enterprise customers a secure way to host applications not only on virtual resources but also on physical, dedicated network servers.
In April of last year, Satoshi Nakajima, founder of Washington-based Big Canvas Inc., was eagerly inviting new customers to subscribe to his company's flagship product, PhotoShare, which lets users swap Apple iPhone photos for free.
Everyone in the IT industry is talking about cloud computing, but there is still confusion about what the cloud is, how it should be used and what problems and challenges it might introduce. This FAQ will answer some of the key questions enterprises are asking about cloud computing.
Google has apologized for yesterday's service outage that left 14 percent of its user base without Google's wide variety of online services for a few hours.
Software developer Christopher Shockey saw the first signs of trouble in late 2008. A sales rep who had always represented Web application development provider Coghead was now calling on behalf of Coghead's much larger rival Salesforce.com.
Nick Carr was right and I was wrong. Sort of, anyway.<br/>
If cloud computing is to move beyond the hype cycle, vendors need to put aside their differences and agree on common principles related to security and the interoperability of cloud platforms, a growing number of industry players are saying.
When the IT world looks back at 2008, it will certainly remember the global financial crisis. But it will also likely link that time frame with the takeoff of cloud computing, the engine behind more conferences, conversations and marketing collateral than seemingly any other technology in development today.
Companies looking to reduce their IT costs and complexity by tapping into cloud computing services should first make sure that they won't be stepping on any privacy land mines in the process, according to a report released this week by the World Privacy Forum.
As cloud computing's security gaps become more visible, users are finding ways to safeguard their data.
Back in 1991, before the Internet was a big deal, Ohio State University technologist Jerry Martin signalled the nascent Internet's value with an official standards document entitled "There's gold in them thar networks!" (RFC1290) Although simmering as an academic tool for years, the Internet had not yet triggered a significant paradigm shift for commercial computing. Martin's formal proclamation was an early push to business, which eventually embraced Internet commerce wholeheartedly.
Enterprise IT shops are starting to embrace the notion of building private clouds, modeling their infrastructure after public service providers such as Amazon and Google. But while virtualization and other technologies exist to create computing pools that can allocate processing power, storage and applications on demand, the technology to manage those distributed resources as a whole is still in the early stages.
Cloud services claim to provide nearly everything you need without requiring you to run your own IT infrastructure. From e-mail and Web hosting to fully managed applications to vast on-demand computing resources, the cloud is shaping up to be one of the most important technology shifts in the last few years.