We are all aware of the United States military, and that it is the largest in the world. It has a budget of over £340 billion and employs in excess of 3 million people. 1.5 million of those people are in active duty, or regular military personnel.

Of course, such a large organisation will have a monumental IT infrastructure as well as some of the tightest data security on the planet. Such an infrastructure also brings with it an inevitable large hardware stack.

Currently, the Department of Defence has some 1500 data centres which it is planning on reducing substantially.

A combination of budget cuts and security concerns has meant that the substitute for hardware has come in the form of Cloud Computing – high security Managed Servers, Cloud Hosting services and so on.

The DoD is moving towards cloud computing, using it to collect data as well as the …

Code-switching is a linguistics term that refers to the act of switching between two or more languages in a single conversation. It’s like starting off the conversation with a greeting in one language, switching to English for most of it, but using elements of the other language throughout the conversation. When our girls were learning English this happened quite frequently, with a sentence often beginning with «осторожный» (careful) and continuing on with an explanation of why some action was dangerous and ending with «ладно» (okay)?
Code-switching generally occurs in a sentence where it grammatically aligns. Thus the use of interjections and stand-alone phrases in one language to get the attention of a child make perfect sense.

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Dell is in buyout talks with “at least” two private equity firms that would take the PC company-in-transition private, according to a story in Bloomberg Monday afternoon that sent Dell’s stock up close to 14% to over $12 a share, roughly what Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein thinks Dell’s worth.
The report cites two unidentified people with “knowledge of the matter.”
Dell refused to comment on rumor and speculation.
Bloomberg called the talks “preliminary” and said they “could fall apart” if the financing can’t be arranged or the potential investors can’t figure out how to ultimately exit the investment.

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By Jon Smith

With more and more firms looking to cut down on digital storage space in 2013, one area of IT management that is set to expand is the reliance on cloud computing. The cloud industry is still in its relative infancy, although there are already key trends that are expected to develop in the industry this year.

Integrated cloud and mobile

The reliance between mobile and cloud activities is expected to become all the stronger in 2013.

More and more mobile applications are linked to cloud back-end services and the majority of cloud services have a mobile application. One firm proving this link is CloudOn, which aims to optimise Microsoft services for mobile devices. The company’s software is hosted on an application housed in the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Personal clouds

In the old days, an employee’s computer would be the one location where information is …

For many companies, the business benefits that cloud computing promises are too compelling too ignore: improved agility, lower costs, better resource allocation, and fewer operational issues. As a result, organizations have been moving commodity infrastructure and services to cloud-based services managed by some of the world’s leading technology companies — including Office 365, Microsoft’s primary offering for business productivity in the cloud.
Given these gains, no company should ignore a move to the cloud. However, a full jump to the public cloud without careful consideration is ill advised. Some companies can’t move everything to the cloud because they have compliance, regulatory, or government restrictions that limit where data can be stored and who can have access to it. But many companies shouldn’t move everything to the cloud, because there is simply not parity between online and on-premise versions of SharePoint. What makes SharePoint compelling for many enterprises is the ability to extend, customize, and integrate with other enterprise systems, much of which is impossible with the Office 365 platform. Until there is parity, certain workstreams should stay in their current environments.

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How can we regain control of our data and get a complete view of critical information, while still reaping the many benefits that SaaS has to offer? The explosion in Software as a Service has changed the world of data access dramatically. Business critical information that was once within the four walls of the organization is now locked in a variety of SaaS applications deployed on the public Internet. This presents a serious challenge to business decision makers who are driven to make the right choices for their organizations based on a now incomplete picture of the world.
In this General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Jesse Davis, Director, DataDirect Research and Development at Progress Software, looks at how you overcome these challenges and regain full visibility to your business data wherever it may live.

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“Despite the lock-in…it’s really not about the money but about the features and the product offering.” So states a blogpost I just read from a company that is dissatisfied with one major cloud vendor and is moving to another.

Yet cloud vendor lock-in — what I like to call Vendor Lock-In 2.0 — seems to me to be a major issue facing our industry.

I say this as I experience my own cloud build-out. I’ll be spending a lot of my time this year implementing a number of cloud-based solutions at a small enterprise near by current base in northern Illinois. We are already hosted by one of the major cloud vendors, and upping the number and size of our instances with this company.

Then, last week, I met with the company’s matriarch, to discuss the company existing, ancient workflow and how we could use PaaS and then other -aaS within the cloud to bring the company from the 19th to the 21st century. This is a family-owned business, started a couple of generations ago. The matriarch alleged she knew very little about technology, and listened to me patiently for a few minutes.

She then pounced: «can I move all this to another vendor if I’m not happy?»

«Well, not really.»

«Why? Is this a technical issue?»

«Yes, sort of.»

«But the vendors could make this easy for me if they wanted to, right? I can plug everything in this building into the same socket. But your cloud vendors won’t let me do this with their cloud services, right?»

And there you have it. We’re moving forward, albeit more slowly and cautiously than I’d like. My clients wasn’t worried about security – she assumes a massive cloud infrastructure vendor will do a better job than we could ever do locally. She wasn’t worried about the price per se – she knows it’s prohibitive to buy our own iron. She wasn’t even worried about downtime – she’ll make that stuff roll downhill to her titular CIO.

But for this company, it is about the money if she has to, in essence, develop everything twice. It’s also about not being trapped, anymore than having a single option for any other part of this business. The local Chinese restaurant is great, but not a place we go to every day.

I’ve written a little bit about the «metadata» problem, and it looks like I should write some more about it.

But as a customer — not a writer — I must ask: «what are the major cloud vendors doing to fix this? Why do you think Vendor Lockin 2.0 is any more appealing than the original version?»

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