Cloud computing is at the forefront for many organizations across the world. Experts believe it is the future of IT. Considering all the benefits offered by the cloud, making the transition may appear inevitable to enterprises. But just like any major technology, it also comes with certain caveats – security and privacy of business data and legal compliance among others. While these concerns are now well known, the most obvious disaster that can befall a business depending on cloud computing is still largely overlooked – what happens when the cloud provider shuts shop?
Consumers have already woken up to this scenario when Google shut down its popular RSS aggregator Reader. A cloud service provider may close its doors for any number of reasons: bankruptcy, business failure, breach of contract, being acquired by a bigger company or even regulatory problems. If the provider is located in another country or is privately held, the risks are even higher.
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Beyond the BRICs: Who Inspires Tech Confidence?
Today’s announcement by the US Federal Reserve Bank that it will continue to buy $85 billion in commercial bonds per month will no doubt ease a lot of minds in developing countries. A nice story in The New York Times focused on this topic, noting the recent currency weakness in several of the current darlings of international investment: India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, and Turkey.
No offense intended to anyone, but can we be a little more creative in the countries we cover? This group of countries is in the “BRICS+” group that routinely come up in conversations about investing in developing nations. They are all large economies, with various signs of strong growth in recent years.
But none of them score particularly well in our research, which looks at national ICT commitments and ranks 102 nations on how they are doing on a relative basis, ie, how well they do with the resources they have. Our research indicates that most of the international darlings have under-committed to their information technology infrastructure, and will disappoint a lot of investors and other backers along the way.
Travel to those places, and you’ll find a still-horrendous lack of physical infrastructure here, a large but weakly monetized economy there, enormous social problems here and there, and a boom driven almost singly by real estate over that away.
We encourage the business and government leaders of all the above-named countries to think about ICT and think about how better Internet access, faster Internet speeds, and higher IT budgets will lead to less income disparity and better lives for their people.
In our opinion, investors and companies looking for stronger places to put their money and people include several other places that we’ve identified as regional leaders: to name just a few, Morocco, Ghana, and Kenya in Africa; Malaysia and Philippines in Asia; Chile and Uruguay in South America; Bulgaria and Jordan in Southeast Europe & the Middle East.
Contact me to find out more and learn why we feel this way.
World’s Biggest Data Breaches [Infographic]
Cool and disturbing at the same time. A fully interactive version can be found here where you can click each circle to get more information. I thought about adding all the numbers but stopped at 140,621,000 between 2012 and 2013.
World’s Biggest Data Breaches [Infographic]
Cool and disturbing at the same time. A fully interactive version can be found here where you can click each circle to get more information. I thought about adding all the numbers but stopped at 140,621,000 between 2012 and 2013.
Enabling High-Efficiency Storage Solutions
Increasing the I/O performance of next-generation data centers and cloud computing environments is essential for supporting enterprise e-commerce, database and email applications. To successfully deploy high-performance storage, it’s essential for storage appliance software to be flash-aware and maximize solid-state drives (SSDs) for performance and hard disk drives (HDDs) for capacity, enabling an optimum price-performance storage solution.
With the explosive growth in and demand for information, next-generation data centers and cloud deployments require cost-effective storage solutions that provide end users with a high quality of service (QoS) in accessing and manipulating data. Usually, data centers – either corporate or cloud-based – run specific applications, such as database indexing and email exchanges. To provide a top QoS, these applications typically run on servers with high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and in turn provide access to data stored within the storage system.
Breaking Through the SaaS Ceiling
It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way. Alas, virality is an elusive goal, particularly in SaaS. For this reason, SaaS Don’t #10 insists that you should not depend on network effects. Instead you should focus first and foremost on satisfying each and every single customer. But, if you’ve done that…bring on the hockey stick!
This is the fourth post in a series that paves the path to sustainable SaaS growth. The first post in this SaaS growth series introduced the concept of the SaaS growth ceiling, as well as the three fundamental SaaS marketing levers for breaking through it: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and viral customer network effects. This installment explores the third, final and most funnest SaaS marketing lever: network effects, offering three proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive SaaS growth by getting your customers to sell themselves.
Breaking Through the SaaS Ceiling
It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way. Alas, virality is an elusive goal, particularly in SaaS. For this reason, SaaS Don’t #10 insists that you should not depend on network effects. Instead you should focus first and foremost on satisfying each and every single customer. But, if you’ve done that…bring on the hockey stick!
This is the fourth post in a series that paves the path to sustainable SaaS growth. The first post in this SaaS growth series introduced the concept of the SaaS growth ceiling, as well as the three fundamental SaaS marketing levers for breaking through it: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and viral customer network effects. This installment explores the third, final and most funnest SaaS marketing lever: network effects, offering three proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive SaaS growth by getting your customers to sell themselves.
Beware of the Accidental Cloud Architecture
Prior to service-oriented architecture (SOA), many companies suffered from the infamous “accidental architecture” which evolved as a result of accumulating a large number of point-to-point application integration connections. Unless IT takes a strong role ensuring Software as a Service (SaaS) purchases by lines of business (LOB) integrate easily with the existing infrastructure, history is likely to repeat itself by reversing the benefits of SOA with a new form of chaos called the “accidental cloud architecture”
In this Q&A, Oracle’s Bruce Tierney, a director of Oracle SOA Suite, will outline a number of best practices businesses can adopt to avoid creating the accidental cloud architecture. Bruce will also explain how organizations can best leverage SOA and BPM technologies to create an optimal hybrid on-premise/private/public cloud infrastructure.
Can a Dedicated Server Equate to an Immediate Performance Boost?
Performance is your website’s first impression to visitors. Almost 50% of users expect a web page to load within two seconds. The move from a shared server to a dedicated server can alleviate many of a website’s performance issues and improve overall revenue and user experience.
Shared hosting, by contrast, has hundreds of other websites on the same server. All bandwidth, server memory, hard drive space and CPU cycles are shared with other website owners. Database servers are also shared with these hundreds of other site owners. The result can be a bottleneck at the server-level.
Dedicated servers are leased or fully purchased machines completely controlled by the webmaster. All server resources and databases are dedicated to the one business. Bandwidth, which plays a major role in how quickly a page loads, is also dedicated to the server, so no other website traffic interferes with the business’ traffic.
How to Protect Against Your Cloud Storage Provider’s Demise
This week’s news about cloud storage provider (CSP) Nirvanix has lots of organizations thinking about and, in some cases scrambling to deal with, the repercussions of a cloud provider shutting down. While pundits may speculate about what happened to this particular CSP and ponder the various «what-if» scenarios of how the outcome might have been different, such analyses offer little consolation to the customers who are affected by this sudden change and loss of their trusted cloud vendor.
Adding to the hysterics, cloud opponents on the sideline may find time to revel in the momentary superiority of traditional IT infrastructure which is unaffected by such disruptions. However, those who understand the intrinsic value of cloud storage solutions and have been perceptive of prior happenings in the cloud industry may recall this week’s incident is not unique, as a major vendor shut down their CSP services over three years ago. Instead, they may ask whether the events of three years ago have improved the ability of customers to react to an event of this nature.