Last week’s Windows Azure Storage outage made me thinking how many of us evaluate the vendor’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) before they decide to deploy workloads in the cloud. I bet many think about it only when it is too late.

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Last week’s Windows Azure Storage outage made me thinking how many of us evaluate the vendor’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) before they decide to deploy workloads in the cloud. I bet many think about it only when it is too late.

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I watched with interest recently an interview with NetSuite CEO, Zach Nelson on Bloomberg TV. During the interview Nelson stated his belief that retail wasn’t dead and that Apple had shown the way to all retailers with regards customer experience. Nelson also stated that in his mind, retail would be the next industry to be “disrupted by the cloud”.

In this blog I will examine some of the reasons why retailers might look to the cloud for business management systems that help to grow their business.

Customer Experience

Retailers are faced with a battle on two fronts, being squeezed by the need to cut costs at the same time as customers are demanding an increasingly better experience. They expect an ‘omnichannel’ shopping experience where they can interact with a brand through any channel and receive a consistent experience across the board. They want to be able to shop anywhere …

Before you add another decimal place to security budgets, maybe it’s time you consider the how cloud-deployed security options can not only address the complexities of enterprise security ably, but do so at considerable savings.
With all the talk of fiscal cliffs sequestrations, financial binds and “next year’s budget,” I started thinking about cloud security in more tangible ways. Specifically returns on investment, economic impact and total costs of ownership. Just like death and taxes, businesses can add intrusion and attack to the list of sureties. I can hear CFOs all over the world sigh in exasperation as they feel pressured to add another expense line item to minimize the building security threats to their enterprises.

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Before you add another decimal place to security budgets, maybe it’s time you consider the how cloud-deployed security options can not only address the complexities of enterprise security ably, but do so at considerable savings.
With all the talk of fiscal cliffs sequestrations, financial binds and “next year’s budget,” I started thinking about cloud security in more tangible ways. Specifically returns on investment, economic impact and total costs of ownership. Just like death and taxes, businesses can add intrusion and attack to the list of sureties. I can hear CFOs all over the world sigh in exasperation as they feel pressured to add another expense line item to minimize the building security threats to their enterprises.

read more

Big Data applications such as Hadoop and Hive are becoming more widely adopted and mainstream. There is an increasing number of users who will select the cloud – whether private or public – as an efficient and scalable deployment vehicle for these large-scale distributed apps. Hadoop implementations can involve deployment of dozens to thousands of application nodes – a scale that can become very time-consuming to manage. Embracing Big Data applications is one thing, but users will struggle to manage them due to a lack of tools designed for such complex applications in the cloud. New solutions are required to enable a far simpler setup, configuration and provisioning of complex Hadoop and Hive deployments on a large scale – and also to manage them over their continuing life cycle.

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Baidu, which is often called the Google of China, has apparently won the race to become the first company to deploy servers based on ARM smartphone chips in a “large-scale” production environment in its data center.
It’s using a custom version of Marvell’s low-power 32-bit quad-core Armada XP CPU Server-on-a-Chip (SOC) in a personal cloud storage system called Baidu Cloud or Baidu Pan.
It’s unclear whether any other kind of server is being used to deliver the service.
The boxes themselves, called “easy-to-integrate,” were run up by an unidentified Asian ODM.
Marvell, like the other dozen or so ARM fabricators, is hoping to eventually challenge industry-standard x86 servers, a situation Intel would rather avoid. ARM has forced Intel to try to cut its inefficient power consumption.

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Or how to connect the architecture dots to support a smart connected planet.
The notion of a connected planet is far from new. However, the number of connections as illustrated in figure 1 is growing at an exponential rate, and it is fast becoming a reality in which many organizations must operate.
However, I doubt many organizations are preparing for this in a systematic way. More likely, experience suggests that dozens of connected ‘solutions’ will permeate the organization via myriad routes and just add to the complexity of the business and IT landscape, becoming yet more spaghetti that someone is left to untangle.
Architecture is key to dealing with this. However, architectural practices must evolve to themselves become more connected, and not a set of isolated disciplines as they are often practiced today.
Hence, in this note as well as considering the challenges and opportunities provided by the connected planet, I outline the role of connected architecture.

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Or how to connect the architecture dots to support a smart connected planet.
The notion of a connected planet is far from new. However, the number of connections as illustrated in figure 1 is growing at an exponential rate, and it is fast becoming a reality in which many organizations must operate.
However, I doubt many organizations are preparing for this in a systematic way. More likely, experience suggests that dozens of connected ‘solutions’ will permeate the organization via myriad routes and just add to the complexity of the business and IT landscape, becoming yet more spaghetti that someone is left to untangle.
Architecture is key to dealing with this. However, architectural practices must evolve to themselves become more connected, and not a set of isolated disciplines as they are often practiced today.
Hence, in this note as well as considering the challenges and opportunities provided by the connected planet, I outline the role of connected architecture.

read more