Cisco has been forced to apologise for what Home Networking Vice President Brett Wingo described as “confusion and inconvenience” following the rolling out of their Connect Cloud system.

The issue concerns a cloud-based update Cisco made to their Linksys EA2700, EA3500 and EA4500 firmware which had originally been rolled out automatically to users’ routers.

The update took many users by surprise, and they weren’t best pleased about it either, with complaints ranging from security concerns on cloud-based LAN administration to privacy fears.

Cisco has since released instructions on how to roll back the automatically updated firmware to the previous iteration.

In a blog post, Wingo said that the Connect Cloud service was available to those who had opted in to automatic updates and that data was not being illicitly stored “consistent with Cisco’s practices”.

Perhaps worryingly, the privacy concerns related to the original Cisco Connect Cloud terms of …

The storm which accounted for Amazon’s cloud outage over the weekend has resulted in one company ditching the AWS system over fears of further unavailability.

From 2300 EST on June 30 users of several high profile sites such as Pinterest, Netflix and Instagram were unable to access content, with AWS “investigating connectivity issues”. The issue was resolved by 0054 EST on June 31 but updates on power restoration appeared sporadically throughout the day.

It appears, however, that for one company this downtime was the final straw.

WhatsYourPrice.com, an online dating service which allows users to arrange dates by naming their price, has gone its own way with Amazon following the provider’s latest EC2 outage. Reports state that WhatsYourPrice.com has now upped sticks and moved to Las Vegas-based cloud provider FiberHub.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this was that, according to WhatsYourPrice, Amazon’s support team …

The past few days have seen a variety of cloud-oriented news come from the Indian market and reveal some intriguing trends. What are the highlights?

• The cloud market in India is on the verge of being worth $1bn, according to consultants Zinnov
• Public cloud – a hitherto nascent market in India – has increased significantly and should only go higher
• Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) “have started taking advantage of the cloud” in terms of economic benefit yet exercises caution overall

The report from Zinnov, entitled “Public Cloud Opportunity in India”, has found that cloud services overall in India hit their highest value of between $860m and $912m at the end of 2011.

Zinnov elaborates on why the market has significantly expanded since 2009.

They cite reasons such as an increase in using local infrastructures, increased outsourcing leading to greater cloud adoption and adoption from both large companies and SMEs, leading to …

The economics of public cloud computing are accelerating the pace of change occurring in enterprise software today.

Many of the scenarios that Clayton Christensen insightfully describes in The Innovator’s Dilemma are playing out right now in many sectors of this industry, shifting the balance of purchasing power to line-of-business leaders away from IT.  True to the cases shown in the book, new entrants are bringing disruptive innovations that are being successfully used to attack the most price-sensitive areas of the market. 

Winning customers at the low-end and making their way up-market, new entrants are changing the customer experience, economics and structure of the industry.  Salesforce.com is a prime example of how the insights shared in The Innovator’s Dilemma are alive and well in the CRM market for example.  This is an excellent book to add to your summer reading list.

Defining The Public Cloud

The National Institute …

These days, it seems that the whole world is gunning for Amazon.

Who can argue with the success of their on-line retail ventures, Kindle franchise, and of course AWS? 

The secret to Amazon’s success is their ability to tune out the noise and focus on innovating, disrupting and creating new markets.  Here’s five reasons how not to compete with Amazon AWS:

1) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

While Amazon’s competitors are busy building out their cloud infrastructure offerings, they are too closely aligned to Amazon’s vision and business model. Meanwhile, Amazon is innovating and disrupting their own market by offering new features while reducing costs.

Therefore, it seems that AWS is always one step ahead of the competition and thus customers continue to flock to their services. Rather than copy Amazon, competitors need to focus on innovation, features and benefits for the consumers of …

For those not familiar with Quest, they are a software company not to be confused with the telephone communications company formerly known as Qwest (also known now as centurylink).

Both Dell and Quest have been on software related acquisition initiatives that past few years with Quest having purchased vKernel, Vizoncore (vRanger virtualization backup), BakBone (who had acquire Alavarii and Asempra) for traditional backup and data protection among others. Not to be out done, as well as purchasing Quest, Dell has also more recently bought Appassure (Disclosure: StorageIOblog site sponsor) for data protection, Sonicwall and Wyse in addition to some other recent purchases (ASAP, Boomi, Compellent, Exanet, EqualLogic, Force10, InsightOne, KACE, Ocarina, Perot, RNA and Scalent among others).

What does this mean?
Dell is expanding the scope of their business with more products (hardware, software), solution bundles, services and channel partnering opportunities Some of the software tools and focus areas that …

Research recently published by Cisco Systems has revealed that cloud usage in the United Kingdom and Ireland is becoming increasingly mainstream.

Cisco, who recently brought out their cloud networking app, found a number of interesting results in their ‘CloudWatch Summer’ report:

• Nine tenths of those polled saw the cloud as an important process – up 38% from last year
• Nearly a third see cloud as being critical to their company – up 24% from last year
• Security is less of a concern although still a worry – just over half saw said they had security concerns, down 20% from last year

This certainly aligns with other research Cisco has done this year on the subject. This year’s Global Cloud Networking Survey showed that worldwide cloud adoption would quadruple by the year’s end.

It could be argued that the numbers almost appear to be an irrelevance if the arrows keep pointing up …

Strategies that suggest running company servers from data centres (Cloud Computing) are not a new concept to businesses. But as time has gone on, this strategy has now become a viable alternative to SMEs, providing a number of attractive benefits. As a result, many companies are actively turning to cloud-based strategies rather than merely refreshing server hardware.

But frustratingly – and perhaps inexcusably considering the huge volumes of ink dedicated to the serious considerations of pursuing a cloud strategy – too many companies are making costly mistakes, forcing Marcie Terman, Business Development Director at DataFort, to vent and highlight – once and for all – the six most important areas of risk to consider when making such a major step.

1)    Risks around service continuity:

 Commodity services – those ‘off the shelf’, cheap solutions – will often neglect to make any mention of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) concerning service continuity. But you must understand the risk …

In the week that the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency reported worldwide cloud outages cost at least £45m over five years, the all-encompassing Amazon EC2 Cloud was down on Friday night due to heavy storms in Virginia.

From approximately 2300 EST on Friday users were unable to access various sites utilising the Amazon infrastructure cloud, including Pinterest, Netflix and Instagram.

It’s certainly more proof that real clouds can have an effect on cloud computing. This particular storm was deadly, with the death toll as high as 17 across eastern America.

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) status board is a healthy sea of green as of Monday morning, but July 30 and 31 was a different story in the North America region with the EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS) and Elastic Beanstalk clouds in Virginia affected across both days.

A statement from AWS at 2321 EST on Friday said …

You realise the overarching benefits of the cloud, but you are a bit wary regarding the security of any data stored and transacted in these virtualised environments. 

But the cost-saving benefits, user preference and resource delegation of the cloud are such that not integrating some processes, applications and data is counter-productive to your overall IT strategy.

So you decide that a private cloud is a more secure route that its public counterpart. But are you really any more secure?

The quick answer is no. But not for the reason you might think.

A private cloud is infrastructure operated solely for a single organisation. The only difference is that your data is segregated from any other organisation. And if that brings you any semblance of peace, then it’s a good investment.

It all depends on your business need. It offers greater control, but means you shoulder all the overhead, updating …