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 …

For the past couple of years, we’ve heard the term “Hybrid Cloud” discussed as the nirvana that Enterprise IT is truly looking for as they consider new operating paradigms to better align business needs and evolving technology. “Hybrid Cloud” would be the bridge between the known entity (“Private Cloud”, “resources within your Data Center”, “virtualized legacy applications”, etc.) and the new, dynamic entity (“Public Cloud”). There was just one small problem – this reality was a lot easier said than done (previously written about here, here, and here

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CTOlabs.com, a subsidiary of the technology research, consulting and services firm Crucial Point LLC and a peer site of CTOvision.com, has just published a white paper providing context and use cases on Hadoop For Law Enforcement, an important mission-focused domain ripe for the application of more Big Data solutions. From the report: Big Data, the […]

This post by BobGourley was first published at CTOvision.com.

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Last week we received an email from Thinkfuse, a cloud app that delivers “simple status reports.” To make a long story short, they told us (and their many customers) that they were purchased by Salesforce and were shutting down operations. Here’s a screenshot of the email: Getting bought by Salesforce is big news for Thinkfuse. […]

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As you may be aware Amazon AWS US-EAST-1 experienced two outages in June that resulted in widespread service interruptions and significant downtime for AWS maquis customers such as Netflix, Pinterest, Istagram, Heroku.

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A friend of mine from my IBM days (an expert in Data Warehousing, BI, etc.) told me about the Hadoop conference he attended in San Jose few weeks back. When he attended the same conference two years ago in New … Continue reading →

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It took Amazon until midday Monday to say that its cloud was back up after it crashed in a nasty electrical storm on the East Coast Friday night bringing down Amazon-dependent companies like Netflix, Instagram, Heroku and Pinterest.

Hundreds of thousands of households were still without power Monday.

The thunderstorm blew out power for a little while at its giant Virginia data center and Amazon’s backup power in one of its data centers longer.

It’s the third time Amazon has gone down since April. It experienced a power outage in Virginia a couple of weeks ago.

This time EC2, Relational Database, Elastic MapReduce, Elastic Beanstalk and Elastic Block Storage services in at least one of the 10 data centers it reportedly has in Virginia were impacted. Some writes to EBS weren’t saved or didn’t update various volumes.

Most services seem to have come back by Saturday but Amazon remained tight-lipped about it until Monday when it claimed only a single digit percentage of its customers had been affected.

The impacted Amazon customers don’t seem to have invested in disaster recovery and redundancy in another availability zone.

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I’ll keep this story short, so as not to strain the cloud unduly.

Amazon’s latest, unfortunate outage has brought out the Chicken Littles for a return appearance – gloating pullets who take seeming pleasure in mocking cloud computing and its potential.

Of course, electricity is still out in many places where AWS is back in. Losing electricity can be said to be more of an inconvenience than losing Netflix, yet few people are calling for a return to candles and natural breezes as the way to light and cool our homes.

I wonder how many private datacenters went down in the recent mid-Atlantic storm, and how many companies had their bacon saved – or kept their bacon – in outsourced redundant systems. How many times did cloud computing save non-cloudy companies over the week-end, versus the number of cloud systems that went down?

In the end, I will bet my 40 acres and a mule that lack of redundancy was once again the root problem here. Too many companies seem to want cloud on the cheap – no insurance needed as the made a mad dash toward the bottom line. Amazon in the past has implied that its failures stemmed from a lack of failover provisioning by stingy customers. Will it do more than imply that this time around?

It takes a long time for technological change to make itself complete. I had a boss in the late 80s who refused to allow voicemail in the office because he thought it made people hide behind their phones. A major hardware chain in the Northeast didn’t even have phones at that time because its management thought they made people lazy.

Amazon’s recent troubles are embarrassing, are fortuitously timed for Google to offer an allegedly more reliable alternative, and provide ample fodder for media know-nothings and knowledgeable industry revanchists.

To me, the troubles point out once again that you can’t do this stuff on the cheap. The opportunity cost of sticking with less elastic systems is tougher to measure than costs associated with outages, but nevertheless, far more companies have been sunk by opportunity costs over the decades than by an overly aggressive move to technology.

Cloud computing will be just fine, even as it leaves nay-sayers in the dust, shaking their fists at all this dad-gummed change.

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You’ve either read about or lived through the massive storm that hit the Mid-Atlantic coast last week. And, by the way, if you are going through a loss, damage or worse, I do hope you can recover quickly and wish you the best. The weather took out power for millions including a Virginia ‘cloud’ datacenter which hosts a number of entertainment and social media sites. Many folks looking to get thru the candle-lit evenings were without their fix. While there has been confusion and growing pains over the years as to just what ‘cloud computing’ is, this instance highlights the fact that even The Cloud is still housed in a data center, with four walls, with power pulls, air conditioning, generators and many of the features we’ve become familiar with ever since the early days of the dot com boom (and bubble). They are physical structures, like our homes, that are susceptible to natural disasters among other things. Data centers have outages all the time but a single traditional data center outage might not get attention since it may only involve a couple companies – when a ‘cloud’ data center crashes, it could impact many companies and like last week, it grabbed headlines.

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Local File Server for team collaboration is a very familiar use case. Typically a local IT administrator set up a file server in a Local Area Network(LAN) environment, such as in a branch office. The whole office then use network shares to share files. For example, below is a picture of a Shared folder in Windows File Server 2008. The local folder’s name is TeamFolderLocal and it is published as a network share.
Cloud-based team folder is also a very familiar use case. In Gladinet Cloud, the administrator can setup a team folder so anyone that has assigned read/write permission can access the team folder. Below is a picture of a team folder inside web browser.

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