Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Thinking about storage in the cloud – managing user risk

Leave a reply

I am a regular user of Skydrive, Google’s drive and Evernote – for storing information.  Also use both boxcryptor for the on the fly encryption of certain classes of data,

This recent piece in the Huffpost, serves to remind me why In god we may trust but not in one cloud provider.  Not sure the article is fair to the cloud provider (in particular or in general) in that availability is very high and that when outages occur there is a great deal of focus of substantial resources on fixing a problem impacting millions of users.

I thought the point about potentially innocently breaking a cloud provider rule and then being locked out of one’s data indefinitely pending resolution of the infringement was more worrying.  And who’s to day tow or three vendors might decide to keep you out of all their cloud environments because you represented a perceived threat?  Rcetnly have seen at least one business almost go to the wall because Google blacklisted them because of what they thought were legitimate SEO activities.  And it proved very difficult to demonstrate to Google’s satisfaction that they had addressed the issues.

Looking from the outside very easy to see why ckound providers needs rules, guidance, vigilance – in order to maintain systems integrity, support high availability.  But users need also to have a contingency plan – which must include some alternatives and backup date locally or with other, potentially non aligned, cloud providers.

Gartner trends which catch my attention

Leave a reply

T0p 10 emerging infrastructure trends – Gartner

Most of this rings a bell with me.  Increasingly where companies do not provide ipads (and the equivalent) people are just buying them and using them.  And this does lead to people using specific applications which get the job done and work on these platforms.  And the issue of corporate data being storied, as a result, on devices and/or the cloud is a fact of life.   BYOD needs to be understood and embraced for the opportunity it actually represents.

The private cloud (in the sense of companies using cloud technologies on their own platforms) is here.  The real game is figuring out the move for corporates to public cloud – what can be moved and how to work with multiple cloud providers (power of the cloud broker).  Public cloud is what needs to be understood and embraced – to make a real difference.

I like the comments about end of the traditional service desk.  This is not as far removed as people may think.  For a number of years now I have found that I get excellent support from a range of user driven support sites.  Ultimately as users rely more on cloud and personal apps not practical to think companies will deal with all the support calls. It’s actually about educating users to think before they commit to using an application – when you become dependent on this application who will provide support in a crisis? (not your IT department).

 

 

Is ‘private cloud’ cloud or just private?

Leave a reply

Rick Nucci, CTO Dell Boomi, does not pull his punches.  For him ‘private cloud’ fails the test:

It’s not cloud because it does not provide the primary and fundamental benefit of cloud; “my computing is delivered to me from someone else’s infrastructure”.

So, he sees it more as a company availing of cloud technologies but within their own infrastructure.

The post itself does not really have much new – but is a reasonable summary of the basic classifications of cloud.

Built for the cloud or moving to the cloud

Leave a reply

Exciting times for CIOs and business executives – real options from both Microsoft and Google to support their information workers.

For those brought up on Microsoft, with what seems like unlimited (if somewhat daunting) functionality in the Office suite, it always seems that the Google Apps suite is ‘dumbed down’ – you are required to give up some functionality.   On the other hand it may seem like nearly everything you actually  need to do can be done in Google Apps – and there’s less to learn.

The cloud seems to have caught fire.  Microsoft has been pushing aggressively on its BPOS offering and the pricing has become a lot sharper.  Meanwhile Google has been busily beefing up its sales and support resources around Google Apps.

Either way both offerings have many attractions for the CIO – in terms of taking away headaches around upgrades, storage, support, etc.

And both offer lots of functionality in the collaboration type space – wikis, blogs, etc.

Side by side with this there are all the other players e.g. zoho with a very comprehensive offering for the information worker – also priced on a subscription basis.  And for project management basecamp seems to be getting a great deal of traction.  And one goes back to the previous thought – are some of these simpler, built for the cloud, product offerings easier to use, if somewhat ‘dumbed down’?

Interesting piece in Forbes re Google, ‘When Google runs your life’.  Seems to me that no more than Microsoft pushing wall-to-wall MS, Google is inevitably pushing google wall-to-wall.  Apologies for unfortunate use of outdated imagery – probably should be cloud-2-cloud.

I think much of the elegance of the web 2.0 applications has been their simplicity and ease of use.  That has driven initial uptake. Products such as googlewave, in trying to deliver a very rich solution, risk contradicting some of this.  There are similar risks in any vendor looking to achieve cloud-2-cloud dominance.

Seems to me that what the internet and the cloud  should be offering – as they evolve – are  easier and more effective ways to access resources (people, knowledge) – both inside and outside the organisation in which you work/ study/ volunteer.  Cloud based computing is part of this.  I think as such the winning solutions may be ones built from scratch for the cloud, expecting to coexist in the cloud, not expecting to dominate.

What does the cloud hold for traditional ERP vendors?

1 Reply

Is it possible that the traditional ERP vendors may lose their dominant positions in the mid and large size enterprises because of cloud computing and what it enables – notwithstanding their own efforts to exploit the cloud.

Seems to me that the cloud enables business managers to demand a different experience of implementing information solutions to support their businesses.  There is an emerging demand for simpler, faster, cheaper implementations – potentially not built on one integrated solution from one ERP vendor.  And this may work well for the implementation partners also.  Ultimately they may be required to work off a reduced margin – but this may be achieved for significantly reduced investment and reduced risk of failure.

Excellent piece recently in CIO dealing with the future of ERP.  The piece does not purport to have all the answers – but certainly speaks to the challenges being faced by traditional vendors and the opportunities for those with solutions built for the cloud.

Making Dublin a smart city

2 Replies

Interesting piece in Fortune

San Francisco gets smart with green technology

…in the context of Ireland and its drive for a smart economy and knowledge society.

As I stand at bus stops wondering when the next bus is due and I think about the technology which is so easily available I wonder why we are not moving forward faster e.g. integrated ticketing?

Dublin needs to be a smart city.  Press on asap.  Food for thought in this article.

Irish government to appoint a CTO?

Leave a reply

So the government published its paper: Knowledge Society Strategy: Technology Actions to Support the Smart Economy.

There is already plenty of comment – on twitter, in the blogs, on the news and there will be more over the next few days.  Comments ranging from ‘a lot of waffle’, ‘telling us what we already know’, ‘where’s the meat?’, etc.  But buried in the report are enough reference points to show where we’ve been making progress and where we’ve been falling behind.

When I read Friedman’s ‘The world is flat’, listing his concerns about the state of education, engineering in the US, I felt he could have been writing about Ireland.  Ironically he references Ireland as a country pulling itself up and leveraging the flatness of the world.  However the shortage of maths proficient secondary school leavers is a major concern and cannot be fixed over night.

The topics discussed in the paper are very worthy of attention – and do represent opportunities for Ireland Inc e.g. cloud, green data centres, networking.  Delighted to see reference to semantic web – not really that surprising after €25m of government investment.

I just picked out one small detail from the report (p45):

The Government should appoint a high level CTO with the authority to drive cultural change across the many departments and agencies.

I have commented previously on such appointments in the US – within the Obama administration.  I would strongly support such an initiative – though she/he will need plenty of support from Mssrs. Ryan and Lenihan.

What about those not using social networking?

3 Replies

Twice today I was asked by people who are infrequent or non users of social networking solutions (and blogs) – how do you avoid leaving the non users out?  Or, when you are looking at a restaurant recommendation ot a wine recommendation – how valuable is the recommendation, given it is only based on information supplied by social network users, who may or may not be the best judge of the specific appeal of a restaurant or a bottle of wine for me?

If there are large groups of people who do not participate in social networking what is the impact for me, as a social networker and for them as non users?  Is a new elite being formed?  Even if people arecurrently  joining networks such as facebook in their millions, what about all of those users who cease to use the application some time after their initial registration?

Perhaps it’s a little (more than a little) like people choosing not to use a phone or not to use a mobile phone.  They are being left out, but may feel that overall quality of life is improved (or at least maintained) by not participating in a technology enabled, driven, environment.  And that environment is worse off for their non participation.

I tend to believe that social networking (when enabled by technologies/ standards such as SIOC) will prove to be a medium of communication and/or collaboration that people, for the most part, will need to join.  As the networks begin to work together and integrate the case fo participation will become greater.

It’s not all positive on the social networking side – lots of poor quality communication/ idea sharing/ workload sharing.   But grow it will – and opting out will gradually become less of an option for our citizens.

Moving on from traditional thinking

Leave a reply

I guess it’s challenging for all of us who have worked for the last 25 years.  In my final year in Trinity College Dublin I was writing Assembler for the Motorola 68000 chip.  The Mac was about to burst on the scene.  Since then I have worked in a Professional Service Firm, my own IT consulting business and with a number of start up businesses.

Many of us have come to think of the business entity as the key business unit – be it a company, a group of companies, a sole trader, a partnership.  And businesses do business with other businesses – ordering, buying, selling, etc.  And each business operates to a set of standards – standards to meet their own expectations and those of their customers.  Many of the standards are driven, underpinned or enforced by external agencies e.g. State, Professional bodies, Insurerers, regulators.

The web has had all sorts of impacts on business – the emergence of online B2B abd B2C, major reengineering of processes and business themselves, globalisation on a par not expected.

And now the web is throwing new opportunities and challenges at all of us.  In fact one can only wonder if we had had this web 10 years ago what types of businesses would have been built over the last 10 years?  Which businesses would never have existed?

Even back in 1984 in TCD we were collaborating – as we worked in a group of three students to design our basic computer.  We also collaborated on the cricket field as we set traps for opposition batsmen.  And we collaborated in preparing for exams – through sharing of lecture notes, etc.

But what we are witnessing now is a series of developments – Social networking, Semantic web, the cloud – which when combined mean that those who do not collaborate risk being eliminated.  We have often discussed the importance of knowledge management within the organisation – even between partner organisations.  However the tools beginning to emerge now promise to facilitate collaboration and knowledge management on a scale previously unimagined – right across the globe, the web and time.  ultimately traditional business practices and structures must be transformed to enable society to benefit from what’s beginning to happen.