Microsoft released on Thursday a new position paper, "Privacy in the Cloud Computing Era: A Microsoft Perspective," that includes information about the remote storage and processing of personal information.
Privacy and security concerns continue to be a primary argument that cloud naysayers use against storing data and applications on the Internet. Big IT vendors and service providers like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard will sooner or later be forced to take the cloud seriously or risk missing out on the whole next wave of IT consumption. And their large enterprise customers will expect them to offer cloud services with the appropriate levels of privacy and security measures in line with their business needs.
The interesting thing about this paper is that Microsoft takes surprisingly minimal responsibility for the data it will manage:
... Read moreWith the rise of cloud computing and Web applications, monitoring and management complexity has crossed the line from the network deep into applications. Businesses that are dependent on the web (companies like Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com) are concerned with more than just the red light/green light mentality of the client/server days.
Monitoring has evolved from "Am I alive?" to "How well is everything running?" and "Is my performance maximized?" It follows that businesses need performance data from applications, not just infrastructure, to ensure proper delivery and function (and, down the line, good user experience).
Web apps present a new set of monitoring and management challenges. I asked Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero to give me some thoughts on the evolution of monitoring networks, applications and the Cloud.
1. Frequent Innovation and Rapid Change
Web application companies deal with change hourly. The more pieces that change and the faster the changes occur, the higher the likelihood of new problems being introduced into what is already a dynamic environment.
This can happen at the largest shops, as witnessed recently when Google claimed every site on the internet was malware.
The challenge becomes keeping track of all of the changes and knowing what change resulted in what improvement (or degradation) to applications. This data is crucial to ensuring application health, but keeping pace with changes and the varied impact is a complicated process that legacy monitoring tools like HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli by design are not designed to handle.
2. Specialized Technology
Web platforms that include LAMP, Java, and J2EE applications require specialized, cohesive metric collection to correlate application performance up and down the stack. This includes visibility into all the technologies that matter in Web application environments - from operating systems, Web servers, application servers, databases and virtualization - is critical.
3. Small Staff, Large Responsibility
The web ops people at any business wear many hats: monitoring 24/7, capacity planning, SLA compliance reporting, business metrics delivery to the rest of the company to name a few.
The aforementioned "rapid change" adds fuel to an already roaring (and hectic) fire. Shrinking budgets mean smaller web ops teams, and the fewer people to spread out across those tasks, the harder monitoring becomes.
Finding a solution designed to fill that gap means the difference between a band-aid (restarting an already- dead server) and avoiding cutting yourself in the first place (a diagnostic process to prevent and/or manage around a problem).
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Reviews have been mixed but the guys at Hispazone put the Eee Top through it's paces (in both English and Spanish) and I think it looks pretty amazing.
The part that really matters is the touch-screen that is demonstrated in this video.The reviewers seemed to be genuinely pleased with the whole experience:
Even with the snags we can get from the Eee Top, it will become a referent in tactile control for the domestic computers and will probably be a before and an after in what we know as domestic computer because this kind of interface "naturalize" the use of the computer making it more integrating and easy for the whole family.
I wrote last month about ASUS' Netbook domination. I certainly hope Dell, HP and Lenovo are paying attention
With all the hype in the cloud and the clear necessity for big software vendors to stake their claim I would have thought Sun would have announced/done something already. As my partner-in-crime Ross Mason points out in this post, they did: network.com--which is basically Grid computing and is shockingly dated in just a few years.
I wrote previously that "Java-in-the-cloud" will lead us to "Platform-as-a-Service" and as I continue to think about it, Sun has more of the pieces than any other BigCo--the right of hardware, operating system (Solaris) and development environment (Java) than does HP, IBM, or Microsoft. And don't forget that they also have MySQL and a huge development community.
I wonder why Sun hasn't figured this out and why there isn't already a "Java-in-the-Cloud" distribution that has the functionality of Java with some level of restrictions or other permission management geared toward SaaS.
Wouldn't it make sense to take the fact that Java is now open source and direct some energy toward making a cloud distribution? Or at least couldn't Sun come up with a Cloud infrastructure that doesn't look like crazy zeros and ones (or tables and rows) but instead gives the deep functionality of Java with the abstraction that defines modern service-oriented architectures?
As HP Redirects Its R&D Toward Big Results one would expect to hear something new and exciting, or maybe some clarity about what the company is planning to actually do. Instead we get a fantastic array of buzzwords from the last 5 years.
1. Mobility
They project that use of computing devices must seek to become seamless, so that users are transferring information and working within a familiar interface as they move beyond their offices. Information will continue to explode, so capturing and storing information will be less important than analyzing and delivering the right information at the right time.
2. Cloud computing
"Cloud computing is taking off," said Robison. Instead of depending on faster and faster personal devices, users will start to depend on the network cloud to deliver personalized services, based on where they are and what they're doing, he said. "Software as a service is just getting started," he predicted. In the future, "everything is delivered as a service."
3. Crowdsourcing
HP is going to try to find new ways to tap the insights and intuitions of people outside its halls by calling for ideas or requesting a design from a group that may not be known to HP but is rated highly by other users of its services. "Crowd sourcing," where professional services are solicited on the Internet, is "going mainstream," Robison predicted.
Maybe it's the paraphrasing in this article, but it sounds like HP is really behind the times.
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