Cloud computing

Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox? Heck, use 'em all!

It's true that the newly launched Google Drive competes with plenty of other services for sharing files across all your devices. But there's something very different in this particular situation than in a lot of online services.

Namely this: why not use them all?

With social networking, few people have the patience to keep a lively feed of activity at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and any number of other sites. We gravitate toward the one where our contacts are active.

And with e-mail, it's inconvenient to have multiple addresses on multiple services, generally speaking.

But with … Read more

Google Drive: It's slick, integrated...and not exactly free

Google is set today to open Google Drive, a service to store files online and share them among various computing devices that turns out to be a lot more important than you might think.

Why? Two reasons:

First, Google's service goes well beyond rivals because of integration with Google Docs, Google+, Gmail, and other services. Second, beyond a basic free level, ordinary consumers will pay to use Google Drive -- not much, but enough to make them into customers, not just users of an advertising-subsidized service. That's a pretty big philosophical shift for Google.

What is Google Drive? … Read more

Google Docs upped to 5GB of storage; hints at Google Drive

Google Docs users now have 5GB of space to house their documents, up from just 1GB previously.

A check of my own Google Docs storage confirmed the 5GB now available, though the Verge says the rollout seems to be staggered, so some users may not yet see the increase.

The timing of this move could be a sign that Google is ready to kick off its Google Drive, especially following a Reuters report claiming the company will announce the new online storage service as soon as today.

Taking a page from SkyDrive, Dropbox, and other online storage sites, Google Drive … Read more

Where IT is going: Cloud, mobile, and data

Cloud computing seems to often get used as a catch-all term for the big trends happening in IT.

This has the unfortunate effect of adding additional ambiguities to a topic that's already laden with definitional overload. (For example, on a topic like security or compliance, it makes a lot of difference whether you're talking about public clouds like Amazon's, a private cloud within an enterprise, a social network, or some mashup of two or more of the above.)

However, I'm starting to see a certain consensus emerge about how best to think about the broad sense … Read more

Okta aims to make cloud identity secure for the enterprise

You may not yet be familiar with Okta, an on-demand identity and access management service company founded by former Salesforce.com executives and backed by big-time venture investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate. But as cloud services continue to find their way into the enterprise, there is a good chance it will be noticed by companies that will have the need to support identity and access management across enterprise/cloud borders.

While this is an early market, the premise of Okta (and others such as Symplified) is that the next generation of IT infrastructure is being built … Read more

IBM Fellow Jeff Jonas on the evolution of Big Data

Last week I reconnected with Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group and a recently named IBM Fellow, about what's going on in the realm of big data.

When I first met Jonas, back in June of 2010, he was focused on how companies are dealing with the deluge of information associated with Big Data. His focus hasn't changed, but he told me his perspective on how we make sense of data continues to evolve -- especially as we move in and out of demand for real-time versus batch data processing.

New Big Data tools … Read more

Amazon unveils CloudSearch service

Developers who use Amazon's Web Services now have a new way to bring search into their applications.

Launched today in beta mode, CloudSearch offers a full-blown search service in the cloud that developers can build into their apps. Using the AWS Management Console, developers create a search domain, upload the data that they want searchable, and then CloudSearch indexes the content, according to Amazon.

Like other cloud-based services, CloudSearch is also scalable, so it can expand as the amount of data increases. Developers can also tweak key settings and parameters without having to upload the data again.

Amazon's … Read more

The promise of VDI: Are we there yet?

My wife works for our local school department as an IT support specialist assigned to the town's largest elementary school. Like many U.S. elementary schools, kids and teachers use a variety of personal computing devices, including PCs, notebooks, and now tablets. (Everyone wants to use these 'cause they're way cool.)

Keeping this veritable Noah's ark full of computing animals happy is more than a full-time job. There are more than 400 of them and they have quirks that give most of them unique personalities. If she comes home and tells me she had time for lunch, … Read more

Google gives Chrome OS a less alienating interface

In the computing world right now, there are two general ways to show windows on a screen: with the window taking up the entire screen, as on smartphones and tablets; or with resizable, overlapping windows, as on personal computer OSes.

Until yesterday, Google's browser-based operating system, Chrome OS, fell into the former camp. Users had no choice but to see browser pages and run browser apps at the full size of the screen. That changed with a new window manager that debuted with Chrome OS 19.0.1048.17, released in a developer build.

With the Chromebook notebooks that … Read more

Yandex cloud service offers 10GB of storage for free

A new Web site is offering 10GB of online storage for free. The catch? It's only in Russian...at least for now.

Launching today as a beta version, Yandex.Disk (English translation) is the latest in a growing lineup of cloud storage sites, letting people store files online and access them from computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Files stored locally and online can be synchronized among multiple devices to ensure that the versions stay consistent. So the same document you save on your desktop PC can be accessed and edited on your mobile device. You can view and launch your … Read more