How phone-hacking feds have been fooled by the cloud

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

I was in a meeting last week where both of the staff from my client had a strong affinity for the word “layman”. Whenever I strayed into territory they preferred to find too technical, they would say “well, I’m just a layman…”. I’m thinking of a particular conversation about their server hard disk running out of space. “What” they asked “you mean the memory? We bought some more of that, didn’t we?”

I despair of the whole concept of the “layman”  - they seem to stop being laymen and turn into the copyright-smashers from hell when it comes to downloading the illegal copies of movies that make up the bulk of the space consumed on their file server, after all.

Now, I’m sure we all have our stories about wilful ignorance in pursuit of a bit of nerd-baiting, but this particular BBC article caught my eye, because it implies that the “layman” state of mind is doing a good deal more damage.

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Microsoft connects you to the cloud at TechEd 2011

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Relax – when I say Microsoft’s “connecting you to the cloud” this isn’t the long-predicted release of a brain implant chip worthy of Cronenberg at his finest. It’s a bit more straightforward, though describing it to those not already in daily contact with the cloud produces furrowed brows – not because it’s hard to understand, but because systems designers considering a cloud rollout in their business can’t believe it’s not included already.

It is now. Robert Wahbe was the main presenter in the TechEd keynote, and he laid out a toolkit for linking your internal servers to your Windows Azure cloud instances. There’s Azure Connect, which is all about the TCP/IP pipeline between the inside of your organisation, and the inside of your cloud presence: and there’s Concero (not Concerto, before the subeditors shoot me), which is a data synchroniser, so you can have an internal server and a cloud server and keep the two in step.

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Behind the scenes of a cloud conversation

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Eagle-eyed surfers will already have spotted my bumbling efforts as part of the Cloud Power initiative, and those who didn’t can now go and have a bit of a giggle, come back, and say whatever comes to their mind in reaction to the footage.

I thought I’d do a bit of a behind-the-scenes account here for interested parties, and also explain why I’m happy to take the risk of being an idiot in a video that exists purely because a single vendor – Microsoft – wanted to make it.

First off: Tim and I didn’t rehearse. I believe I get worse with each rehearsal, starting from a pretty low base in the first place. We had a set of basic questions but we didn’t have any set conclusions we were expected to work towards. Given the breadth of the questions being asked, this was something of a relief.

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Can Parallels get noticed in the cloud?

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

One of the many reasons that I like the whole topic of cloud computing is that it suits my way of thinking: I tend to grab a series of themes out of a “cloud” of topics and see if a concept pops out of the randomness — and if you are trying to work out what to buy and who to buy it from, the one strong similarilty between “the cloud” and buying services is that it looks pretty random.

All the potential suppliers look like a random collection of logos to the consumer: dipping into the attendee list at Parallels Summit here in Orlando this week we have MigrationWiz, R1Soft, Smarsh, Tilera, Apptix, BobCares, Comodo (that last one is an old friend to PC Pro, so maybe they’re not quite as random as the others).

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Twitter data demand highlights cloud control problems

Monday, January 10th, 2011

I see from the news that Twitter has been forced to bend over and succumb to a thorough Data Rogering by the US Government.

I see from the news that Twitter has been forced to bend over and succumb to a thorough data rogering by the US Government.

It appears that some foreign nationals are up in arms about this.

Can I say “I told you so”? For over two years, I have been raising the question of the territoriality and legal framework of data held by US companies, especially when the data is held on US territory.

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Calculating the real cost of cloud computing

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

This week I have been getting unpleasantly confused by a pre-Christmas present of cloud computing hype. Take the CEBR 2011 Cloud Dividend report, commissioned by EMC, which joyfully predicts that the cloud will benefit the European economy by as much as £148.9 billion per year by 2015. Other highlights include the creation of 289,000 jobs in the same timeframe, although the UK could apparently lag behind the rest of Europe courtesy of our relatively poor broadband infrastructure.

As regular PC Pro blog readers will know, I’ve already suggested that there is such a thing as free cloud computing for the small business. OK, the free lunch option is restricted to the very small end of the small business scale, and even then we are talking more Google Mail than a fully blown data centre in the cloud, but it’s a start. The smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud rings true as far as I am concerned. What’s more, I would contend that it’s a damn site more relevant to most small businesses than reports of some notional global economic value of cloud computing sponsored by a company pushing the cloud as hard as it can.

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The £100 billion question: is the cloud good for British business?

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Here’s an interesting question to ponder: is the cloud good for your small business but bad for employee relations? The question started to form some weeks back after I penned a piece here entitled free cloud computing for your small business in which I concluded that the smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud.

I was somewhat taken to task for making this assumption, both publicly and particularly in private via email where, using language that would shock an Irish builder, it was explained in no uncertain terms that I was talking out of my posterior again. The main argument being that free cloud services suck because free service support always sucks on the one hand and any business which entrusts its data to the cloud, free or otherwise, is bereft of common sense. I disagreed then, and still do now. The cloud is, inherently, good for business. Period. But whether it is good for staff relations could well be another matter.

A newly published Populus Poll, commissioned by cloud service provider Keboko, which suggests that cloud computing could save UK businesses a staggering £104 billion per year. This research, consisting of interviews with 1,117 adults, calculated that with the average UK worker tied to their desk for 37 days a year just to carry out basic admin tasks and an average hourly wage of £13.04 multiplied by some 29.02 million people in employment that the cost of ‘red tape’ was £104 billion a year.

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Free cloud computing for your small business?

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

There is such a thing as a free lunch, and when you start using open-source software you can probably throw in breakfast and a late night snack as well. But can you really run your small business in the cloud for nothing?

I have been using free or open-source desktop software for some time now, and know many a small business which does exactly the same. However, transferring that concept of ‘free is good’ to incorporate cloud computing for business has been a much harder sell.

I recall one small business client literally laughing in my face when I suggested that a ‘free cloud infrastructure model’ might be the way forward for his just-the-two-of-us company on a limited budget. He stopped laughing when he received my invoice, of course, but that’s a different story altogether.

The point being that this guy, like many others, missed the point: low-cost and no-cost does not have to equate to doing business on the cheap. Which led me to thinking, isn’t it time we stopped automatically adopting a ‘you get what you pay for’ mentality and instead seriously started considering that a free lunch might not taste so bad after all?

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Intel Research Day: pick of the projects

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

I’ve already written about Dispute Finder, a neat little service which is up and running – albeit shakily – right now. But Intel’s Research Day in Mountain View, California hosted some far more ambitious and long-term projects too. Here are my favourite projects from the rest of the show: research being what it is, some of them will probably never be heard of again, but others may well find their way into real-world products in the next few years.

Oh, and just to ramp up the excitement, I’ll take you through my top seven in reverse order.

7. Location Awareness with LED Visible Lighting

This is one of those ideas whose appeal lies in its sheer simplicity. In short, it’s a system that warns you when you’re too close to a car in front – or when a car is too close behind you. The clever part is that it works out the distances involved by triangulating the beams from LED headlights and tail-lights.

It’s a fast system, and accurate – the showcase stand included a live demo with some toy cars, tracking their locations in real time to a precision of under an inch. It can even track multiple cars at once. (more…)

Is there enough bandwidth for Microsoft’s cloud?

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Microsoft is in no doubt what message delegates should take away from TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans: the cloud isn’t just here, it’s maturing.

Unlike most of the other cloud announcements you might hear, Microsoft is ready to acknowledge the true basics of cloud computing: you might have a cloud all of your own, you might have a trusted supplier, but none of that matters unless you can make a choice during a normal working day to pick up your work and make use of the servers up the line, at your supplier’s hosting centre.

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