Top 10 business technologies of 2010 – really?

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Analysts at Gartner yesterday attempted to look into the future to guess what would be making the biggest impacts on businesses in 2010, as it revealed the top 10 strategic technologies for 2010.

Technologies to make the top ten include Client Computing (think virtualisation, again), Social Computing (personal and work time will mix, darn it) and, rather less exotically, Flash Memory.

Meanwhile, Gartner also points to the rise in mobile apps, stating that despite the plethora of applications for platforms such as the iPhone, it predicts a newer version with identical operating system interface and processor architecture.

But can we trust Gartner to predict the future? (more…)

Microsoft attempts to clean up its cloud

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

You may have read my not-terribly-polite post about the astonishing restrictions found inside Microsoft’s terms and conditions for its hosted services. Well here’s the follow-up.

Because yesterday, I (and a couple of colleagues) had an hour-long “full and frank exchange of views” with four senior Microsoft Redmond people responsible for the hosted services offering: Eron Kelly, Senior Director, Microsoft Online Services; Kore Kourbourlis, Senior Director, Compliance and Privacy; Brendon Lynch, Director, Trustworthy Computing; and Mike Ziock, Senior Director of Operations, Business Online Services.

We went through our concerns regarding data movement, implications for data protection issues under EU law, SLA, the sign-up process, terms & conditions and so forth. (more…)

The perils of cloud computing (part II)

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Following hot on the heels of Jon Honeyball’s warning about the dangers of cloud computing, comes another all too real example from no lesser source than the Google press office, commenting on this morning’s Gmail outage:

“I’d send you this statement by email, but I can’t”.  

The withering of Ma.gnolia

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

It is extremely easy to sit on the sidelines and say “hahahahaha” when someone else’s system goes bang. Schadenfreud is a particularly self-indulgent emotion.

But I strongly advise you to go to http://ma.gnolia.com and watch the video. The background is that magnolia was a service which stored bookmarks. A lot of people relied upon it for their bookmark stores, and it was a “software as a service”. A cloud computing thing, if you like.

Unfortunately, it has gone bang, with irretrievable data loss.

Without question, this has been a learning experience for those enthusiasts who put a lot of effort into building the service, irrespective of their understanding (or lack of it) of risk assessment.

When you watch the video, you too will wince as I did about the choices they made. “Did you do any backup testing?” “Nope” made me squirm.

But think of the wider SaaS perspective. When you put a SaaS into your business process, do you really know who you are dealing with? Have you really looked at the SLA, the recovery tools and so forth?

Of course, it would be wrong to scale up a disaster at a community enthusiast site into the wider space of Azure or Google or Amazon services. But vendors will be selling SaaS services hosted on those platforms, and on all sizes of platforms all the way down to one PC with no working backup.

At the end of the day, it’s your business and you have to take responsibility for it. SaaS is not a major thing which cures all known ills.

Microsoft brings the clouds to sunny LA

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

LA may be bathed in warm sunshine, but here at the city’s Sheraton Hotel things are very cloudy indeed. It’s only the preview day of Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, but I’ve already lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard the phrase “cloud computing”.

Tomorrow’s keynote speech by chief software architect Ray Ozzie (pictured) is being trailed with the tagline “cloud computing takes centre stage”, and we’ve been promised in-depth briefings on the Midori/Cloud/Strata (pick your own Microsoft codename) operating system tomorrow.

Yet, even before Ozzie’s curtain-raiser, Microsoft’s staff are already talking up the company’s cloud-computing vision. Group product manager David Appel has already tried to put clear daylight between Microsoft and Google, insisting that consumers and companies want to take their pick of applications to run in the cloud, and those they want to use on their own PCs. The implication was clear: Google may well have a vast repertoire of online services, but it hasn’t got the desktop software to match – no matter what clever tricks it can pull with offline access in Google Gears.

Has Microsoft got a bevy of online services up its sleeve? We’re about to find out. 

The clouds are coming!

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

There’s something in the air. In fact, look closely and you can see it. Up there, white and fluffy, and apparently full of exciting new technology. You see, all the best new technologies are moving to the cloud, and if you haven’t moved your data to the cloud yet… well, heaven forfend.

I’ve just deleted filed two press releases in the space of two minutes that sell themselves on the back of cloud computing. The first was from respected backup specialists EMC: “EMC has today announced its first major step into cloud computing as EMC Mozy and Lenovo will now offer unlimited online backup for SMBs” to quote the first line – head to Lenovo’s Protect My Data site for details.

(more…)