Is The Cloud Prepping for Hockey Stick Growth?

(Updated 3/10/2012)  
There are a number of significant things at play that may indicate the start of a hockey stick growth spurt in cloud computing.  Some may think it’s just a price war but I don’t think so.  In my last article I covered a number of changes that Amazon has made to their AWS offering.  In just the last couple of weeks, Amazon has started lowering their prices on various components of their AWS portfolio including S3 which saw a 192% year over year growth in 2011, and EC2.  This week, Google and Microsoft announced lower prices for storage.  In addition to this, SalesForce.com recently announced pretty good first quarter results, highlighting two big wins, HP and Time Warner (Per ZD Net Article).  It’s hard to tell but SalesForce.com may also be lowering prices a tad.

Rapid Expansion of Amazon's AWS

Since I wrote my last two articles on Amazon Web Services (My intro to AWS and Using AWS), Amazon has continued to pile on capabilities into their of their infrastructure and platform cloud services.  They are rapidly building new products, data centers, and expanding capabilities in existing products.  In just three months since joining the Amazon Web Services Family, they have stuffed my mailbox full news about new product announcements, new data centers, and enhanced or expanded capabilities in existing services.  

iDrive Bulk Restore

I've been using iDrive for quite some time and I continue to recommend it to most of my home and small business clients (read my review HERE).  One thing that I didn't know was that iDrive offers what I call a bulk restore option.  When you have a complete disk failure and you need to restore all of your data, you can restore over the network but that could take a very long time if you have as much data as I have.  In addition, your network provider may get crabby about your high data usage.  In this case, iDrive also offers a "Rapid Serve" service where they Express ship your data to you on a special iDrive Portal USB hard drive. The cost is $69.95 and you can keep the hard drive.  The drive also comes with software to perform local backups with the same security and versioning features of iDrive Online backup.

Read my full review of iDrive and a couple of others to learn more.

- Chris Claborne

How to Get Started With Cloud Computing

Some IT departments want to utilize public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS) but aren’t sure how to get started.  I’ll discuss some ways to use cloud computing as you flesh out how you will use it and integrate into an existing information technology architecture.  If you’re not sure what IaaS is, read my previous article, “Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS”.

Cloud in 2012? Start Planning Now

Thinking about utilizing cloud services in 2012 and want to start mitigating some potential risks today.  InfoWorld’s Tim Greene recommends that you start working over you network provider today.

Is Zoho's CRM App Growing Up?

Zoho “software as a service” (SaaS) company has always impressed me.  I use their Invoicing application and reviewed it last year.  According to InfoWorld’s Chris Kanaracus, Zoho is gunning for SalesForce.com with their latest upgrade to their CRM application.  Zoho is claiming they are making inroads into the CRM SaaS market that SalesForce.com is known for.   I like the fresh approach they take to their applications, making them more inviting, easier to understand than their stodgy old school counterparts. Looking at the flashy new capabilities, mobile access, and continious improvement without the hassle of upgrades, I can't help but think they are the next big force in small business solutions via SaaS.

I think that in 2012, we will continue to see more fireworks in the SaaS and infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) cloud industry.  

- Chris Claborne
 

Using Amazon’s AWS

In my last article, “Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS”, I introduced Amazon Web Services (AWS), and I used AWS to describe the terms “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS).  In order to better understand the value of AWS, I deployed a real world application.  In this article, I’ll step through how I deployed and scaled my example application on AWS and comment on where I found the greatest value to be.  If you haven’t read my first AWS article, “Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS”, I suggest you read it as an introduction to AWS.

Gartner Has First Ever IaaS Magic Quadrant Report

From ReadWrite Cloud's David Strom,  "Gartner Has First Ever IaaS Magic Quadrant Report"

A new Gartner Magic Quadrant report is available this week covering the public cloud computing vendors. Not surprisingly, AWS received top honors, although Terremark, Savvis and CSC were also praised. Bluelock, a smaller vendor, also got props. The report is very detailed in the usual Gartner manner and is a must-read for enterprise IT architects who are evaluating players in this space.

I don't have access to the report but am interested to read it.

Exploring Amazon's Cloud IaaS & PaaS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a large offering of various compute and applications services that I will use for this article to help describe what “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) are.  

AWS is used by many large Internet companies like active.com, Ericsson, the guardian news, Yelp,  IMDB and others to deliver their web applications or services.  Although I’ve covered Software as a Service” and related benefits, risks, and some specific applications, this article will take the next big step into another side of cloud computing, using public scalable infrastructure to deploy your in-house applications.

Have an "Exit Plan"

Although this is sort of IT 101, build an idea of what it looks like to shut down an application that you either built or are using as a service.  This should include things like migration of your data, and how you scrub important business data from the vendor's servers.  This article by Paul Venezia of InfoWorld explains the implications of exiting and how one IT group ensures their data has been removed from a providers servers.  I don't think the author goes far enough because there are most likely backups of your data on remote servers and possibly tape.  You should already know what your provider's retention policy is and what form these backups are kept.  If you have stand-by servers in another data center, you may want to perform a wipe on those disks as well before the storage space is released to other customers.  I'll assume that the backups on tape will eventually be destroyed and if you've actually implemented with this provider, that you are OK with their security policies that control access to backup media and their disposal procedures. 

Apple Marketing Misstep and Cloud Sneak Attack

Version numbers & product names are pure marketing.  In my opinion Apple made a marketing mistake in naming the latest phone the “4S”.  Many bloggers,  Bill Houle among them, stated this as well.  

I was resisting writing my own thoughts and reviews until I saw this article from BGR which is very much in alignment with my own thoughts.  Also, after playing with Siri and other iOS goodness, I’ve come to the conclusion that the software is helping start what could be the next major revolution in tech.  The sneak attack is iCloud, Apple’s cloud computing beach head.

HP TouchPad Thoughts

What follows are my growing notes on the TouchPad.  It’s not really just about the touchpad but to help me understand why iPad is continuing to kick butt in the tablet market.  Some say that there is no tablet market, there’s an iPad market.  The vote is still being counted on that one but early polls show iPad with an unbeatable lead for the next few years.  This isn’t anything new but in review is in part my quest to understand the “why”.   Part of it may indeed be the emotional connection that Apple somehow makes with a very large segment of users.  The Gardian author of “Why do some people really hate Apple” and Donald Norman’s book “Emotional Design” get in touch with this idea.  Although not the key topic of this article I give my thoughts on the Gardian article at the end.  

Comparing Local to Cloud Security

The first thing that prospective cloud users ask about a new cloud application is "What about security?".  It's a good question, and one that should always be asked when looking at a new public cloud based service vs. internally hosted “private cloud solutions”.  One of the things that I highlight for my clients is that when looking at the security implications of using a public cloud computing service, they should use a fair comparison.  They should compare the security of the public cloud to their alternative, usually an application deployed on their "private cloud" or locally hosted solution, on their own hardware located within their walls.  

This is the first in a series of articles that I will be writing to help answer how we can evaluate cloud security for our business and make good choices.  I want to peel away that first layer when evaluating security.  What you might find is that getting into minute detail on cloud vendor’s security scheme isn’t needed if you can’t afford to do the most basic things for your own locally hosted business system.   I’ll revisit some of the things I mentioned in the security section of my risks article.

Backup The Cloud

Hopefully you’ve read my article about backing up your workstation to the cloud and using a secondary backup to something like a USB drive, but what about backing up the cloud?  One of the benefits of using cloud computing is that you don’t have to backup, nor do you need purchase and maintain the software, and other components needed to backup.  If you are a little bit scared of say, having a client or co-worker nuke a document in Google Docs, Spanning Backup may be your solution.  It’s a cloud backup service (think of it as insurance) that backs up your cloud documents.  Crazy, I know, but if it’s something you worry about, there’s a cloud solution.  

- Chris Claborne

Using Google's Two-Factor Authentication

UPDATE:  If you've read about Gmail account passwords getting stolen (hackers getting users to load a fake page and stealing password) and you are concerned, you really should read this.  Had those users turned on Google’s “Two-Step Verification” they probably wouldn't have been hacked.

Google introduced what's known in the industry as "two-factor authentication” last year.  Google calls it "2-step verification".  Although I use a two-factor authentication system every day for the company I work for and have used others in the past, it’s time to tighten my security belt. In addition, I feel that if I’m going to write about Google’s system, I really should be using it.  Actually I think you should too.  Security is in the news a lot more these days and people are putting more of their lives into the cloud.  If you use Google Docs and other services like I do, you should be doing a better job of ensuring your stuff is secure and private.  

After the break, I’ll explain what it is, how it works, and how to turn it on for your Google account.