Archive for the ‘Cloud Computing’ Category

Strategic Technologies of 2010

Monday, February 15th, 2010

An article led me to information research firm Gartner’s interesting list of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010. First the short form (not in a ranking order):

Cloud computing, advanced analytics, client computing, IT supporting green initiatives, reshaping the data center, social computing, security based on activity monitoring, flash memory, virtualization for availability, and last but not least, mobile applications.

Some items on this list are well known buzz generators: the cloud, social computing, and mobile. Advanced analytics comes close, at least in the enterprise ‘verse.

Others are less obvious. Flash memory is nothing new, but it is getting cheaper and taking over jobs once reserved for hard drives, with implications not only for mobile devices (more memory!) but also spillover effects on important little details like power supply and cooling.

‘Reshaping the data center’ isn’t really about technology at all, but firms being more careful about paying for fully installed capacity they may not use for years. Provide the infrastructure, says Gartner, but don’t fill the space till you need to.

‘Virtualization for availability,’ on the other hand, is an interesting twist I hadn’t heard before – keeping a virtual machine’s memory updated in more than one location, so that if the machine hosting the VM itself crashes a backup physical machine can step right in to keep the VM running.

Read the original to fill in the rest of the story. It is a good reminder of the variety of fronts that technology is advancing on – some of them all over the news, others less obvious because they work at the back end, and sometimes not technology itself but learning how to handle it.

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Posted in Cloud Computing, Energy, Mobile Internet | 2 Comments »

TecTrend of the Year

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

It was not in medicine or biotech, where the news has been on the political front, and the magic bullets of genomics are proving elusive.

It was not in search. Bing avoided being scoffed at, but it has not upended search or put any real scare into Google. Wolfram Alpha never understood my queries the handful of times I played with it.

Social media are in contention. This was the year that Facebook and Twitter made the big time. My brother in law offered an alternate view, unkindly calling Facebook ‘AOL for the 21st century.’ Sites that depend on coolness are always at risk from a newer, cooler site, but having an online social presence has gone mainstream, like email a decade ago.

Mobility has also gone mainstream, and the iPhone edges out the Kindle as Gadget of the Year – not its debut, but the year you couldn’t avoid it if you wanted to. But as one commentary noted (alas, I forgot to bookmark it so I can’t link it), the more powerful smartphones become, the more they become just another way to go online. Mobile will merge into the Internet.

Which makes this the year of the Cloud. It isn’t a gadget, and it doesn’t have the pop culture visibility of social media, because cloud computing is inherently a back end technology. Most of the time we don’t know, care, or think about where our applications and data are stored, only that we can get at them (and other people can’t).

But as I’ve suggested previously, mobility reinforces the push toward the cloud. So long as you only have one computer, local storage is simple and convenient. But once you also have a mobile device, you want handy access to your apps and files – meaning they have to be available to you online, and it no longer really matters where they are stored, only that they are secure.

So I designate cloud computing as our official TecTrend of the Year for 2009. Stay on top of industry news with TecTrends Reporters, and you won’t have to wait for another New Year’s Eve to know next year’s trends.

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Posted in Cloud Computing, Mobile Internet | 2 Comments »

Thanksgiving Leftovers

Sunday, November 29th, 2009
  • Finally, a conspiracy theory I can believe in. Lee Gomes speculates in Forbes that the whole Vista fiasco was a marketing ploy by Microsoft to drive sales of well-received Windows 7. After all, says Gomes, the biggest selling point of many Microsoft releases is that they fix the flaws of the previous release. (Ba-da-Bing!)
  • Meanwhile, Microsoft is establishing a cloud presence. It has spent $500 million for a data center near Chicago, where 400,000 servers will run on Microsoft’s Azure operating system. But to compete in the cloud, Microsoft will have to build a new business model as well, in place of those software upgrades that have served it so well.
  • And nuclear power struggles to make a comeback. In a section devoted to energy, Technology Review looks at nuclear’s prospects 30 years after Three Mile Island. (No full free access.) The industry’s challenges now are mainly financial. Only large plants are economical, but their high front end price is a barrier, given the uncertain future cost of other power sources.

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Posted in Cloud Computing, Energy, Productivity Software | 2 Comments »

Flying Into the Cloud

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Nothing on the current Internet scene is bigger than the Cloud. Gmail is there, and Google is staking its future on the Cloud. But then, Google has always been in the Cloud. Social networking, the hottest thing, is all in the Cloud. And Software as a service (SaaS), provided from the Cloud, is a looming overcast over the enterprise marketplace.

The Cloud is as big as the Internet sky, and like an invisible tornado it wants to hoover up everything – your apps, your operating system, the backup drive tucked into a corner of your desk – and whisk your entire desktop to Oz. No more massive operating system taking up half your memory before you open any applications.

But there are a few bumps of turbulence in the cloudy sky. An intruder hacked into the Google Apps Twitter implementation, getting in through the password reset function. (How wonderfully, or dreadfully, ordinary.) This caused a stir for the City of Los Angeles, which is planning a shift to Google email and productivity suites, and triggered a whiff of anxiety among cloud computing advocates.

It also triggered articles in the business press that, like many such articles, play Captain Obvious, reminding you of things you already know but easily forget. Do ask your cloud vendor questions about security. (And really ask; don’t just ask boilerplate questions and accept a boilerplate answer.)

Some particular technology applications favor the Cloud. Server demand can fluctuate widely, for example, and a server farm can assign units as needed. An e-commerce firm with its own servers must either face slowdowns when traffic is heaviest (sale days, for example), or must keep servers that sit idle most of the time. Perhaps it doesn’t hurt that most people with websites, like me, have them hosted somewhere. So we are accustomed to having our websites hosted out in the Cloud.

Other Cloud successes seem due to particular firms and their services, such as SalesForce.com. I don’t have a staff of salespeople, so I haven’t a clue what this SaaS package does, but it must be doing it pretty well because it gets a lot of attention.

Whether the Cloud conquers business computing is going to end up depending mostly on fairly prosaic things like comparative cost of onsite hardware versus cloud services, perceived service quality, and how many people out there come up with killer-app Cloud solutions.

On the consumer side it is more complicated. Are people comfortable storing their personal files off in the Cloud somewhere? Don’t some people wish they could delete some of their Facebook pictures, and really delete them? And I like knowing where the manuscript of my novel is, a copy safely on my backup drive. How safe that really is, is another matter, but I like the feeling. Do I really want to entrust it to the Cloud?

But the mobile Internet will probably win it for the Cloud. My desktop is one thing, but no one expects to keep everything they own, so to speak, loaded into their smartphone. Which won’t keep you from demanding access to all your virtual stuff, whenever and wherever you want it. With a mobile device storing something in the Cloud feels natural. The coming mobile Internet age will probably leave earthbound desktop users like me as quaint fossils, with my external drive still next to my landline phone.

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Posted in Cloud Computing, Mobile Internet | 3 Comments »