You hear that the cloud is a resilient, redundant source of computing power that will always be there when you need it. Then you read about the outages at infrastructure-as-a-service providers.
Amazon Web Services suffered an outage in June – tough for some, though not as bad as Amazon’s “remirroring storm” in April 2011 that led to thousands of customers being inconvenienced or financially damaged. The security certificate-issuing server in Microsoft’s Azure cloud failed to make the leap and didn’t recognize the date Feb. 29 this year, causing an outage. In 2007, Rackspace lost a transformer at one of its datacenters, and servers started going down.
Why weren’t these outages preventable? Do they each reflect a single point of failure that should have been both foreseen and prevented, or is that just Monday morning quarterbacking?
In fact, cloud datacenters rely on a relatively new type of architecture, running with fewer personnel and more moving parts than conventional datacenters. The designers of these architectures go to great pains to build in redundancies and prevent failures, but they don’t always foresee some events that sound like long-shot impossibilities but nevertheless do happen.
Cloud computing brings many things--it allows collaboration among employees and others who are not geographically co-located. It might save money. It provides redundancy to existing storage.
The promise of 24/7 uptime is one that's almost impossible to deliver, if nothing else because there is little control over the last mile that connects persons to facilities to get to the cloud.
I'm actually less of a fan of cloud computing than others, but there are benefits. It just seems like the primary benefits are not the ones pitched, setting up eventual disappointments.
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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