WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, February 08, 2013

Want your mind blown? The Motley Fool Rulebreakers released this report revealing the significance of what has now become referred to as “the cloud.” Give it a read.

What is the cloud?

To be clear, the definition of cloud computing is sometimes still debated among investing and technological professionals. In short, though, cloud computing is a new industry where services are offered and delivered via a network, primarily the internet. Most all firms providing cloud computing services utilize rental or pay as you models for charging users.

Following are 3 of some of the most utilized services:

Software (like accounting, information systems, or HR)

Storage (benefits of data storehouses without owning the necessary tools)

Infrastructure (benefits of hardware and structure without owning the assets)

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Calculating the true cost of cloud outages

Amazon.com had an outage for 49 minutes on Jan. 31, and it cost big -- more than $4 million in lost sales. I'm sure many in the cloud computing community where thinking, "Now you know how it feels." According to Network World's Brandon Butler, "Amazon officials have said that the biggest customer of the company's cloud division -- AWS (Amazon Web Services) -- is Amazon.com. AWS has experienced a variety of outages during the past three years, but usually the Amazon.com retail site is not impacted." For example, an EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Storage) outage in October 2012 affected such customers as Reddit. Moreover, an outage on Christmas Eve 2012 brought down Netflix, but not the video steaming service that Amazon.com provides. In the Jan. 31 case, Amazon.com appears to the affected party.

How Cloud Computing Is Driven by Mobile, Media and Marketing

The crucial fact is that those who defend enterprise computing fail to grasp the fact that legacy IT infrastructure and operations don't address the requirements of new application types that I label the "three M's"—mobile, media and marketing. These apps are flocking to public cloud computing because they're not well served by traditional infrastructure and are much more aligned with what cloud computing brings to the table.

Size Doesn't Matter In IaaS Game

ElasticHosts has launched a new style of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to challenge Amazon, Rackspace and other major cloud service providers with its own brand of cloud services.

ElasticHosts announced Feb. 5 that it has nine data centers around the world, and it's possible all nine would fit into one of Google's or Microsoft's.

Cloud Computing And Thin Clients

Thin clients have been around for as long as there have been computers tied together in networks. The concept is pretty simple; individual users do not need full access to a computer to do their work, so rather than placing a fully functional computer on each desk, a thin client machine provides just the functionality needed to accomplish the necessary tasks.

Thin client systems are useful in some business and institutional settings. They have the advantage of keeping the major computing functions, processing and storage, in a safe, central location. There is also potential savings in software licensing, the software is licensed to the central computer but can be accessed from any of the thin client remote terminals.

We hope these short sum-ups on Cloud Computing are helping you to take a knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming week.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

Santanu Das

Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.