WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, March 15, 2013

For many companies, moving their web-application servers to the cloud is an attractive option, since cloud-computing services can offer economies of scale, extensive technical support and easy accommodation of demand fluctuations.

But for applications that depend heavily on database queries, cloud hosting can pose as many problems as it solves. Cloud services often partition their servers into “virtual machines,” each of which gets so many operations per second on a server’s central processing unit, so much space in memory, and the like. That makes cloud servers easier to manage, but for database-intensive applications, it can result in the allocation of about 20 times as much hardware as should be necessary. And the cost of that overprovisioning gets passed on to customers.

Source: MIT.edu

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Google Elbows into the Cloud

In a battle for dominance in cloud computing, Google is taking on Microsoft and Amazon in their own back yard. Google said Tuesday that it was doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, and stepping up the hiring of engineers and others who work on cloud technology. It is part of Google’s dive into a business known as cloud services — renting to other businesses access to its enormous data storage and computing power, accessible by the Internet.

Cloud computing's security pitfalls

The word cloud evokes images of all things soft and gentle; the kiss of a kitten or the soft touch of a lambswool mitten. While that might be true of clouds in the real world, those in cyberspace are turning out to be very different entities indeed, especially when it comes to security. Some of them are downright dangerous.

Why Cloud Computing Is Slowly Winning The Trust War

Seeing skeptical CIOs agree to cloud-based pilots of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other applications is evidence of how cloud computing is slowly winning the trust war. Further evidence can be seen from how skeptical many of these CIOs initially were, and how successful pilots led to their gradual trust. This trust hasn’t come cheap however.

Big Data Is the New Cloud Computing

Big data used to have a specific meaning. Meant to describe cast-offs such as log files, this information was "big" because of the amount of electronic refuse created when processing, say, an e-commerce transaction. Big data used to be an exercise in digital dumpster diving. Those days are gone. At the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference, "big data" became a proxy for social data compiled by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. A synonym for capturing sentiment, but on a grand scale. Every company had to become a "big data" company, panelists enthused.

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

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