What’s the status of cloud computing? There’s been so much talk and hype about cloud over the past few years, it can be hard to tell where it is, and what you should be doing about it. My latest IT Briefcase column dives into the current state of cloud computing.
The presence of “big data” is changing the way data is being stored for organizations. Not only do organizations have structured and semi-structured data, but there are volumes of unstructured data coming from sources within and increasingly outside the firewall. The percentage of mission-critical data is growing within the company as well, and therefore creating a situation where IT has to be able to guarantee as much as half of the data that resides in a company’s systems can be recoverable and accessible within minutes or hours.
Read the full column on big data storage and backup at IT Briefcase.net.
Like it or not, Big Data is coming. In order to be ready, it’s important to also consider the security implications of a Big Data strategy. Read my recent IT Briefcase column on Big Data and Security for all the details.
There is no doubt that Big Data and Cloud Computing are taking the enterprise computing landscape by storm hand-in-hand. Big Data — the ability to effectively capture, manage, and utilize large swaths of different-structure data – has companies with their head in the clouds, as the first enterprise-grade version of a Big Data software platform became available in January. Read the full story on Big Data in my recent IT Briefcase column.
Just as there are a range of potential problems facing traditional IT, cloud computing also has its share of potential drawbacks. For example, a spate of recent cloud outages have raised new concerns about infrastructure vulnerability when it comes to running business-critical services on the cloud. Given the recent push to move Big Data to the cloud, we are at an important inflection point regarding the viability of the public cloud and what enterprises should be doing.Read the full story on Cloud Problems at IT Briefcase.
Microsoft is upping the ante considerably with its recent announcement regarding Yammer. For a price of $1.2 billion, Yammer has agreed to be purchased by Microsoft, according to sources. The synergy between the two products makes for an easy sell, since Yammer’s social collaboration software already links to Microsoft products like Outlook email and SharePoint collaboration, enhancing the traditionally dominant office productivity tools. Read the full story about Microsoft and Yammer.
Lots of stuff happening in the cloud and social marketing space. My recent column on cloud-based social marketing acquisitions covers the developments.
The goal of business intelligence is to support better decision-making in business. The direction of modern healthcare is evidence-based medicine driven by the proper use of data. Clearly, the combination of business intelligence in healthcare would seem to be a match made in heaven. On the one hand, hospitals have terabytes of data about patients, procedures, pharmaceuticals, and diagnoses. They have a veritable goldmine full of data and information that can be used to drive superior patient treatment and care. If only they had a way to mine that data, though. The reality is that many of today’s healthcare systems are a discrete collection of legacy systems that do not share information readily, making it very difficult for a clinician to utilize all of the data that has been captured in a meaningful way for the patient’s best care.
Is there a solution? Perhaps…. Read my latest IT Briefcase column on BI and Healthcare.
We’ve seen lots of recent announcements about new cloud computing solutions. But one that caught our eyes was HP’s announcement of its first public cloud services available as a public beta. On May 10, 2012, HP released three beta services that are the first of their kind under the company’s Converged Cloud portfolio. HP Cloud Compute (on-demand virtual servers), HP Cloud Object Store (online storage), and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network (global content delivery) are all available via a pay-as-you-go model. Pricing is tiered – for example, a standard medium instance for HP Cloud Compute that delivers 4GB of RAM and 120GB local disk is $0.16 per hour. Pricing is 50% off for a limited time as HP establishes its service levels.
For the complete story on HP’s new cloud offerings, check out my recent column IT Briefcase column on HP’s Cloud Computing.
There’s no doubt that cloud computing will be a big part of most organization’s future IT plans.
The real question, though, is how to get there. That’s why I’ve pulled together some considerations that organizations should think about to start mapping out their move to cloud in this IT Briefcase post on Cloud Computing Considerations.
