Moving to a SaaS desktop environment such as Google Apps or Microsoft 365 has proven to be a compelling proposition for a number of companies. In particular companies operating in travel and retail find that cloud based ‘office’ environments are a good fit with their mobile workforces. Apparently, the move is often triggered by the […]
Last week I delivered a two-day CCSK (certificate of cloud security knowledge) in Kuala Lumpur. The typical structure of this training, as suggested by the Cloud Security Alliance, calls for a day of lecture followed by a day of practical exercises. However, I mixed lecture with case study and exercise, because I have experienced that […]
How good is ‘Google Sites’ as a web hosting platform? For my contribution to the Computer Measurement Group’s (CMG) yearly conference (CMG Las Vegas 2012) I am reviewing a number of webhosting options. One of the basic options is ‘Google Sites’, which is a content management system (CMS) with hosting and a content distribution network, […]
Amazon Web Services’ S3 can be a pretty good and cheap approach to webhosting, serving files at a cost of  cents per 1000 hits. How much of an improvement would it be to serve these files out of Amazon’s Cloudfront, the content delivery service that caches content around the world? Here are the results of […]
What do you do when somebody comes to live next door and spoils the whole neighborhood? They leave, you leave or you learn to live with it?
What does that have to do with cloud computing? I will give you an example.
Just to let you know that I created a brief note about 5 organisations that got value from using cloud computing. It is brief, but explains the main business reason and how they did it. Examples include profit and nonprofit businesses, public cloud and private cloud. You can get immediate access to it by filling […]
With multiple cloud providers, possibly including private clouds and internal IT, how do you make this manageable for the user? How can you create a single user name that can be used across all these services? Ideally, the user needs to login only once. This is often called ‘Single sign on’ or SSO. The big […]
When I talk or write about cloud computing, the first questions that come to the minds of people are: How do I know my data is stored in a safe way? Think: crashes, outages, viruses, providers going bankrupt etc. How do I know other people don’t touch my data? Think: hackers, criminals, our government, another […]
One of my course participants came back to me after I wrote about “public and private cloud computing“. His company runs a service where his customers access their digitized paper files. The service runs on servers that they deploy from a hosting provider. Because of this, they can promise their customers that their data will […]
