There's a common assumption that the Cloud's destiny is to be a public utility. Mark Thiele, of data center operator Switch, argues that would kill competition and innovation, and that IT can be a better option.
After Sandy, disaster recovery is on everyone's minds. But for companies who can't find the budget for a full-on business continuity plan, here's a way to start small by focusing on your post-disaster communications plan. this ensures you keep in touch with customers and employees.
In the fight over private versus public clouds, we’re all arguing about the same thing. But we keep doing it because we somehow believe we can confuse the customer into buying “more of mine” and “less of hers” if we explain how our vision of cloud is better. I’ve written about what cloud is or isn’t several times in the past, but, I feel that I missed some important context. The context is what leads me to consider the idea of three different clouds. So what are they?
Big data this, big data that, everywhere you look these days there are stories and adverts for big data products, and services. We know why the industry likes big data, it’s because they expect it to be a $50 billion market in the next five years. Many of us have also come to accept that big data can offer a real competitive advantage to those who use it effectively. So, if it’s safe to assume that big data is real, and that you should be investing, where do you start and what should you expect as you go through the adoption process? Big data today, is what the web was in 1993. We knew the web was something and that it might get big, but few of us really understood what “big” meant. Today, I believe we aren’t even scratching the surface of the big data opportunity.
Just thirty years ago, innovation in almost any category was measured in years, but today it’s measured in weeks or months. If you were to focus on information technology specifically you could even argue that change can occur in days — and that cycle will continue to accelerate.
But adapting and innovating in IT requires that you have a platform strategy that allows for heterogeneous adoption of technology at each layer of infrastructure. You also need simplified, cost-effective, real-time access to a wide range of partners and solution providers, otherwise known as your technology ecosystem. This group of providers will be a veritable marketplace of vendors that are proprietary and open source, but whom together create a combination of technologies and services that allow the buyer to mix and match for any solution requirement.