Friday’s tragic mid-Atlantic storms may have been a tipping point in Cloud adoption strategies across the enterprise spectrum. This morning, CIO’s are assessing and defending their choices in conference rooms worldwide, answering to a litany of concerns. Will the weekend outages prove serendipitous for Google’s spanking-new Cloud service product? Once again, we turn to the experts:
“A Summer Storm’s Disruption Is Felt in the Technology Cloud” New York Times
“There was little information for customers about what had happened, or even whether user data was safe…The interruption underlined how businesses and consumers are increasingly exposed to unforeseen risks and wrenching disruptions as they increasingly embrace life in the cloud. It was also a big blow to what is probably the fastest-growing part of the media business, start-ups on the social Web that attract millions of users seemingly overnight.”
“Cloud Outages Show CIOs Still at Vendors’ Mercy” Clint Boulton, WSJ
“When software running in-house suffers an outage, performance monitoring tools alert IT to the problem. This not only gives IT team time to fix the problem, often before end-users are even aware of the problem, it gives CIOs a sense that they’re in control, and lets them report status and problem resolution processes to their CEOs. ‘As CIOs, we want a throat to choke,’ said Salesforce.com customer James Szma.”
“Why performance will help Google steal cloud customers from Amazon” James Urquhart, GigaOM
“The I/O experience alone has been a real thorn in the side of many technologists, who — despite having designed applications to account for performance inconsistency — have real concerns about whether their applications can run as efficiently as possible in such an environment. If Google’s performance claims are confirmed, you will see one or two large-scale AWS customers begin to spread their compute loads between the two services by the middle of 2013. Heck, at least one may actually move off of EC2 altogether.”
“Cybercrime Moves to the Cloud” Elinor Mills, CNET Australia
“The same flexibility and freedom that companies get from having their software and services hosted in the cloud is enabling cybercriminals to conduct highly automated online banking theft — without doing much of the necessary information processing on their victims’ own computers.
Security and privacy experts have long worried that criminals would launch attacks on the servers storing the data in cloud environments. But a report released last week from McAfee and Guardian Analytics (PDF) shows that criminals are now using the cloud infrastructure itself to get more capability out of their campaigns.”
Image Credits: 1. Guardian News, 2. Terra Green, GNU LGPLv2.1; CBSi
