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Cloud

Pertaining to applications provided as services through the Web.

A Million Monkeys Demonstrate the Power of Hadoop

May 10, 2012 by Alex Olesker
with 172 views
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The idea is that, though at any given instance the chance of a monkey typing a sonnet is essentially zero, with infinite instances it becomes almost certain. Anderson wanted to try this for himself but he didn’t have a million monkeys, a million typewriters, and infinite time and resources, so instead he used his home computer, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and Hadoop to achieve the same results. [read more]

Behind Latest Systems Integration Boom: Cloud, Virtualization and Government

May 10, 2012 by Joe McKendrick
with 48 views
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Photo: Wikipedia

The cloud is disrupting the systems integration market big time, a new study confirms. Will the systems integration industry as we know it look very different in a few years, as companies seek applications and services in bite-sized chunks off the cloud, versus big-budget engagements? [read more]

BI Past, Present, Future — Interview with TEC

May 9, 2012 by Timo Elliott
with 73 views
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The key area of improvement that is required is to always remember that BI is about people and the business, not about the software architecture. The technology is, of course, often a challenge, but when BI projects fail, it’s almost inevitably a problem with organization, culture, expectation setting, and business alignment. If you run a BI project, you should be spending more time on these things than the underlying IT infrastructure. [read more]

The Amazon Effect: Zuora, Citrix and the Acceleration of the Cloud Economy

May 7, 2012 by Brent Leary
with 82 views
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When Amazon started making their infrastructure and IT processes available outside the company firewall in 2006 it was a tipping point of sorts for business consumerization of the cloud.  Companies of all sizes leveraged a variety of Amazon Web Services to store data, stream video, run online stores and a ton of other things. And... [read more]

Has 'cloud computing' become a redundant phrase?

May 6, 2012 by Joe McKendrick
with 190 views
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My eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Pedrick, probably would have a field day with her red pen if she ever read many of the IT-related blogs out there – including mine. One of her pet peeves was the loading up of sentences with redundancies; most thoughts could be expressed neatly and cleanly with an economy of words. Consider phrases... [read more]

Refuse to be a Cloud data hostage.

April 27, 2012 by Ephraim Cohen
with 46 views
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Most people agreed that, philosophically, Vogels was right – nobody wants to be pay big bucks just to be held hostage to a cloud vendor, regardless of whether it was for IaaS, Paas, or SaaS. For that matter, nobody wants to have to pay big bucks to break free, either! [read more]

Behind AmazonSupply, a Nuts-and-Bolts Service Oriented Architecture

April 26, 2012 by Joe McKendrick
with 82 views
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Photo: Wikipedia

Jason Busch takes a good stab at analyzing the architectural underpinnings of AmazonSupply, noting it has an edge over B2B e-commerce competitors because it is an SOA-enabled platform-based model, “with interoperability at the very core of the DNA.” [read more]

Why a Chargeback Model for Private Cloud May Be Problematic

April 14, 2012 by Joe McKendrick
with 98 views
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Photo: Wikimedia

Essentially, private cloud is pitched as a more secure answer to public cloud — only services are purchased from IT or some other group in the organization, versus an outside provider such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft. However, from an economics standpoint, the two models aren’t comparable [read more]

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Is Cloud Computing Hurtling Towards Disaster?

April 12, 2012 by Paul Barsch
with 124 views
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As public cloud environments inevitably experience technological advances, increased multi-tenancy, colossal system sizes, tight coupling of processes and components, and myriad IT personnel decisions (and errors) these systems will grow more risky to the point where system accidents will become commonplace. [read more]

Datameer Provides End-user Focused BI Solutions for Big Data Analytics

April 10, 2012 by Bob Gourley
with 118 views
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Lightspring/shutterstock.com

I’ve met with the CEO (Stefan Groschupf) and other Datameer executives. I’ve also interacted with them in events like our Government Big Data Forum. Through these events plus demonstrations by some of their greatest engineers has led me to a few conclusions about Datameer. In general, I believe enterprise technologists should take note of this firm for several reasons. [read more]

Challenges and Opportunities in Big Data From Industry and Academia Panel

April 5, 2012 by Alex Olesker
with 209 views
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After government executives announced 0ver $200 million in Big Data initiatives last week, a panel of thought leaders from industry and academia moderated by New York Times technology and innovation reporter Steve Lohr discussed the current state and exciting future of Big Data research. [read more]

BI in the Cloud

April 4, 2012 by Shaughn Knight
with 264 views
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Julien Tromeur/shutterstock.com

BI facilitates companies to analyze data and turn it into valuable business information. As more data and applications migrate into the cloud, numerous new data sources are being created. Cloud-based BI and analytics offer companies and business users multiple benefits. Businesses of all sizes can leverage vast computing and storage resources in the cloud without having to invest in expanding their existing IT footprints or IT support staffs. [read more]

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Is Bigger, Better in the Cloud?

April 2, 2012 by Paul Barsch
with 85 views
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Pictureguy/shutterstock.com

Risk management is a critical topic business and IT professionals must take into account in terms of cloud computing. And especially for mission critical data such as human resources, payroll, financial or even patient data, security and privacy of sensitive data is a paramount concern when considering cloud delivery models. But do the biggest cloud providers hold the most promise in terms of viability, security, and risk management? [read more]

The Fallacy of the Data Scientist Shortage

April 1, 2012 by Neil Raden
with 1,164 views
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Photo by justgrimes via Flickr

The shortage of data scientists to handle big data is overblown. Much of these activities are currently practiced, albeit without Hadoop and some other recent innovations. But the simple truth is that even data scientists spend a good portion of their day doing things that can be done by others. In addition, the demand for data scientists is hardly even across industries and those that require these skills already have them or know how to get them, either through employment, 3rd party analytics providers, purchased apps or consulting. [read more]

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From Complexity to Simplicity in the Cloud

March 21, 2012 by Paul Barsch
with 103 views
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The inner workings of cloud computing can be quite complex. That’s why the founders of Dropbox are on the right path—make cloud computing as simple as possible with easy to understand user-interfaces to mask “behind the scenes” infrastructure and connections. [read more]

Are Public Clouds Complex Environments?

March 15, 2012 by Paul Barsch
with 74 views
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Image courtesy of author's blog

To understand if a particular system is complex, we must understand if it has characteristics such as connected objects (nodes and links with interdependencies), multiple messages and transactions, hierarchies, and behavioral rules (instructions). [read more]