Stories by Bernard Golden

  • Cloud computing has its ‘Jevons Moment'

    In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question, a book with a prosaic title that contained profound implications. Jevons set out to establish the size of England's coal reserves, a critical question for industrial and naval power. During his research, he stumbled upon a curious paradox: As coal use became more efficient due to the advent of better quality steam engines, coal consumption rose rather than fell.

  • The real Cloud computing revolution

    My last post noted that the IT industry appears to suffer from cloud computing ennui, as the number of Google searches for the term over the past two years has dropped significantly. I also said that other evidence indicates that many IT users appear to have put cloud computing in the "done and dusted" category despite not really understanding it very well.

  • 10 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2014

    Cloud computing is increasingly becoming the rule and not the exception for application deployment. This will make 2014 an interesting and disruptive year for vendors, service providers and IT organizations grappling with this change.

  • Cloud security not really slowing IT adoption

    Cloud security has been discussed ad nauseum for years, and it's often cited as the biggest barrier to enterprise cloud adoption. Such conversations are misguided and ignore the larger challenge of cloud adoption: accommodating developers.

  • Cloud computing done the Netflix way

    I serve as the co-chairman of the SVForum Cloud and Virtualization SIG, based in Silicon Valley. Thanks to our location, we are able to call upon an array of innovative and interesting speakers and attract a sophisticated, knowledgeable audience.

  • How Cloud computing is forcing IT evolution

    I had the privilege of chairing the infrastructure track at last week's Cloud Connect conference. Three of the presentations were particularly interesting, offering a good perspective on just how dramatic an effect cloud computing is having on IT. Summed up, the capability and agility of cloud computing is forcing an extremely rapid evolution.

  • How Cloud computing is changing data center design, cost

    If you've read this blog for a while, it's no secret that I believe that one aspect of cloud computing is a dramatic drop in the cost of computing. While many discuss cloud computing's cost advantage in terms of better utilization via resource pooling and rapid elasticity, we believe that there is a more fundamental shift going on as data centers are redesigned to focus on scale, efficiency, and a shift to commodity components.

  • The challenges of competing with Cloud computing providers

    In discussions about cloud computing and in comments readers leave on my blog posts, I commonly get statements along the lines of "Yeah, this cloud computing stuff sounds great, but at the end of the day, you have to have an IT guy solving problems like they've always done." In personal interactions, I often hear this sentiment portrayed as, "Public cloud computing is fine for the SMB and startup market, but enterprises aren't ready to move to that model." The tone of much of this feedback is that anyone who advocates cloud computing is at best naive or at worst incapable of understanding the real details of IT.

  • Cloud computing's present and future: What you need to know

    I had the opportunity to participate in two conferences over the past couple of weeks, and got what are essentially headlines ripped from today's newspapers about the state of cloud computing in the real world as well as a figurative text message from the future of cloud computing.