In April of last year, Satoshi Nakajima, founder of Washington-based Big Canvas Inc., was eagerly inviting new customers to subscribe to his company's flagship product, PhotoShare, which lets users swap Apple iPhone photos for free.
Everyone in the IT industry is talking about cloud computing, but there is still confusion about what the cloud is, how it should be used and what problems and challenges it might introduce. This FAQ will answer some of the key questions enterprises are asking about cloud computing.
Google has apologized for yesterday's service outage that left 14 percent of its user base without Google's wide variety of online services for a few hours.
Software developer Christopher Shockey saw the first signs of trouble in late 2008. A sales rep who had always represented Web application development provider Coghead was now calling on behalf of Coghead's much larger rival Salesforce.com.
Nick Carr was right and I was wrong. Sort of, anyway.<br/>
When the IT world looks back at 2008, it will certainly remember the global financial crisis. But it will also likely link that time frame with the takeoff of cloud computing, the engine behind more conferences, conversations and marketing collateral than seemingly any other technology in development today.
Companies looking to reduce their IT costs and complexity by tapping into cloud computing services should first make sure that they won't be stepping on any privacy land mines in the process, according to a report released this week by the World Privacy Forum.
As cloud computing's security gaps become more visible, users are finding ways to safeguard their data.
Back in 1991, before the Internet was a big deal, Ohio State University technologist Jerry Martin signalled the nascent Internet's value with an official standards document entitled "There's gold in them thar networks!" (RFC1290) Although simmering as an academic tool for years, the Internet had not yet triggered a significant paradigm shift for commercial computing. Martin's formal proclamation was an early push to business, which eventually embraced Internet commerce wholeheartedly.
Enterprise IT shops are starting to embrace the notion of building private clouds, modeling their infrastructure after public service providers such as Amazon and Google. But while virtualization and other technologies exist to create computing pools that can allocate processing power, storage and applications on demand, the technology to manage those distributed resources as a whole is still in the early stages.
Cloud services claim to provide nearly everything you need without requiring you to run your own IT infrastructure. From e-mail and Web hosting to fully managed applications to vast on-demand computing resources, the cloud is shaping up to be one of the most important technology shifts in the last few years.
A year in which the economics of the travel and hotel industries are so bad that business analysts keep making comparisons to the months immediately following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York is not generally the time most IT people would be comfortable putting together a disaster recovery plan for the first time. Most would be in their offices, sweating over spreadsheets, looking for ways to trim spending a bit more, or push a project to drive down operational costs.
Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google's and Amazon.com's current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation's own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.
When the computer industry buys into a buzzword, it's like getting a pop song stuck in your head. It's all you hear. Worse, the same half-dozen questions about the hyped trend are incessantly paraded out, with responses that succeed mainly in revealing how poorly understood the buzzword actually is.
As IT evolves to support everything from virtualized desktops to mobile and social networking, new advances promise to change the way the business side of the house gets the job done. Here's a look at some of IT departments' game-changing technologies and how they affect the everyday worker.
EDGE is the leading technology conference for business leaders in Australia and New Zealand, built on the foundations of collaboration, education and advancement.
ARN has celebrated gender diversity and recognised female excellence across the Australian tech channel since first launching WIICTA in 2012, acknowledging the achievements of a talented group of female front runners who have become influential figures across the local industry.
Innovation Awards is the market-leading awards program for celebrating ecosystem innovation and excellence across the technology sector in Australia.
