by DavidSpratt | Oct 29, 2012 | ICT
We are delighted to hear that tech giant HP has just confirmed its commitment to cloud computing. It will come as a relief to many of HP’s customers around the globe that the company has finally moved to address their lack of a viable cloud computing offering.
Their Converged Cloud – a ‘technology framework incorporating public and private clouds plus managed hosting’ – is HP’s open-source answer to the market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud. HP has hinted at some major announcements ahead – at December’s HP Discover Event in Germany – and industry whispers are that these will include details of their refined cloud services offer.
Over the past few years, a noticeable lack of communication around their offering in this key area is reflected in HP’s increasingly poor financial and share price performance – the company having recently hit its lowest stock price in a decade. (more…)
by DavidSpratt | Aug 2, 2012 | ICT
Who owns your data if it resides in the cloud somewhere? Let’s say that you are using a cloud based CRM system and the company delivering it goes into receivership. What happens to your data? Can the receiver sell it to a competitor? Can they even demand that you buy it back from them under threat of refusal to give you access to it? Even worse (if that’s possible) they could just decide to blank the disk storage and sell it for scrap to recover funds.
Microsoft’s announcement last week that it will collaborate with NZ hosting company Revera to provide its public cloud systems on Revera’s private cloud infrastructure goes a long way towards addressing this issue for New Zealand businesses
The alliance will create a hybrid cloud service that Revera has called ‘Homeland Collaboration’. In real terms what this means is that cloud computing services – originally developed for the retail/consumer market driven mainly by US companies – are now more aligned to the needs of the New Zealand businesses adopting them.
Data sovereignty relates to the Laws under which cloud services operate. These Laws are usually focused on the physical location of the servers that deliver the service. Prior to this new hybrid cloud service, a New Zealand user could end up subject to US Law or the Law of one of its States in the event of any dispute. This is potentially confusing, complex and very, very expensive. Put simply, the hybrid cloud service brings New Zealand businesses back under the jurisdiction of New Zealand law.
Hat’s off to Revera – a fantastic example of a Kiwi company seeing the gap and taking the initiative to fill it – to the benefit of all. But don’t be lulled into a false sense of security, data ownership is still covered by the contract in place with the service provider (eg Microsoft, Rackspace or Salesforce.com) so READ THE SMALLPRINT carefully and make sure that you know how they deal with data ownership before you sign up.
by DavidSpratt | Feb 27, 2012 | ICT
Cloud services have emerged as a genuine threat to established hardware and software providers as well as to the many thousands of IT professionals who have made their living selling and supporting these products over the last twenty or more years.
This threat makes ICT investment decisions by businesses particularly challenging as we are encouraged by one group to stick with the tried and true and by another to throw away the old and bring in the new.
How can the average business customer judge the importance of a new technology or the continued relevance of existing technology choices to their business?
While the answer to this question can often be complex, at its heart is a simple challenge “What is the purpose of this technology?”
This three part series assesses the importance of cloud services to business by looking at whether a particular service reduces costs and/or improves businesses performance when compared to the existing way of doing things.
Part One of this series addresses Infrastructure as a Service – where traditional ICT services such as storage and processing power are provided.
Parts Two and Three will address:
Platform as a Service – where organisations can purchase the toolkit necessary to build and operate their own software
Software as a Service – where organisations can access software such as email or office productivity tools. (more…)
We are delighted to hear that tech giant HP has just confirmed its commitment to cloud computing. It will come as a relief to many of HP’s customers around the globe that the company has finally moved to address their lack of a viable cloud computing offering.