AWS in 2018: past is prolog One of the publications to which I am a regular contributor recently asked me to jot down some predictions for AWS in the coming year. While I understand the appeal of this genre, I’m loathe to label something a prediction, with all the Solomonic connotations, since I feel that our inherent cognitive… Read More »
Google Cloud services have evolved significantly over the past year, with an eye toward the enterprise. But there’s still room for improvement in 2017. The popularity of Amazon Web Services’ public cloud makes it easy to overlook other large, competitive infrastructure as a service options, such as Google Cloud Platform. Most people are familiar with Google’s cloud offerings… Read More »
It’s easy to migrate data to the cloud, but not as easy to get data out. AWS has eased some lock-in concerns with data export and transfer techniques. Cloud data lock-in is a perennial concern of IT execs who fear that once they move applications and data to an infrastructure as a service provider, technical constraints will make… Read More »
Backup and redundancy continue to be two of the most common usage scenarios for public cloud — and the reason is simple economics. Renting or building space in a secondary facility for backup is expensive, particularly when there’s a thriving, competitive industry devoted to providing rentable IT infrastructure. Due to its integration with Windows Server, and flexible licensing… Read More »
In many organizations, the IT department was an evolutionary outgrowth of increased dependence on technology. This meant IT itself was often organized around technologies, not business processes or salable products. The resulting IT silos, marred by intra-departmental finger-pointing and information hoarding, create inefficient operations, poor IT service delivery and slow responsiveness to new service requests. Indeed, IT is… Read More »
As AWS continues to evolve, it moves from being an infrastructure as a service provider to a platform for application development and runtime infrastructure. While many AWS back-end services are tailored to the enterprise, other services such as Mobile Hub and Device Farm have commercial uses. And Amazon Lumberyard is the newest among those. On the surface, Lumberyard… Read More »
Despite the advantages of cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, they still come with overhead. Whether its virtual servers, object storage buckets or SQL databases, you must provision resources before using them. While that seems like an obvious requirement, it does add cost, time and friction to the cloud experience. But what if the… Read More »
In IT, each generational transition has called for modernizing and redesigning applications, business processes and IT infrastructure to exploit new capabilities and efficiencies. This occurred when PCs and LANs usurped the mainframe and drove client-server computing, eliminating expensive hardware and the issue of data scarcity. Innovation happened again when the internet and WANs disrupted client-server computing, and then… Read More »
With scores of different services, AWS can be daunting to new users. Indeed, it exemplifies the paradox of choice, namely that having more options and degrees of freedom creates complexity that makes it harder to make a decision. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the choice of databases. AWS has six database products, including two different relational… Read More »
This column initially appeared on Diginomica as Digital Hijackers: The Rising Threat of Ransomware to Business Imagine you are the CEO of a hospital and come in one day to find staff in a panic because they can’t use critical systems like CT scanners, lab test and emergency room equipment or access pharmacy records. That’s precisely the nightmare scenario… Read More »