Virtualization

Nick Carr sees cloud's potential -- but while it's tempting to forecast The End of Computing, it's unlikely that IT development will stop at Amazon-hosted centralized computing, Bernard Golden argues.

Traditional business intelligence solutions can't scale to the degree necessary in today's data environment. One solution getting a lot of attention recently: Hadoop, an open-source product inspired by Google's search architecture.

Can cloud providers achieve economies of scale that preclude almost any organization's data center from being cost-competitive? Doing the math on one real-life example, a Microsoft data center, gets pretty interesting.

There's a great deal of uncertainty how data security and privacy laws and regulations apply in a cloud computing environment. That's not good news for policymakers or users.

Where you come down on that question depends a great deal on how you think most IT organizations will consume cloud services. How will IT organizations achieve an infrastructure that scales easily, can be reconfigured in minutes rather than weeks, and has a transparent cost based on usage?

Salesforce.com's plan to integrate Twitter into its Service Cloud customer service platform could benefit competitors.

The typical cost discussion regarding internal data center versus cloud provider costs is over-simplified and fails to assign a true cost structure to the internal data center side. This isn't really surprising: Most IT organizations really don't have a clear understanding of their true costs in the first place.

The bottom line on this week's announcements from Amazon and Microsoft for AWS and Azure, respectively: Significant improvements to their offerings that reduce common objections to the use of cloud platforms.

CIO.com's Bernard Golden says a new UC Berkeley report has some sage advice for IT groups regarding cloud computing, but that it also underestimates some challenges.

This plan presents the extremely intriguing possibility that IBM might offer IBM-powered systems as EC2-based "cloudburst" capability, enabling companies with IBM-based systems located within their data centers to dynamically expand applications into EC2.