Archive for May, 2010
Cloud computing tops Gartner Group’s list of Top Ten strategic technologies and trends for 2010. Says Gartner V.P. David Cearley, “Companies should factor (these) top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years.”
Jon Brodkin, a senior editor at Network World talks about some of the confusion around how cloud apps work and what kind of long-term impact they will have on business technology.
The popular understanding of “Cloud Computing” is, to say the least, pretty cloudy. The “conventional” understanding of cloud computing involves application (software) hosting at data centers “out in the Internet cloud” that are owned by whoever is providing the hosted apps. The hosting companies own the hardware that houses the software you’re using, and they, not you, are responsible to keep that hardware running properly, to back up the data you’re creating on their servers, and to support the software you’re using.
That all sounds really good at first glance, and it clearly offers some excellent business benefits, but prospective users of cloud computing have some very important concerns that have largely been buried under a truckload of hype in the industry buzz over “the Cloud.”