Given how much confusing and often contradictory information has been filling the media over the last week, it wouldn't surprise me if some iPhone users were calling in priests to exorcise the demons of privacy invasion.
If you are a professional or small business currently beta testing Microsoft's cloud-based productivity and collaboration suite, Office 365, you will want to add your registered domain name to the service.
As with any new exciting technology, companies commonly look towards creating a "strategy" around the movement in order to ensure their investments achieve the greatest ROI. In the 1990s, it was all about how companies needed a "Linux" strategy; the last decade has been dominated with companies needing a "virtualization" strategy; and the trend I'm seeing today is everyone talking about needing a "cloud computing" strategy.
Last week I wrote about how CIOs should go about rolling out cloud computing initiatives. In the piece, my conclusion was headed "An Unusually Fast Platform Shift"; I noted that the pace of innovation and adoption regarding cloud computing far outstrips any previous platform shift.
I'm guessing many of you are asking if cloud computing isn't just a new name for ASPs, software as a service, outsourcing or, for us older guys, timesharing. While the cloud certainly shares principles with all of them, something more significant is happening, something with the same impact as the generational shift from mainframes to client/server.
As poet Robert Burns famously put it, the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley, that is, they often go awry. Im thinking of those lines as I struggle to clean up a backup and subsequent hard drive replacement that went seriously wrong.
I like to think that most of us who use computers are reasonably bright and responsible. So I get really irritated by the mindset of some technology vendors who insist that treating us like children is not only okay, but also the responsible thing for them to do.
Somebody once said that cloud apps are just like enterprise software, only more so. OK, nobody ever said that. Actually, most everyone says they're much easier and faster than traditional software projects. And done right, cloud projects can be. Because done right, they are smaller, simpler, and more separable than tightly-coupled software projects were.
During the past three to five years, when most companies began rolling out virtual servers in earnest as replacements for physical servers, acceptance has grown so quickly among both end users and IT staffs that more than half of all companies now deploy new applications on virtual servers by preference, rather than physical ones, according to a December study from IDC.
Yet another reason to take extra precautions while browsing Facebook arose today as reports surfaced that traffic destined for Facebook from AT&T's servers took a misguided loop through China and South Korea this week.
Windows Intune, Microsoft's Web-based PC management and security platform, is available today for purchase or for a 30-day free trial.
There's a new version of the Firefox browser coming out this week, and it's so good you may want to adopt it instead of either Microsoft's IE or Google's Chrome. Indeed, I've already made the switch using an almost complete version of Firefox 4; the finished product will be ready to download on Tuesday, March 22.
You might think that technology supports your business, but you're wrong: Technology has become your business. The 21st century reality is that you don't have a business without technology; it has become as integral to the way your business operates as are people, finances, suppliers, business partners, and all the rest. That means it's too risky to build your business and only then look to put supporting digital technology underneath. Instead, business and technology must be designed and built together, as a unified whole - there are simply too many design tradeoffs between the physical and digital aspects of your business to risk doing it any other way. The new mindset is that "your business is embodied in your technology," and this calls for a new approach to business technology architecture and strategy.
As more sourcing executives consider incorporating SaaS solutions into their overall technology vendor landscape, the potential to significantly disrupt the current software market grows. And while SaaS adoption is expected to expand in the coming years, the challenge for sourcing professionals will be a lack of uniform adoption across the whole software market. In some software categories, SaaS will be a disruptive technology, in others the only option, and in many cases SaaS will have minimal impact.
Marquette University's IT department deployed unified communications tools to improve collaboration among faculty and staff - IT staff collaboration wasn't the priority. But as it turned out, Microsoft's Lync suite of voice, videoconferencing and instant messaging tools proved to be IT's life raft during a snowstorm-related data center calamity.