The latest edition of Six of the Best, featuring the CloudTech editorial team’s favourite links from around the web, has either a slightly hotchpotch feel to it, or covers an extremely wide range of cloud computing stories over the past couple of weeks. We’ll leave it up to you to decide.
1) Moving to the cloud? Don’t rush to kiss legacy applications goodbye [Forbes]
Dominick Paul, national vice president of strategic solutions for SunGard Availability Services, opens with an anecdote. He kicked off a presentation at a CIO summit by explaining that “with the advent of the cloud, UNIX was now a legacy platform.” The audience got the joke – given that UNIX was the hottest thing just five years ago, it seems bizarre to consider it legacy because of the cloud.
As a result, Paul’s theory in the article goes: “Just because cloud-based technologies are the future doesn’t mean that ‘legacy systems’ like mainframe, iSeries and UNIX are history yet.”
Boot up: Plenty of cloud thought leaders have been stressing the importance of on-premise – or more importantly, don’t go all the way to the cloud and forget everything else. As Nirvanix customers will testify, when things go belly up your world can come crashing down quickly.
2) Amazon: Cloud is just the way people do business now [V3]
At the AWS Enterprise Summit in London, Amazon vice president Stephen Schmidt said that companies were getting more comfortable with deploying services in the cloud – and it’s now seen as de rigeur – the AWS veep likened using the cloud to “paying for electricity instead of firms generating it for themselves”, according to author Daniel Robinson.
Boot up: Earlier this week, an analysis piece from Ovum StraightTalk described AWS as “way ahead of other IaaS providers when it comes to the breadth, depth and number of price cuts,” as well as noting that Google’s price cuts were surprising because of the search giant’s “rather timid” approach in the past.
However, author Laurent Lachal adds: “Low cost is the least important reason for an enterprise to pick an IaaS provider. Even AWS competes less on low cost than on the breadth and depth of its technology…business service portfolio and the scope of its partner ecosystem.”
3) Case study: How the BBC uses cloud to process media for iPlayer [Computer Weekly]
The BBC has transferred its content-streaming iPlayer service to the cloud using software called Video Factory, according to Archana Venkatraman in Computer Weekly. BBC iPlayer launched in 2007 to high praise, but demand and user expectations outgrew the rapidly ageing system. The answer, therefore, lay in the cloud.
Boot up: Plenty of announcements related to cloud and entertainment have been made in recent weeks, not least the news that the Xbox One is to launch in China from sister site DeveloperTech. While you’re there, make sure to check out the opinion article from John Mack on April 15 which starts: “Today, I begin with a simple statement: cloud hosting is the future of the games industry.”
4) Ruckus Wireless says new cloud Wi-Fi service opens doors for partners [CRN]
US Wi-Fi provider Ruckus Wireless has launched the first cloud-based Smart Wi-Fi Access Management Services (SAMS), which combines the best of both Wi-Fi and cloud, being able to consume Wi-Fi as a subscription based service without building extensive data centres.
Ruckus VP corporate marketing David Callisch told CRN that the move would not only help partners, but improve relationships with end customers. “[Partners] don’t want to just sell infrastructure to a hotel or a school and just walk away and never see them again,” he said. “They want to have more of a relationship and more of an annuity-based business.”
Boot up: Ruckus has been busy on the announcements front, with sister site TelecomsTech covering the release of what is claimed to be the first product designed on the fledgling 802.11ac standard from the ground up. The company was also at Mobile World Congress in February, with an LTE-heavy conference agenda belying the innovative work done in the Wi-Fi space.
5) SA businesses rush to the cloud, expect 75% penetration in 2 years [Ventureburn]
Here’s an interesting global perspective on cloud. Oliver Potgieter, director at cloud provider Alto Africa, expects South African businesses to lead a charge for “massive adoption” of cloud computing, claiming that currently SA is six years behind the US in utilising cloud technologies.
“For decades, IT has served its own interests and not that of the business,” he writes. “With cloud computing, a corner is turned. Cloud delivers. It is secure, it is flexible, it scales – and South African companies, like those in developed countries, are ready to take to the cloud en masse.”
Boot up: According to a recent survey from government cloud provider Eduserv, a lack of awareness and skills around cloud computing is halting its adoption in central government.
6) And finally: Check out this neat infographic from storage provider Backupify detailing the history of storage, from punch cards in player pianos to the cloud, as well as a graphic posted on CloudTech last week examining the explosive growth of cloud computing.
Six of the Best is an occasional series which uncovers the CloudTech editorial team’s favourite stories from around the web. You can find previous editions here.
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-GB
X-NONE
X-NONE
MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0cm;
mso-para-margin-right:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0cm;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}
