3rd January 2012

Whilst Cloud Computing is still very much in its infancy, I expect great things are still to come for the industry once cruelly referred to as "just another fad". Below, I outline my predictions for the year ahead and where I see Cloud Computing technologies heading in 2012.

The economic crisis will be the number one driving factor for the increasing uptake of Cloud Computing

We are continually being subjected to the doom and gloom of the economic turmoil. Recently it was documented that Britain could be stripped of its AAA credit rating, because of the fact that it is not immune from the Eurozone crisis. Such a lack of confidence in the economy trickles down to the individual companies on the frontline who are finding it increasingly difficult to secure credit from the banks. In short, businesses simply do not have the upfront capital that they had five years ago to invest in new infrastructure or refresh their networks, and are therefore instead looking for more cost-effective alternatives.

9th December 2011

Power outages such as those experienced by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft in recent months are not only hugely embarrassing for the cloud giants, but also incredibly disruptive for the affected users.

Take for example, Amazon Web Services' latency issues in its Virginia data centre in April. A number of sites that use Amazon's cloud to run their web services, including Hoot-Suite, Foursquare and Quora, were all knocked offline for several days, which was obviously hugely costly for all involved.

16th November 2011

With the advent of Cloud Computing, businesses are able to pool resources, and form partnerships with other companies in the Cloud much more readily than they would have been able to do ten years ago. Indeed, ecosystems are forming across all verticals and across businesses of all sizes because storing data and applications in the "ether" makes it far easier for others to access that information for themselves. Furthermore, pooling resources in the Cloud could mean that two companies agree to share the cost of a virtualised server, resulting in reduced capital expenditure for both.

26th October 2011

High profile power outages, such as those suffered by Amazon, Microsoft and Google in recent months are continuing to mar the Cloudcomputing industry. But many Cloudservice providers are attempting to lessen the frustrations of the thousands who are faced with significant downtime by pledging to pay out compensation to all affected customers. Indeed, many providers are starting to guarantee a "four nines" (99.99%), or even a "five nines" (99.999%), SLA with regards to uptime. Such SLAs state that if the end-user receives less than 99.99 or 99.999% uptime, they will receive an agreed amount of compensation.