Published: April 28 2011, 09:19 AM | 2 Comment(s)
by George Watt

Resiliency is not a byproduct of cloud computing About a week ago while thinking of cloud services I realized that I had been having a recurring thought for several weeks: "If a cloud falls in the forest, would anybody hear it?" I resisted several urges to tweet those words thinking it might not really make sense to others and that it might not resonate. I'll never know now - what a difference a week can make . Collateral Resilience The buzz following a service disruption at an undisputed leading cloud provider might give one the impression that there was widespread belief that resilience is always a byproduct of cloud services. If you believe that to be an overstatement perhaps you might at least agree that many consumers of cloud...
Read more...

Published: April 26 2011, 09:21 AM | no comments
by Jay Fry

I'm a sucker for a clever headline. A while back I ran across an article about the "7 Deadly Sins of Cloud Computing" in Computerworld. Antony Savvas was writing about a report from the Information Security Forum (ISF) that announced it had identified those items of great IT wickedness that will turn something that sounds as angelic as it comes - cloud computing - into some sort of pit of eternal damnation. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating, but just go with it. (Though after the beating that Amazon took from some quarters after their EC2 outage last week, maybe I'm not exaggerating by much.) So what were those 7 cloudy yet sinful atrocities? I'll tempt fate by listing them here, as reported by Computerworld UK: Ignorance...
Read more...

Published: April 25 2011, 10:56 PM | no comments
by CA Community

Some blogs percolate for a while, waiting for a good day to be put to paper. For this one - about the cost of reliable cloud - that day was last Thursday, the day a network mishap caused an outage at Amazon Web Services taking down more than 100 customers, many of which cloud providers themselves, in its aftermath, while at the same time a similar mishap at Sony PlayStation´s network stopped about 70 million gamers from connecting. A lot has been written about the outage, so I won't repeat that here (if you want to catch up suggest you read: TechCrunch for the PlayStation story, GigaOM for an overview of the Amazon issue, eWeek for some interesting analysis and the DotCloud blog for a very readable explanation of day to day use of a public...
Read more...

Published: April 20 2011, 10:10 PM | no comments
by CA Community

Over the last 18 months, the media, technologists, analysts, CIOs and CEOs have all been talking about the cloud. Now, most organizations are embarking on some form of cloud computing, but as always, technology is the relatively easy part. For those of you wanting to keep your feet firmly on the ground, and looking to set your direction and strategy, here are some simple guidelines to help you along the way. 1. Start your cloud strategy (and any cloud project) with an exit strategy Now this may seem like contradictory advice, but there is a great risk of vendor lock-in with cloud computing than there is with traditional on premise software, and I'm sure that you will be aware of the downside of vendor monopolies such as high cost, low responsiveness...
Read more...

Published: April 19 2011, 10:34 AM | 3 Comment(s)
by Christine Needles

Adam Famularo, general manager of the Cloud Computing business here at CA Technologies, recently was named a commissioner for TechAmerica Foundation's new Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD²) . The commission's three-month mandate is to provide the Obama Administration with recommendations for how government could better deploy cloud computing, and for public policies that will help drive United States innovation in the cloud and spur economic growth. In his role as a CLOUD² commissioner, Adam will collaborate with leaders across industry and academia to provide recommendations to drive further U.S. advancement and innovation with cloud computing. The commission's first meeting took place...
Read more...