Cloud Computing

OTT Threat to Telco’s Middleware Opportunities

I recently participated in two Comverse events, and once again the message was driven home to me about the enormous opportunities that lie ahead of the industry in the field of new telecoms applications. The middleware and cloud applications that are now appearing at the edge of the network will of course, be further developed once high-speed broadband becomes available, but already they are having an enormous impact on the telecoms market. The new user experiences that can be obtainable through these applications will enrich fast broadband networks beyond recognition. What we now have is, on the one hand, the Over-The-Top (OTT) applications that have conquered the world...

Web Application Delivery: The Challenge of Managing Thousands of Web Applications in the Cloud

Cloud Computing is a hot topic. Some say it is already here, most agree that it will be much bigger in the coming years. It is pushed forward by the economic benefits of virtualization and consolidation. Take a heterogeneous data center, full of many kinds of servers, running a myriad of applications and consolidate it into a uniform farm of virtual machines, where each application is services by one or more VMs and you have a cloud, what is called a private cloud.

FCC’s Genachowski Promises He’s Not Out to Regulate Net, New Media

We learned from The Wall Street Journal yesterday that "Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski gets a little peeved when people suggests that he wants to regulate the Internet." He told a group of Journal reporters and editors today that: "I don't see any circumstances where we'd take steps to regulate the Internet itself," and "I've been clear repeatedly that we're not going to regulate the Internet." We're thankful to hear Chairman Julius Genachowski to make that promise. We'll certainly hold him to it. But you will pardon us if we remain skeptical...

Google Energy - Are You Surprised?

Just when you thought Nexus One was the biggest thing coming out of Google this week, we now get word about Google Energy. Well, Nexus One is a big deal, but I say that wearing my telecom analyst hat. Switching to my smart grid hat, Google Energy is something else altogether... As big as that is -- and will be -- Google Energy has all kinds of implications for smart grid. For starters,

CircleID’s Top 10 Posts of 2009

Looking back at the year that just ended, here are the top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry news on CircleID in 2009 based on the overall readership of the posts. Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership in 2009 and best wishes to the entire community in 2010.

Privacy Getting a Reboot

Anyone old enough to remember when cross-border data flows were limited to what could be put in a DHL box in New York and sent directly to Milan for the next day? Or when MIPS were so costly and centralized that batch processing was the norm? The world has changed, but the rules governing data protection and privacy haven't (much). Today technology allows and users demand that data flow without the drag of political boundaries or national borders, yet we still want assurances that our information will be protected and respected.

The Coming of the ADC

In the previous decade and the beginning of this one, Server Load Balancing (SLB) reigned supremely in the web data center. Lately, a new class of products is replacing the older load balancers. These products are known as Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) and in the following paragraphs I will share my thoughts on the reasons for that.

Net Neutrality, Slippery Slopes &  High-Tech Mutually Assured Destruction

Ten years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman lamented the "Business Community's Suicidal Impulse:" the persistent propensity to persecute one's competitors through regulation or the threat thereof. Friedman asked: "Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft?" After yesterday's FCC vote's to open a formal "Net Neutrality" rule-making, we must ask whether the high-tech industry -- or consumers -- will benefit from inviting government regulation of the Internet under the mantra of "neutrality."

How Open Cloud Could Have Saved Sidekick Users’ Skins

The cloud computing scandal of the week is looking like being the catastrophic loss of millions of Sidekick users' data. This is an unfortunate and completely avoidable event that Microsoft's Danger subsidiary and T-Mobile (along with the rest of the cloud computing community) will surely very soon come to regret. There's plenty of theories as to what went wrong -- the most credible being that a SAN upgrade was botched, possibly by a large outsourcing contractor, and that no backups were taken...

Email Snooping Can Be Intrusion Upon Seclusion

Analysis could also affect liability of enterprises using cloud computing technologies... Local elected official Steinbach had an email account that was issued by the municipality. Third party Hostway provided the technology for the account. Steinbach logged in to her Hostway webmail account and noticed eleven messages from constituents had been forwarded by someone else to her political rival.