Remember the heady dot.com days circa 1999? We thought we were reinventing
business, forming a New Economy, revolutionizing the essential nature of
commerce. In our dreams! By late 2001 the bubble had burst, and what we
thought was a new paradigm for business—the World Wide Web—turned out to
be little more than a new marketing channel.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to disparage the power and importance
of the Web. After all, the Web, and the Internet in general, have deeply
affected so many aspects of business today. It’s hard to remember the time
when you had to talk to a teller to use a bank or a stockbroker to trade
stocks! But we were wrong that the Web was a revolution. It wasn’t a
paradigm shift. Fundamentally, the rise of the Internet was more evolutionary
than revolutionary.
Not wanting to succumb to this delusion again, ZapThink has long held that
th... (more)
Quick quiz for all your Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from
the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you,
here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling
ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of
configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,
applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with
minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Give up?
What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds
typically consist ... (more)
Conventional wisdom would have you believe that Public Clouds are inherently
insecure, and that the only way to meet your organization’s stringent
security requirements in the Cloud is to implement your own Private Cloud.
Conventional wisdom, you say? Unfortunately, there is precious little wisdom
available of any kind when it comes to Cloud Computing, let alone the
conventional type!
In fact, large software and hardware vendors are largely responsible for the
whole “Public Cloud is insecure” canard, introducing fear, uncertainty,
and doubt (FUD) into the marketplace. After all,... (more)
Every specialization has its own jargon, and IT is no different—but many
times it seems that techies love to co-opt regular English words and give
them new meanings. Not only does this practice lead to confusion in
conversations with non-techies, but even the techies often lose sight of the
difference between their geek-context definition and the real world
definition that “normal” people use.
In our Licensed ZapThink Architect course, for example, we spend far too long
defining Service. This word has far too many meanings, even in the world of
IT—and most of them have little to... (more)
Anybody who is considering a move to the Cloud knows that the greatest
economic motivation for Cloud Computing is the pay-as-you-go,
pay-for-what-you-need utility computing benefit, right? Deal with spikes in
demand much more cost-effectively, the public Cloud service providers gush,
since we can spread the load over many customers and pass the savings from
our economies of scale on to you. The utility benefit is also a central
premise of Private Clouds. Build a Private Cloud for your enterprise, the
vendors promise, and you can achieve the same economies of scale as Public
Clo... (more)