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This Week in Cloud, April 28, 2011: AWS outages and what businesses can learn from it, CenturyLink buys Savvis, Greenpeace publishes report shaming cloud vendors. And more…
Feature article
More than 7 deadly sins of cloud computing
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.)
Read the full article for a list of the initial 7 cloudy yet sinful atrocities, along with five new ones Jay added with some help from his followers on Twitter.
Cloud News
- Amazon Web Services suffered more than two days of serious outages last week, causing many industry watchers to write about the concerns this type of high-profile outage raises for cloud computing in general. Here are two such articles in the New York Times and IT Business Edge. Robert Dutt writes in PC World about ‘what businesses can learn from the Amazon cloud outage.’ Picking up on the concern about putting all your eggs in one basket, Dana Gardner writes on IT-Director.com about cloud brokering and highlights some of the key players in this space.
- Greenpeace published a report on which cloud heavyweights are the greenest in terms of their use of electrical power, and which are the dirtiest. Greenpeace was not impressed by any of the vendors. Apple was cited as the worst; Yahoo and Google scored highest. A more detailed summary and link to the full report can be found in this Computerworld blog.
- BMC announced a updates to its cloud lifecycle management software, including the introduction of Service Governor, which acts as a broker between pools of resources available and requests made by end users. For more information, read this article in IT News.
- The US Air Force is building a cloud-based system to share intelligence information across multiple military and federal sources, according to this Information Week article.
Cloud Views
- This Wall Street Journal article identifies six questions that companies should ask before journeying into the cloud.
- This Computerworld article explores what happens to data when your cloud provider evaporates because of closure or outages.
- In this Cnet blog, Gordon Haff writes about cloudbursting, including why it is something of a red herring and when it makes economic sense.
MSP Corner
Many of our “This Week in Cloud” subscribers are managed service providers. Starting this week, we are adding an MSP-focused section to the newsletter to cover some of the key pieces of news and analysis specifically related to cloud service providers.
- CenturyLink buys Savvis for $3.2 billion, making CenturyLink the third largest communication service provider in the United States. Read more in this The Register article.
- Is there a silver lining for MSPs in the Amazon Cloud Outage? Read this MSP Mentor article to read Joe Panettieri’s thoughts.
Upcoming Cloud Events
- Closer 2011: 1st International Conference on Cloud Computing & Services: May 7 – 9, Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands
- TMForum Management World: May 23 – 26, Dublin, Ireland
- Forrester’s IT Forum, May 25 – 27, Las Vegas, Nevada
- Cloud Expo East, June 6-9, New York City
- The Business of Cloud Computing: June 13 – 15, San Diego, California
