Cloud Ventures

Although there are a number of suppliers in the Cloud market, most accept and note the primary dominance of Amazon, and the distinctions in scale of the Cloud that they operate. The Cloud providers market is like McDonalds – S, M, L and Super-size! So while there are announcements all the time about hosting providers launching Clouds to take on goliath, there’s only a few big boys playing around at the Super-size level: Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft. So in contrast you definitely take note when that player is Google - announcing their own IaaS, Google Compute. If you were to pick any one who could be considered a large enough data centre operator to trouble someone of Amazon’s size it would be Google – There’s no doubt they understand, and operate, very large-scale computing. So leveraging that scale is as smart a move with them as it is with AWS, and of cour... (more)

Big Data Analytics for E-Health, via Google PaaS

Recently I’ve been lucky to meet with the CTO’s of two important Canadian public sector organizations, Canada Health Infoway and the Province of Ontario. Indeed Dennis Giokas kindly presented on Cloud Computing in Healthcare at our recent seminar in Toronto. This presentation was about the recent CHI Cloud white paper, which is quite visionary in its description of how Cloud will evolve and grow in E-Health. In particular, and this was the common theme for Ontario as well, was the forecast of increasing use of SaaS (Software as a Service) as a delivery model. This is a simple a... (more)

Challenges in Virtualization

By Sue Poremba Virtualization has been a boon to enterprise as it makes IT operations more efficient. Some like its green qualities as virtualization saves on energy consumption, while others appreciate the storage capacity, as well as the data recovery solutions for if disaster strikes. However, the virtual environment is invisible, and with that come more challenges in making sure it runs smoothly. The cloud might be simple to setup, but it becomes more complex over time. In addition, the more machines and data involved, the more difficult it can be to monitor for space, CPU ... (more)

MaaS Implements Small Data and Enables Personal Clouds

MaaS (Model as a Service) sets a new concept to order and classify data modeling design and deployment to the Cloud. MaaS changes the way to move data to the Cloud because allows to define data taxonomy, size and contents. Starting from data model design, MaaS might guide the DaaS (Database as a Service) lifecycle, providing data granularity and duty rules: as a consequence, MaaS implements the new concept of Small Data. In fact, Small Data answers to the need of controlling “on-premise” data dimension and granularity. Anyway, Small Data is not data volume limitation. Small Data... (more)

Google Enterprise – Getting Things Done, Google style!

Last year I posted a blog to the Allstream portal about how tools like Cloud-based Microsoft Outlook services can help you implement personal productivity best practices, like ‘Getting Things Done‘. This type of functionality is also possible with the Google toolset, indeed to be fair this is one way to see how Google outshines the competition in terms of their Cloud fit for this type of agile working. Google Enterprise The primary challenge with defining ‘Google Enterprise’, as in how the Google cloud suite can be used by large, and small, businesses to better improve activities... (more)