Cloud Hosting HQ

Which option should you choose? This article found on TechJournal South takes a look at three different deployment models and their benefits:

A Consonus customer, a large information services developer and provider, spent years considering various cloud computing models and their permutations. The customer first examined three of the four cloud computing deployment models — private, community, public, and hybrid — then evaluated four different management options: in-house, hosted, managed, and managed/hosted.

What cloud computing model and management option did they choose? Well, let’s first look at the benefits and challenges of the three cloud models they considered.

This article over at pcworld.com takes a look at bringing your business into the cloud.

The Internet has changed the way people do nearly everything–from consuming media to performing research to maintaining relationships to communicating.

Its effect on business has been similarly wide ranging. And today, for mission-critical data, Internet-based computing–aka cloud computing–is introducing major changes to the way work is done.

Whether you’re ready to move your business operations to the cloud full time or just want to dip a toe in the water vapor, cloud integration offers significant benefits.

In this intelligent-enterprise article, David Linthicum takes at the association between the iPad and the Cloud and misperceptions that many people hold regarding the device.

Truth-be-told, the iPad has about as much to do with cloud computing as any device that can connect to the Web. While any appliance, which is what this really is, needs to have a robust back-end infrastructure to support the native applications, from on-line banking to Twitter, there is not much new here that we’ve not seen before. Not the architecture, the concept, or even the technology. It looks a bit better, I will give you that.

Bernard Golden, a contributor to the International Data Group (IDG) News Service, talks about why some companies are running into problems trying to put their apps on the cloud. His reasoning is that they’re treating the cloud as if it were just an update to traditional hosting solutions.

In our discussions with these companies, their question is: “Shouldn’t this problem be solved by cloud computing? After all, the cloud offers resource elasticity, processing power on demand, huge scalability. So why is my application running into these problems?”

The challenge they’ve run into is that they treated cloud computing like Hosting 2.0, and now they’re suffering for it.

Read the full article here.

This article at reddevnews.com examines a few companies that you may or may not know about:

Don’t just consider the “big boys” when determining your cloud computing partner — many vendors have a lot to offer. Here’s five up-and-coming platforms to add to your consideration list.

This article from Network World takes a look the complex structure of the cloud:

The reality of cloud computing has always been a lot more about the nuts and bolts of data-center operations than about the metaphor of on-demand computer power flowing from anonymous sources somewhere on the other end of the network connection.  Still, it’s a bit too meta when you realize that cloud-computing platforms are often made up of other clouds.

A presentation at CloudConnect by Guy Rosen, CEO of Vircado and the man behind the jackofallclouds blog.

This article at zarjay.net takes a look at some of the cloud-based services that are available from three very well-known companies. These services are setting trends now that will be come the standard for cloud-based services in the not to distant future.

There are quite a few services available now, but the big three you should probably know about are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Amazon started the whole trend and offers the most wide array of services. Google offers one specific service for cloud hosting (although you can arguably say that almost every Google product is a “cloud service”), and Microsoft is the one getting the least attention, but their strength in the business world may end up making their services the most widely used.

Read the rest of the article to learn more about  the services each company is providing.

This article on thewhir.com takes a look at some ideas for the future of cloud hosting as presented by De Spiegeleer at WebhostingDay 2010.

In his presentation, “Cloud 2.0: a vision on the next generation of cloud products,” De Spiegeleer presented some very compelling ideas on how to improve the entire data center environment — starting from the physical layer. He explains that most IT effort in the cloud is focused around upper layers, but there is little attention paid to automation, preventing of disasters, remote control, monitoring, auditing, power optimization, and a host of other problems.

This article on networkcomputing.com takes a look at some of the crucial elements of  security design as we move forward with cloud-based IT.  Specifically it takes a look at the concept of the “11 “commandments” established by The Jericho Forum regarding the security principles of cloud-based computing.

The 11 commandments, released in 2006, include, among other requirements, the need to use open, secure communications protocols; security mechanisms that are pervasive, simple, scalable and easy to manage; authentication, authorization and accountability must work outside an organization’s area of control, and required levels of trust.

The article provides a good overview and evaluation of the security concerns faced by cloud hosting and how they should be approached.