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Whole New Use for the Cloud
USA Today had a story today about a woman who located her lost/stolen iPhone because the thief used it to take pictures of himself without realizing she had her phone set up to automatically upload photos to her iCloud account.
Now that's what I call cloud computing!
Google CIO Says Tipping Point Near on Cloud Computing in Enterprise
Google CIO Ben Fried has told a tech executive summit in New York that he thinks the tipping point for Cloud computing to explode into the Enterprise space is at hand. And Fried says the prospect is scary and disturbing.
Of course it's clear that Google has a vested interest in spreading this meme, but that doesn't mean the meme is a lie. As Fried points out correctly, "The macroeconomic tides — you can’t fight them forever — will force companies to adapt. "
This shift opens myriad opportunities for entrepreneurs and for mid-size companies with agile development capabilities to jump in and provide services and supporting products that could fuel another round of economic expansion. At the same time, as large companies outsource IT infrastructure, jobs will be lost. My guess is that the smart IT guys have already figured this out and begun joining the ranks of the self-employed to tie into and support the Cloud services their former employers need.
What say ye?
Hidden Gotchas in Data Security in the Cloud
Noted IP attorney Melise Blakeslee of the Sequeltech law firm today posted an insightful and helpful piece on what you need to think about if you're storing client data in the Cloud. It's not only not as straight-forward as you might think, those waters are, she says, fraught with danger.
Most Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) provide absolutely no guarantees about or support for dealing with data security breaches that occur on their servers even if they are clearly negligent. Only market conditions allow this to continue to be the case. Blakeslee offers some good insight into what your exposure is likely to be (did you know the average data security breach ends up costing the responsible company several million dollars?) and how to do what you can to minimize it.
If you're storing data in the cloud, you owe it to yourself to read this.
Best OS X Lion Review I've Read: Andy Ihnatko's
I've been reading tons of reviews about Apple's newly announced OS X 10.7, aka "Lion" in the last couple of days. Easily the most exhaustive -- so much so that it borders on a book -- is the one at ArsTechnica byJohn Siracusa. But my favorite of all of them I've read so far is by famed Mac guru and sit-down comic Andy Ihnatko. The long online version of his Chicago Sun-Times piece is not only concise but insightful. I particularly liked his observations about what the new OS seems to signal for the future of Apple and computing devices.
Ihnatko postulates that if you look at some of the key new features in Lion -- particularly auto-save, version control and full-screen apps -- portend a future in the iCloud wherein a potentially vast array of computing devices from Apple or using its OSes can provide a hardware layer of transparency that is only a dream in today's computing environments. While he also finds much to criticize or at least, as he says, get all "grumpypants" on us, overall he declares the $30 OS a must-have for today's Macintosh users.
My techy son-in-law, Jeff Soule, takes a narrower view of Lion on his blog, declaring that the new multi-touch gestures -- which, interestingly, Ihnatko finds useless or annoying -- make him feel almost like a magician as he maneuvers his way around his environment.
For me, I haven't yet downloaded Lion, for a few reasons:
- I have become more cautious about doing things that could disrupt my working environment in the past couple of years.
- The machine I'd find most adequate to put Lion through its paces is my MacBook Air but it's not running Snow Leopard so the upgrade process is going to be painful, long and a little more expensive and a lot more annoying.
- I wanted to understand recovery processes and risks for this all-Net approach to delivering an entire OS. I'm now satisfied that this won't be a catastrophic problem.
I'll take the Lion plunge soon, I'm sure, but primarily because I see this as a way of leveraging the future and getting a better handle on the OS and hardware implications of the Zero-Pound Computer I've been advocating for the past decade or so.
