The promise of the cloud is getting the foremost resources on your money. Nonetheless it leaders must carefully evaluate potential cloud services before they take the plunge. Like many technical innovations, the cloud’s value proposition is that it makes IT faster, easier, and less expensive. Put in a different way, the implicit and explicit promise of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), unified communications as a service (UCaaS), and similar offerings is set getting more for less. Who doesn’t want that? Startups, for instance, can keep investors happy by buying resources from the cloud and only scaling them up only when their creation begins to take off. There’s very little capital investment required. Established companies with legacy technology can migrate functions to compliant platforms with no need to rebuild their infrastructures. Young or old companies with big IT departments might reduce overhead by moving specific workflows and responsibilities to off-site providers. Hooray for the cloud! But... Read More »

Appliances that link on-premises systems to cloud resources will mean datacenters with less equipment – in smaller facilities. On the eve of the millennium, a shot was fired that hardly registered contained in the walls of datacenters. Launched in 1999, Salesforce.com would go from being an extra dotcom to reshaping the way in which businesses buy and deploy software. Its “no software” campaign really meant no software running on your datacenter. It pushed CRM software out of the datacenter and into the cloud. In its wake, a brand new category would emerge. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) quickly spread way beyond CRM to assimilate other software packages, forsaking a graveyard of once-mighty software empires. Siebel who? But a number of big iron remained in place, unruffled by the limited power available to software that runs too far-off from the datacenter, where most data still lives. Ultimately, SaaS has only managed to capture a sliver of the information essential to run most businesses. The emerging category of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)... Read More »

The security firm SplashData publishes its list of the 25 worst passwords of 2013. 10 Top Password Managers (Click image for slideshow.) Thanks to the Adobe security breach last year, which exposed the IDs and encrypted passwords for 38 million Adobe.com users, we now know that probably the most usual password on the web is “123456.” As such, SplashData, a working laptop or computer security firm that makes password management apps, recognized “123456” because the “Worst Password of 2013.” The corporate says its list of the 25 worst passwords relies at the frequency of passwords found online by reason of disclosures — largely but not exclusively from the Adobe incident. The convenience with which these passwords can be cracked using brute-force methods shouldn’t be taken under consideration. A two-time runner-up, “123456” has dethroned “password,” a native favorite using its jaw-dropping obviousness and its always amusing self-referential nature. It slipped only to No. 2 at the list and will regain the... Read More »

Analysts predict US tech companies may lose $180 billion by 2016 using international concerns about intelligence agencies’ spying. 10 Cool DARPA Projects In Development (click image for larger view) Creating an enormous digital dragnet designed to aid U.S. intelligence agencies spot terrorists before they’ll strike might seem great inside the abstract. But what are the true-world implications? For US technology firms that sell hardware, software, and services, that could be a collective lack of $22 billion to $35 billion through 2016 because of foreign businesses and governments worrying if the National Security Agency (NSA) can spy on those service or product. That figure comes via the data Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington-based policy research group backed by many leading technology firms, including Cisco, Google, IBM, and Intel. “The prospective fallout is pretty huge given how much our economy relies on the data economy for its growth,” Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow at Washington-based policy group New America Foundation, told Bloomberg. “It’s increasingly where... Read More »

Consider these four guidelines for enterprise mobile application development within the age of mobile and cloud. The ever-growing dependency on mobile technology has made the necessity for enterprise applications a hot topic. While convenient for staff, the rapidly evolving application ecosystem is fraught with complexities for businesses. Developers should consider these challenges once they begin building applications that access core corporate data. Things like mobile device management (MDM), mobile application management (MAM), enterprise mobility management (EMM), and cloud services all create confusion about what you want to start enabling your employees with high-value business applications. Many device management vendors say that they’re going to manage everything on the device level, while cloud vendors want enterprise decision makers to shift data to their cloud technology (something that provides many enterprises heartburn due to level of risk to data and other security). In any case, many existing cloud vendors aren’t providing the prescriptive instructions on ways to develop and deploy applications to finish users. I’ve highlighted four... Read More »