Concerns about NSA surveillance driving some Canadian and UK companies to take their cloud computing business abroad. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (click image for larger view) Fully 1 / 4 of companies are moving data out of america due to revelations in regards to the scope of knowledge gathering by america National Security Agency, claims Canada-based cloud hosting provider PEER 1 Hosting. Some qualifications apply: The survey behind the company’s assertion doesn’t cover 25% of all businesses. It describes findings from a ten-minute survey of 300 small companies — 250 employees or less — based within the UK and Canada. When the sample is confined to simply Canadian companies, 33% say they plan to go data out people datacenters. Evidence of that exodus isn’t extensive: PEER 1 was ready to point to at least one client, iDigital, that have been handling data flight. Matt McKinney, managing director of iDigital, an 85-person cloud hosting provider based in British Columbia, Canada, said in a phone interview that... Read More »

A game made Windows 3.1 users fall in love with the mouse. Now Windows 8 needs a game as satisfying as solitaire. You’ve got to confess that Bill Gates or whoever came up with the idea that of solitaire for Windows was a genius. Users on the time were conditioned without knowing it by the hand-eye coordination demands put on eyes, hands, and a mouse. Solitaire was the magic for that teaching. We played it until the Pavlovian bell rang, happy to monitor a whole deck of cards flow around the screen informing us we had won the sport. How do you erase such deep training from the minds of users? The mouse isn’t dying. Businesses are comfortable buying PCs and desktops because there isn’t any reason to change to a brand new platform. Change management is a subject that everybody talks about, particularly within the geek world — but nobody embraces it in terms of his or her own shop. People claim the rationale... Read More »

Former US Transportation Department CIO Nitin Pradhan discusses why he established GOVonomy to compare government needs with innovative technology startups Nitin Pradhan has seen technology innovation from all sides of the general public-private sector divide. Pradhan was CEO of a wireless startup, the managing director of Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology, and an IT executive at Fairfax County Public Schools (the nation’s 12th largest school district) before serving as CIO of the united states Department of Transportation from 2009-2012. Since leaving US DOT, Pradhan have been on a mission to bridge another divide by making a marketplace designed to check government needs and opportunities with emerging technology products from startups and growth companies. Pradhan, who also writes about technology and government for InformationWeek, talks with InformationWeek Government editor Wyatt Kash about his rationale for the marketplace, called GOVonomy, and why it fills a necessity he first recognized as a federal government CIO. Nitin Pradhan, co-founding father of GOVonomy. InformationWeek: Why did you are feeling the... Read More »

Nasuni’s UniFS uses stream of snapshots to create a versioned file system inside the enterprise and within the cloud. Nasuni, a provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service, has received US patent 8,566,362 at the core file system utilized in its Nasuni Filer products. The file system is UniFS, and in contrast to most object store file systems, it generates a stream of snapshots that could take where of backup systems, in keeping with CEO Andres Rodriguez. “It is a file system born for the cloud,” he said in an interview at Amazon’s Re:Invent event in Las Vegas last week. When storage moved into the cloud, it established a fundamentally different way of generating large-scale storage. Systems like Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Storage, Amazon Web Services S3, and Google’s Cloud Datastore are object storage systems that capture and hold data within the style of files. The files may vary widely in size and contain forms of data, or they just be a “blob” of audio, video, or other multimedia... Read More »