Google battles Amazon for corporate Clouds
Google says it's in the enterprise Cloud market to stay.
Google says it's in the enterprise Cloud market to stay.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act reform bill advances to the Senate floor to better protect email privacy. Meanwhile a House subcommittee considers privacy protections for location data, data which some in law enforcement say is necessary to solve crimes.
Windows Intune, Microsoft's Web-based PC management and security platform, may not get the same level of attention as cloud services like Office 365 or Windows Azure, but Microsoft is betting big on Intune to be the cloud service that will facilitate IT's evolving job of remotely managing PCs.
If you're an emergency response agency providing relief after a natural disaster and you can't communicate and share resources, you're in for a disaster of your own.
The best cloud applications have development (or at least scripting) capabilities for creating and extending the platform's database and computational capabilities. But even the best of the cloud applications must put in limiters for their platform/development environments: an app isn't a general purpose run-time or generic object container. For example, the development language must be made safe for a multi-tenant deployment, and must be well-behaved so that user code can't take down the virtual machine, database, or overall application.
Windows Intune, Microsoft's Web-based PC management and security platform, is available today for purchase or for a 30-day free trial.
CIOs push data into the cloud. Employees post ever more personal and professional information on social-networking sites. And as the WikiLeaks organization talks about releasing secret information about Swiss bank accounts-on top of rumors that it may disclose documents from a large bank in the United States-CIOs find themselves reviewing internal policies and answering questions about security from their CEOs.
The business benefits of a cloud computing model have been well stated. You cut costs by switching to more flexible on-demand IT resources that can better handle the ebb and flow technology needs at a company.
Anticipation was high before this week's Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas that Microsoft would once and for all present a viable iPad competitor.