Monthly Archives: February 2014
Building anything can be a challenge filled with pitfalls you can see and minefields you can’t. The construction of a private or hybrid cloud for your enterprise is no different.
Sure, the private cloud offers lots of benefits, from cost savings to greater efficiency and increased data security across your organization.
But if you don’t watch your step, it’s easy to walk smack into buying costly technology that doesn’t meet your expectations. It’s also quite feasible to set expectations too high internally, leading to disappointment and slashed budgets in the future.
The analysts at Forrester Research have issued some handy guidelines to enterprises interested in setting up a private cloud – an option now within reach for an increasing number of companies through an emerging class of cloud management platforms.
Here’s a list of some do’s and don’ts when delving into the cloud, according to the folks at Forrester: Continue Reading…
A big reason why companies are using virtualization is to make more efficient use of hardware such as servers. So-called “virtual machines” – meaning software programs that emulate how given pieces of hardware work – essentially allow one set of hardware to do several jobs at once on many different machines.
Now, a relatively new approach promises to bring this same basic idea to networks that carry phone calls, data and video. It is being billed as the largest disruption to the way computer networks are designed and operated since the introduction of TCP/IP paradigm more than two decades ago.
Software-defined networking, or SDN for short, allows a central software program (rather than hardware) control networks that move the data, video and phone calls from one place to another. A somewhat more technical definition is that SDN separates what’s known as the “data plane” – the part of the network that moves data packets – from the “control plane,” which handles jobs like routing traffic and configuring and operating the network.
This is vital for cloud computing because the emerging field of SDN may make it less expensive – and faster – to build networks that carry large amounts of traffic. Continue Reading…
Happy Friday!
We’d like to introduce a new, occasional feature here titled Head In the Cloud. We hope it will send our readers into the weekend with a smile.
From all of us here at Connectloud, have a great weekend!
In a previous post, we discussed security issues surrounding the public cloud. The main point: If you’re the customer of a public cloud service, you are essentially trusting that provider to properly secure the system and protect your data.
Ironically, one of the companies we named as an example of a public cloud provider, Dropbox, recently had a major issue of its own. The prominent file-sharing service — one used by many businesses for primary cloud storage — went down for several hours on Jan. 10, according to multiple media accounts. Continue Reading…
