In its October issue, ‘The Economist’ includes an article about the ‘cloud wars’. It tries to analyze the position of the biggest IT players in the Cloud field (the services they offer, possible concerns about privacy, strategies in the mobile handset arena, etc.), their strengths and weaknesses. Not surprisingly, it devotes special attention to MicroSoft, IBM, Apple and Google.

Their description of the topic and the present state of things will seem pretty superficial to those that are already familiar with cloud computing. However, there are two things to note about this article:

1. If some topic is in ‘The Economist’ front page, as this article is, you can be pretty sure they consider it a very serious issue. So it seems more and more clear that cloud computing is not only a fashionable term, it is a trend that will radically change the way that IT is provided and consumed.
2. Not European company is regarded at all as a prominent player in cloud computing.Moreover, “the company or companies that dominate will be American”.

Regarding the second point, we do not agree… that much. It is true that American companies are far ahead and European firms must react quickly so they are not left behind. But some European groups are already creating innovative contributions to the cloud world. EU FP7 RESERVOIR, OpenNebula and others are very interesting research initiatives that address important issues and bring solutions not offered yet by any company. Also, Spotify, the free online music service, is one of the most well-known cloud services known today, and threatens the position of applications such as iTunes. Let’s only hope that next time ‘The Economist’ does not dismiss that quickly to their European neighbors (as they so often do ) when they talk about cloud computing.

In this entry from Cloud Scaling blog the author presents some numbers about the leading IaaS provider, Amazon EC2. As the author himself states, some numbers should be pretty good approximations, others are only guesses, but it can help to get an idea of how Amazon is building its infrastructure, and the potential of the cloud business as a revenue source. Note that these numbers refer to EC2, other Amazon services such as S3 are not included. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent article describes “new” approaches by Amazon, CohesiveFT and other relevant Cloud players to secure their networks.After all,  it is not just about providing secured VMs in a very secure hypervisor, but also about securing the very communications themselves.

Again, the wheel turns to use well-known technologies for securing the networks and label them with the new buzzword.

In addition, Amazon offers the possibility of integrating a  corporate physical machine  with those in the public Cloud so as to let users keep the sensitive data home. A deeper analysis on how the information exchange is done between local physocal machines and Cloud machines, how keys are maaged and so on.

Anyway, this new announcement shows the important concern security has become when it comes to Cloud adoption by enterprises.