SaaS & Cloud Computing

Some say cloud computing will become ubiquitous. Others say it's hype. But it's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Here's a scorecard for figuring out "when to cloud" on an application-by-application, project-by-project basis.

The hidden costs of cloud computing. There is always lots of buzz around Google Apps availability and the tradeoffs versus Microsoft Office. TwinStrata throws out an interesting analysis, built from real infrastructure metrics.

Volunteering at a soup kitchen occasionally or hammering nails for Habitat for Humanity might have satisfied some people's altruism, but Bobbie Wilbur went one better. She started a new career. In 2005, using her talents from a successful stint as a conultant for Deloitte LLP, Wilbur helped create The Center to Promote HealthCare Access in Oakland, Calif. and develop its One-e-App, an online service that targets a vastly underserved market: people in need.

Updating business processes with 21st century IT thinking means avoiding the well-known, old-fashioned consulting firms.

Vendors sell software loaded with security problems, then they drag their feet in fixing them. That scenario opens an opportunity in the United States for a European security company.

No wonder Sun had the audacity to up their price to IBM at the last minute. Question answered, but many more emerge.

We all know that Google Android Netbook devices will be hitting the streets in the coming months. They are going to be running on really inexpensive ARM-based hardware and be getting a nice, easy interface, care of Google. A perfect storm of events might open the door for the broad adoption of the Google Netbook.

In part 1 of this post I talked about emerging cloud technologies, and how one management technology built for the cloud paradigm is at play in bringing cloud-like capabilities to your infrastructure. Pressing on with this theme, one more example helps paint the picture of what cloud really is, and why much of the baggage we get mired in (the hoopla about standardization) should be tossed out with the bathwater.

Chatter on about the pros and the cons of the cloud as we might, you're seeing vendors demonstrate every day how the fundamental concept of cloud is changing how you will compute tomorrow. This is part one of a two part post.

Twitter, Facebook and other high-traffic social network sites have all suffered embarrassing performance problems. But there are ways to build such sites better.

Google beat earnings forecasts for the first quarter ended March 31 despite a global recession that is affecting the company's main revenue engine, online advertising.

There's a new division inside Microsoft dedicated to the security and identity problems IT face.

You can’t spend more than five minutes on the Internet these days without bumping into the term Software as a Service (SaaS). As software licensing gets more expensive and budgetary belt-tightening becomes a necessity, companies are turning to SaaS as a way to save money, but some CTOs worry about its reliability. As with with most evolving technology, people either love SaaS or hate it. Meet Amy Wohl. She loves it.

In Thursday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches Microsoft reveal Office, Exchange, and SharePoint 2010: not waving, but drowning? Not to mention Error'd...

Microsoft today let loose a new beta version of its flagship enterprise messaging software now called Exchange 2010. As Eric Lai reported for Computerworld, this is a big update and it looks to address some of the competition from Google.