Webmaster Blog

Cloud computing has gone far beyond an inevitability or trend; the cloud is a reality now, a business tool that many companies have been using for years. The recent explosion is just the latest in a series of developments that have seen many businesses adopting the cloud and making it a regular part of their operations. According to a recent study, 58% of businesses spend more than 10% of their yearly budgets on cloud services. There’s little debate that cloud computing is sweeping through the business world, but what does the future hold? A close look at current trends and movements reveals details that could shed some light on what awaits the cloud in the years to come. New Applications & Services Cloud providers are always looking for ways to stand out from the rest of the pack, and the best way to do that is through developing the latest innovative applications. In most cases, the innovations will come from already existing providers or those businesses that are already using cloud computing. It is this added experience that can be a driving force for new solutions and applications in the cloud community. Existing services can also be expected to get better,...

According to InfoWorld, Amazon has just released a new service known as the Cost Explorer, with the goal of enabling organizations to more easily view and analyze their spending using Amazon's hosted cloud services. Amazon Web Services have, in the past, been criticized for the difficulty involved with tracking and projecting cloud costs. It seems that the industry giant was listening, because the new tool is likely to be a big hit with current users.To assist users, the Cost Explorer, which is free, will come with several preconfigured reports that can help make clear the totals of daily spending, the monthly spending for each service, and more. Cost Explorer allows users to create customized filters for cost analysis based on services, tags, time period and accounts. Cost Explorer is capable of analyzing data for the current month as well as the previous four months of available data.According to a recent study by RightScale, about 94% of companies now use cloud technology in some capacity. However, there is a wide variety of adoption levels when it comes to deployment. Keeping the cost of cloud services under control can be difficult for companies that use it for a large range of capabilities.Amazon seems to...

With the cloud hosting becoming increasingly popular among the webmasters, it is becoming ever more important to try and identify its influence on SEO practices, but before we dive in, let’s first define the two terms. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a discipline that deals with increasing a website’s ranking on search engine pages. This is achieved by active outreach, but also by making sure that the site complies with Google’s Webmaster’s Guidelines and as is transparent and visible to search engines’ crawlers as possible. Having your site hosted with a cloud hosting provider means that your site won’t be located on a single server, but instead, in a virtual environment composed of a number of servers, scattered all across the world. One of the immediate benefits to SEO that cloud hosting can have is the redundancy that comes with having a number of servers host your website. You don’t have to worry about downtime due to a malfunction or other server issues, because as soon as one server experiences some difficulties, its workload is relegated to another one. Another benefit that SEOs can get from cloud hosting is the fact that the pages are served locally, which is to...

As February comes to a close, we can see just which tech companies managed to keep their footholds and which businesses lost ground to their more innovative competitors. The findings show that longstanding American tech institutions are losing significant market influence, while smaller, lesser-known upstarts are only gaining. Take, for example, IBM: after specializing in business tabulating procedures for the last twenty years of the 19th century, the company was incorporated in its current form in 1911. From there, it grew into a computer producer, analytics powerhouse, and infrastructure hosting agency. Even being entrenched in the industry for more than 100 years, IBM stocks are showing losses in 2014. Year to date, the company has lost $4.78 on its stocks, almost a full percentage of their worth. On the other hand, groups like Akamai Technologies, Inc. and Juniper Networks have seen 32% and 24% growth, respectively. Where are IBM and older companies like it going wrong? Outdated Hosting Methods Need to Stay in the Past The issue for IBM lies in its continued reliance on physical hardware. Before cloud computing appeared in the foreground, businesses were left to rely on physical servers for their IT infrastructures. For a long time, the...

There’s no doubt that cloud computing unleashed countless possibilities in today’s technological world. Email services, cloud storage and virtual computing environments are some of the few examples.   Perhaps, one of the best benefits of the cloud for business organizations is web-based office suite software.   First off, a web-based application is any kind of computer software that you use over the internet through the aid of your web browser. Apart from installing a web browser on your PC, there is absolutely no local installation involved in using web-based applications.   Why Use Web-Based Software? For businesses, using web-based software will free you from having to worry about the technical aspects of installing the software on PCs and maintaining them too. All the data security, upgrades, and even backups are handled by a totally different crew of IT specialists, leaving you with only one task: to work.   Security Safety of your data shouldn’t be ignored as well. Traditional software allows users to save their files locally on their PCs, and no one can really argue that there is danger in doing this.   However, as much as clicking the “Save” button will give you assurance that your work is...

With more people making the move to the cloud, NASA has recently attempted to follow suit by transitioning into using cloud computing services. However, the move called attention to some shortcomings in their IT governance and risk management practices. NASA’s problems with moving to the cloud should be an example to other agencies of what to avoid when they make a similar transition.  For now NASA will have to resolve some of their issues with IT in order to continue moving to the cloud and update their programs.  Late In The Game NASA has been late in the game to make the transition to public cloud services with currently only about 1% of their budget spent on cloud computing. They hope to increase this number to about 75% in the next 5 years but problems recently came to light as they attempted to move to the cloud. Auditors released a report criticizing their weaknesses in IT and the fact that a number of cloud contracts were signed without approval of the Chief Information Officer to prevent security risks. A few of their systems ran through the cloud for two years without authorization and no security measures and tests. The CIO was...

Public Clouds are readily available from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, HP, Dell & Memset amongst others. These Public Clouds use Virtualisation technology to store multiple instances of virtual machines on large pools of physical servers within geographically dispersed data centres. This will mean that customers will be running their virtual machines alongside other customers on the same physical server without any knowledge of who the other customers are or what they're using it for. Not everybody wants to share the hardware that their systems run on with unknown neighbours. However, people do still want to take advantage of the efficiency savings derived from using the Cloud. That’s when you seek out a Secure Private Cloud. That’s not to say Public Clouds are insecure, they are and work very well with the hypervisor separating virtual machines from one another to all intense purposes the same as if they were on separate physical machines. So if the hypervisor keeps you separated what’s the big issue? Well, legislation may mean that if you store sensitive data you may not be allowed to keep that data on hardware you share with others. Alternatively you may work with partners who have strict security procedures from preventing you...

The rise of social networking sites such as Facebook has led to a number of developments and changes within the technology world occurring alongside alterations to our own lives. Many of us would now struggle to conduct our daily forms of communication and correspondence without the use of such sites, but what exactly does this mean for cloud computing? Have sites such as Facebook made people more receptive to and comfortable with the computing solutions that they offer? Cloud computing has been labelled as the “next big thing” of the technological world, despite initial concerns over the safety of data and the security of the services that are provided. The increasing acceptance and positive expectations for cloud computing could therefore be attributed to the changes which social media sites, such as Facebook, have instigated. Opening a world in which our personal information and data is entered on a web-hosted site has meant that many of us are beginning to find ourselves more comfortable with the notion of entering data into an online environment. Familiarity All new technologies and systems become commercially popular once they are considered familiar, with the step between familiarity and normality being particularly small. Social network sites and...

Cloud computing is a new technology that is gaining so much popularity. Many companies are starting to emerge which offers cloud computing services and businesses are now faced with a decision on whether to implement cloud technology or not in their enterprise.To sum up, cloud computing is a technology where a host provides IT services over the Internet. All of the company’s software, data, and application are hosted on a central location called a cloud provided by the hosting service and all the users of the company have access to the cloud via the Internet.Any technology has its advantages and disadvantages and here is a list for Cloud Computing Technology: Advantages of Cloud Computing 1.    Cost Saving. Companies can save big by employing cloud computing as it eliminates cost for hardware and software as the company will be using the IT infrastructure of the cloud hosting company instead. In a normal setup, company needs to buy hardware and software licenses to operate a network. The amount of data of the company also dictates the amount of storage space needed. With cloud computing, company uses the resources of the hosting company to store their data and applications. Companies also pay for use...