To win the cloud, remember George Westinghouse
Is the cloud the final computing architecture, as NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson claims? Even if it's not, the winners will be the transaction and infrastructure providers.
Is the cloud the final computing architecture, as NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson claims? Even if it's not, the winners will be the transaction and infrastructure providers.
Organisations have been gathering our personal information in remote datacentres for decades. But combine the social web, cloud storage and cheap computing power and it's a whole new ball game.
The cloud has levelled the playing field for business, says Amazon's chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels. Ten years ago, a start-up needed $5 million. Now, Vogels says, it's "just $50,000 and a coffee shop around the corner".
When businesses turn into a set of web APIs, decisions about trust, security, and risk management become more important than ever -- and many of these are board-level decisions.
But Australian businesses 'aren't very far up the maturity ladder with this stuff yet', says network engineer Mark Newton.
A small premium beef producer in northern New South Wales gives a hint of what the dawning age of mass customisation might look like. Cows with Bitcoin.
While the Internet of Things is clearly a security disaster waiting to happen, it could also be a massive opportunity for network management firms in the SMB sector.
Allowing staff to choose their own computer and smartphone rather than using the standard company roll-out will, in theory, help attract talented staff rather than corporate droids. But what about the security risks once the IT department loses control?
Moving your data into the cloud creates a raft of security challenges, but, according to information security specialists, those challenges are less about hackers and more about data availability and signing the right contracts.
NetSuite's partnership with Yammer "adds social" to business software, just like Salesforce.com's Chatter. But is the social buzzword really a business revolution?