People blithely talk about scalability as a driver for moving to the cloud. But unless you define scalability precisely, you'll never know if cloud is the best way of achieving your goals.
For big data to amount to a serious asset that business and operations can exploit, datacentres will have to take a long, hard look at infrastructure and architecture.
With its consumer focus, Apple has overlooked the importance for enterprises to be able to control and distribute patches and upgrades. It's a shortcoming to which Microsoft and its Surface tablet will not succumb
Exploiting big data is not just a resource for business users. It can also transform IT, says Lori MacVittie
Plans for Wi-Fi on the London Underground are welcome, but the 'bursty' nature of rush-hour requests will be hard to address, says Lori MacVittie
Organisations are shifting business-critical processes to the cloud without first weighing up how their networks will withstand the sudden onslaught of traffic, says Lori MacVittie
Some assume that the internet lends itself to large-scale data-sharing. It's a mistaken belief, says Lori MacVittie
Cloud-based initiatives from Amazon and Google may amount to a return to the bad old days of the mega-proxy, says Lori MacVittie
2012's Olympic Games in London seem the perfect showcase for the cloud, but with this year's outages it's not clear whether the technology is stable enough, says Lori MacVittie
It's all very well planning how to get data into the cloud, but moving it back out again requires at least as much thought, says Lori MacVittie
