Is the cloud killing Apple?

Recent financial results from Apple's competitors show that the company may be losing more ground than it's gaining from the cloud.

As a recent Financial Times article points out, cloud computing is helping Apple's rivals, but Apple itself may be missing out. While Apple's mobile devices have driven the growth of clouds, the company stands to gain much less from that surge, given how it is positioned within the market.

ESBs See Rapid Growth Outside SOA's Shadow

Forrester is one among many organizations that positions an enterprise service bus (ESB) as service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure, and ESBs are indeed effective in supporting the creation and use of services in many organizations. However, ESB use is growing more rapidly than this use case can explain. A recent survey reveals that the primary use cases of ESBs are actually messaging and routing, data transformation, and transaction mediation, ahead of SOA support. App delivery leaders and enterprise architects should adjust road maps to reflect this dominant role for the ESB as integration infrastructure.

The cloud's place in a SOA world

SOA is still a big deal

In a March 2011 Forrester survey, “SOA Adoption in 2010: Still Important, Still Strong,” Heffner found that “SOA still has strong penetration and high satisfaction rates.” He added that even though more focus is devoted to “cloud computing, mobile applications and social networking, enterprise interest in SOA-related products remains significant.”

Heffner said in his report that SOA penetration among Global 2000 enterprise companies runs at 82%, and satisfaction with SOA architectural principles is at 77% for enterprise customers and 81% for small and medium-sized businesses. He also found that utilities, telecom, finance and insurance have the highest rate of use of SOA, with a strong majority in other sectors as well.

Microsoft details workings of cloud strategy

Microsoft kicked off its annual TechEd conference Monday much the way it did last year's, heavily touting cloud computing as a more efficient way for businesses to run IT operations. This year, however, company executives provided more details about how organizations can actually use cloud computing day-to-day.

The next release of Microsoft System Center will be key to a unified cloud strategy, which will allow line-of-business owners and administrators to control both their public and private cloud workloads from a single view, he said.

Microsoft System Center 2012, due to be released by the end of the year, will feature a single console that will allow virtualized workloads to be managed, whether they reside in-house or on the public cloud.

Dropbox caught with its finger in the cloud cookie jar

Online file storage and sharing site Dropbox admits that it can see the data you've stored. Oops...

“We may disclose to parties outside Dropbox files stored in your Dropbox and information about you that we collect when we have a good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) comply with a law, regulation or compulsory legal request; (b) protect the safety of any person from death or serious bodily injury; (c) prevent fraud or abuse of Dropbox or its users; or (d) to protect Dropbox's property rights.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Dropbox now asserts that it can decrypt and pass your data on to a third party if Dropfox feels it needs to do so, in order to protect its property rights.
As a result, Soghoian has filed a 16-page complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which asks the FTC to have Dropbox admit that it can get at Dropbox data, making your data vulnerable to an attack on Dropbox's servers; require Dropbox to email its 25 million customers to warn them of the potential problem and suggest that customers encrypt their data independently; force Dropbox to refund money to people who paid for "Pro" service, if they felt they were deceived; and enjoin Dropbox from making future deceptive statements.

Is it time to abandon cloud computing?

Many have suggested we abandon a cloud only strategy.

Should we abandon the cloud for healthcare? Absolutely not.

Should we reset our expectations that highly reliable, secure computing can be provided at very low cost by “top men” in the cloud? Absolutely yes.

I am a cloud provider. At my Harvard Medical School Data Center, I provide 4,000 Cores and 2 petabytes of data to thousands of faculty and staff. At BIDMC, I provide 500 virtualized servers and a petabyte of data to 12,000 users. Our BIDPO/BIDMC Community EHR Private Cloud provides electronic health records to 300 providers.

I know what it takes to provide 99.999 percent uptime. Multiple redundant data centers, clustered servers, arrays of tiered storage and extraordinary power engineering.

With all of this amazing infrastructure comes complexity. With complexity comes unanticipated consequences, change control challenges and human causes of failure.

The False Cloud Debate

Public cloud advocates have said for years that the core value of public clouds is the ability to scale and provision on demand and on the cheap -- they're right. However, many fail to accept there may be times when the architectural patterns of public clouds best serve the requirements of the business when implemented locally -- in a private cloud.

If you accept that the value of cloud computing is in some circumstances best expressed in a private cloud, it should become apparent that the movement to the cloud should be prefaced by good architecture, requirements gathering, and planning. Those who view the adoption of cloud computing as simply a matter of private versus public are destined to not understand the core business issues, and they risk making costly mistakes.

Can you live in the Chromebook cloud?

The Google Chromebooks are coming, and at a decent price point that will surely attract casual users. What most folks will have to determine before picking up one of the shiny new Chromebooks coming next month, is can the cloud computing model work for everything?  This is a hurdle that Google and its partners must overcome in the marketing of these new notebooks. If consumers buy them and run into even one task they can’t do the reaction is going to be swift and loud.

Google links Android to App Engine cloud

Forging links between cloud and mobile computing, Google plans to introduce this week a set of Eclipse-based Java development tools for building Android applications backed by the company's App Engine cloud platform, a company representative confirmed on Monday morning.

With App Engine Tooling for Android, Google will enable developers to build Android applications using common tools and techniques spanning client and server parts of applications to make it simple to deploy the server side to App Engine, the company said on the website for its Google I/O conference being held in San Francisco this week. The session on App Engine Tooling for Android is scheduled for Tuesday.