Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: cloud computing

  • Apple and the long game

    Apple and the long game

    As expected, Apple announced their new range of iPhones and a smart watch today with many digital trees being felled as the tech media falls over to describe all the shiny features of the new devices.

    Buried in Apple’s announcements though are the company’s real long game in payments and the Internet of Things.

    For the IoT, the various ‘kits’ Apple have announced in the last year — HomeKit, HealthKit and now CloudKit — are the serious plays in this space as they bundle together programs, devices and data streams across health and smarthome applications.

    CloudKit moves Apple onto another level as it makes it easier for developers to build back end applications that tie into smart devices; even if someone isn’t using Apple equipment they still may find themselves firmly in the walled garden of Cuptertino.

    The long awaiting release of Apple Pay leverages iTunes’ strength as a payment platform, bundling a secure chip into the new iPhone adds to the company’s pitch of being a trusted partner to merchants and payments processors.

    What today’s announcements of new hardware, software and APIs indicate is Apple’s shoring up the perimeters of its walled garden.

    For it’s competitors, this raises the ante; Google Wallet has nothing like the market penetration or customer acceptance that iTunes has and earlier this week Amazon effectively admitted the Fire smartphone has been a failure by slashing prices. Facebook has made promising noises about payments but still remains locked in an advertising driven business model.

    While there’s no doubt the new iPhone will be a success, although the jury is out on the smart watch, Apple’s real game is in controlling a large part of the payments industry and the internet of things. Today’s announcements are a key step in that strategy.

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  • Making business more flexible with cloud computing

    Making business more flexible with cloud computing

    This post is third in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

    One of the challenges for a growing business is the cost of equipping new workers, cloud computing is making this easier and making companies more flexible.

    Not so long ago, the cost of setting up a new staff member with a computer, software and all the other oncosts was prohibitive. In industries like architecture, design or Engineering it was quite possible to spend $30,000 on a fully equipped workstation.

    For most businesses it was quite typical to send $3,000 on a PC fitted out with Microsoft Office, line of business software and associated IT setup costs.

    Often the employee costs were even higher as they spent days sitting around waiting for the IT people to get around to setting up an account or a new license to arrive for the critical business software tools.

    For businesses with varying workflows — particularly those in project based industries like designers and architects — these costs were a major hassle if you were only taking on a contractor or temporary worker for a few weeks. It either meant wasting capital on expensive equipment that was unused most of the time or paying outrageous rental fees.

    With the arrival of cloud computing all of this changed and the relatively cheap cost of setting up new workers is now one of the reasons why it’s so easy to start a business.

    Another benefit of cloud computing is it allows staff to work from home and on the road. Not so long ago, remote working was a complex and expensive thing to set up, now the cloud services don’t care where you’re connected.

    The modern cloud computing model is coming up to being a decade old and smart businesses are using its benefits to their advantage, those who haven’t explored the benefits are being left behind.

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  • Apple’s security challenge

    Apple’s security challenge

    This week’s news about celebrities’ personal photos being stolen from their iCloud accounts would be irritating Apple ahead of their September 9 media event.

    Unfortunately for Apple they seemed to have walked into this by making things convenient for users rather than enforcing strong security measures.

    As Arik Hesseldahl in Re/Code describes, this breach was probably due to Apple not encouraging two factor authentication and not limiting the number of password guesses.

    The latter is particularly irritating as it shouldn’t be hard for a system to pick when a brute force attack — a computer guessing a password millions of times a second — is being staged against a user.

    It’s also trivial to limit the number of guesses as most other services do.

    For users, the best protection is to have complex passwords which reduces the effectiveness of brute force attacks. It’s also worthwhile being careful with your personal nudie photos.

    The consequences of having your iCloud account compromised are more than just losing your embarrassing photos, Wired’s Mat Honan had his entire digital life hijacked through this method two years ago.

    With Apple aspiring to control the smarthome and smartcar markets, the consequences of accounts being breached becomes exponentially greater. These are issues Apple and the rest of the internet of things industry need to take seriously.

    Hopefully at Apple’s big media event next week, some brave journalist will stand out of the assembled masses of sycophant hacks and ask CEO Tim Cook some hard questions about security on the shiny new iDevices.

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  • Driving the hybrids — VMWare and the case for hybrid cloud computing

    Driving the hybrids — VMWare and the case for hybrid cloud computing

    A decade ago VM Ware disrupted the corporate IT world with its virtualisation software that changed the way big organisations used their servers. Today the company is facing up to the challenge of dealing with its own business being disrupted.

    In the late 1990s when a big business wanted a new server it had to get someone to physically install one, VM Ware’s founders came up with the idea of ‘virtualisation’ with their software creating a virtual server that looked to the network like it was a discrete, real computer.

    Naturally this was quicker and cheaper than buying and setting up a whole new server and VM Ware was an immediate success that upended the ‘big iron’ end of the computer industry.

    Today VM Ware is valued at $42 billion on the stock market and is one of the IT industry’s giants.

    However the virtualisation market itself is being disrupted by cloud computing. For many businesses, it’s even cheaper to pay Amazon, Microsoft or another cloud service to provide the servers for you.

    So VM Ware is reinventing itself with a range of services to meet the challenge from the cloud providers. One of it’s key strategies is to provide a ‘hybrid’ cloud where customers run some IT services on their own servers and others on the cloud, the idea is this offers the best of both worlds.

    This is almost the same challenge that Microsoft faces as both companies see their core business models being threatened by internet based technologies, something that VM Ware CEO Pat Gelsinger concedes.

    “We think of Microsoft having a strategy much like ours, given they have on premise and in the cloud,” says Gelsinger. “We sort of agree on the shape of the market. We would say that Amazon and Google see a different shape in the market.”

    Amazon and Google’s view is a ‘pure cloud’ model where companies and consumers run all their IT on web based services. In that world, purists like Xero’s Rod Drury are openly disdainful of the hybrid model believing it to be cumbersome and adding complexity to a simple business solution.

    For companies like VM Ware and Microsoft their future lies upon the hybrid model being adopted by business. This is a high stakes industry battle which will define the careers of many IT workers and the shape of the businesses they work for.

    Paul travelled to the VM World conference in San Francisco as a guest of  VM Ware.

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  • Fear in the cloud – the loss of trust in online business

    Fear in the cloud – the loss of trust in online business

    Today I spoke about online safety to the Australian Seniors’ Computer Clubs Association about staying safe online.

    Hopefully I’ll have a copy of the presentation up tomorrow but what was notable about the morning was the concern among the audience about security and safety of cloud services.

    The ASCCA membership are a computer savvy bunch – anyone who disparages older peoples’ technology nous would be quickly put in their place by these folk – but it was notable just how concerned they are about online privacy. They are not happy.

    Another troubling aspect were my answers to the questions, invariably I had to fall back on the lines “only do what you’re comfortable with”  and “it all comes down to a question of trust.”

    The problem with the latter line is that it’s difficult to trust many online companies, particularly when their business models relies upon trading users’ data.

    Resolving this trust issue is going to be difficult and it’s hard to see how some social media platforms and online businesses can survive should users flee or governments enact stringent privacy laws.

    It may well be we’re seeing another transition effect happening in the online economy.

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