Tag: cloud computing

Is the Virginia storm outage bad news for cloud computing?

A disaster or an opportunity for the cloud computing industry?

On the eve of the US Independence Day holiday weekend, the last thing you need is a storm taking out your services. Unfortunately a storm across Virginia did exactly that to one of Amazon’s key data centres, taking with it popular social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest along with the Netflix movie service.

Having a key data centre going down and knocking out the services that rely on it surely exposes one of cloud computing’s greatest weakness – or does it?

Last week I spoke to Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security for Google Apps, who made the point “not all cloud providers are created equal”. The Virginia outage illustrates this.

Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram all made choices to solely rely on one data centre for key parts of their services leaving them exposed should a storm, earthquake or tsunami affect that location.

Eran introduced me to a term I hadn’t heard before – “shared fate zones” – a good example of which would be putting all your servers in Virginia where they can be knocked out by a storm, in California or Japan where an earthquake can disable them or solely around the Indian Ocean where a tsunami like that of 2004 could know them all out.

All the major cloud providers have the facility to spread loads across the globe for exactly this situation. The services affected by the Virginia storm chose not to do this and they eventually were caught out.

Events like this aren’t just an issue with cloud computing, or even technology in general. Storms, earthquakes, fires and many other natural or man made disasters are a fact of life which can disrupt business. If an earthquake hits your town, the question is how quickly can your business and customers get back to normal.

Distributing services is actually the cloud’s strength, it means we’re not tied to one office or location so we can get back to normal a lot quicker than those who have lost everything.

Computer networks being knocked out is nothing new, we’ve seen this plenty of times over the last fifty years as squirrels have chewed cables, technicians have pressed the wrong button or natural disasters have disabled data centres. By spreading the load, cloud computing services should make networks less prone to problems.

A lot of people will say in the next few days that Amazon’s outage illustrates the unreliability of cloud computing, it’s actually the opposite.

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Managing your digital estate

What happens to our social media and cloud accounts when we pass away?

Everyone who goes online leaves “digital footprints“, a trail of the things we’ve done on the web. When you pass away, what happens to those status updates, comments and documents you’ve left on the Internet?

Dealing with the passing of a loved one is always difficult but today we have an added complexity of dealing with the online problems of social media sites suggesting people still “like” the deceased or valuable documents locked into cloud computing services.

With more of us storing information into cloud computing services, having important data locked away becomes a real risk and how online storage or software companies deal with deceased estates becomes important.

Online services don’t have a standard way of dealing with the data of someone who has passed away, here’s a quick sampler of some of the different policies.

Facebook

The social media giant has the easiest way to manage a deceased’s profile, simply fill in a form and swear you’re telling the truth. Facebook will then “memorialize” the account.

“Memorializing” is an interesting way of dealing with user’s passing. Rather than deleting the account, Facebook will lock out everyone but friends who are still able to post to the deceased’s wall. In some aspects, this is quite an elegant solution.

LinkedIn

One of the features of LinkedIn is that it gives upfront suggestions of who should be in your network. If you’re a heavy user of the service, you’ve almost certainly encountered a suggested contact that is either inappropriate or distressing so the stakes for LinkedIn in keeping their contacts up to date is high.

LinkedIn’s process of dealing with a deceased’s passing is an email to customerservice@linkedin.com with the word “deceased” in the subject line. You need to give some details on the user’s passing and their account.

Google

With Google offering both social and cloud computing services, they are probably the most important service of all. Google’s requirements for handing over account details are rightly stringent.

Google’s procedure for deceased accounts involves the person first reporting the user’s passing to identify themselves first. Interestingly this has to be done by post.

Twitter

Like Google, Twitter requires anyone reporting a user’s death to mail proof of identity along with a death certificate. Once they are satisfied the user has passed away, they will deactivate the account.

PayPal

“When contacted in regards to a deceased estate we move quickly and with respect to close the customer account.  Our policy and process is similar to many large financial institutions including banks  When PayPal is notified that an account holder is deceased immediate steps are taken to suspend the account to prevent any unauthorised transfers from the account. 

To close the account of someone who has died, PayPal needs to be sent paperwork including; details of the Executor of the Estate and a copy of the death certificate for the account holder. The documentation is reviewed and, once authenticated, the account is closed. If there are funds in the PayPal account, then these will be issued to the Executor of the Estate. 

With bankrupt estates we refer this directly to our legal team who deal with them on a case-by-case basis and take action according to the instruction provided by the person or company handling the bankruptcy.”

Apple

No specific policy, the company recommends “customers needing guidance in relation to a deceased estate contact iTunes support at http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/contact/“.

Amazon

No clear policy. The company has been approached for comment.

Digital estate management services

There’s a number of services which help manage digital identities after someone passes away. Mashable reviews a number of these.

Sharing passwords

One simple solution is to share passwords with your next of kin, but that is a horrible security risk which isn’t recommended.

A slightly different solution is to split passwords in two and give half to different people, that still has risks and can get complex.

Probably the biggest problem with passwords is they change. Even if you write the password in your will or share it with trusted loved ones there’s a good chance it may have changed in the meantime.

Central email accounts

Probably the easiest, albeit still risky solution, is to have all online services pointing to one email address. almost every service has a “recover my password” feature which an executor or loved one with access to the central address will be able to recover most account login details.

Should everything else fail there are the courts and every major online service will obey a properly executed legal order although anything involving lawyers invariably ends up messy, difficult and expensive so that course should be the last resort.

As with everything online, balancing security, convenience and privacy is a difficult task for both individuals and companies. It’s not made better by the distress and grief when someone passes away.

Ideally we’d all plan these things and it would be easy on our loved ones although things often don’t turn out that way. It’s as true online as in any other aspect of life.

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Using cloud computing to grow your business

An evening workshop on using cloud computing to grow your business.

Computers have changed business over the last thirty years and now cloud computing is changing the ways we use computers.

Smartphones, tablet computers, laptops and PCs are all becoming more productive and efficient as cloud services make it easier for business grow and become profitable.

Join Paul Wallbank and the Bondi Business Enterprise Centre for a two hour session on how you can use cloud computing services in your business.

Tickets are only $35 and the session will be held from 5.30pm on Wednesday, June 20  at Bondi Library, Denison Street Bondi Junction, NSW. You can book through the BEC website.

You’re probably using cloud computing services and don’t even know it, find out how to use them better.

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Using Cloud Computing to grow your business

A two hour workshop on using cloud computing in your business

Cloud computing tools can help your business grow, improve flexibility and build profits.

ABC radio commentator and author of eBusiness, Paul Wallbank, looks at how you can use these services to improve your business’ profitability, be more flexible and overcome the problems often found by growing businesses.

This two hour evening workshop is part of the Bondi Business Enerprise Centre’s social media progam. Seats are $35 and bookings are essentials. Contact the Enterprise Centre to secure your place.

Address:
Denison Street
Bondi Junction, NSW
2150
Australia
Map and Directions

Date: 20/06/2012

Start Time: 5:30 PM
End Time: 7:30 PM

Price: A $35.00

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FUD on the Desktop

Can moving off Windows XP really save companies money?

“User productivity costs jump up a staggering 40 percent“, “return on investment over 130 percent over a three-year period” and an eighty four percent drop in IT support costs are some the latest claims from Microsoft in their campaign to wean users off Windows XP.

These, undoubtedly true, claims are pretty impressive and compelling for cash strapped IT managers, but do they really matter anymore?

With the rise of Bring Your Device policies and cloud computing, what operating system employees use is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

In large organisations that supply workers’ computers, most systems are run on SOEs – Standard Operating Environments – which means users have limited accounts and can’t install rogue software.

For those organisations wedded to supplying staff with desktop or laptop computers XP is fine and almost all of them are well advanced in their plans to redeploy to Windows 7 or 8 when the XP support period runs out in April 2014.

We’re seeing fewer organisations locked into the SOE model as the financial sums and business benefits of moving over to an employee Bring Your Own Device – BYOD – model start to look compelling.

Developing an SOE is a complex, time consuming task for an organisation – the package has to be tested to work on the company’s hardware which might include dozens of different types of printers, laptops and other devices. Then it has to be tested on all the software employees use.

In a big organisation developing new operating environments is not done lightly. It’s a complex, expensive process.

With a BYOD policy the company can develop a standard desktop environment that runs on a web browser. Staff can then bring their own device running on Mac OSX, Android, Linux or even Windows XP and, as long as their browser is up to date, they can run on the corporate network.

The IT department no longer has to care about what the staff member has on their desk and can focus on more important business technology issues – although sadly the password issue doesn’t go away.

For Microsoft, this evolution in corporate IT is a problem. Increasingly big organisations aren’t placing orders for big fleets of centrally managed desktops. The IT industry has moved to the cloud.

In a perverse way Microsoft are winning the desktop battle, most of those workers in companies implementing BYOD policies will choose Windows 7 or 8 systems because they are cheap and work well in a business environment. The problem is that’s where the profit no longer lies.

While we’ll see more FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt – about cloud computing, BYOD and Windows XP over the next year, the battle has been fought and won.

Increasingly Microsoft are looking like an exhausted army that has won an irrelevant battle while the real war has moved elsewhere.

The challenge for Microsoft is to find its way back to relevance in an era where the operating system doesn’t really matter.

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The View From The Cloud

Where is the cloud computing industry heading and how does it affect businesses?

I’m presenting View From The Cloud this afternoon where we look at the results of SmartCompany’s technology in business survey.

The results are interesting, with nearly half the respondents saying they don’t use any cloud services.

Almost certainly, those respondents are wrong – they don’t realise many of the things they do on the web are cloud based. The 9% who nominated “they don’t know” are closer to the truth.

Those “unknown unknowns” are the big challenge for business managers and owners – those who think cloud computing isn’t being used in their organisations don’t know what their staff are up to with their laptops and smartphones.

Of those who are knowingly using cloud computing services, over two-thirds said they did so for the flexibility while just under a half appreciated the cloud services’ ability to grow with their business.

An encouraging aspect of the survey is how only a quarter of the respondents nominated price as being the reason for adopting cloud services.

This is an aspect of selling cloud computing services that has worried me for a while, that companies are commoditising their market by giving away free – or insanely – cheap services.

As always, price doesn’t drive the good customers and this survey illustrates that. Provide a good service at reasonable price points and the customers will come.

Business respondents also illustrated a mature attitude towards risks with cloud service with 61% concerned about data safety and half of that number worried about access issues.

An interesting part of the threat response was that 17% had other concerns about cloud technologies – including being tied to one vendor.

This is an interesting attitude which indicates people don’t understand the degree of vendor lock in that already exists in the computer world and why the majority of businesses are using Windows computers running Microsoft Word. If anything, cloud services are far more open than boxed software.

Vendor lock in though is a real concern and something that all cloud computing users should check before they, or their business, becomes too dependent on any one software package, consultant or online application.

Overall, the SmartCompany business technology survey is an interesting snapshot of where business is today with emerging trends and services. Join us at 12.30 to discuss the results.

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Forget Plastics, today it’s Big Data

Big Data is the IT industry’s latest buzzword but it’s been sitting on our desktop all along

“Plastics” was the career advice to uni students in the 1967 movie The Graduate. Today the same advice to a smart young entrepreneur would be “big data”.

Big data is the current buzzword for the IT industry, we’re seeing start-ups with cool tools popping up and whole new job descriptions to manage it, while big and small businesses ponder how to use another technology in their operations.

At the end of the month, the third of the City of Sydney’s 2012 Let’s Talk Business series will see SmartCompany’s James Thomson among others discussing how data drives business.

How we use data in our business is something we’ve had to come to grips with for ages, but many of us haven’t really started to find those nuggets of value in our databases.

We’ve actually been in the era of big data for decades since computers were introduced in the workplace. One thing that PCs do very well is gather and store information.

Today computerised point-of-sales systems, database software, loyalty programs and web-tracking tools mean we have a massive amount of data about our clients at our fingertips.

As computers get more powerful and cloud-based services start making detailed data analysis more available, we’re going to see even more data pouring into our businesses.

Social media services add to the data deluge as they gather, giving even more intelligence about our markets, individual customers and the performance of our businesses.

The problem is that many of us are already overwhelmed by what we have. The thought of even more data we can’t use causes many managers and business owners to hide under their desks and weep.

An article in the MIT’s Technology Review about Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania looked at this problem.

Professor’s Fader’s view is that most businesses have enough data – the problem is managing what we have, along with the risk of trying to extrapolate too much from historical information.

To deal with this overload we’re seeing companies like Kaggle starting-up to help us mine this data and get useful information about our businesses and customers.

What these data-mining companies are promising is the ability to see the patterns in what appears to be just a mass of confusing data.

Already we’re seeing businesses that can connect the dots get a head start on their slower competitors who don’t appreciate the value locked in their databases and CRMs.

Making sense of the data we’re accumulating is the real challenge. If we’re not paying attention to what we already have then there’s little point in gathering more.

Tickets for How Your Customer Data Can Drive New Business at the Sydney Town Hall on May 29 are still available.

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