Imagine if the Founding Fathers of the United States had iPads when they were signing the Declaration of Independence or The US Constitution. Rather than pulling out a big quill pen and dipping it in ink, each delegate could have walked up to the desk and signed the document with their finger. In fact, they could have passed the iPad around to each other for signing rather than all walking up to the document. That would have helped Ben Franklin, since he had gout and it was tough for him to stand up and walk.
If John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson used DocuSign Ink to sign an electronic version of The Declaration of Independence, not only would the iPad have captured their signature, but it would have put a time and date stamp along with the GPS coordinates of where they signed. All of that information, including the document, would go to a secure storage area in the cloud and be retained.
Read the rest of this entry »
According to IDC, 80% of new commercial enterprise applications will be deployed on cloud platforms in 2012. Add to that the expectation that intelligent mobile devices will exceed “traditional computing” devices by almost 2 to 1 within the next 24 months and you have a very different world from just a few years ago.
Cloud computing is very hot and every major software, hardware and technology services company is trying to get into it. In some cases, vendors are throwing a web front end onto an application and calling it a cloud service. Many others are creating infrastructure for companies to run their own applications in the cloud or are providing complete business systems.
I was talking to a customer this week and the CIO said they are moving as much as they can to the cloud. Some will be public and some of it private. He said that a vendor would have a hard time getting a traditional server-based product in the door today. They don’t want to buy anymore servers, capitalize them and go through a chargeback allocation process.
Read the rest of this entry »
This past weekend a lot of people in the Northeast United States got a little surprise from mother nature. A wet heavy snow decided to hit us on October 29 and cause all kinds of problems – cancelling Trick-or-Treating on Halloween was the least of our worries. My power was out for 48 hours and a lot of people in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut are still without power. A lot of businesses couldn’t open and a lot of people were left just trying to stay warm.
Fortunately cell phones were working and a few places got power back Sunday night. Thank goodness for my local public library. It had power on Monday morning and it had Internet access so I could go in and use the Wi-Fi. Obviously word got out because the place was packed.
My business stores all of our information in the cloud, so getting back to work was easy. All my documents and email is in the cloud, so I could communicate and continue with my projects. Here are 4 great cloud services we use to make sure we can do business no matter what the weather may bring. Read the rest of this entry »
I just listened to an excellent webcast by Neil MacDonald at Gartner on “Why Cloud-Based Computing Will Be More Secure Than It Is Today”. Gartner says that security concerns seem to be top of mind in different surveys on the adoption of cloud computing. Security is important, but people are focusing on the wrong thing.
Many organizations focus on securing or locking down devices. IT locks down servers, firewalls, desktops, mobile devices, you name it. That is a part of the solution, but what is really most important? It’s controlling the outcome of a process, and that is typically about the information.
MacDonald gives a great example of how organizations already give their most important data to 3rd party providers. Think about payroll. Most companies outsource this process. Talk about sensitive data. Somehow we trust those organizations with the security of our personnel information.
Read the rest of this entry »
Here is another great video explaining cloud computing. Lots of people are still confused with all the terminology thrown around, so I thought that with Dreamforce and VMWorld 2011 this week, it was a good time to help explain the cloud in simple terms. Both of these conferences bring together luminaries, dignitaries and companys (couldn’t think of another aries word) from all over the tech world.
I bet if you ask 10 people for their definition of cloud computing you would get 11 different answers. There are too many terms to shake a stick at and differing views on everything.
Most people can at least agree that the cloud has many benefits for consumers and businesses because it makes life easier. Hopefully you will be a little less confused after watching the video.
Read the rest of this entry »
