During 2012, the shining star for cloud services has once again been Amazon’s web service (AWS) offering. It success and popularity has made it an almost household name for cloud based web services. However AWS, or any other web services cloud offering, isn't the only...
As the push towards the cloud continues, the inertia of its popularity can leave CTOs with the impression that the world is black and white with only two options: in the cloud or not in the cloud. The nuances and diversity of solutions can therefore be lost in the...
Predictions are hard to make in any area of life, however short term forecasting is not impossible. Ask a meteorologist for the weather in the next twenty-four hours and you will get a fairly accurate prediction. Ask for the outlook over the next 30 days and you will...
Linux continued to perform well as an alternative server platform in 2012 and RedHat has maintained its position as a reliable and trusted Linux distribution. This reliance on Linux based servers is likely to increase during 2013 as more services migrate to the cloud...
Here's a common situation: you manage an application; you haven't gone through a release; no patches have been applied (to your knowledge); and the infrastructure guys say that they haven't touched the network in ages. But a user calls, and to your...
As the push towards the cloud continues, 2013 will see a growing emphasis on cloud-related outsourcing projects. Cloud-related IT expenditure covers a wide range of areas including; Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud compute centers, infrastructure as a service...
In 2013, roughly one third of businesses will increase their IT outsourcing budgets. Chief Information Officers and CEOs, from small businesses to large enterprises, are planning to up their spending on the outsourcing of web/e-commerce platforms, application...
At this year's Electric Cloud Summit there was big focus on Agile software development practices. Even a casual look at Electric Cloud's product line, which includes ElectricAccelerator, ElectricCommander, and most recently ElectricDeploy, will make it obvious that...
Outsourcing IT, technical and engineering related tasks, rather than employing extra staff, is a cost effective way of staying flexible in an ever changing market and economy. However, one big question that needs to be answered is; does your outsourcing company have...
The technology industry loves buzzwords. The decade of the '80s was all about synergy and paradigm shifts. In the '90s, it was the web and the Internet. The turn of the century brought talk about virtualization and social media. Today it's all about the cloud. Of...
Often times, I'm caught in a situation where an application or service is not directly accessible to me from the network I'm currently on. For instance, if I'm at a customer site, I may need VNC or RDP access to a collocated server. Sure, I could open up port 5901...
The difference between quality assurance (QA) and testing is often misunderstood. In fact, the terms are frequently used interchangeably. However, testing is actually just one part of QA. Quality assurance, on the other hand, covers a larger, more holistic part of the...