Asia, Europe will ride the cloud faster, says Microsoft
According to Allison Watson, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s worldwide partner group — there is a mouthful — businesses in Asia and Europe seem to be more willing to adopt their Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) — another mouthful — faster than those in the U.S. This international market, Watson believes, is more conducive to a “digitally-connected environment”.
In recent months, cloud computing has raised some serious question marks with a number of high-profile outages by Amazon and Google. Nevertheless, the hype or reality, depending on your perspective, is growing unabated. Microsoft has added its hat into the pile with the announcement of Windows Azure, a cloud computing services platform.
Microsoft’s technology will essentially allow businesses to grow their own clouds and offer those services to their customers. Naturally, the company seems confident that this is a good thing and that companies in Europe and Asia are prime candidates for being their guinea pigs. Watson promises that SaaS (software-as-a-service) will bring Microsoft customers big revenue. Time will tell if that big revenue is accompanied with big headaches.
Source: ZDNet Asia
Photo: Flickr
Tag: amazon, cloud computing, google, microsoft, servers, services, software
Lightning strike brings outages for Amazon cloud
Amazon.com has released a statement saying that the recent outages experienced on some of their Web services were due to lightning strikes in the United States. On 6:30pm Pacific Daylight Time, a lightning strike caused some of the servers to lose power. This led to disruption with their EC2 service for a limited number of customers.
Such an outage will once again raise questions about the reliability of cloud computing services. On one hand, such outages could have easily happened at any data center, even one locally owned by a small business. On the other hand, users of the services are still putting their data, sometimes of a sensitive nature, at the mercy of the service provider, something that makes some businesses uneasy.
EC2 is a service providing customers with access to Amazon servers using Xen virtualization, a free and open source virtual machine environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. This is not the first service disruption for Amazon’s offerings. Google’s services were also interrupted recently, leading some critics to step to the debate table for a fresh round of anti-cloud computing arguments. Undoubtedly the debate will rage on, and only time will tell how reliably the services can be.
Source: ZDNet Asia
Photo: Flickr
Tag: amazon, cloud computing, outage, service interruption, virtualization, web servers, xen