How to Choose the Right Cloud Computing Vendor

It has been noted by multiple advisory and analyst groups, that there's an awful lot of interest in the cloud area right now. It’s not surprising that business see benefits in the cloud services and cloud providers are in great demand. But can all companies quite deliver on the services they're promising? How to choose the right partner in the growing number of cloud providers crowding the market nowadays? You definitely want to do more than type the names of a few providers in a search engine. Selecting the right cloud services provider is a critical step to ensure that they can deliver on the promises offered by cloud computing.

Patrick Grey, president of the Prevoyance Group, and Charles King, principal analyst of Pund-IT, help to sort out the problem and give their tips and expert advice on the best way to seek a cloud computing vendor. Below are a couple of guidelines they suggest:

• Use metrics. Set benchmarks to measure good performance. Be realistic, though: 100 percent isn't always achievable, but maybe 99.9 percent is.

• Network. The best resources for choosing prospective vendors are other IT decision-makers and other vendors. "You would be well-advised to touch base with vendors you work with closely," says King. "You basically have to get out and work the networks and see what you can find."

• Make a test case. A good way to test a prospective vendor is to give them a non-essential part of your business first. And only then you can eventually move more critical pieces over.

• Consider data storage and security. Take a look at how a cloud provider's data storage, data security and security infrastructures work. How do these firms protect your data? What kind of security measures are in place?

• Use a service-level agreement. For critical, sophisticated or big projects, include a service-level agreement detailing which metrics need to be met and what penalties will ensue if they're not met.

Source: NewsChannel 5

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Top 10 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2010/11

Gartner has identified 10 mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2011, and as Nick Jones, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, says these “10 mobile technologies should be on every organization's radar screen".

So, here we go:

• Bluetooth (3 and 4). Two new Bluetooth versions will emerge by 2011: Bluetooth 3 will introduce 802.11 as a bearer for faster data transmission, and Bluetooth 4 will introduce a new low-energy (LE) mode that will enable communication with external peripherals and sensors.

• The Mobile Web. More smartphones will appear in the world market and that will encourage greater numbers of people to access conventional websites on mobile devices. So, mobile applications will eventually be as important as web pages are today.

• Mobile Widgets. Widgets provide a convenient way to deliver simple, connected applications, especially those involving real-time data updates (such as weather forecasts, e-mail notifications, marketing, blogs and information feeds). They can also be a good first step to assess the demand for an application on a specific platform before undertaking expensive native development.

• Platform-Independent Mobile AD Tools. Even though platform-independent application development (AD) tools cannot deliver a "write once, run anywhere" equivalent to native code, they can significantly reduce the cost of delivering and supporting multiplatform applications that provide a more sophisticated experience than the mobile Web and operate outside signal coverage.

• App stores. They will be the primary distribution channel for mobile applications and a commercial channel to sell applications and content (especially in international markets), and they will provide new options for mobile application sourcing.

• Enhanced Location Awareness. By the end of 2011, over 75 percent of devices shipped in mature markets will include a GPS. GPS will be the primary, but not the only, means of establishing handset location. Wi-Fi and cell ID systems will remain important in situations where GPS is unavailable or unreliable.

• Cellular Broadband. Continuous improvements in wireless broadband performance in 2010 and 2011 will increase the range of applications that no longer require fixed networking, and make cellular broadband a more effective fallback when fixed connections fail. Embedded cellular networking will become a standard feature of many corporate laptops, and will enable new types of network-connected devices and business models, such as e-books and media players.

• Touchscreens. Emerging as the dominant user interface for large-screen handsets? Touchscreens will be included in over 60 percent of mobile devices shipped in Western Europe and North America in 2011. Organizations developing native handset applications may need to exploit single and multitouch interfaces and haptics to give their applications a compelling and competitive user experience.

• M2M. Many network service providers increased their commitment to machine to machine (M2M) in 2009, so a good range of both national and multinational M2M service options will be available in mature markets during 2010 and 2011.

• Device-Independent Security. This isn't strictly a single technology, but refers to a collection of security technologies, application technologies and sourcing options that enable the provisioning of applications that are secure, but less tightly tied to specific devices and platforms, and that, in many cases, do not require security tools to be installed on the client.

Our 2 cents: mobile applications are becoming as critical as corporate websites for a number of reasons. They provide unmatched user experience to the increasing community of owners of powerful smartphones and other mobile devices. Marketers will keep leveraging the proximity, both physical and emotional, of mobile devices, first and foremost smartphones, to place their products closer to buyers. Predictions about which platform (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or something new we haven’t yet heard of) will take the lead in the coming two years are more difficult to make, but it’s evident that mobile application development market has a very bright future ahead.


Source: Gartner

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