If your business relies on the speedy resolution of an issue from your cloud provider, then test them before you try. Send them that email out-of-hours to see how quickly and how useful the reply actually is. Try and reach someone on the phone. Look around the forums to see how many qu...

As the theme tune to the classic 1984 Ghostbusters movie goes, "If there's something strange, in your neighborhood, Who ya gonna call?", I am left wondering what we'll all be singing (shouting?) when something goes wrong in our cloud world. When you've got your whole business in the cl...

"Mass psychology" scientists study this kind of phenomena and the "mass psychology of fascism" is of course the most famous lab case. The extraordinary experience SYS-CON Media lived through became part of a Forbes Magazine investigative cover story called "Attack of the Blogs" that fo...

Earlier this month I attended the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas. The core theme of Impact was "Smart SOA" and how cloud computing comes together in the enterprise, with the emphasis on private clouds. The core notion of private clouds for IBM is really about extending their expe...

If you were to believe the hype from the media and certain so called industry experts, you would be forgiven for thinking that cloud computing is the second coming. The answer to all our scaling and usage problems. Everything to everyone. The notion that the "cloud" is always on, or up...

It is the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world, but how is it best defined? I refer of course to 'Cloud Computing' - the phenomenon that has as many definitions as there are squares on a chess-board. To try and narrow it down we bring here a ro...

As new offerings like Amazon's CloudFront, Microsoft's Azure, and VMware's vCloud are rolled out, the worldwide cloud computing momentum continues to grow. Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal surveys a globe-girdling network of leading infrastructure experts, IT industry executives...

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal seeks to boost your understanding of Cloud Computing concepts and to bring you the latest news, views, and developments - but we couldn't do so without our amazing high-energy pool of contributors, including many of the hard-working executives driving ...

Every year SYS-CON polls the Internet technologies community and asks them to share their thoughts on what's around the corner in the world of i-Technology and Web-based enterprise. The main themes were very clear. Cassatt Corporation's CEO Bill Coleman, for example - famous in a forme...

From Amazon EC2 and App Engine from Google to Utility Computing, Virtualization, and Walled Gardens - there's no aspect of Cloud Computing that hasn't already been addressed at some level of detail in SYS-CON Media's Cloud Computing Journal (www.cloudcomputing.sys-con.com). Here's a ro...

While cloud computing reporting has recently been focused on Microsoft's Azure announcement and Amazon's upgrade to EC2, there's an elephant in the cloud: Google. According to a well-researched article in SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a pr...