Lock-in, migration costs can put a damper on cloud projects
Cloud services promise low cost-of-entry and rapid return on investment, but those advantages make it easy to overlook associated investments. To find out the true return on investment (ROI) of cloud computing enterprises have to dig deeper, according to a white paper from industry organization Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA).
Calculating the total cost of an IT service against its potential return is always a challenge for IT staff, and that holds even truer for cloud computing, according to ISACA. A thorough analysis of cloud computing benefits must include short-, medium- and long-term views as well as termination costs, it said.
Hidden costs that enterprises may fail to anticipate when moving quickly to cloud-based services include the cost of bringing services back in-house due to regulatory change; unexpected expenses involved in the initial migration of systems; and lock-in with a specific provider or proprietary service model, according to ISACA. Read more...
Google establishes partner program for cloud services
Following the best marketing practices of traditional IT firms, Google has launched a partner program to help third-party vendors use and sell Google cloud services.
The Google Cloud Platform Partner Program will provide "our partners with the tools, training, and resources they need to successfully address your business' IT needs," wrote Eric Morse, who is Google's head of sales and business development for the Google Cloud Platform, in a blog entry announcing the program.
Google will offer resources around its cloud offerings, such as the Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, and Google Cloud Storage. Google did not detail what specific tools, training and resources it would offer, nor what the qualifications are for becoming a partner. Read more...
Online dating site dumps Amazon cloud services
Online dating site WhatsYourPrice.com has kissed Amazon Web Services goodbye after severe East Coast thunderstorms knocked out one of Amazon's data centers last weekend causing a services outage.
The service interruption, which began last Friday and continued through Saturday before being fixed, was the second Amazon Web Services outage since mid-June.
WhatsYourPrice.com, where members bid for first dates, said in a statement that the Amazon services outages "produce a lot of unhappy customers." Read more...
Cloud failures cost more than $71 million since 2007
A total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 well-known cloud services since 2007 had an economic impact of more than $71.7 million dollars, said the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) on Monday.
The average unavailability of cloud services is 7.5 hours per year, amounting to an availability rate of 99.9 percent, according to the group's preliminary results. "It is extremely far from the expected reliability of mission critical system (99.999 percent). As a comparison, the service average unavailability for electricity in a modern capital is less than 15 minutes per year," the researchers noted in their paper. Read more...
Amazon boosts Web Services security for government agencies
Amazon is stepping up the security and access features of its cloud services in an effort to attract more government agencies as customers.
On Tuesday, Amazon announced the Amazon Web Services GovCloud, a service that complies with the International Traffic in Arms Regulation. ITAR regulates how government agencies manage and store sensitive data, including defense data.
Any cloud service used by organizations that are covered by ITAR can only be accessible by U.S. citizens. Because the AWS GovCloud is only accessible by U.S. citizens and complies with ITAR's other requirements, government agencies can use the service to store and manage additional kinds of data, AWS said. Read more...