In the aftermath of travel chaos caused by the Icelandic volcano ash, it was interesting to observe the dynamics in the social media world as several thousand stranded passengers across the globe relied on Twitter for information. Differently to the disastrous opening of London Heathrow’s Terminal Five, ‘acts of God’ such as this can’t be helped. [...]

I opened my post yesterday morning and found a T-shirt was enclosed. It featured the logo for the new Steria Infrastructure on Command service. So I took a photo (as you can see) and put it up on my Flickr page. Somehow, that photo of a T-shirt on the floor in my living room was [...]

The cloud. It’s all hot air isn’t it?
Well, it depends on your position in the debate. To many, it’s just some new terminology, cooked up to make Software as a Service (SaaS) sounds sexier. To others, it’s a way of life. An entirely new way of doing business. A business model that changes the game.
But [...]

Every time I write an article about cloud computing I always think it has landed at the right time. Just as green issues hit the top of the corporate and government agendas we have this new way of delivering technology that gives us better services, lowers costs and actually creates much less carbon.
I have been on [...]

Governments are determined to look green, at least on paper, and it is only a matter of time before datacentres get stung by the taxman.
In recognition that datacentres being massive users of power, governments might tax them in relation to the amount of power they use. Datacentres probably already account for about 5% of global [...]

You wouldn’t think allowing workers to choose their own devices, rather than give them all a PC, would help reduce costs and carbon emissions. If you did the same with company cars you might end up with a fleet of Ferraris.
But allowing workers to buy their own devices, that can link to the internal cloud, [...]

Perhaps the best example to use when talking about sustainability and performance is that of public sector organisations. Local government is a great example. Being part of the government they have to be seen to be green. They also have to work on a shoestring and provide a high level of service.
Recently, I was at the [...]

The last decade has seen IT outsourcing mature from being an innovative service for a few to a standardised utility that a wide range of companies take advantage of.
Outsourced services such as desktop and server support, which makes businesses more efficient, have been provided by external suppliers for so long that there is little left [...]

As Bill Thompson pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago, there are many obstacles on the path of businesses hoping to save money  by using cloud computing. They include the difficulty of implementing effective governance processes on public cloud systems and fears over security and availability.
Many cloud providers are touting internal or ‘private’ [...]

While the phrase ‘cloud computing’ is in imminent danger of falling into the valley of lost meaning that has claimed so many IT-related terms over the years - remember 4GLs, anyone -  the move towards online hosting of data and services seems unstoppable now that networks are fast enough and server farms powerful enough to [...]