Whether you’re moving an existing application to the cloud or starting afresh on the cloud with a brand new application, CAP is an important topic to consider when (re)designing the architecture of your app. CAP stands for Consistency, Availability and Partitioning, three characteristics that are key when designing a distributed application. These three characterictics have an important bearing on the capability of your application to scale up or down with no negative impact which is a basic requirement for cloud based applications.
To sum up, CAP is an important part of any systems architecture – be it on the cloud, hosted or on-premises and the overall objective is to find and design the appropriate balance between the three requirements for your application.

In summary, this intent has been shown by the following;
The US Government has signalled a clear intention to use cloud computing services. This intention was first signalled with the release of apps.gov – a US Government portal to allow different cloud service vendor to market their offerings to the government sector and to provide information on cloud computing
A ‘cloud first’ policy is being adopted by Federal Government. This means in effect that provided security, reliability and cost-effectiveness criteria are met, Federal agencies should use cloud based services as a default.
Considering that the US Government spends $80m each year on IT related expenditure, this could be a huge investment in the Cloud.

On Wednesday 16th June last, I attended a Best Connected event organised by Enterprise Ireland on the topic of “Managed Services & Solutions – partnerships in the Cloud”. In this post, I list some of the main points that were discussed during this cloud computing seminar.

Cloud computing is getting increasing attention as more and more companies are availing of cloud based services and as the maturity of cloud services evolves. As with any new technology trend, it’s important to remember that certain basic principles apply, particularly from a customer’s perspective, when they are assessing the costs and benefits of cloud based services. In this post, I would like to cover some of these basic principles, in the areas of features/requirements analysis, security and regulation.

In a recent US survey 45 percent of Local Governments were using cloud computing. The survey, conducted during the first two weeks of April by the nonprofit Public Technology Institute (PTI), aggregated the opinions of 93 local government IT executives in the US. The findings revealed that an additional 19 percent of local governments plan to implement some form of cloud computing within the next 12 months, while 35 percent don’t intend to do so at all.

How can a business decide on using the cloud or not ? Cloud computing services are increasingly being used worldwide. However there are still businesses, of all sizes, looking at cloud computing and wondering if it is appropriate for them and what benefits and costs will it involve. In fact, they are wondering how real [...]