First off, it’s important to understand that cloud computing is fundamentally about resources:

·         Structured and Unstructured Storage (kind of a hybrid of what you may think of as “RAM” or “disk”)

·         Compute power (similar to processor or CPU power)

Over the last 10-15 years, there has been a large paradigm shift in the models that we use for accessing these two fundamental resources.  This has been driven largely by the growth of available bandwidth.

Model	Resources Locality	Power per Device	Connectivity Model	Compute Model	Bandwidth Requirement
Mainframe	Local	Large	None	Centralized	None
PC	Local	Small	None	Centralized	None
Networked PC	Shared Local	Small	PC-PC	Distributed	Small
Client-Server	Mostly centralized, On Network	Specialized	PC-Server (=Network)	Hybrid	Small
Internet	Distributed, Off Network	Specialized	Network-Network	Distributed	Medium
Peer to Peer	Distributed at the fragment level	Aggregated Small	PC-VirtualNetwork-PC	Distributed	Medium
Cloud	Fundamentally transparent as to location	Little to N/A	Network-Cloud	Centralized	Large

 

I will follow this up with posts about each service, but I wanted to list a few here:

·         Microsoft Windows Azure - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

·         Salesforce’s Force.com – http://www.force.com

·         Amazon.com AWS:

o    Elastic Compute Cloud  (EC2) – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

o    Simple Storage Service (S3) – http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

·         Google App Engine -  http://appengine.google.com

·         Risk mitigation:

o    Downtime: Mythical “100% Uptime”

o    Data loss: Data replication

o    Server failure: Redundancy

o    Natural disaster:  Geographical distribution

·         Scalability

o    “on demand resources”

o    Available in small increments

·         Cloud Readiness assessment- Contact us!

·         Cloud Strategy – Contact us!

·         “Port my app” to cloud – rewrite apps to leverage cloud resources

o    This may be moving your database into the cloud

o    Or very “processor intense” loads to the cloud

o    Or the whole application!

o    Contact us!

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You may never directly see the underlying database structure that holds your company's valuable data but what you can't see may be unnecessarily costing you time and money. Database "normalization" is a technical term which describes how the tables, fields, and data relationships are structured in a database. Databases can be under-normalized or over-normalized and finding the right balance of normalization is essential when designing a custom database solution.

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Many clients do not understand why they should pay for an up-front "scoping" exercise that does not directly result in software being delivered. "Scoping" allows both the software buyer and the software developer to get on the same page by establishing well-defined expectations for the outcome of the project. Proper scoping is crucial to a successful, on-time and on-budget software project.

To begin a scoping exercise, a Project Manager will identify the key people involved in defining and ultimately using the software product. The Software Project Manager meets with these stakeholders, documents the existing business processes, discusses ways in which the processes may be improved as a result of the proposed software project, and identifies any other functional requirements of the software. After the meetings are completed, the Project Manager creates a scoping document which describes the solution to be build based on the information gathered.

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