I love my job, but I really don’t enjoy my commute….and the unpredictable traffic. Living on the west side of San Francisco and working on the east side of San Jose, Google Maps tells me my journey is a hefty 47.2 miles and 1 hour and 1 minute (without traffic.) Holidays, rain, and accidents can add minutes and sometimes hours.
Twice a day, to and from work, I start asking the questions:
How busy is it on the road right now? Is the road full of tired commuters, semis, or concert traffic?
Which lane should I be in? If I’m in the fast lane, what are the odds of it coming to a screeching halt while I watch the other three lanes go by?
Do I need to detour to another interstate or highway due to an accident or concert?
Do you think hybrid clouds look like your granny’s network too? Well, that may be extreme, but there is no doubt that hybrid clouds are networked in ways we saw things connected a decade back. Consider a recent example I came across while discussing cloud adoption at a large global enterprise headquartered in the US. Their Asia office wanted to deploy a regional application for local use. It was impractical to deploy it at one of the two large data centers in the US since user experience would be sub-optimal due to latency issues. Hence they chose a local cloud provider to host the application. Sort of a hybrid cloud situation. So what? Read More »
Everyone has dirty secrets. One of mine is that I like Mazda Miatas, little sports cars that are cheap to buy, cheap to own, handle well, perform above expectations and require little care. Regardless of how you feel about handling and the sensation of dropping the top and having the wind blow through your hair, a little Miata can only do so much. Try to pass, uphill, on a warm day and god forbid, do so with the air conditioner on and a passenger on board, and that little Miata is going to be taxed out. That is one of the reasons I added a little bit of hardware acceleration in the form of a supercharger to mine. Suddenly, with that small upgrade, the little car that could but suffered under heavy load suddenly became the little car that did.
Innovative managed ISR G2 marketing with crowdsourcing platform jovoto
The ISR G2 is one of Cisco’s most versatile products -- it delivers next generation WAN and network services, enables the cost-effective delivery of high-definition video and collaboration, and provides the secure transition to the next generation of cloud and virtualized network services.
Cisco has teamed withjovotoon an innovative marketing initiative to develop creative yet focused campaign concepts for managed ISR G2. jovoto is an online collaboration platform that delivers creative collective intelligence and builds on the concept of co collaboration with its global community. It establishes a sustainable partnership between brands that seek ideas and creative idea-driven individuals and communities.
Launching on August 23, Cisco and jovoto will run a six week contest to challenge the jovoto community to create concepts that communicate a compelling value proposition for the ISR G2. Anyone can submit new ideas, review the submissions, and provide feedback and comments to make them even better. There are prizes for the top ideas and for the highest ‘karma’ points -- the most active participants who comment and help shape these ideas.
We want YOU! Are you a designer with amazing ideas for how to turn the ISR G2 value proposition into an great marketing campaign? Submit an idea (or five)! Are you an IT professional who we’d want to hook? Give your candid feedback and tell us if these ideas would get you to think about ISR G2.
Compared to the people who have been without a home over the past several months through floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and tornados, it sounds rather trivial. I was only dealing with some renovations which involved moving my home office and waiting for the cable guy.
Still, to my 7 and 9 year old, not being able to connect to Moshi Monsters and Club Penguin was a big deal. As for me, I managed to get by, tethering to my iPhone and physically going into the office more than usual.
But it got me thinking about our reliance on the physical and what that means in the context of the cloud.
Following the floods up in Queensland, Australia, I heard a story about a cloud-based managed service provider. As the floodwaters receded, they hired a bunch of sales folks who went around to every small office and retailer in the region and told them to call before they spent their insurance money buying new computers. Why buy a bunch of servers to run MYOB or Quicken and risk floods, fire and theft, when you can run everything including your POS out of the cloud?
But when you don’t have an Internet connection, the cloud is of little use.
Google is facing this exact dilemma with its upcoming Chromebook release, and is providing offline support for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs—something they apparently have been running internally for the past several months. Interestingly though, based on both the Cr-48 pilot release and earlier internal conversations, it would seem that there is a view within Google that begins with the assumption of always-on connectivity to the cloud. “When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.” And so offline support becomes the exception, instead of the rule.
Of course, when you hit that exception, knowing exactly how your business will continue to run is crucial.
Clearly, there are trade-offs to be made. Without an Internet connection, I can’t access my cloud based applications and data, but neither can I send and receive email or verify credit card transactions. What do I need to be able to do even in an offline state, and what applications are useless to me unless I’m online?
What are the options for WAN redundancy? When I learned about the Japanese earthquakes and tsunamis, I knew my friend was safe was from his Facebook postings. While he didn’t have power, his phone still worked. For individuals, perhaps tethering is the right solution; for a small branch, 3G backhaul as a failover option in the router may be more cost effective.
Ultimately, the answer will be that there is no single answer. Not only is every business different, but each application and its use will be different. It’s only when you take stock of those applications that you understand where your own requirements lie.
I needed to stay connected to do my job while the renovation work was being done. But my kids… they read a book instead.
