Developers urged testers currently subscribed to the Azure Community Technology Preview to upgrade their accounts to paid subscriptions by February 1. Users who do not upgrade will be unable to create new databases, but will retain access to existing databases between February 1 and March 1. Clients who do not upgrade by March 1 will have their accounts deleted.

http://www.edlconsulting.com/newsdetail.php?id=596&headline=Microsoft_Azure_cloud_computing_platform_due_February_1

The Microsoft Azure enterprise cloud computing platform will have its full commercial release on February 1, the company revealed in a blog post on Monday.

I realize I’m dating myself, but the first computer I ever owned didn’t have a hard drive. It had two drive bays that held 5.25 inch floppies. Later, I bought a then revolutionary machine, an 8086 I think, with a 40 MB hard drive, and I wondered how anyone could ever fill it up. And the last time I moved, I discovered a box filled with floppies and 250 MB Zip drives.

It’s obvious that none of those devices are nearly large enough to satisfy our appetite for digital music, photos, videos, presentations and the like. But there’s a less obvious issue that bothers me a lot. If that old box contained a floppy or a Zip with something I needed, I’d be altogether old of luck. Where would I find a drive that would accommodate the media, particularly the cardboard-packaged 5.25 disks — even if they hadn’t deteriorated too much to be read?

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142248/Why_the_Cloud_Should_Have_Your_Back_Up?taxonomyId=

You get the idea. No matter how disciplined we are about backing up our digital stuff, our efforts will be useless when the media becomes obsolete.

Many enterprises are intrigued by cloud computing’s attractive benefits, including elastic scale, low cost and fast implementation. They should not, however, fail to consider the risks involved. Gartner has identified what it believes are today’s top five most critical inhibitors to adoption and the common approaches to reducing the risks.

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20091207/management03.shtml

None of the risks discussed here is a “showstopper” for all enterprises and for all specific use cases within any single enterprise, but they will be for some. Confirm that these inhibitors are understood and reasonably mitigated to get stakeholder approval for investments in cloud computing services. Then tackle others that may also apply.

The financial industry, as well as the market at large, has latched onto the term “cloud computing” with a vengeance, and you have to admit that the basic premise (datacenter on-demand) is pretty sexy.  However, all may not be as it seems.

Cloud computing is not a new concept. The vision of the on-demand datacenter has been around in one shape or another for more than 20 years, and (for good reason), is usually described as the “holy grail” of datacenter architectures. Like the grail, it has always been sought after, but remained out of reach.    Virtualisation has changed all this and has brought the vision almost into our grasp.

As you consider the use of clouds, the first thing you need to consider is, “how can they be used effectively?”  The biggest challenge is that a cloud is an amorphous infrastructure, owned and operated by someone else. So what subset of your financial data could safely run in this kind of environment?

http://www.dofonline.co.uk/management/questioning-cloud-computing-for-the-finance-industry-110920.html

Cloud computing is not a new concept. The vision of the on-demand datacenter has been around in one shape or another for more than 20 years, and (for good reason), is usually described as the “holy grail” of datacenter architectures. Like the grail, it has always been sought after, but remained out of reach.    Virtualisation has changed all this and has brought the vision almost into our grasp.

All of the traditional aspects of data cleansing that apply to on-premise software systems also apply to cloud-based services and applications, but there are additional challenges to take into consideration. The types of questions that arise are:

Should we stage the data in an on-premise database?

Do we need a cloud-based test environment?

What if we can’t customize the software as a service business process?

http://www.information-management.com/infodirect/2009_145/cloud_software_as_a_service_saas_data_cleansing-10016410-1.html

This article addresses the challenges and many of the common questions that companies have regarding data cleansing in the cloud.

Bringing a new level of sophistication and scalability to its cloud computing services, Amazon (AMZN) said it will offer a relational database and increased memory options to its popular Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The Web retailer also plans to cut prices on the per-hour fees it charges for its cloud services.

Coming a few weeks before Microsoft (MSFT) releases its new Azure cloud computing service, Amazon’s moves put the two tech giants on a collision course in the cloud. They also allow businesses to offload complicated database management tasks in the same way that many are offloading telephony and communications management to cloud providers.

http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/cloud-computing/amazon-beefs-up-its-cloud-offerings.html

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) “is a Web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud”