Can insurance companies risk ignoring the cloud?

Since joining Bluewolf, I have been blown away by the expansive success we have had transforming businesses - including those competing in the most commoditised and regulated environments. Until recently, I’d spent my entire career in the insurance industry - an industry that is highly regulated, fairly traditional and generally slow to adapt to technology. The evidence shows that insurance companies that don’t leverage cloud technology to create unique customer experiences are at high risk of getting left behind.

Insurers tend to depend on core legacy system applications due to compliance...

By Bluewolf, 14 December 2012, 0 comments. Categories: Architecture, Industry.

Contractors would do well to use the cloud

Building contractors were told this week that cloud computing could make a huge difference to the construction industry, especially when it comes to project management. Autodesk, which develops some of the most influential design software such as...

By VI, 10 December 2012, 0 comments. Categories: Adoption, Architecture, Migration.

Going global: Implementing the cloud without borders

Any move to the cloud requires a transformational way of thinking. With a global enterprise, this shift requires unique preparations and considerations.

Not only do standard challenges (i.e. alignment, business process, and change management) become increasingly complex as you add geographies and cultural differences to a project, but compliance and data quality concerns further complicate matters and require a detailed and methodical approach.

Over the past 12 years, Bluewolf has worked across every major timezone and global currency to deliver on the promise of the cloud.

We know that when it comes to a global cloud deployment, there should not be a “one size fits all” approach.

Laying the right foundation:

Before getting started, companies should reflect on...

By Bluewolf, 20 November 2012, 0 comments. Categories: Adoption, Architecture, Migration.

Is there still a place for the virtual tape library?

Today, a great number of different storage mediums exist whose purpose is to retain information in some manner. One of the oldest data storage mediums, the tape, is a linear storage system that still has great application with today’s revisions to this long standing technology.

Implementing tape storage within virtual storage infrastructure can be a great asset to a backup and recovery solution for many industries.

The tape storage system sequentially stores data on drives that utilise a magnet tape as a...

By Deney Dentel, 04 September 2012, 0 comments. Categories: Architecture, Best Practice, Storage.

Dating site dumps Amazon EC2: “100% uptime a required SLA”

The storm which accounted for Amazon’s cloud outage over the weekend has resulted in one company ditching the AWS system over fears of further unavailability.

From 2300 EST on June 30 users of several high profile sites such as Pinterest, Netflix and Instagram were unable to access content, with AWS “investigating connectivity issues”. The issue was resolved by 0054 EST on June 31 but updates on power restoration appeared...

By James Bourne, 06 July 2012, 0 comments. Categories: Architecture, Economy, Industry, Migration, SLA.

Nine specifications for a Cloud Computer: A call to action

What is cloud computing? We recently asked a number of people in our industry, and got back a range of interesting, and sometimes self-referential, responses. According to our respondents, cloud computing means anything from a single-tenant, multi-user application cloud (also known as software-as-a-service or “Saas”) to multi-tenant, general purpose, on-demand clouds (sometimes called platform-as-a-service or “PaaS”).

I think the world of computing, generally, is moving away from a...

By Steve Tuck, 22 June 2012, 0 comments. Categories: Architecture, Vendors, Virtualisation.

Cisco reveals cloud-ready networking app

Networking firm Cisco has introduced its Cloud Connected Solution, a new application that has been designed in order to allow users to connect securely to cloud services.

It will deliver cloud-enabling routing and wide area network (WAN) optimisation platforms as well as Cloud Connector software and services.

The application is also designed to enable organisations to implement cloud computing and accelerate the deployment of cloud services whilst delivering an optimal user...

By VI, 15 June 2012, 0 comments. Categories: Adoption, Architecture, Enterprise.

False Positives and Other Misconceptions in Static Analysis

In ongoing discussions here at the blog and elsewhere, I keep seeing the topic of false positives in static analysis come up. It’s certainly a very important issue when dealing with static analysis, but the strange thing is that people have very different opinions of what a false positive is, and therefore different opinions of what static analysis can do and how to properly use it.

In the simplest sense, a false positives means that the message that a rule was violated is incorrect, or in other words...

By Arthur Hicken, 03 November 2011, 0 comments. Categories: Architecture, Big Data, Data & Analytics, Monitoring.