I just ran across some new research on Content Marketing that I thought you might enjoy. It is written by Rebecca Lieb, an industry analyst for digital advertising and media at The Altimeter Group. Follow this link: http://www.rebeccalieb.com/blog/
New Global Study: Only One-Third of Companies Making Effective Use of Data-by EMC
Largest-Ever Data Science Study Cites Looming Talent Shortage, Lack of Open Data Access as Key Opportunity Inhibitors for Big Data
http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2011/20111205-02.htm
Internet Gains on Television as Public’s Main News Source by PEW RESEARCH
PEW RESEARCH CENTER FOR THE PEOPLE & THE PRESS
More Young People Cite Internet than TV
January 4, 2011
The internet is slowly closing in on television as Americans’ main source of national and international news. Currently, 41% say they get most of their news about national and international news from the internet, which is little changed over the past two years but up 17 points since 2007. Television remains the most widely used source for national and international news — 66% of Americans say it is their main source of news — but that is down from 74% three years ago and 82% as recently as 2002.
[Read more…] about Internet Gains on Television as Public’s Main News Source by PEW RESEARCH
How to Ensure Business Continuity with Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing Newshttp://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/How-to-Ensure-Business-Continuity-with-Cloud-Computing/By: Chris Pyle These days, businesses of all sizes are looking to cloud computing as a means to more efficiently deliver IT services to users. Cloud-based solutions offer a cost-effective way to maintain high availability and reliability for user applications, especially if they support mobile workers, telecommuters or field-based teams. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Chris Pyle explains the important disaster recovery and business continuity benefits that cloud computing can deliver to your business. Traditional disaster recovery and business continuity methods can be cumbersome and extremely expensive. They typically require buying and maintaining a complete set of hardware that matches or “mirrors” a company’s business-critical systems, including sufficient storage to house a complete copy of all of the company’s business data. The mirror data center environment must reside in a colocation facility or some other remote environment.One of the key benefits of the cloud model, and one that is often overlooked, is how cloud computing can help to ensure business continuity and speed disaster recovery. In today’s “new normal” economy, companies of all sizes have to look for affordable ways to deliver quality IT services reliably and continuously to customers and employees. Cloud computing presents a low-cost disaster recovery and business continuity solution for small and midsize businesses and a more cost-effective alternative to cost-conscious larger corporations. Add to the hardware capital outlay and ongoing maintenance fees the cost of regularly replicating production data on the mirror systems, physically moving the data from Point A to Point B. Another added cost factor is keeping the application software in sync in both locations. The software has to be updated every time there’s a modification or upgrade to the production systems. [Read more…] about How to Ensure Business Continuity with Cloud Computing |
Cloud Computing: Pros and Cons
From: www.cio.com
May 18, 2009
ON THE UPSIDE
1. Fast start-up
“Cloud computing is really a no-brainer for any start-up because it allows you to test your business plan very quickly for little money. Every start-up, or even a division within a company that has an idea for something new, should be figuring out how to use cloud computing in its plan,” says Brad Jefferson, CEO of Animoto, a New York company that creates full-motion videos out of customer-selected photos and music. “Cloud computing has changed the game for entrepreneurs — the greatest part about it is that on launch day, you have the confidence that you scale to the world.”
2. Scalability
To figure out if you’re a good cloud service prospect, first consider the variability of the resource utilization of your own IT structure, says Tom Nolle, CEO of CIMI, a high-tech consulting firm. “If you’ve got enormous peaks and valleys, you’re forced to oversupply IT resources to address the peaks. It may be significantly less costly for you to outsource the peaks,” he says.
3. Business agility.
“Your mind really changes quickly when you can solve problems using IT resources but you don’t need a long-term commitment and you don’t have to wait a long time to get them,” says Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, a cloud management and support company. “Cloud computing changes the whole pattern of agility at a much lower cost.”
4. Faster product development
Since moving some applications and data to Amazon’s cloud last April, Eli Lilly & Co. has seen provisioning time drop from weeks to minutes, says Dave Powers, associate information consultant at the Indianapolis company. “If I can give scientists eight weeks back on their research, that’s a huge value there,” he adds. “This is really starting to impact how we do business. We’re starting to reduce cycle times in research, which is critical for us. That’s a trickle-down effect of technology that we can make available to the scientific community.”
5. No capital expenditures
Are you out of space in your data center? Have your applications outgrown the infrastructure? Cloud computing services allow a company to shift from capital to operational expenses even in do-or-die cases, says Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus, a consulting firm specializing in advanced IT technologies.
ON THE DOWNSIDE
1. Bandwidth could bust your budget
Such was the case at Sony Pictures Image Works, which considered then ruled out an external cloud service to address storage scalability challenges, says Nick Bali, senior systems engineer at the Culver City, Calif., company. Every day, Sony animators access and generate between 4 and 12 terabytes of data. “The network bandwidth we’d need to put that into someone’s cloud and to read it back is tremendous, and the cost would be so large that we might as well buy the storage ourselves rather than paying someone else for it,” he says. Now Sony is evaluating a private storage cloud, using ParaScale’s cloud storage software.
2. App performance could suffer
A private cloud might, but a public cloud definitely wouldn’t lead to improved application performance — not when taking network latency into account, says Tony Bishop, CEO of Adaptivity, a consulting firm specializing in next-generation IT infrastructure.
“I couldn’t see an investment bank putting a latency-sensitive application on an external cloud,” adds Steve Harriman, a vice president at NetQoS. [Read more…] about Cloud Computing: Pros and Cons
