Lori MacVittie

Regulations like HIPAA and PCI-DSS are designed to guarantee that providers storing electronic personally identifiable information, or PII in the vernacular, is safeguarded against theft or accidental disclosure. They are not designed to provide consumers with any kind of “social gag” that might alert them they are offering up information or photographs the likes of which they may later regret sharing. While social networking sites like Facebook now provide “privacy” options that allow consumers to control who can see photos and read information posted, it does not force (though it does prompt and encourage occasionally) the use of such controls. That is completely up to the consumer. Rielle Hunter is extremely upset with the three photographs of herself featured in the latest issue of GQ magazine. The woman who was involved in a months-long affair with Democrat Jo... (more)

What Does a Two-Year Old and Cloud Computing Apps Have in Common?

What does a 2-year old and cloud-based applications have in common? The Toddler has recently decided that he can navigate the stairs by himself. Insists on it, in fact. That’s a bit nerve-wracking, especially when he decides that 2:30am is a good time to get up, have a snack, and recreate a Transformers battle in the family room. It’s worse when you’re asleep and don’t know about it. Oh eventually you hear him and you get up and try to convince him it’s time for sleep (see? all the grown ups are doing it) but it takes a while before he finally agrees and you can climb back into be... (more)

Nobody Puts "Load Balancing" Baby in "Cloud Computing" Corner

SocialCloudNow recently wrote up a pretty darn accurate (which is hard to find these days) description of “cloud computing” by walking through the components required. The author did an excellent job – especially where he dove into the relationship between orchestration and cloud computing. Loved that a lot – most folks ignore that piece of cloud computing even though it’s very, very important. But I was a bit put off (okay, a lot put off) at one statement: An honorable mention goes out to the Load balancer – which does the obvious. Honorable mention? It’s an afterthought that ... (more)

That Whole Concept Is Broken

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer Agreed that cloud vendors need to differentiate on services. Disagreed that cloud standards will not forward that cause and that virtualization platform makes a difference. The battle for virtualization platform dominance rages on, but it will not be virtualization that makes or breaks a cloud computing offering; it will be the diversity – or lack thereof - of the services it offers. We need to stop focusing on virtualization as the be-all and end-all of cloud computing and start bending our efforts toward what really matters: the ability of providers... (more)

If I Had a Hammer . . .

Or Why Carr’s Analogy is Wrong. Again. Nicolas Carr envisioned compute resources being delivered in a means similar to electricity. Though providers and consumers alike use the terminology to describe cloud computing billing and metering models, the reality is that we’ve just moved from a monthly server hosting model to a more granular hourly one, and the delivery model has not changed in any way as we’ve moved to this more “on-demand” model of IT resources. There’s very little difference between choosing amongst a list of virtual “servers” and a list of physical “servers” with v... (more)