Technknowledge

A secure backup means saving data two or three times at different locations, which should be common practice. Anyone who wants to save data online can check with a provider about their practices. But if a third party is subcontracted to do server maintenance, the possibility of mistakes increases. Know how your provider stores data.

It's become ever easier to save a document with Google or a picture with Flickr thanks to the quick spread of online storage Relevant Products/Services services, known as the cloud Relevant Products/Services.

Quite simply, the cloud allows users to dispense with purchasing their own software or extra memory. Instead, they can access programs and storage space offered by third parties online, even if those functions are stored on computers that are on a different continent.

The bonus is that the data Relevant Products/Services is then accessible from anywhere in the world. Plus, users can skip buying expensive software. But there are risks of storing your files on someone else's computer, especially when it is far away.

"In general, cloud computing Relevant Products/Services is not unsafe," says Stefan Katzenbeisser of the computer science department at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. The more important question is how the service provider goes about storing data.

Customers with T-Mobile USA recently suffered data losses when files stored with the smartphone service Sidekick got lost during maintenance on a server Relevant Products/Services. "But that's not a problem of cloud computing," says Katzenbeisser. It's a problem with the way the data is stored.

A secure Relevant Products/Services backup means saving data two or three times at different locations, which should be common practice. Anyone who wants to save data online can check with a provider about their practices, notes Katzenbeisser. But if a third party is subcontracted to do server maintenance, the possibility of mistakes increases.

Katzenbeisser sees clear benefits to cloud computing for businesses. "It means I probably don't need to set up a new infrastructure Relevant Products/Services and can save on resources."

But he's skeptical of the benefits for private users. "I still don't understand why I should save private photos on the Internet." Nonetheless, using the cloud means computers can access the data from any Internet-connected device, assuming the data hasn't been lost.

As much as Twitter is a powerful communication and social application, it's a relatively simple Web app. As part of a new contest sponsored by Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails developers are going to turn Twitter into their own application server.

The contest asks developers to program the "Worst App Server Technology Ever" (Waste) using Twitter as the message bus. While much of the contest is being done tongue-in-cheek, it's actually an interesting use case to see if a service like Twitter can take the place of a more traditional message bus like IBM MQ series or AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol).

Contest participants register up to five Twitter handles and code the function that each would perform in a program. When the contest challenge is issued on November 12, participants will have to use at least 10 of the pre-designated Twitter handles (other than their own) as endpoints to perform functions on data sets located at unique URLs. All messages will work through a series of automated public Twitter replies.

This is somewhere between an application server, a social game, the "telephone game" and service-oriented architecture (SOA) where Twitter plays the role of the enterprise service bus and the Twitter API is the broker between data sources. SOA relies on services exposing their functionality other applications and services can read to understand how to utilize those services. In this case, Twitter can be used as an application server in the cloud. (Take that buzzword bingo players.)

The funny thing is that as absurd and comical as this sounded when the Engine Yard guys told me about it, I've started to think about this as a way to possibly achieve a real technological breakthrough. And while I don't think that Twitter will be the "cloud bus," I do think that there is a lot to be learned from applying this type of constraint to a data flow process.

Engine Yard VP of marketing Michael Mullany told me that the contest shows how developers can leverage a relatively straightforward platform in innovative ways. But it's also another example of an interesting marketing effort to use Twitter as the vehicle for one's own benefit. Also, in true open source fashion, developers wind up building new applications based on code written by their peers.

Let's hope Twitter can handle the attention and developers are not greeted by the ever-lurking fail whale. You can check out the contest and learn more details at Engineyard.com

IBM on Wednesday announced a program designed to help educators and students pursue cloud-computing initiatives and better take advantage of collaboration technology in their studies.

The IBM Cloud Academy, announced at the Educause annual conference, includes a global roster of educational institutions as initial participants. Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

IBM will provide the cloud-based infrastructure for the program, with some basic collaboration tools available at the outset. IBM's LotusLive service provides the basis for the new offering. Participants will immediately be able to do some very basic tactical functions on the new system:

* Create working groups on areas of interest to the education industry
* "Jam" on new innovations for clouds in education-related areas with IBM developers
* Work jointly on technical projects across institutions
* Share research findings and exchange new research ideas

Shared research across universities and other higher-learning institutions remains a vital part of technological innovation, but many programs don't have formal tool sets in place. Cloud services are a logical place to run these types of programs, especially as international groups need immediate access to data from their partners.

Cloud computing has many benefits for academia, as IBM highlights through its Cloud Academy program:

* With cloud computing, universities can open their technology infrastructures to businesses and industries for research advancements.
* The efficiencies of cloud computing can help universities keep pace with ever-growing resource requirements and energy costs.
* The extended reach of cloud computing enables institutions to teach students in new, different ways, and help them manage projects and massive workloads.
* When students enter the global workforce, they will better understand the value of new technologies.

Universities--and perhaps more to the point, students--are not just the target market for current and future cloud services, they have come to expect software to work in a different way than we did even 10 years ago. Efforts like this will help push the boundaries of application consumption and increase innovation.