TechVirtuoso

The New/Original Enterprise Cloud Provider

April 27th, 2012 at 8:46 AM  No Comments

With “The Cloud” exploding and companies jumping in two feet forward there are a lot of vendors trying to get a piece of the pie.  While I was at Cloud Connect this past February there were quite a few of these companies present trying to show off their product.  One thing I took away from this trip was every one of them, with the exception of one, compared themselves to Amazon (which wasn’t even present at the show).

SunGard provides enterprise class “Cloud” services to the medium to large enterprise space instead of to anyone who wips out a credit card.  They have been a pioneer in the DR space starting out almost 30 years ago and in my opinion has been working on what we now call “The Cloud” before the term became hip.  They are using VCE’s standard Vblock platform and only allow VMware hyper-visors (a fact that my friend @JohnObeto doesn’t like but understands) but that isn’t the driving factor to their success. No matter what hardware you put in place, it is only good as the people you have supporting it.  SunGard gets this and in my opinion is one of the reasons they have been so successful since 1983.

One thing is for sure, all of these entries into what we used to call managed service providers have changed the way we do business today. As Amazon has jumped out as the clear leader in this space, I believe SunGard will continue to be the enterprise Cloud choice for mission critical solutions.

Disclaimer:  While I was waiting in the SunGard booth for my appointment at Cloud Connect I picked up a scratch card that they gave to anyone stopping by the booth.  My friend received a Starbucks gift card but I only won an iPad2. This was not a bribe but rather a bunch of luck and it did not persuade me to write this article.  My opinions are my own and my integrity and posts can not be bought, not even with a new iPad3.

Is there such a thing as security in the cloud?

May 6th, 2011 at 5:22 PM  1 Comment

Unless you have been hiding under a rock you have heard about Sony’s PSN getting hacked.  Apparently I was hiding under a rock yesterday as LastPass, a cloud password storage company, also had a possible security breach and I didn’t hear about it until about late yesterday evening.

I am not going to act tough, although at first I freaked out a little bit.  Immediately rushing to conclusions, imagining all the passwords I would need to manually go through and change. Fortunately after reading their blog post and Last Pass CEO’s interview with PC World I felt a little more at ease.  I used a strong master password so I should be OK.  I am very impressed at how they handled the situation  and how open they were from the beginning.  I think I will be keeping the majority of my passwords with them.

It seems like every other day there is another company sending out emails notifying their customers that their personal information may have been compromised.  All of this has gotten me to think, with the growing number of companies learning everything it possibly can (looking at you Facebook and Google) is any information we give out on the computer really safe?  Do these cyber crimes continue to rise because the consumer is more at ease to post their private lives and information on the net?

Using Dropbox to sync your documents

October 25th, 2010 at 10:33 PM  1 Comment

I have always wished I could come up with a better way to migrate documents from one machine to the another as well as accessing my work and personal documents from any machine easily.  I finally got fed up when I started going through my backup drive.  I found multiple revisions of my documents in different folders from many PC migrations.  I couldn’t find anything if my life depended on it.

Off I went on a search for a tool to keep me in sync.  I have had a Dropbox account for a long time but never really used it.  Decided to download the software to see how seamless I could make the setup.  I was very surprised how easy it was to get setup and moving.  Now whenever I migrate to a new desktop or laptop I don’t need to worry about copying my documents.  Whenever I need a different revision of a document it is at my finger tips.  Whenever I need to access a document at a public machine I can do it.

I don’t know how I got along for so long without it.  If you haven’t started to use Dropbox I would suggest you head over to dropbox.com and download the utility. There are clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. You will be kicking yourself that it took you this long… I know I did.

Microsoft CES keynote fails to excite

January 7th, 2010 at 8:28 AM  No Comments

If you couldn’t get a chance to watch the Microsoft CES pre-show keynote last night, you didn’t miss much. If you were actually at the event, I feel sorry for you, it must have been hard to stay awake.

After starting late due to power issues (which fried one of the Microsoft demo units on stage) the keynote got off to a rather boring start with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, giving various statistics about how well recently released products like Windows 7 and Bing are doing. For the first half hour, the audio stream for the webcast was so bad, it kept cutting out and then required constant volume adjustment. Note to Microsoft, hire a decent sound engineer next time.

If you’d like to watch the keynote for yourself, you can see the saved version on the Microsoft website.

It was all pretty much downhill from there. The much discussed “Courier” tablet that many in the tech press was excited they would announce never came, and there were no details about Windows Mobile 7… at all. Only “we’ll have more about mobile at Mobile World Congress.” So overall, the keynote failed to deliver much of anything that we didn’t know or have not seen already. But, here is a breakdown of what was covered, after the break.

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