Windows Azure is a product of Microsoft and it provides various internet services that can be useful for both on-premises and off-premises environment. It is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Its production will start from January 1, 2010.
Windows Azure Platform provides a simple and flexible environment for developers who want to create a cloud application. It can be easily implemented in your current environment and also supports multiple languages. Windows Azure supports the following: Microsoft Visual Studio, SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP. The following are the five services that are provided by the platform:
• Live Services
• SQL Services
• NET Services
• Share Point Services
• Dynamics CRM Services
Functions/ Usage of Windows Azure are:
• Large-volume storage
• Batch Processing
• Complicated/ large-volume computations
• Build, modify and distribute applications with minimum on-premises resources
• Run commodity processes in the cloud
• Create, test, debug and distribute Web services swiftly and economically
The benefits of Windows Azure Platform are:
• Reduces cost of building and extending on-premises resources
• Cuts down the cost, time and effort of IT management
• Your ideas/ applications will be brought to market faster than expected
• Flexible platform adapts to the changes in business environment and customer needs
• Choice of selecting the best suitable on/ off premises deployment model
• Save energy and time by focusing less on managing operational resources and constraints
• Eliminate the need of hardware management
• Existing tools can be used to build cloud applications
• Consistent on-premises development
• Use computing resources only when required
The launch of Windows Azure is significant as it is the first step of Microsoft in ‘Cloud Computing’ followed by ‘Microsoft Online Services’.
- Brian Kingsley, Director of Technical Services, ACS Services, Boston
Facebook is one of the largest and most popular social networking websites having more than 350 million active users worldwide. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.
Recently Facebook and ‘king of search’ – Google signed a deal where Google can display real-time results of public content from Facebook fan pages. It means that over 1.6 million active Facebook fan pages can now appear in Google as a search result. For example – If a person is searching for ‘Best real estate deals in California’ and you have recently updated your Facebook page writing ’10 best real estate deals’, then there are chances that you might get a customer instantly. This deal opened the gateway to a more efficient SEO. Hence, it is a great time to create a Facebook fan page and help your business grow.
‘Google-Facebook’ deal has led some privacy setting changes which have created innumerous controversies and criticism among Facebook users. After the revamped privacy settings users have less control over their personal data and their information including private photos is also publicly available. This has annoyed many Facebook users and they have poured their negative comments on various blog sites. They demanded the old privacy settings back and posted comments that they want to deactivate their Facebook accounts.
To summarize all let us discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the changed privacy settings by Facebook.
Advantages:
• Updates in Facebook page can appear as a Google search result which will help a business gain customers.
• Increased online presence.
• Finding people and connecting with them will be much easier.
Disadvantages:
• Personal information such as gender, date of birth, photos, etc is publicly available.
• Less control over private information.
• Enemies can find you easily.
• Increased opportunities for Cybercrime.
This is not the first time that Facebook has been criticized for changes. They have been questioned many times for their confusing privacy settings. However, the best part of Facebook is no matter whatever changes they make or how many users get annoyed, it is among the top-visited social networking websites with ever increasing number of users. Social Networking Forecast for 2010 predicts that Facebook will still top the list and will have over 500 million users worldwide till the end of 2010.
For more information on Privacy Policy and Settings you can visit the following websites:
http://www.facebook.com/policy.php
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/02/facebook-privacy/
- Brian Kingsley, Director of Technical Services, ACS Services, Boston
According to Wikipedia, “Monitoring generally means to be aware of the state of a system”. It is an essential part of any organization, state, government and even family. Monitoring helps us to avoid circumstances that may cause loss to time, money, resource, relation, etc. For instance, let us take a very simple example of a business organization lacking efficient internal monitoring system. This may lead to many circumstances such as server break down, power failure, etc. It causes delay in work, wastage of time, loss of money, loss of resources, etc plus an additional expense that the organization will have to bare to solve the issue.
Being more specific, we can say that monitoring should be done appropriately according to priority. As I work in an IT industry, I know the importance of servers, network, computers, etc in an organization. Hence, these must be the first things to be monitored effectively and efficiently to avoid break downs and hindrances in smooth work flow.
A computer network must be constantly monitored to avoid slow or failing network. Continuous monitoring is done be a system that notifies the network administrator in case of outages. An intrusion detection system monitors networks from outside threats, whereas an internal network monitoring system monitors network to avoid problems such as overload, network crash, etc. Network monitoring is a critical IT function that can aid in saving a lot of cost of the company in network performance, infrastructure, employee productivity and many other things. Following are some of the strategic tasks a network monitoring system can do for the organization:
• Confirm regulatory and policy compliance
• Search redundant resources and emphasizes on possible cost savings
• Solve efficiency-sapping mysteries like dropped mail sessions
• Help determine employee productivity
• Spot overloaded equipment before it can bring down a network
• Identify weak wide-area-network links and other bottlenecks
• Measure latency, or the delayed transfer of data
• Find anomalous internal traffic that might be indicate a security threat
Server monitoring is done to have a check on the speed of the server, failures and other such problems. By this the owner will be able to know when one or all of his computer devices are down due to server issues. Monitoring if done regularly, can avoid outages and help company from losses due to major crashes and break downs.
Monitoring equipments help to take immediate actions and respond to the problems before it becomes an unavoidable issue and start harming the devices, processes, time and cost. Network monitoring systems can be software or firmware, simple or complex. There are open-source tools available which are innovation and very inexpensive. They can work with most of the tools, platforms and environments. If you feel that your network is too complex and it requires professional skills to monitor, you can always outsource monitoring. Outsourcing companies offer wide level of services and packages that can suit your budget. Their professional touch will make it all the more advantageous for the organization.
ACS Services is one such company that provides IT services for easy management. Its list of services includes:
• Managed IT Services
• Network Support
• Server Support
• PC Support
• Help Desk Services
• Help Desk On Demand
• Setup and Configuration
• Relocation Support
• Data Protection
• Total Server Protection
• Disaster Recovery
It is a one-stop destination for all your IT needs. Now professional monitoring is not too far away. For more information, visit:
Other sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_monitoring
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_server_monitoring
http://www.cio.com/article/133700/Network_Monitoring_Definition_and_Solutions
- Brian Kingsley, Director of Technical Services, Boston
Phone 877-227-7773
Email 