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Home Blog Page 7911

Amazon Cloud Outage – The Risk Side of Cloud. Build Critical Operations In-House

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Few days ago when we had hosting issue, we wrote a piece, titled, Be Careful With Cloud Services – When Problems Hit, You Are Helpless.

 

Most people have since figured out that cloud based operations are good – savings in cost and outsourcing of IT operations, at least those ones in the cloud. But cloud operation also carries major risks.

 

Amazon cloud systems have proved many of us right. According to CNN, Amazon EC2 cloud product had  some problems preventing some companies from operating at full capacities yesterday.

 

A rare and major outage of Amazon’s cloud-based Web service on Thursday took down a plethora of other online sites, including Reddit, HootSuite, Foursquare and Quora.

 

The outages began Thursday morning just before 5 a.m. ET and were still ongoing more than 12 hours later. In a series of running updates on its Web services “Health Dashboard,” Amazon described its efforts to recover from the cascade of problems kicked off by an early-morning “networking event.”

 

Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) hosts many major websites on its web servers through a service called EC2. The “elastic” infrastructure model is designed to scale up automatically to handle giant traffic spikes — the kind Amazon gets every year during its December e-commerce rush.

 

The lesson is simple – do not give your business to the cloud. You must hold some parts internal- especially the most critical ones. You cannot afford for crises to come and you become powerless and resort to just calling a phone. Cloud is good, but it can take a business out of operations within hours. If you are a financial institution, build an internal backup that can keep you working in case there are some problems. You need to be in charge of your critical infrastructure, irrespective of the cost savings. Amazon has just educated us on the risk side of cloud today.

 

 

photo credit/ CNN

 

Tekedia Innovation Forum – Join The Conversation. Top Prizes N10k/month

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We invite you to join the conversation in Tekedia Innovation Forum . Prizes are as follows:

Highest Commenter Prize

Every month – the  top poster will be announced and you will go to our Lagos Office and collect N10,000 cash. If not living in Lagos or Owerri, we pay into your account. Check our address at Fasmicro website (our parent company).  We will contact you and also announce it (only your username) in the Forum. You need at least 30 comments to qualify every month.

 

Topic with Highest Comments Prize

The Topic needs at least 30 comments to qualify. We award to the person that started the topic. So, if you start a topic that brings better comments, you get rewarded.  You will be paid the same N10,000 per month as described above.

 

The month of April 2011 is already gone, we are not going to award anything for it. Rather, we will aggregate April and May for these prizes. Subsequent months will  run on themselves – the first day starts on the 1st of every month (0.01am) to 11.59pm Nigerian time of the month. This promotion is ongoing.

 

www.tekedia.com/forum

CBN Governor Listed in TIME Magazine 100 Most Influential People

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Congratulations Mr. Governor!

 

The following is from Time Magazine, naming Mr Lamido Sanusi as one of its most influential people.

 

The story of Nigeria’s first half-century of Independence is a tale of wasted potential: sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country, home to its biggest oil riches, impoverished by thieving autocrats. A key reason a new Nigeria no longer seems fanciful is Central Bank governor Lamido Sanusi.

 

A veteran of an often corrupt banking industry, Sanusi, 49, took up his position at the height of the financial crisis in June 2009 and immediately turned on his former peers. He took over nine banks, sacked the chief executives of eight of them, ordered a series of mergers and named their biggest debtors. He was, he said, cleaning up not just banking but all Nigeria. Sanusi’s will be a long fight and a dangerous one: death threats have obliged him to employ armed guards. But it is also essential for Africa’s sleeping giant to finally awaken.

Read more:

Social Media – Which Nigerian Firm Can Make It to Nigerian Stock Exchange? Without Public Exit, Investors Become Lukewarm to Investing in the Nation

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Nigeria does not have much success in keeping wholly indigenous technology firms in the stock market, for long, unless you include local variants of the oil giants and conglomerates as ones. But when it comes to truly home grown companies, statistics are not that great. Japaul – an oil company did get there, but over the years is trying to stay there as everyone does, we must add.

 

In the ICT sector, Omatek Computers proved very successful. It went public and is still there – yes, the stock is struggling and who is not? But that is still a well funded company since it takes a lot of resources to get a hardware company like Omatek to get off the ground.

 

But in the core social media and mobility, which company will be successful to get to the stock market could be cloudy. The reason being that few are indeed been funded very well.  With all the many firms in Lagos, Pagatech appears very promising if it can execute on its mobile payment. It is well funded and can easily scale to the level that will enable it to be admitted into the stock market.

 

Yet, Pagatech has got a lot of funding from outside Nigeria. From Draper to venture funds, this company is highly externally funded.  So, it is in another league.

 

Other startups are not lucky in Lagos as access to capital is still limited. How many social media firms that will mature to stock market is something one cannot predict because Nigeria does not have a good history of nurturing technology companies to stardom. And without that, investors do not see exit paths and that stifles the risk appetite to even invest in the nation. Until that exit pathway is developed, attracting funding into the market could be difficult.

 

Nanotechnology: A Link between Butterflies and Your Money?

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An introduction to our book from the publisher.

 

Hershey—June 4th, 2010– Although advances in nanotechnology and microelectronics promise boosts in the economy, the general public’s financials are not usually directly affected. Researchers in the UK are using nanofabrication techniques, with data collected from tropical butterfly studies, to create encryption technologies for currency and other important documents that people use every day.

 

The Cambridge University scientists were able to reproduce iridescent patterns and color arrangements of the Swallowtail butterfly. While the butterflies use their particularly-colored, scaled wings for mating and survival activities, scientists plan to build upon the potential of the fabricated optical designs, in order to better guard against forgery and counterfeiting activities.

 

The researchers used nanotechnology through self-assembly and atomic layer deposition to mimic the butterfly wings’ intricate patterns. Mathias Kolle, the lead researcher at Cambridge University explains that, “although nature is better at self-assembly than we are, we have the advantage that we can use a wider variety of artificial, custom-made materials to optimize our optical structures.”

 

Other examples of nanotechnology and microelectronic uses to improve economic conditions can be found in one of the latest releases by IGI Global, publisher of information science and technology, “Nanotechnology and Microelectronics: Global Diffusion, Economics and Policy” . Edited by Dr. Ndubuisi Ekekwe of Johns Hopkins University (USA), this reference explores the relationships among technology transfer and diffusion, trends and developments, and economics and policies as they relate to advances in nanotechnology and microelectronics.

 

Dr. Ekekwe states that “Nanotechnology is estimated to grow in excess of $1 trillion global market by 2015 with energy, textiles, and life sciences the leading sectors transitioning from labs to markets. This technology will drive a new global economy, nanomics or nanotechnology-driven economy and usher in a revolution that will advance genetics, information technology, biotechnology and robotics through low cost, high utility and high demand of its products.”

 

He continues, “One major goal of this book is to highlight multifaceted issues surrounding nanotechnology and microelectronics and technology in general on the basis of economics, innovation, policy, transfer, and global penetration through comprehensive research, case studies, academic and theoretical papers.”

 

To learn more, please visit http://www.igi-global.com/Bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=40290.


Other Related Titles Recently Released by IGI Global Include:

 

About IGI Global

Since 1988, IGI Global has provided comprehensive research not just on computer science and information technology management, but also on how information technology affects human activities and interactions. IGI Global is a leading multimedia publisher of books, reference works, journals, encyclopedias, teaching cases, proceedings, and databases covering the areas of education, social science, library science, healthcare, business management, public administration, and computer science. Information on all of IGI Global’s authoritative resources can be found at www.igi-global.com. IGI Global’s office is located in Hershey, PA, USA.

Order inquiries may be directed to: 717-533-8845 x110, cust@igi-global.com, or to book wholesalers or journal subscription agents.