A while back a PC Magazine wrote What Does Cloud Computing Mean for You?, and it is definitely worth a second look.
Some of the important takeaways from the piece are about how it will effect not just corporate users but also end users. In fact I think it’s safe to say that we probably are doing more with cloud computing today than most of us even realize.
“The most important single characteristic of a cloud is abstraction of the hardware from the service,” says John Willis, a noted cloud-computing expert and blogger, explaining that the location of the servers is not as important as easy access to the data. “However you define it, I think cloud technology will have a footprint in every business that does IT within the next five years.”
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Backing up data is a vitally important thing to all organizations, including colleges and universities. With a warehouse full of past and current students’ data it becomes extremely important to keep this information safe and secure.
Amazon recently announced an Import/Export service for S3 that lets you ship or have them ship a hard drive loaded with hundreds of gigabytes or more that would normally take days or longer to backup through even the fastest data connection. In the announcement Amazon states:
Amazon Web Services has announced the limited beta of AWS Import/Export, a new offering that accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity. You can use AWS Import/Export for migrating data into the cloud, sending backups to AWS, and interchanging data with others.
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This past week it was announced that the IBM/Google cloud computing initiative is giving 14 universities almost $5 million in grants to pick up cloud computing projects. The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the grant money.
Award Winners
- Carnegie-Mellon University
- Flordia International Unviersity
- MIT
- Purdue
- University of California-Irvine
- UC-San Diego
- UC-Santa Barbara
- University of Maryland
- University of Massachusetts
- University of Virginia
- University of Washington
- University of Wisconsin
- University of Utah
- Yale
Although these universities will run a range of projects what is most interesting is academia’s excitement and embracement of this rapidly developing and exciting technology.
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Online video has reached critical mass. Earlier this month comScore released compelling data stating that American’s viewed 11.4 billion videos for a total duration of 558 million hours in the month of July. Yes that’s right 11 BILLION videos! So let’s break this down a little bit:
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If you read any article about cloud computing there is a lot of confusion and speculation being written about this topic. Most will admit there is a huge amount of buzz and hype around the terms, but there is a lot of speculation as to its validity for mission critical data, reliability, and overall level of service. The truth of the matter is that much of the underlying infrastructure aren’t brand new concepts only the idea of getting resources through your network connection from offsite instead of a local network. Also this all encompassing term is being used to include any service that you receive remotely which for a lot of organizations there has been resources being consumed this way that are now being reclassified.
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As the costs of gas and traveling continue to go up many prospective students will not visit as many campuses as previous classes enjoyed. A simple to use and vibrant interactive map or virtual tour can sometimes be the deciding factor in your institution making the short list of travel destinations. A recent Associated Press article, 10 ways to control the cost of college visits, instructs prospective students to take virtual tours as the #1 step before actually visiting a college. The article also shares that “It’s not atypical for someone to spend $3,000 on travel, food, and lodging costs for such visits before selecting a school to attend”.
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So you have already been convinced why you need to have videos on your website, so the next obvious question is what types of videos are there to have?
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