Karl Robinson's blog

I've just read this article on Microscope about Gartner's findings that 60% of virtualised servers are a security risk.  It seems that IT departments, in their haste to embrace virtualisation, and the many benefits it brings, are overlooking the obvious security aspects that they would normally consider in the physical world.  My guess is that this stems from virtualisation being deployed in dev & test environments, where perhaps security is less of an

The recent week long outage experienced by US based hosting provider HostV highlights the importance of choosing a hosting provider who can demonstrate true resilience – particularly if whatever you are hosting is critical to your business – and let’s face it, nowadays most hosting is business critical in some way shape or form.

A recent article on Microscope highlighted the Gartner opinion that the focus on Private Clouds is set to remain until 2012, with enterprises still reluctant to invest in the various public clould offerings available such as Amazon, Go Grid etc.

This is hardly surprising due to the fact that these services are relatively new and there still remains a lot of scepticism, founded or unfounded, over their security, stability and compliance.

In a recent speech given by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to the CBI here in the UK, he referred to 'The New Efficiency'.  He was referring to the pressure in the IT market to enable customers to do more with less.

The Cloud Data team and some of our clients enjoyed a fantastic day's sailing yesterday on board 'The Bare Necessities' during the Equinix Silicon Cup.

Over 40 racing yachts were chartered by IT companies and 2 races were held in the Solent in the afternoon.  The Bare Necessities sailed alongside the racing fleet, giving all on board an excellent vantage point to watch the amateur racers and smile at the mistakes they made!

Cloud Data is pleased to announce the formation of a strategic alliance with Global Data Vault.

Global Data Vault and Cloud Data are service providers addressing business continuity and data protection needs for customers in the small-to-medium business (SMB) and small-to-medium enterprise (SME) space.

Disaster recovery is climbing the IT agenda, according to the recent Symantec Disaster Recovery Survey.  The survey highlights that requirements for IT DR solutions are increasing, whilst budgets are remaining static, thus forcing decision makers to look for more cost effective DR solutions. 

33% of respondents did not back up their virtual environments, and 31% do not test virtual environments as part of their DR plan.

Cloud Data is proud to be sponsoring the 'Storage Virtualisation Product of the Year' category at this year's Storage Awards, which take place at the Tower Hotel in London on Thursday 11th June.  Awards are voted for by readers of Storage Magazine, produced by BTC.

Interesting news article on Microscope which shows that virtualisation is really here to stay.  Analysts IDC are predicting that the virtual/physical server ratio will be 3:2 by 2013.

This clearly demonstrates that virtualisation is now mainstream - no longer an experimental technology only used for development and testing, but a production ready technology which is widely adopted.

This week has been a big week for the world of Cloud Computing, with 2 leading software companies announcing the release of their ‘Cloud Computing’ focused products.