Hovhannes Avoyan

Opening Keynote at Cloud Expo One growing cloud computing customer base I don’t talk about nearly enough is universities, high schools – even kindergartens. Teachers and their students are increasingly using the cloud to provide educational content online and enrich the learning experience. Register Today and Save $550 ! Explore Sponsorship Opportunities ! Schools are using cloud services like Blackboard to do things like post homework assignments online, construct and manage online courses, prod students who are late in payments to come up with the cash and, in the event of emergencies, notify students and parents via phone and email messages. But as we all know, the cloud is not perfect, and things can go wrong. Even the biggest platform providers are suspect to outages, hacking and other security issues. That’s why, if you’re in the education field, and you’re in... (more)

Textbooks or the Cloud?

What would you rather carry on your back — textbooks or lighter than air apps and data? When I went to school (six miles each way in the snow and rain, LOL), every year the books got heavier. Now, students can look forward to easy trips home with courses online — brought to them by the cloud. I recently read a commentary that said textbooks met the needs of 19th and 2oth century students, but that they fall short of the needs of today’s interactive students. “They are old-school delivery that supports old-school pedagogy,” the author stated. ” (OK, I must admit, I had to go to ... (more)

Small Business Solution: Cloud-based Website Monitoring

I read in a new survey of small business owners that they’re not very confident about an economic recovery and that considerable numbers are going to be exercising fiscally conservative strategies to get through expected tough times. For example, 62% see the current state of the U.S. economy as “poor,” while an equal number believe the economy is getting worse.  What’s more, over half are experiencing cash flow issues and about the same number expect to decrease business development spending over the next six months. Source: Discover Card What struck me most when reading these ... (more)

Don’t Assume Cloud Services Will Save Your Data

When you trust your data to a cloud service provider, do you automatically assume that it will remain safe? And do you assume that, should a service failure occur and the data appears lost, that the provider will have automatically backed it up somewhere – saving the day? Don’t assume. Earlier this month, there were three power outages at Amazon Web Services, and people lost their data. One customer was so angered by it that he/she left a post on Amazon’s blog, entitled: “Amazon EBS sucks; I just lost all my data.” The gist of the disappointment was a notification to the user t... (more)

Four Favorite Flavors Today to Cloud Computing

Just as there’s vanilla and chocolate and other ice cream flavors that different people gravitate towards, there are four favorite flavors today to cloud computing, according to an article I just read on IT World. A lot of this I’ve heard already, and certainly seen already among my Monitis monitoring services client base. One is internal or private clouds — which allow a company to use virtualization and management software to tie together servers, storage, networks data and apps. The end goal is to allow companies to shift storage, computing power or other resources invisibly ... (more)