Should CIO report to CFO?

Increasingly I've noticed that CFO are taking over the overall control of IT department & making the CIO report into the CFO. I guess the thought process is that in this competitive market CFO wants to keep a control on IT budget and make sure every penny is spent wisely. However I wonder if every IT initiative can be looked at keeping short time benefits in mind, does the financial background of CFO enables them to look at bigger picture or long term goal? I strongly believe few large IT initiative cannot be always looked at from the profit & loss point of view rather long term returns, business benefits and efficiency. Sometimes its good and bad to roll IT into CFO organization however it largely depends on the business model and objective where an organization want to go.

An Open, Interoperable Cloud

This article describes how interoperable clouds can be created, today, through the integration of open standards such as the Open Cloud Compute Interface, the Open Virtualisation Format and CDMI. They provide the means to package virtual infrastructure deployments, an API for the runtime management of storage infrastructure and an API for the runtime management of infrastructure as service.

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EU Data Protection Directive and cloud backup

Tonight I was just investigating some "cloud backup storage solution (encryption included if possible)". I also discovered about the EU Data Protection Directive, that some cloud providers use as a marketing benefit for the final user.

What is it?

The European Union (EU) has a European directive restricting the use of a cloud backup in certain circumstances, the EU Data Protection Directive(EUDPD). The EUDPD defines some basic requirements on the protection of personal data of European citizens.

In practice the EUDPD prohibits many organisation to send any personal data to countries outside the European Union.

Sample company that I found zmanda.com (see logo at the bottom on the right border)

On clusters, the SQL Server Browser listens on which port?

Answer: IP_ANY

Explanation: In a cluster, the browser listens on the IP_ANY port, since this is not a cluster aware service.

Ref: SQL Server Browser Service - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181087.aspx

ABV - Architecture Business Value

Enterprise architects can add tremendous value to their organization's selection of a packaged application solution by analyzing each candidate's Architectural Business Value (ABV). Forrester Research's Randy Heffner explains how.
Read more here

Will Google+ dethrone Facebook ?

The announcement of the social network Google+ to dethrone Facebook captivated the world. Yet the service is no longer accepting any new tester until further notice, a victim of its success ALREADY.
Service here.

My google+ profile

Three features that separate "the cloud" from hosting

There are three features that separate "the cloud" from previous notions of outsourced hosting or managed services:
- Multi-tenancy: You contract for a service, not a physical server. Your application may share hardware and other resources with other customers without any impact on the service level you receive.
- Elasticity: You can configure new services in minutes. The providers have large enough scale to be ready with excess capacity, and have created management panels that allow for self-service provisioning.
- Location independence: Your services can be moved quickly to other data centers in order to provide increased capacity, uptime, and/or disaster assurance. The "cloud" is a whole new paradigm made possible by advances in virtual server management.