A decade ago, companies like SunGard grew very quickly by selling a solution most of us would call “cold site disaster recovery.” In essence, SunGard compiled a number of physical servers and compute capabilities, then leased these servers to many companies to be used in case of a disaster on a first-come, first-served basis.

SunGard built facilities in cities around the country such as Chicago and Philadelphia where users could converge when a disaster struck their primary data center. By loading their applications onto the DR servers and mainframes, users could attempt to recover their operations from “cold” servers.

These cold servers were bare metal servers – no operating system, no applications, no patches and no data. Once the tape backups and the IT recovery team finally arrive at the recovery site, the system recovery begins the time-consuming process of loading the system from the tapes. And as if that isn’t hard enough, tape backup is notoriously unreliable. Tapes have high failure rates when it comes to trying to read a tape from a different tape reader than it was written from.  It’s not unusual for tape readers to need recalibration just to recover the data on the tapes for DR purposes.

The typical cold site would allow for a 48 hour pre-scheduled annual disaster recovery test. Unfortunately, most of the users I’ve spoken with were unable to recover their entire system during the test window due to the time-consuming task of system recovery.  This leaves the remaining untested part of the DR plan tied to the “hope and pray” strategy – not a particularly comforting position to be in for a mission critical IT infrastructure.

Cold site DR is dead.

With the increasing demands for 7×24 IT availability, recovery time requirements have dramatically shrunk over the last decade. While 10 years ago, a 3-5 day disaster recovery time was acceptable, most businesses are now demanding 1-4 hour recovery times given their heavy dependency on their digital infrastructure and electronic assets. This requires an entirely new disaster recovery strategy.

Fortunately, fundamental shifts have taken place over the last decade that makes it far easier and more cost-effective to achieve significantly faster disaster recovery times. Faster, more cost-effective Internet connectivity, point-to-point networks, more cost-effective SAN storage and the advent of cloud computing have changed the rules for disaster recovery.

One of the most significant advantages to cloud computing is what the cloud delivers in terms of disaster recovery. Cloud Computing delivers faster recovery times and multi-site availability at a fraction of the cost of conventional cold site disaster recovery.

Cloud computing virtualization delivers a very different approach to disaster recovery. The entire cloud server, including the operating system, applications, patches and data is encapsulated into a single software bundle or virtual server. This entire virtual server can be replicated to an offsite data center and spun up in a disaster recovery cloud in a matter of minutes.

Since cloud servers are hardware independent, the operating system, applications, patches and data are safely and accurately replicated between data centers, removing the burden of reloading each component of the server. This dramatically reduces cloud server recovery times compared to conventional disaster recovery in which physical servers need to be loaded with the OS and application software, then patched to the last configuration used in production – all before the data can be restored.

Cloud-based disaster recovery delivers warm site recovery times more cost-effectively and without the drawbacks of conventional cold site DR approaches. It also enables much faster recovery point objectives (RPOs) – eliminating the risk of data loss when failing over the DR servers.

With cloud-based DR, the server replication is dramatically accelerated and network replication becomes the critical path to recovery, including IP address mapping, firewall rules & VLAN configuration. Solutions like Online Tech’s DR Now! cloud-based disaster recovery not only replicates the servers between data centers, but also replicates the entire network configuration in a way that recovers the network as quickly as the backed up cloud servers.

Cloud-based DR delivers a set of benefits that make it difficult to look back at cold site DR with any sense of nostalgia. Long live cloud-based disaster recovery!

Cloudability, a platform to manage and monitor all of your cloud costs in one place, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, led by Trinity Ventures and Walden Venture Capital.

Cloudability, which launched in early November, helps businesses be more efficient on the cloud by analyzing a company’s entire cloud spend for cost savings opportunities and make recommendations. Cloudability supports more than 80 cloud and application providers, including AWS, Rackspace, Heroku, Airbrake and Google Apps, to give companies the ability to monitor and analyze complete cloud spend across multiple vendors.

The startup aggregates cloud costs into comprehensive reports and a simple dashboard to help companies understand and manage their cloud service spending, increase efficiency, reduce waste, and identify opportunities for coud cost savings. The service also includes daily customizable email and cloud spend/ activity notifications.

Cloudability is now tracking more than $21 million in cloud spend, and in its private beta identified an average of $2000 in efficiency gains per customer. Early beta users include SlideShare and others, and currently 1,000 businesses are using the platform to track spending.

The startup plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team, and accelerate product development and additional cloud-service integrations.

Many might ask, what is cloud computing? It is actually a general term for any application that distributes hosted services all around the internet with services such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service.

To further illustrate what is cloud computing, three significant features had to be pinpointed. Firstly, it is highly in demand, thus selling every minute/ hours; secondly it is elastic, which suggest that users can have as much or as little services required at any given time; and thirdly, the services is fully govern by a provider, which suggested cloud hosting. With the advancement on information system, the innovation of computing and the idea on producing a fast moving internet along with a weak economy had boost the curiosity in cloud computing.

Usually, a cloud can be either privatise of publicly owned. A publicly owned cloud sells its services to anyone and everyone in the visual world; and presently, the largest cloud hosting provider is Amazon. A privatised cloud is when a cloud hosting provider sells their services to a selected number of people. Also there are times when a cloud hosting provider utilises a public cloud resources to form their private cloud, and such event suggests virtual private cloud. However, privatised or publicly owned, the function of cloud computing is to offer an easy yet straight forward entry to computing resources or IT services.

To understand more about what is cloud computing, the 7 type of cloud computing services had to be acknowledged.

First is the web-based cloud service where the user is able to utilise a certain services without needing to fully developed the whole application, for instance, program that is used in credit card processing.

Secondly is the Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) application with the goal to provide a series of application to several users, especially to those that are using a browser, this can be commonly seen while conducting a sales service.

Third is the Platform-as-a-Service function where users are allowed to manoeuvre his/her own applications/ software freely but with a main requirement of using the cloud provider’s network.

Following is the utility cloud services where it provides users with a virtual storage and server options in which users can administer; it also allows the creation of a virtual data centre.

Managed services are the next in line where it shows the ‘oldest iteration of cloud solutions’. In this process, cloud providers will be the one using the application in order to monitor a service or to incorporate anti-spam services.

Last but not least is the service commerce where it established the incorporation of SaaS and managed services by providing a hub where users can interact between one another. Such application involves expense tracking, tracking of orders or virtual assistance services.

It’s hard to use the Internet anymore without being watched. Tracking cookies follow your every move, so advertisers can figure out what to sell you. Social networks keep you constantly signed in, in part so they can see what other websites you visit. Phone and tablet apps may be gathering information about you, including your contacts list or your camera roll.

If you want to participate in today’s Internet, and all the apps and services that go with it, you have two choices: Accept that your information is out there and try not to worry about it, or arm yourself with some privacy protection tools. Should you choose the latter path, check out these apps and services to help you stay anonymous online and keep your information out of the wrong hands:

PrivacyScore

PrivacyScore rates websites and Facebook applications based on what they do with users’ personal data and how they track users. For instance, you can find out whether a site or app shares your data with other companies, and what happens to that data if you terminate your account. In addition to PrivacyScore’s website and Facebook apptools, the group offers a Chrome extension that displays a score for every site you visit, when possible.

When you want more security than your browser’s private sessions will allow, Cocoon goes even further. The Firefox browser add-on routes traffic through proxy servers, thereby protecting the user from tracking cookies, spam and viruses. Cocoon also offers a standalone iPhone and iPad browser. The free version includes advertisements, but you can make them go away for $5 per month.

All Android apps tell you what information they intend to access before you download, but LBE Privacy Guard is helpful you overlook those details or need an easy way to keep track of them later. Within the app’s Permission Manager, you can see which other apps require access to text messages, contacts, call logs, GPS data or other information. If you have a rooted Android phone–the equivalent of jailbreaking on an iPhone–you can go even further and manage the types of data that each app can access.

The iPad has, quite quickly, become the tablet of choice for enterprises, with some 97 percent of all tablet activations in Q1 of 2012 attributable to Apple’s tablet, according to Good Technology. So it comes as no surprise that apps are rushing into the wake of those purchases to make the iPad more work-friendly.

The latest in that story is a release of some social software from harmon.ie that will make SharePoint, the collaboration software from Microsoft, usable on the iPad, as well as the iPhone. Harmon.ie’s CEO, Yakov Cohen, says this marks the first time that business users can access SharePoint from both the iPad and desktop with the same user experience.

“Until now, you had solutions for business users only for the iPad or only for the desktop but not for both,” he says.

Harmon.ie has carved out a niche for itself as an integrator for enterprises that want to incorporate more “social” collaboration tools into their workflow on Windows but have held off for problems of security on consumer-grade social networks or for the fact that workers are not necessarily going on the internet as much as they are nosing around their own networks working on email.

The company says it already has 1 million people using its existing edition for Outlook, which which adds social features and collaboration to a user’s Outlook mail and calendar applications.

Putting SharePoint accessbility on the iPad gives harmon.ie a lot of potential in tapping a big market that has yet to be served: some 78 percent of corporate America already uses SharePoint, according to Forrester, with half of their workday (yes — half!) spent in email. Microsoft, perhaps understandably, has not created iPad and iPhone support for SharePoint itself.

The product is available as a free, read-only version, and a full version for $19.99 that lets users edit and collaborate on documents on the SharePoint platform. An MDM version, allowing for more secure connections, will be available in Q2, the company says.

Similarly, support for Android and Windows 8 coming “in future,” says Cohen. (harmon.ie for iPad is HTML5-based, he says, which makes it relatively painless to provision it for all HTML5-based platforms.)

(CNNMoney)  — Most people make a living while they’re at work. But what if you could earn a few bucks just walking to the office?

Gigwalk, a startup founded last summer in Mountain View, Calif., takes the phrase “mobile workforce” literally. The company harnesses America’s vast army of iPhone users, enlisting them to complete various “gigs” when they’re out and about.

Rates for these micro-tasks have included $5 to snap a picture of a restaurant’s chalkboard menu for an online restaurant guide, $7 to visit a wireless store and check on product placement for a cell phone manufacturer and $30 to test out a new iPhone app. Users are encouraged to work gigs into their regular routines, picking up pocket cash while they make trips to the gym or run errands.

“It’s whatever is convenient,” says Ariel Seidman, the co-founder and CEO of Gigwalk. Inspiration for the service came last spring when Seidman, 34, was the director of mobile search for Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500). He watched mapping companies spend exorbitant amounts of time and money dispatching contractors to gather information from far-flung locales. What if they could rely instead on iPhone users who were already there?

Seidman left his job last June. He enlisted two former Yahoo colleagues, Matt Crampton and David Watanabe, to help build the software platform that would bring his idea to life. In December, Gigwalk landed $1.7 million in startup capital from sources including the Greylock Discovery Fund, managed by LinkedIn (LNKD) co-founder Reed Hoffman, and Harrison Metal, founded by Michael Dearing, a former senior vice president of eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) and an early funder of AdMob, which Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) bought for $750 million.

“I thought it was an amazing concept,” says Jeff Clavier, a managing partner at SoftTech VC, which also invested in Gigwalk. “After five minutes I thought, ‘This is like mobile crowdsourcing.’”

Gigwalk’s corporate clients include TomTom, the Dutch maker of portable GPS systems, and MenuPages.com, the New York online restaurant guide. Gigwalk executives would not say how many clients, in total, have signed on so far. They also declined to release their revenues and the number of active “gigwalkers,” saying only that thousands of people have completed tasks in seven cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

To sign up for the service, iPhone users download an app, then register with Gigwalk and pass a background check. The company plans to launch an app for Android owners later this year.

Gigwalk uses iPhone owners’ GPS locations and home addresses to filter and distribute appropriate gigs for them. Once a user accepts a gig, there’s a limited time to finish it, usually a couple of days. After a completed task is approved, the user gets paid through PayPal.

To commission Gigwalk for a job, companies specify what tasks they’d like to outsource to smartphone users and pay Gigwalk a lump sum upfront. A percentage of that sum goes directly Gigwalk — the company would not disclose how much — and the rest goes to paying “gigwalkers” as they complete their tasks.

Reliable workers — those who do a good job and don’t submit fuzzy menu photos — are rewarded with the first pick of better-paying gigs.

Gigwalk has become a big time-saver for MenuPages, which maintains 32,000 online listings for restaurants across the country, according to Tom Bohan, the company’s director of content operations. One of MenuPages’ biggest challenges is keeping track of current information: new food items, hours of operation, whether there’s outdoor seating and wheelchair access. In the past, they’ve mostly used Craigslist to hire hourly contractors who can visit those businesses in person to collect data.

Bohan discovered Gigwalk late last year. Though they cost about the same as his regular contractors, gigwalkers turn assignments around for him much faster, he says — typically in about two weeks instead of eight.

Gigwalk’s biggest challenge? Getting people to take time out of their day for small payouts of just $2 to $15 apiece. Seidman says he doesn’t expect anyone to drive 15 minutes to do a $2 or $5 gig. But he hopes they’ll be willing to work multiple gigs into their morning commutes, or squeeze in a task that’s just two doors down from wherever they happen to be at the moment.

That’s worked out well for Andrew Schut, 47, a medical device consultant in New York City who’s the top-grossing gigwalker so far, earning $2,173 since March. Schut maps out clusters of gigs whenever he goes for a walk and tries to knock out a couple on the way to his clients’ offices.

“It’s given me the motivation to see parts of the city I didn’t know about,” says Schut, who created an online community called gigwalkingtips.com. “The beauty of it is you do it when you have time, and if you have time.”

Editor’s note: Mitch Lazar is CEO of Taptu. He Founded CNN and Cartoon Network Mobile. He was a former journalist at CNN and one of the co-founders of CNN.com. Prior to joining Taptu, Mitch headed Yahoo! Mobile Europe.

Staying on top of your game and understanding the competitive landscape is essential to winning in the modern business world. A huge component to staying ahead of the curve is keeping a close eye on competitors in your market, which entails maintaining a watchful eye on industry news. Some companies turn to expensive news monitoring services to keep track of their respective industry, but in reality there are more viable options. Emerging tablet news and information services like Flipboard, Pulse and others are proving an incredible companion to business and consulting executives in staying current with industry changes occurring around them.

Jeff Cavins, CEO of Fuzebox, recently wrote in Business Insider that the explosive uptake of tablet computers is fueling the growth of what he called the new “iPad economy.” Cavins said: “The iPad is shifting the way businesses function, changing how executives interact and transforming the economics of today’s business operations.”

The iPad economy is a growing reality across the globe, and businesses are turning to enterprise apps to help them succeed. Simple RSS readers are used to condense multiple streams of content from a variety of sources into single channels, granting users access to diverse content all in one place. Some applications have further simplified news aggregation by using innovative search technology that goes beyond the function of RSS readers to deliver richer streams of highly targeted information to business users – a critical asset to businesses large and small.

Better Search and Filtering Offers Essential Time Savings

Improved search and filtering techniques make it simple and easy for a business to set up a Web-monitoring service. Google News and Google Alerts were an early step in the right direction, but anyone who monitors news on a daily basis knows that these services don’t always give you the news you want when you need it.

As users continue to adopt tablets as a primary reading outlet, there is a huge opportunity to create real-time, targeted news experiences. Apps like Zite, which was bought by CNN in 2011, aim to learn about users’ interests through the stories they read, and provide related content based on those preferences. News-reader apps give users the power to create their own streams of content based on keywords to offer analysis of the topic across any genre of content, keeping them constantly updated in the ever-changing world of business.

Recently we have seen innovative companies like Wavii launch to further personalize the way users get their news, and as this vertical continues to mature, we should see more sophisticated technologies making their way onto tablets.

By utilizing apps that filter and search, tablets are changing the way news is channeled and consumed. Best of all, once streams are set up, they can be shared business-wide or between colleagues so the wheel never has to be re-invented.

Gesture Based Information Consumption Increases Efficiency

Touting efficiency, news-readers give users the opportunity to scan hundreds of articles in a few moments and immediately delve deeper into the most interesting content. News-reading services do all the heavy lifting by aggregating the stories that match your interests, giving you more time to spend reading the news you care about rather than searching for it. The same way Evernote helps you save your daily thoughts and ideas all in one spot, news-readers concisely track what’s going on in every field that interests you.

Beyond increasing efficiency, news-readers also allow for easy sharing of any stories of interest with your community of colleagues or friends. Every blog and news site has its own way to share stories you enjoy with friends, but they are not always convenient for users. Tablet apps make sharing simple, while still driving traffic back to the original source.

Bookmarking Makes for Easier Follow Up

When browsing a vast number of stories every day, it’s often hard to keep track of the important ones, or to flag them down once you’ve flipped past. Easy in-app bookmarking tools such as Pocket or Instapaper make for a better overall experience because returning to a piece of interesting news is simple. Creating your own playlist through bookmarks is intuitive, as is sharing that list with colleagues, which is an asset for group collaboration.

Apps are abundant, but the ones with the potential to make a difference to the business world are those that improve productivity, efficiency and knowledge sharing. Discovering and utilizing these gems in a marketplace that has become a sea of apps is a difficult task. Apps like news readers set themselves apart by providing essential tools for businesses and adding value to help them win in their respective vertical.

by Sharon Vaknin April 24, 2012, www.howto.cnet.com

Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive, and other cloud storage services (reluctantly) welcomed a new competitor today: Google Drive. The freemium service, which replaces Google Docs, lets you store files and access them from your computer, phone, or tablet, no matter where you are.

To get started with Google Drive, head to drive.google.com and enable the service. Once you have access to your Drive, you’re ready to get started.

Right away, you’ll notice that Google Drive looks and acts a lot like Google Docs — you can create files, collections (folders), use the top bar to search, and upload files by dragging and dropping into the browser window.

However, unlike Docs, you can now manage your entire drive from your desktop by installing the Google Drive application. To get it, head to drive.google.com and select “Download Google Drive” in the left sidebar. After a short installation process, a “Google Drive” folder will be added to your desktop. That folder is synced with your Google Drive, so any changes you make to it will be reflected in the Web interface, and vice versa.

So, when you add a file to the Google Drive folder, it will be uploaded to your Web drive (as long as you’re connected to the Internet.)

Now that you’re synced up, check out these Google Drive features:

• Documents are free. Google gives you 5GB of free storage space, but any docs you create within Drive don’t count against your storage.
• Upload up to 30 types of files. Photoshop, movies, photos — you name it. Google Drive supports the storage and viewing of all the popular file types. So, you can upload a movie to your Drive and play it back within your browser, no matter where you are.
• Share files, folders, or your entire Drive. Have a document you want to share? Or a home video stored on your drive? Just like Google Docs, you can share those files. Simply right-click a file or folder, select “Share…,” and choose your sharing option. To give someone access to your entire drive, click the button with the person and a plus sign at the top.
• Utilize Google Goggles. With the Goggles technology built into Drive, you can search for a photo using the search bar. Likewise, you can search for text in a scanned document. After some testing, the feature isn’t totally reliable, but it’s worth trying if you need help finding a file or photo.
• Collaborate on videos, photos, and more. The collaboration feature from Google Docs is now available for any type of file. For example, if you upload a video to Drive and share it with someone else, you’ll be able to discuss that video with the comment tool.
• Install third-party apps. Third-party developers have created apps that work seamlessly with Google Drive. Pixlr lets you edit uploaded photos, HelloFax lets you send free faxes, and DocuSign lets you sign official documents, all within Google Drive. To get these apps and more, head to Google Drive > Settings > Manage apps > Get more apps.

If you plan to use Google Drive, couple it with the Android app (iOS app coming soon), and check out our complete hands-on. Dropbox users can back up their storage and move it to Google Drive using this tutorial.

(CNN) — Most Internet users and tech experts think cash and credit cards will become things of the past in the next decade as people turn to their mobile phones to make payments, results from a newly released survey suggest.

Nearly two out of three respondents to the survey (65%) told the Pew Internet & American Life Project that they think most people will have fully adopted the “mobile wallet” as their day-to-day means of paying by 2020.

Whether it’s paying for coffee with a mobile app, using more versatile apps such as Google Wallet or doing business using tools such as Square that turn phones into mobile cash registers, the adoption of mobile payments is clearly under way.

In a December report from comScore, 38% of smartphone owners had used their phones to make a purchase of some kind.

That finding jibes with an earlier Pew study in which one-third of smartphone owners had used their phone to do some sort of banking (such as checking their balances or paying bills) and that nearly half (46%) had paid for an app with their phone.

In the survey released Tuesday, 65% of respondents agreed with the following statement:

“By 2020, most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards. People will come to trust and rely on personal hardware and software for handling monetary transactions over the Internet and in stores. Cash and credit cards will have mostly disappeared from many of the transactions that occur in advanced countries.”

Survey respondent and Harvard University professor Susan Crawford wrote, “There is nothing more imaginary than a monetary system. The idea that we solemnly hand around printed slips of paper in exchange for food and water shows just how trusting and fond of patterned behavior we human beings are.”

Crawford, an ex-special assistant for technology policy for President Barack Obama, asked, “So why not take the next step? Of course, we’ll move to even more abstract representations of value.”

One-third agreed with an essentially opposite statement, saying there won’t be a major conversion to “all-digital, all-the-time” payments.

Many cited security concerns as the reason.

“The use of a simple string of digits that must be shared with any vendor with whom you transact is really a ludicrously insecure system that can and must change,” said Peter J. McCann, a FutureWei Technologies senior engineer.

Proponents of mobile payments said technology is evolving but that such payments are no less secure than what most people do now.

“It’s basically the same technology as credit cards,” Mung-Ki Woo, the head of mobile for MasterCard Worldwide, told CNN last year. “It’s not better or worse.”

Pew’s report said those who think mobile payments will dominate in the coming years frequently said the boom in smartphone ownership, convenience and security are key factors that make “these systems an obvious choice to replace established modes of payment in day-to-day commerce.”

The survey, conducted with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, was not random but instead asked for the opinions of 1,021 “Internet experts and other Internet users.” Since it sought the opinions of a specific audience, there is no margin of error.