Often in ICT, the realities of a technology become obscured by a fog of hype. Joseph Sweeney, analyst at IBRS, believes that cloud computing has suffered this fate. In this humorous and insightful piece, Sweeney renders his verdict on some of the more common assumptions about the technology.

Australian internet service provider Internode celebrated its 20th birthday yesterday. [ + ]

Brett Winn is Executive General Manager - Information Technology at Medibank Health Solutions, where he is responsible for improving the delivery of health services using technology. Specifically, he must reduce costs, streamline processes and improve the quality of patient care. He revels in this position despite the stresses, and wants to see government take a greater role in the delivery of health services to the community.

As demand for smartphones in Australia continues to rise, vendors must provide new product innovations to compete for customer interest. Brad Reed, Senior Marketing Manager at LG Electronics, explains how he expects the arenas of mobile hardware, operating systems and application ecosystems to evolve in the coming year.

Certain parties - corporate and political - like to tell us that the NBN is going to enable a raft of broadband services for Australians. So what does the NBN have in store for cloud services? Andrew Collins puts the question to those in the know.

A company without a Facebook profile is just asking for the world to guess at its social worth, one media guru has claimed.

Cloud computing is a concept surrounded by misinformation. But used correctly, it can be of great benefit to your organisation. Analyst Joe Sweeney dispels the misconceptions and explains how to best approach the cloud.

Solid-state disk drives are fast, use little power, get cheaper almost every day and are winning friends among all the big storage vendors. But the disks may also make it harder to use the last line of defence: data recovery. Simon Sharwood reports on the (mostly) upsides and downsides of data recovery using solid-state drives.

The one consistent theme in the digital world is that growth is a constant. It is estimated that from 2009 to 2020, the size of the digital universe will have increased 44-fold; that is a 41% increase in capacity every year. Storing, locating and extracting value from high volumes of data will become increasingly complex. Oracle’s Angus MacDonald outlines a storage strategy to cope with this avalanche of data.

The cloud is the subject of many thoughtful and insightful articles. Salesforce knows a little about the cloud having been one of the first to offer cloud services so Salesforce’s Peter Coffee is qualified to set us straight on ‘private cloud’.

Security vendors like to throw around various apocalyptic scenarios in order to convince IT and security chiefs to buy the latest security doodads. But how realistic are these scenarios? Andrew Collins spoke to one penetration tester about the likelihood of one particular scenario: hackers compromising an airline’s IT security in order to blow up an aeroplane.

The proliferation of email however it arrives is causing storage headaches for service providers.

NBN Co has appointed Tim Smith to the role of General Manager Marketing. [ + ]

Recently in Voice+Data we looked at the plans for Australia’s national e-health network and, in particular, the politics that have delayed its introduction. This month Andrew Collins takes a look at the actual technologies involved, the benefit they bring to remote areas and obstacles to their adoption. There is hope but there is a long way to go.

Cloud services are all the rage now and becoming increasingly so, but how do you actually measure performance? Daryl Cornelius, Director Enterprise EMEA, Spirent Communications, asks: How do you know until you test it? What are the complexities of measuring virtual systems?