Google has fixed a glitch in a program designed to link Gmail accounts and Microsoft Outlook.

Due to a server error, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, which allows users to view Gmail messages and use certain Apps on their Outlook pages, did not work properly. When it works, the Google program lets users receive Gmail e-mails, as well as information from Google Apps’ contacts and calendar tools, in their Outlook inboxes, according to Information Week.

In a post on its blog, Google team members said that the problem was limited in scope. “It primarily impacts customers who have been away from Outlook for more than a few days, so if you’ve been online every day or so, you shouldn’t encounter the problem,” the team said.

The server glitch slowed down or prevented e-mail deliveries to Outlook during the first part of March. Google noticed it on the 13th and announced on 24th that it fixed the problem..

But some of its users didn’t take the glitch so lightly – especially the fact that it took so long to fix it. On Google’s blog, one user said: “OK Google guys, this is not funny any longer. We just lost a major deal because the email was missed. After I’m fired I’m sure my successor will be delighted to switch back to Exchange.”

This isn’t the first time Google has suffered glitches or failures in its cloud-based Apps. Recently, Google Gmail was invaded by hackers, targeting Chinese dissidents’ email.

While I wouldn’t advise betting the farm on e-mail delivery, of any kind, there are some safeguards you can take to make sure you get all you’re expecting. One is the very old-fashioned method of phoning the sender to inquire if it was sent.

Another is to keep track of your application with transaction monitoring.

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.

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 investing in cloud-based services for education extension, alerts or other modules, it’s wise to employ monitoring services to make sure that your goals of enriching the student experience and keeping in touch in times of emergencies aren’t compromised.

Monitoring can help you maintain continuity with services such as:

- Instant failure alerts

- cloud monitoring (to provide information such as number of instances)

- cloud storage monitoring

- transaction monitoring of your site (including tracking the load time for each of your pages)

It pays to educate yourself about how reliable your educational cloud services are and keep informed when they fail.

The U.S. government’s cloud site, Apps.gov, is scheduled for a re-design.

A story I saw says that the General Services Administration (GSA) isn’t entirely satisfied with Apps.gov the way it’s set up now, so some changes are in store for the site, including a soon-to-debut revamped request for quotations for infrastructure-as-a-service, a new informational section of the site, GSA-based social media hosting and a redesign of some of Apps.gov’s user interface and content.

According to the GSA, the problem is that federal employees aren’t buying much on the site – partly due to display problems. Instead, they’re using it more as a place to get information. GSA’s goal is to make Apps.gov a source for both procurement and information.

And apparently, the GSA’s first Request for Quotations (RFQ), which was to have added Web hosting, storage, virtual machines and other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors to Apps.gov, didn’t get the response the agency was hoping for. So, the GSA canceled it, scheduling a new one “extremely shortly,” a GSA official was quoted in the article.

Also, there are changes scheduled for the social media portion of Apps.gov, too. Now, the social media portion of the site only provides agencies with consolidated terms of service for different social media sites. It also enables federal agencies to enroll in external services like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This spring, however, the GSA will take on the role of service provider, hosting and providing blogging and other social media.

And, like any other successful change management strategy, better, more ongoing communication about Apps.gov is scheduled.

I’m glad to see the GSA is on top of making Apps.gov more relevant and powerful for its end users. Updating, refreshing, adding content is an important strategy to keep in mind for any cloud services provider – public or private.

We consider this an important priority for us, too, at Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions. Recently, we announced significant enhancements to our transaction-monitoring tool, enabling important new features and reports. We also made it more user friendly!

San Jose, CA – March 25, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced significant enhancements to its transaction-monitoring tool, enabling important new features and reports.

Monitis’ suite of all-in-one internal and external monitoring tools, already the category standard for feature robustness and ease-of-use, is adding to its transaction monitoring capabilities with:

• The ability to show all resources downloaded during the test flow using detailed information like DNS lookup time, first bite download time, and full-content download-time.
• The ability to add transaction-step reporting for different periods and see the average time for each step to discover transaction flow bottlenecks.
• The ability to monitor from a new European location – the Netherlands.

Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “For e-commerce businesses across the Web, there is no better, all-in-one system than Monitis. Our transaction-monitoring continues to break new ground and innovate faster than the rest.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, comprehensive, yet flexible, IT monitoring solution that consolidates backend, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures. 

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

Contact:

Monitis Inc.

Sales & Marketing Department

info@monitis.com

http://www.monitis.com

US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949

UK + International: +44-845-527-3346

France + International: +33-48-607-9035

2880 Zanker Road Suite 203

San Jose, CA-95134

USA

Monitis is signed on and listed with Google Apps Marketplace, which the company introduced earlier this month.

It feels good to be listed on the Google Marketplace, and we’re in the company of about 50 providers (so far) who will benefit and serve everybody from individuals running businesses from small and home offices (SOHOs), to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). We’re listed right up there with Google’s own suite of applications, Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. Services range from business-from accounting to mailing lists to task management. The applications integrate with Google Apps using open protocols.

What I especially like about Google Apps (and this is a key difference with Microsoft Office) is Google’s ability to access all data from any program. Google has a universal navigation bar that gets added to your browser for one-click access, otherwise known as “contextual integration,” for login – and then access to every application in your cloud.

Browsing the Marketplace? You can find us under “Admin tools.” Check out Monitis!

So there’s some definite things cloud-using businesses should be on the lookout for when it comes to security. This comes from a new report by the Cloud Security Alliance and Hewlett-Packard on major things that hinder cloud implementations.

Here are the major impediments, says the report:

Abuse and Nefarious Use: This means hackers gaining access to applications and data by gaining access to passwords.

Insecure APIs: Faulty code used to create hooks between on-premises applications and their cloud-based counterparts that could lead to a breach.

Malicious Insider Risks: Those in the data centers hosting the clouds, in other words, people who you think you can trust, using their credentials and access to manipulate applications and data and steal digital valuables.

Shared Technology Vulnerabilities: This is what happens when malware infecting one virtual machine crosses over partitions through the hypervisor and infects other apps..

Data Loss and Leakage: The unauthorized or accidental release of data to third parties.

Account Service and Traffic Hijacking: In other words – denial of service attacks.

Another survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers listed security concerns inhibiting adoption. They are:

• Poor provider controls
  
• Inadequate training of service provider personnel
  
• Inadequate or poor access control
  
• Poor data disaster recovery and business continuity planning
  
• Lack of data and resource segmentation
  
• An inability to audit controls and regulatory compliance
  

But what I found really fascinating was a story that listed what’s missing from both of these surveys. There were four items altogether. But here’s one that I thought was most important.

• SLA Compliance: Is the service provider delivering the level of service (availability) and security (confidentiality, integrity) as defined by the service contract?

While many cloud providers offer notification services that report issues like downtime or denial of service, when you think of it, it’s really in their best interest to keep these numbers low, yes? I’m not saying they deliberately mislead, but for a truly independent look, companies should consider independent monitoring services – especially of SLAs.

As today’s fast-paced IT industry changes, with the development and growth of virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing, both open-source network and cloud-based monitoring tools are attracting growing interest.

But which to choose?

Advocates of open-source technology praise the flexibility and reasonable costs of these tools, making them a viable alternative to software offered by large enterprise technology companies. And there are dozens of different open-source projects that target the issue of network monitoring. One program, Snort, developed by Sourcefire, counts 270,000 registered users and millions of downloads.

Users can tailor the tools to their specific networks and apps. And open-source tools have a social media-type feature that enables others in the open source community to exchange experiences and make suggestions about how to make the tools better.

The rising popularity of cloud computing is also driving companies to search for monitoring services that measure firms’ service level agreements with cloud platform providers. Some companies are using open-source network monitoring tools to do the job, while others are turning to cloud-based services. Both typically handle monitoring of e-commerce and Web applications that require constant uptime.

Yet cloud-based monitoring offers some distinct advantages over open-source monitoring tools.

For one, there’s no need to setup or install software. And there are certainly less maintenance efforts involved because there’s no need to worry about upgrades, server maintenance and compatibility issues. And, while community open-source tools are free, upgraded or customized versions can cost a lot. Cloud-based monitoring, on the other hand, as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, runs for pennies on the dollar. And it is designed to allow users to pay as they go (or pay for what they use).

One other important thing to remember, from the cloud, there are no boundaries around where you can monitor an application, website or network.

Which monitoring technology to choose? For cost and ease of use alone, my money’s on the cloud.

San Jose, CA – March 18, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced a major overhaul and upgrade of it’s user interface designed to make the world’s most innovative suite of monitoring tools even more user-friendly.

First-generation and second-generation internal and external monitoring systems have been notoriously complex and difficult to use. When it launched, Monitis’ third generation suite of monitoring tools fundamentally changed this dynamic. With it’s latest UI upgrade, the user experience has been made even simpler. The new changes include:

• A new internal monitoring wizard. The new wizard helps users get set-up faster with no complexity or hassle. The steps in the new wizard are now easier to follow and now enable simultaneous setup of multiple agents (bulk add) and of multiple test types (CPU, process, etc).
• New options in the toolbar. The toolbar now enables users to change the number of columns, enable/disable flash charts, and collapse/expand modules directly from dashboard’s toolbar. The Help section has also been revised.
• Improved visibility and access in the tab bar. The size of the tab bar has been increased, allowing users to see more tabs without scrolling. The tab carousel has also been improved, making it more convenient to scroll and switch between tabs.
• Significant performance enhancements for IE users.

Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “We already had the easiest-to-use all-in-one monitoring suite on the market. With our most recent UI overhaul and upgrade, we’ve gone from strength to strength. As per usual, we’ve been relentless in our pursuit of ways to help IT managers and system administrators save time.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, comprehensive, yet flexible, IT monitoring solution that consolidates backend, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures. 

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

At the @Cloud Connect event this week in Silicon Vally, CA, writer and cloud economics guru Joe Weinman, who is also VP of Strategy and Business Development at AT&T, discussed the inevitability of the cloud and its benefits.

A few years back, Weinman coined the term “Cloudonomics,”a treatise on why the cloud makes sense economically. I’d like to repeat these 10 commandments, rather, laws, that Weinman came up with in this space because I think many of us in the IT industry need a refresher from time to time. Perhaps we get too caught up in the insecurities of cloud computing and we forget about the benefits.

After all, if there were no benefits to cloud computing, we wouldn’t be insecure about them, would we?

What enables the “sustainable strategic competitive advantage of clouds” as Weinman puts it?

1. On-demand services found in a common pool of “dynamically allocated resources”
2. The huge scale of large cloud providers
3. Reduction of costs via dispersion – versus the consolidation and concentration of enterprise data centers.

But it’s the 10 Laws of Cloudonomics that really fine tune the economic benefits of the cloud. They are:

#1: Utility services cost less even though they cost more. While cloud providers may charge a higher cost per unit time than if it were owned, financed or leased, they cost zero when they’re not used. So customers save by replacing fixed infrastructure with clouds when workloads are spiky, “specifically when the peak-to-average ratio is greater than the utility premium.”

#2: On-demand trumps forecasting. Cloud providers can rapidly distribute and provide capacity when it’s needed, and that means your business earns money, e.g., from higher web sales. On the other hand, forecasting is “often wrong.”

#3: The peak of the sum is never greater than the sum of the peaks. Enterprises deploy capacity to handle their own peak demands, for example, a retailer for Black Friday. Done this way, the total capacity that gets deployed equals the sum of these individual peaks. But clouds can reallocate resources across many enterprises with different peak periods. So that means a cloud provider winds up needing to deploy less capacity overall.

#4: Aggregate demand is smoother than individual. Aggregating demand from multiple customers tends to smooth out variation. So clouds get higher utilization, and that means better economics.

#5: Average unit costs are reduced by distributing fixed costs over more units of output. Big enterprises benefit from economies of scale but larger cloud providers can benefit from even greater economies of scale, such as volume purchasing, network bandwidth, operations, administration and maintenance tooling.

#6: Superiority in numbers is the most important factor in the result of a combat. This comes from the classic military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. He argued that, above all, larger armies were key to winning battles. When it comes to clouds, it’s the botnets attackers versus DDoS defenders. A botnet of 100,000 servers, each with a megabit per second of uplink bandwidth, can launch 100 gigabits per second of attack bandwidth. “An enterprise IT shop would be overwhelmed by such an attack, whereas a large cloud service provider — especially one that is also an integrated network service provider — has the scale to repel it.”

#7: Space-time is a continuum (Einstein/Minkowski) Computing tasks can often trade off space and time, for example a batch job may run on one server for a thousand hours, or a thousand servers for one hour. But a Google query is fast because processing is divided among a lot of CPUs. Yet, a cloud provider can offer unbounded on-demand scalability.

#8: Dispersion is the inverse square of latency. Reduced latency is so important these days. It means everything to effectively delivering such services as rich Internet applications, online gaming, remote virtualized desktops, and interactive collaboration such as video conferencing. However, to cut latency in half requires not twice as many nodes, but four times. It’s more economical for clouds to deploy more nodes than an enterprise.

#9: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. No finite quantity of data centers will ever provide 100% reliability, but we can come “very close to an extremely high reliability architecture” with only a few data centers. Cloud providers that want to guarantee high availability services globally for latency-sensitive applications must establish a few data centers in every region. So look for cloud providers so equipped.

#10: An object at rest tends to stay at rest (Newton). A data center is a very, very large object – usually stuck in one place. However, a cloud service provider can establish virtual sites optimally.

Good stuff! Thanks Joe.

Wow! I’m impressed with the deal Google cut for sales of apps on its cloud-based Google Marketplace, which it launched on March 9th.  The cut is 20% of sales of apps, which are integrated with and extend Google Apps.  Apparently, Google will charge developers a $100 admission fee to enter its market and then take the 20% cut of application sales, recurring on subscriptions. (This includes the purchase and install process, as well as any integration features that go along with installable apps.)

To date, Google Apps has more than 2 million businesses and 25 million users.

So here we have a company that’s already a cloud giant, with its GoogleApps (Gmail, Docs, etc.), which is now paving the way for its future fortune as a host for third-party cloud app developers. If I didn’t have all my money tied up in the corner grocery store, I’d buy a few shares of Google stock.

Beyond the awesome deal Google made, however. The store marks another milestone in cloud development, I say.

The Google Apps Marketplace will enable Google Apps users to access business apps for project management, billing and accounting, travel management, and other services, according to an account I read. That’s going to mean a blessing for a lot of small companies and entrepreneurs who can’t afford to buy big, cumbersome and expensive (not to mention update-needy) business software.  (Google Apps Marketplace handles any software updates made to third-party apps.)

This also means Google is getting more aggressive in driving growth for its own suite of solutions, and if you haven’t already figured it out, the move also makes Google more competitive with existing cloud application stores such as Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

Congrats to Google! And my prediction is to make way for an onslaught of developers marketing their monitoring services on the new marketplace, as more and more companies wake up to the reality that the cloud is promising – but it ain’t perfect in terms of being 100% reliable and secure.