Backup Your Data from The Cloud

Cloud computing is hot. It is the backend system that supports many information systems such as email, social networks, photos, etc. However, have you ever plan to backup your data from the Cloud one day?

There are 2 options: Google Takeout and Cloud Export.

Google Takeout (from Google) allows you to download all your data from their services. This includes +1, Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa web albums, profile and streams.

Cloud Export is a Windows application that will backup everything for you. Once login, it will download your contacts, Gmail, Reader subscriptions, Blogger entries, and more and store them all locally. The service supports Google accounts, Google Apps accounts, and even Twitter, Identi.ca, and more.

A New Life with Cloud Computing

Most people know what Cloud Computing is. But, do you know how can someone begin his life with Cloud Computing?

Take an example of Amazon S3 cloud computing services. It stands for Simple Storage Service.

First, we can backup and/or archive all the local files (documents, media, etc) to S3, which available online from everywhere later on. Most of us may currently backup/archive our files using a portable hard disk. Let's see what's the cost of choosing S3 instead of portable hard disk.


S3 operates on a basis of paying only for what you use, with separate fees for storage, data transfer and data requests. Ignoring data request fees because the cost is minimal, the fees break down as follows:

Storage: 5GB free, then $0.15/GB per month (100GB = $15)
Data Transfer (Upload): $0.10/GB
Data Transfer (Download): $0.15/GB

As an example then – if you used it to store 100GB of data – it would cost you $10 to upload it all, $15 per month to store it, and a further $15 when you decided to download it all again.

So do you need to buy a 250GB portable hard disk and carry it everywhere you go?


Secondly, we may want to backup/archive all the online information we had, such as social feeds and online personas.

Again, by using Amazon S3 and Backupify, it simplifies and automates the backup/archive of all these below.

Automatic Backup by Backupify

Most important is, it allows you to search from the backup easily!

And finally, your life will be uncluttered with this cloud computing.

Amazon Web Services and IaaS

With Steve Riley starts his new role as evangelist and strategist for Amazon Web Services, we been introduced about Amazon business model on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

The Amazon’s cloud computing approach follows the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model. AWS includes these components:

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)—virtual server instances on which you run your choice of operating systems, web servers, and applications
• Simple Storage Service (S3)—persistent data object stores accessible through several standard protocols
• SimpleDB—web-based data indexing and querying services without complex schemas
• Simple Queue Service (SQS)—a message queuing service integrated with EC2 and other AWS services
• CloudFront—a content delivery service for data served up from S3 stores close to end users
• Elastic MapReduce—a hosted Hadoop framework for processing large amounts of data

Information Security in Cloud Computing

This is a typical example of information security within cloud computing: you just don't know when will you're vulnerable.

See how Google has handled a bug reported on Google Docs: error allowed unauthorised document access.

Microsoft Windows Azure

Today Microsoft announced Windows Azure, a new version of Windows that lives in the Microsoft cloud. You won't be running Windows on your PC over the internet with Azure, though; instead the platform is intended to help developers host and distribute software running over the internet.

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.

We can use Windows® Azure to:

• Add Web service capabilities o existing packaged applications.
• Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources.
  
• Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises.
• Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively.
• Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources.
  
• Reduce the effort and costs of IT management.