Cloud computing refers to the clouds as the computing resources as opposed to our internal servers.  Many people have unknowingly joined the clouds and yet they resist the movements of the clouds. Why? 

The editor is not a proponent or opponent of cloud computing and is acting as an observer here.  Google mails, Hotmails and Yahoo mails among many others are cloud computing as the email servers that support these mail services are somewhere in the clouds.  Consumers do not pay anything for these email service at the moment but this may change in the future.  Most businesses resist entrusting third parties to handle & store their data rightfully. 

This scenario has produced a clear guidance to us all.  Instead of running our complex email servers in-house, we let go of it.  Instead of running an expensive phone exchange system in-house, we let go of it.  They are just tools and depreciating assets.   Data is different.  Data is the reason for having information systems.  Data is private, unique and hugely important for the management of a business.  Data stays in-house.  A white paper for your reading:    http://www.cnz.co.nz/content/view/64/38/

New Zealand TV broadcast will be digital by 2013 according to a news release on the Ministry of Economic Development website in September.  Hawkes Bay and West Coast will be the first 2 locations to go digital. The South Island, Lower North Island and Upper North Island will follow in 3 stages.  This move will free up some radio spectrum for new uses and give consumers more choices and higher quality TV programs.  

Digital TV is not the same as TV over the Internet which is more commonly known as IPTV, where IP stands for Internet Protocol.  Digital TV refers to broadcasts from TV stations to consumers through the radio spectrum and does not use the Internet as the delivery medium. Transmission of TV content over the Internet is happening already on demand but not as a standard delivery approach.  Most consumers do not have fast Internet connection at this stage to do real time viewing of TV programs and we will have to wait for the government funded ultra fast broadband rollout to take place first. 

Regular visitors to the security industry tradeshow which is held annually in Sydney have commented that the tradeshow is getting bigger year by year and that the displays have become more complex and mind boggling.  The writer decided to take a look of this engineering segment called Building Services Management in the tradeshow held in Darling Harbour in early September.  The writer was shocked and impressed with the state of developments.  Physical real estate access control (not computer firewall), fire alarming (not anti-virus), intruder detection (yes they are Hackers and Trojans), and various bits and pieces have now been integrated with video surveillance to a certain extent in one single computer system.

All top world vendors were represented in the tradeshow.  The writer took a count and found that Europe based vendors were dominant whereas America based vendors were far and few in between.  USA has led in IT industry development especially from the Silicon Valley.  People there are busy working on a new business model called Cloud Computing.  Europeans continue to stay down to earth and have managed to become leaders in transforming physical security system technologies while USA dominates in the clouds.  The Microsoft and Intel of the physical security industry are Europeans in Denmark & Sweden respectively.  

Every organization whether it is a business, school or non-profit making entity has a budget and the manager has the responsibility of making all ends meet.  Many business advisers have advocated deploying technologies to reduce costs.  In doing so, managers have incurred the costs of employing IT people and the gap of IT literacy may lead some into black holes surrendering some control away to IT people.  This is not necessary.  Assume that we do not know why “IP is Everything”.  We just need to know that business dictates the deployment of technology and not the other way round.  Below is an example of what to do.

We want to employ a new staff member.  To do it professionally, we draft a position spec, a personal spec, and various documents that would help give us confidence that the chosen people would be the most suitable person for the job.  We then post the information on a website that specialises in staff recruitment; the price is $200 say for one month of advertisement.  In comparison, a regional paper would charge $200 for one day of a 4cm single column classified ad.  This is what CNZ did a while ago.  CNZ obtained 130 applications in 2 weeks.  We held 2 rounds of group interviews of 1 hour each and selected the most suitable person (and this has been proven so far).  We did not employ an HR consultant or recruitment house to handle this process, and we do not have an HR person in the company.  The end result is that we have spent $200 in the process and employed a very suitable person.  This is one example of using the web for business purposes.  For more real life examples and some concise guidelines, please read this tutorial:  http://www.cnz.co.nz/content/view/68/5/