Hosted business space

Cloud computing, the notion of outsourcing hardware and software to Internet service providers, is showing the classic signs of disruptive technology--it's not good enough for the masses yet, but it has clear potential to shake things up. Forrester Research on Monday released a report written by James Staten, an IT operations and infrastructure analyst, saying that cloud computing does not meet the needs of large businesses. But that could be only temporary. The services offered by a new crop of hosting providers, such asAmazon Web Services, are where the overall hosting market is going, according to Staten. "Cloud computing looks very much like the instantiation of many vendors' visions of the data center of the future; it's an abstracted, fabric-based infrastructure that enables dynamic movement, growth, and protection of services that is billed like a utility. ***

In the late 1990s, we all predicted big things around managed services. As we close 2007, we are all predicting big things for Software as a Service (SaaS). What's old is new again but this time we may be right. Case in point, managed security. A few years ago, enterprise security professionals were too proud and too paranoid to even think about outsourcing security management. As Bob Dylan sang, "the times, they are a changin'." According to a recent ESG Research survey 50 percent of large organizations (i.e. more than 1,000 employees) are either "interested" or "very interested" in outsourcing some portion of their security management tasks. Why the change of heart? Security is getting too complicated and one mistake could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Just ask my Massachusetts neighbor TJX. ***

Microsoft is jumping into the world of online event planning with Windows Live Events, scheduled to launch late Thursday. The free social event planning service lets you invite friends to an event and creates a Web page where people can share photos and stories with blog entries after the event. It uses the same infrastructure as Windows Live Spaces and lets you use your contact list there or in Hotmail or Messenger. Windows Live Event creates a Web page for each event where you can add photos, weather and other information.(Credit: Microsoft) It's got all the standard online invite features and allows you to include a map and customize. I'm not sure if it will dent the business of pioneer Evite. ***