Archive for November, 2009
As recently announced by well a known IT giant Microsoft, its Windows Azure Cloud Platform will be launched into production state on January 1 2010. Currently the platform is in its technical preview state, which in a way means that it is not widely available to anyone who wants to “taste” it.
So what is this Cloud Platform? To answer this question we need to answer a question of what a cloud computing is first. As explained by Wikipedia: “Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-“) based development and use of computer technology”. Simply speaking, this is an internet based environment aimed at providing software in a form of a ready to use service, with no need to worry about technical specification of the hardware required, installation and configuration procedures and maintenance. All this is being carried out on the side of the Host, on a so-called “Cloud Platform”.
Most hosts today offer server-side security, which means that they protect the servers including the OS and services that run on it. However this doesn’t mean that they guarantee protection of either content or software on your hosting account. There are two main reasons for this:
- You possesses full login information to your account. This means that if a password is stolen from you the host stops being capable of protecting anything on your hosting account.
- You are free to install software such as CMS, Ecommerce systems, Blogs, Forums etc. This in turn means that if you put an application that has vulnerabilities your entire site will be in danger. Of course hosts could track all installations on the server, but for a shared server this would simply mean existence of a whole army of administrators monitoring the server 24x7x365 and no such thing as cheap web-hosting would be possible.
As you see the responsibility for keeping your site up-to-date with latest security measures lies mostly on you. But why so much mess about this security thing? Because there are lots of hackers constantly looking for ways to take advantage of someone else’s information. There is no miracle cure for protecting from everything, but there are definitely a few things you can do to ensure better website security. In this article we will tell you about basic web site security measures.
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There is a huge number of articles available these days about Google Wave. Some of them describe various features that are yet to be and already are implemented in this astonishing new technology. What I would like to share in this post is our impressions from using Google Wave. Our Sitevalley team got sweet opportunity to get an invitation to use Wave Preview while it is still not freely available to everyone and for this we would like to thank Google a lot! From very start it was a big load of fun to play with waves and actually most features are still not clear enough for us. Here you will find a few feature reviews, some basics about the conception of Google Wave and several personal impressions we got when using it. I also attached a nice extension list and cool video for those who is starting to use Google Wave or is at least interested in doing so some time soon.