Reuven Cohen

I'm happy to announce that I've agreed to pitch in as a TechStars Mentor for their new Cloud accelerator program. For those of you unfamiliar with TechStars, it's the #1 startup accelerator in the world. Not to mention one of the most selective – although thousands of companies apply each year, they only take about ten companies per program. This gives them a selection rate lower than most Ivy League schools, so you have to be among the best of the best to be in TechStar. TechStars Cloud is a vertically-focused accelerator that funds companies focused exclusively on cloud computing and cloud infrastructure. For me, the more exciting aspect of the TechStars Cloud program is that it's specifically targeting cloud infrastructure startups exclusively. Yes, something I have a bit of experience with. What do you get? How's $100k cash sound? Oh did I mention it's provided b... (more)

The Rise of The Cloud Aggregator

Recently there has been a lot of renewed talk of "Cloud Aggregators" a term that has been thrown around quite bit of the the last few years. But what is a cloud aggregator really? How does one define this segement? How do you qualify a company or service as a cloud aggregator? It's time for my turn to attempt to define this some-what vague term. First, more generally what is a aggregator? One of the best descriptions I could find is described as "a system or service that combines data or items with similar characteristics (geographic area, target market, size, etc.) into larger e... (more)

Cloud Computing & Content Delivery Networks

Reuven Cohen's Blog With Amazon recently stating they plan to start offering a content delivery network service as part of their S3 offering and Microsoft reportedly creating their own CDN in partnership with Limelight there seems to be a renewed interest in CDN's. Whether for public usage like Amazons or Private like Microsoft's, the market for pay per use content delivery services is heating up. According to a recent post on the data center knowledge blog, the Microsoft CDN, which it calls an Edge Content Network (ECN), is designed to beef up the company’s infrastructure to han... (more)

Microsoft Actually Does Get Cloud Computing

Reuven Cohen's "Elastic Vapor" Blog Yesterday Microsoft launched its cloud computing offering, very similar to that of Google's App Engine or Rackspace's Mosso. Micrsoft's Azure Services Platform is a cloud operating "platform-as-a-service" rather then Amazon's Infrastructure-as-a-service that can deliver web, mobile, or hybrid software-plus-services applications capable of bridging traditional operating and hosting environments with Microsoft extensive global hosting environment. According to their press release, "existing software can utilize the services to add cloud capabilitie... (more)

Securing & Hacking the Cloud

Often when those who say the cloud is too early or not ready for wide-scale enterprise usage they point to "security" as being a key concern. Although they are quick to point out the security of a third-party provider is an obvious point of weakness, they typically lack any specific examples of what these possible weak points actually are. So I thought I'd point out a few. When looking at the potential vulnerabilities that cloud computing introduces, I typically recommend looking at the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that a novice user could exploit with little or no technical capabi... (more)