NottTuesday: What does the Cloud mean for your business?

On Tuesday 10th November I went up to Nottingham for NottTuesday. The theme was What does the Cloud mean for your business? and it was all sponsored by Aware Monitoring.

Since this was my first time at NottTuesday, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect and didn’t know anyone except for Nick Barker (@nickpoint) who invited me along. Nick is one of the founders of Aware Monitoring and did a great job of raising awareness of the event, resulting in a turnout of about 50 people, double what was expected when Aware Monitoring ordered food for the event.

I needn’t have worried though, as I was soon introduced to Dave, Phil, and Will. Dave and Phil (@Immunda) are both studying the University of Nottingham, and Will (@erebusstyx) is studying at Nottingham Trent University. Since we all share an interest in computing, it was interesting to compare the different ways computing and its related disciplines are taught at our respective institutions.

The evening kicked off with a presentation from Nick about Aware Monitoring. Unfortunately, due to being in a basement room, there was no internet access and no live demon as a result. However, there were plenty of screenshots and they showed a very polished looking and full featured service.

Simon Oxley (@soxley) then gave a talk about the cloud. He gave a brief history of the origins of cloud computing starting from old mainframes to the internet. He then discussed issues of trust and security and their implications for cloud computing.

This set the stage for an interesting panel discussion. The discussion focussed on issues of security and trust in the cloud, particularly regarding business data in the cloud. A very controversial issue as the discussion easily could have gone on past 20:30 where the discussion was brought to a close.

Overall, I left feeling glad I went and looking forward to December’s NottTuesday, and in fact the only low point during the evening was catching the train back home: I was delayed while the station brought up a new train to replace the original one which had broken down.