A crisp guide to help you choose the right cloud provider :

Cloud computing is an inevitability that you can no longer ignore. Most studies suggest that businesses without a proper recovery plan shut down within 12 months of a flood or fire. With roughly 30,000 service providers in storage and backup, how do you go about choosing the one that serves you perfectly. Few areas of concern could be security concerns ,expensive bandwith, uptime history or unwanted features.

Security:First and foremost, security of your data should be the topmost priority.The Secure Socket Layer(SSL) and Transport Secure Layer(TSL) is the standard and most widely deployed security protocol when transferring data. Going forward, more encryption protocols are required to protect your digital assets in the cloud.Your provider should offer a minimum 128-bit encryption but the ideal is always a 256-bit encryption.

Once you are satisfied with the level of security, you need to probe further into their services and features including :

Regulatory Compliance: It can cover many things from Government regulations-Sarbanes-Oxley and EU Data Protection Act to industry regulations such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA. You need to make sure that your provider submits all audits and follows all regulations. It is all the more important with the 43A amendment to the IT Security Act 2000.

Physical and Digital Security: Does your provider have a good access management strategy and data center orchestration for their data center. Is the data stored protected by a comprehensive endpoint security solution or network based hardware and software security.With 17 percent of Internet servers vulnerable to the recent Heartbleed bug , this aspect is a must to look into.

Recovery Capabilities: A natural disaster or a simple accident can threaten your data.You need to make sure that your provider has “Hot Sites” and “Warm Sites”  with defined Service Level Agreements by the hour. Do they run Disaster recovery tests regularly. The Huffington Post-Hurricane Sandy case study is a case in point.

Integrated Service Provider: An Integration Data Protection Plan includes anti-virus expertise,data cleaning and hardware lifecycle management. A stand-alone backup service provider would not be able to offer this.Do they offer value such as pricing options for different data types.

There would be a lot of other but critical things to consider, your comments on same are welcome!

Social Media New Trends 2014

Here are a few trends I expect this year. Your comments feedback are most welcome!

1. Social TV Integration

Many shows have already begun to integrate social TV, either through polling or integrating social elements within the show. See my example of how both the UFC and WWE are integrating social media into their programming. Social media played a pivotal role in the last presidential election, and it will likely be more integrated into political broadcasts.

As each news channel fights hard to keep their viewers engaged, networks like CNN and Fox have made significant strides to engage their audience, although some would argue that this social media integration has come at the expense of hard-hitting journalism and analysis.

2.Gaming

Sure, sure this was the next big trend in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 ... but 2014 may be the year. Zynga paved the road for simple games and more people are investing and experimenting. Social gaming will go beyond Badges and start influencing people's behavior in the real world. For example, photo scavenger hunts tied to a gaming platform on Facebook may be linked to a social deal site to offer you a discount at a bar

The next Angry Birds (game) will be social. The key is creating a semi-mindless but satisfying game playable while people wait, vegetate or commute.

3.Social media affecting search results

Search engines like Google are continuously perfecting their algorithms, and they'd be out of their minds to ignore the shift toward social media relevance. Google recently made some tweaks to their search algorithm that now returns more timely and recently published content in search results.

For websites and company's that have blogs updated frequently, the integration of social media into search engine results is important. Moreover, search results are getting a lot more personal and customized to individual preferences, especially now with the integration ofGoolge+ into social media.

Pages that have previously been shared by your network on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ rank higher in your own search results. However, For somebody else's search results for the same keyword may look comparably different because their network of friends shares different content.

Expect to see your search results move even more toward social relevance in 2014.

4.Local Differences

One interesting trend in social media comes as a gap in  Facebook's global domination comes in the shape of China. The site is officially banned in China but local sites are massive within the market.

An eMarketer report lists TencentQZone at the front of the pack in China, while TencentWeibo, SinaWeibo, and Renren also have significant market shares. With the Internet itself not expected to reach a majority of China's vast population until 2015, Qzone may even be able to overhaul Facebook's active user figures without having to expand very much outside Chinese borders.

Elsewhere, Russia is dominated by Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, sites that are also quickly expanding into other Eastern European countries as social media sharing sites.

Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Poland were the other countries listed by comScore as the territories where Facebook doesn’t command the greatest market share but even in its own backyard, Facebook shouldn't rest on its laurels.

Overall in social media sharing space Twitter's U.S. growth is predicted to be four times greater than Facebook's over the next couple of years. We've yet to really see howGoogle+ will fare and niche sites like the business-oriented LinkedIn continue to grow within their own remits. Plus, Pinterest is growing fast.

Right now Facebook is sitting pretty. Social media trends can change with alarming rapidity however and, as the spectacular decline of MySpace demonstrated, none of the major players can afford to take anything for granted.

What is Social Media today?

Social media can be best understood as a group of new kind of online media with characterestics such as participation,openess,conversation and connectedness.It provides content for users and allows users to contribute in creation and development of content also.

What is Social Media

Social Media includes web-based and mobile technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue between organizations, communities, and individuals.

Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Social media is ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable communication techniques.

According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (e.g., Wikipedia),  and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), content communities (e.g., YouTube), social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.

Honeycomb Framework The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks (identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups). These building blocks help understand the engagement needs of the social media audience. For instance, LinkedIn users care mostly about identity, reputation and relationships, whereas YouTube’s primary building blocks are sharing, conversations, groups and reputation.

Social Media Examples:

·Social Bookmarking(Del.icio.us,Blinklist,Simpy) Interact by tagging websites and searching

 through websites bookmarked by other people.

 ·Social News(Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.

·Social Networking(Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM) Interact by adding friends, commenting on profiles, joining groups and having discussions.

·Social Photo and Video Sharing. (YouTube, Flickr) Interact by sharing photos or videos and commenting on user submissions.