Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

Wufoo is an online HTML form builder that helps people create contact forms, online surveys and event registrations – including people who don’t know how to write a single line of code.

So, if you design a Wufoo form, it basically does all the heavy-lifting for you and builds the database, backend and all of the scripts needed to collect and understand data (also hosted by Wufoo). So, when you build a form, you can either embed the code on your website or blog or you can provide access to the form via a Wufoo link.

As another example of the explosion of cloud-based apps, Wufoo has now launched a feature that lets users collect money.

Now, Wufoo has entered the world of payments, and the new feature lets users create forms with payment collection options, including PayPal Payments Pro and USA ePay. Many web shoppers are familiar with being taken to a different page of a merchant site for payment — after depositing items in a shopping cart. But with Wufoo, there’s a seamless transition from data submission to payment collection. No journey to a new page necessary.

That’s a good thing for both consumers and website owners.

For website administrators, Wufoo provides payment summary pages, lists of shipping addresses, and can ensure that all users receive an invoice or receipt of the transaction for their records, among other services.

I’m surprised that, with a useful and innovative product like this, Wufoo so far seems to have flown under the radar. But I’m always intrigued to read and hear about more and varied apps being developed for the cloud – and ultimately making cloud computing easier for both consumers and businesses.

Read more about Wufoo’s integrated payment application for the cloud.

The City of Los Angeles is adopting web-based Google Apps productivity software for its 30,000 employees to use.

The 12-member L.A. City Council voted unanimously on October 27th to migrate to the cloud, hiring systems integrator Computer Services Corporation. The move could save the city up to $5 million over the life of the five-year contract.

This decision places L.A. among top public sector operations using the cloud for productivity software. Yet the decision by the council also reflects some ambivalence over security issues and the possibility of data loss: the group voted to include a penalty provision in the contract holding CSC liable if there is a breach of service or the city’s data is stolen.

Recently, Google has had some widely publicized security and availability issues around its email and applications.

Yet, increasingly, despite concerns about outages and data loss, major government agencies are signing up for Google Apps. For example, the City of Washington D.C., the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, and the Prince George County School District in Maryland are all customers. “Many more were watching L.A. closely, and we look forward to working with them,” said Google spokesperson Andrew Kovacs in a recent E-Commerce Times story.

L.A.’s experience with Google Apps is worth watching. I think a lot of municipalities and government agencies now considering the cloud will base their decision on whether to jump or not. And I’m sure that an uneventful record on security and data breaches for L.A. will help them decide.

At a recent Gartner symposium in Orlando, FL, one of its analysts said that the cloud has topped the company’s list of the 10 top tech that IT people need to plan for.

While acknowledging that cloud computing is complicated and presents security challenges for some, Garnter analyst Dave Cearley advised companies to figure out:

- what cloud services might give them value,

- how to write applications that run on cloud services,

- whether they should build their own private clouds that use Internet-style networking technology within a company’s firewall.

The advice on cloud computing came as part of a talk on top 2010 trends that companies should incorporate into their strategic planning, if not their own computers.

Other trends on the list:

2. advanced analytics

3. client computing

4. IT for green

5. reshaping the data center

6. social computing

7. security–activity monitoring

8. flash memory

9. virtualization for availability

10. mobile applications.

Another analyst highlighted virtualization as a top trend, not just broadly, in the sense that virtualization lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, but also as a means to keep computing services up and running despite computer failures.

At the symposium, Carl Claunch said that virtual machines can be moved from one physical machine to another today. But later, by keeping two machines synchronized, a failure in a first machine can be eased over rapidly by moving the active service to the backup.

“We should start seeing this roll out in the next year or two from vendors,” he said.

Read more of the story on cloud computing and virtualization.