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Instead of buying huge amounts of computing power and storage that may be unused for most of the year, companies can get what they need in a more flexible way.

IBM has allotted enough computing resources to cope with the surge during the tournament.

Cloud computing has another useful feature. Instead of being locked into long contracts, firms can buy their IT over much shorter time frames. It can even be metered. This is extremely useful for companies that are launching one-off projects or perhaps start-up firms that are not sure how successful they are going to be. Extra capacity can be bought online and paid for as needed. Zoopla is a UK property website which allows users to search for homes.

Zoopla uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), which launched in 2006 and is the biggest player in cloud computing.

Analysts at Tier1 Research estimate that just 2% of total spending on information technology is on cloud services. Daniel Beazer, a hosting and cloud analyst at Tier1 Research, said: "Most companies have been around for a lot longer than the internet and have systems that are decades old." "Mostly what they have works, just about, so why bother shifting it? The savings from virtualisation and the cloud aren't currently big enough to justify it," he said.

The change is saving around £3,000 a year in licensing costs, according to the schools' ICT manager Phil Jones.

The school has also moved to open source for its virtual learning environment (VLE), now run through Moodle.

While open source has brought benefits in terms of flexibility, there is no doubt that the reduced cost is a major attraction, however. "ICT is always a big drain on a school budget, and any way we can save money is a massive help,"

Open source is also one of the solutions adopted at Notre Dame High in Sheffield, where it is used for email and management systems, as well as the school's VLE, again on Moodle. One of the advantages of open source is its flexibility, but this is only appealing if the school has the technical know-how to tweak it according to its needs

Changes in the educational landscape, such as the emergence and growth of federations, academy chains and clusters of headteachers working together, may resolve this in the future, but in the meantime the benefits of the external support that come from a proprietorial system may outweigh the savings of free software

"One of the risks is schools that go very heavily into open source end up with a system that is so bespoke only the school's technical manager can understand it

Technology in schools: saving money with cloud, open source and consortia

No-one imagined that ISPs would one day offer gigabytes of online storage free—as Google, Yahoo!, Hotmail and other e-mail providers do today. The assumption back then was that if someone had not bothered to download and delete online messages within six months, such messages could reasonably be considered to be abandoned—and therefore not in need of strict protection.

wholesale access to the internet, powerful mobile phones and ubiquitous social networking have dramatically increased the amount of private data kept online. In the process, traditional thinking about online security has been rendered obsolete. For instance, more and more people nowadays keep their e-mail messages on third-party servers elsewhere, rather than on their own hard-drives or mobile phones. Many put their personal details, contacts, photographs, locations, likes, dislikes and inner thoughts on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox and a host of other destinations. Bringing online privacy requirements into an age of cloud computing is only fit and proper, and long overdue.

the international telecoms treaty that emerged focused on how telephone traffic flows across borders, the rules governing the quality of service and the means operators could adopt to bill one another for facilitating international calls. As such, the regulations applied strictly to telecoms providers, the majority of which were state owned.

he goal of certain factions is to grant governments the authority to charge content providers like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter for allowing their data to flow over national borders. If enacted, such proposals would most certainly deter investment in network infrastructure, raise costs for consumers, and hinder online access for precisely those people the ITU claims it wants to help.

a proposal sponsored by the United States and Canada to restrict the debate in Dubai strictly t

o conventional telecoms has met with a modicum of success, despite stiff opposition from Russia plus some African and Middle-Eastern countries. Behind closed doors, the conference has agreed not to alter the ITU’s current definition of “telecommunications” and to leave the introductory text concerning the existing treaty’s scope intact.

The sticking point has been what kind of organisations the treaty should apply to. Here, one word can make a huge difference. In ITU jargon, the current treaty relates only to “recognised operating agencies”—in other words, conventional telecoms operators. The ITU wants to change that to simply “operating agencies”. Were that to happen, not only would Google, Facebook and other website operators fall under the ITU’s jurisdiction, but so too would all government and business networks. It seems the stakes really are as high as the ITU’s critics have long maintained

It said user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords were accessed.

online personal organiser, with users able to save data such as video clips, images, web pages, notes and itineraries in an external storage system commonly known as the cloud.

The firm apologised "for the annoyance" caused by the breach, which it said is becoming "far more common" at other "large services".

Apple revealed a "small number" of its computers had been hacked

micro-blogging website Twitter announced it had been the victim of a security breach which compromised the accounts of 250,000 users.