I was just speaking with Brad Wenzel, nScaled’s VP of Channels, and he said something that really struck me. He asked, do I still listen to music on cassette tapes? Of course not, I answered. All my music is digital. Tapes are prone to failure – drop-outs, unspooling, melting in the sun – and they’re linear access, not random access. Everyone has dumped tapes for MP3 players like iPod. Going digital means easier management, backup and recovery of my tunes.

I’m just getting around to writing about a terrific post by Rodrigo Flores over at GigaOm about SLAs and cloud infrastructure. Flores neatly articulates something that we have based nScaled on – the importance of the enterprise service agreement and SLAs in cloud, and the factors that make a cloud “enterprise grade.”

The past week and a half have brought us the trifecta of business continuity / disaster recovery (BC/DR) stories: Hurricane Irene, the San Diego blackout, and the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I’ll try not to belabor the point – stuff happens, and business need to be prepared – and instead highlight some of the more important lessons.

I just got done reading a survey report put out by Symantec on the topic of SMB disaster preparedness. It stated what I think most of already know, that something like 50% of small and midsize businesses (SMB) don’t have a disaster plan. This is a terrible state of affairs, and I applaud Symantec for highlighting the issue with the report.