Cloud backup: Don't rely on your provider alone

Cloud providers take care of your data, even in disaster. But you shouldn't leave the job solely to them

You've moved data to the cloud. Now it's time to talk about disaster recovery -- how to build a resilient system that can recover from catastrophic failure.

Amazon Web Services, for example, says its S3 service "is designed to deliver flexibility, agility, geo-redundancy, and robust data protection." To IT, that means the system is fault-tolerant, managing the resiliency needs for you. ("Geo-redundancy" means that, if a center goes down, another center in another part of the country or world will pick up the load. You should never miss a beat.) 

If AWS and other public cloud providers include a certain amount of resiliency services, does that mean your data is safe? For the most part, it is. Public cloud providers take great pains to see that data is not lost -- ever.

Cobol -- yes, Cobol -- gets a bridge to Node.js

Cobol and Node.js may seem like an odd pairing, but a developer has created a link between the two platforms, despite criticisms

Linking the old world of programming with the new, a Web developer from Romania has built a bridge between highly fashionable Node.js and that venerated but antiquated business programming language: Cobol.

Found on Github, the node-cobol project enables the running of Cobol code from Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript platform. "I just thought it would be funny to create a bridge between a popular actual programming language -- Node.js -- and an old one -- Cobol," developer Ionica Bizau said in an email. "Honestly, I don't really think there is a real need, except the nostalgia that it creates especially for the Cobol programmers and people who know what Cobol is."