We are now in process of launching our flagship best practices publication, the Cloud CIO guide @ CloudCIO.info. While the technology aspects of Cloud Computing are important, what is actually most noteworthy about the trend is the transformation of the role of the CIO, to become a board-level change agent specializing in innovation. A headline […]

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The landscape of IT innovation is changing.

“Back in the day” (said in my gravelly old-man voice from my Barcalounger wearing my Netware red t-shirt) companies who were developing new technology solutions brought them to the enterprise and marketed them to the IT management stack.

CIOs, CTOs and IT directors were the injection point for technology acceptance into the business. Now, that injection point has been turned into a fire hose.

Think about many of the technologies we have to consider as we develop our enterprise architectures: tablets, smartphones, cloud computing, application stores, and file synchronisation.

Because our users and clients are consuming these technologies today outside of IT, we need to be aware of what they are using, how they are using it, and what bunker-buster is likely to be dropped into our lap next.

Sure, you can argue that “tablets” had been around for a number of years …

Now that we are a couple of years into the great cloud journey is it pretty clear that the big bang theory of cloud conversion is ain’t happening.

Yes, ISVs are moving rapidly to the SaaS model and it would be hard to find a software startup who is *not* starting in the cloud, but enterprise adoption of the public cloud is happening at a more stately pace.

In large part this is due to the simplification required to make public clouds efficient and the complexity that characterizes most enterprise IT environments.  To put it differently, the public cloud makes app deployment simple by pruning app deployment options to the point that few enterprise applications can fit.

Moving forward, I see two paths for cloud adoption: evolutionary and revolutionary.

• Revolutionary cloud: Public clouds like Amazon EC2 and CloudFoundry.com represents a revolutionary leap forward for companies that are willing/able to abandon their current platforms. The revolutionary cloud offers a high degree of operational productivity at the expense of service choice (e.g., you can have any color you want as long as its black).
• Evolutionary cloud: public/private clouds like VMware’s vCloud Director enable enterprises to get cloud benefits (public/private deployment, low upfront cost, elastic scaling, self-healing) without having to make major changes to their application architecture. The evolutionary cloud offers a lower level of productivity with a greater range of choice (e.g., you trade of productivity for flexibility).

Over time, the revolutionary cloud will offer more choice and flexibility while the evolutionary cloud will offer higher automation. Some questions for enterprise developers to answer as they move along this path include:

1. How much control do I have over the deployed application environment? The more flexible the deployment environment, the easier it is to move that application to the public cloud.
2. How do I move applications between different clouds? Having a way to move applications between evolutionary and revolutionary cloud architectures is just as important as being able to move apps between different flavors of public clouds

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What is the “Cloud”? What is “Cloud” computing? These are questions I get all the time. For the vast majority of people, the “Cloud” is a lofty term having to do something with computing or, let’s be honest, puffy cumulus wisps of moisture floating around in the sky. The truth is the “Cloud” is a marketing term made up to sell a service (note: the quotation marks around “Cloud” were to delineate that marketing term. From here on out, “Cloud” will be written sans quotation). That service, the Cloud, is computing and storage capacity as a service. In human terms, it is a system of delivering computing and storage needs via three types of computing services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Although this is true, for most people Cloud can be broken down into two categories, Public or Private.

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Amazon launched a low-cost storage service called Amazon Glacier, according to this TechCrunch article. The latest of Amazon’s cloud services, Amazon Glacier provides “secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup,” according to this Amazon Glacier overview.

Massachusetts has been grappling with how to tax cloud computing services and this month, it has decided on the conditions that make the cloud taxable, according to this NetworkWorld article. Massachusetts will collect taxes on SaaS when a license is required to run the service. Taxes won’t be collected on free, open source software.

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There is a lot of guidance and expertise on achieving PCI compliance. In virtualized and cloud computing environments it is trickier, yet a lot of expertise is building up there as well. Witness the venerable PCI Security Standards organization and its guideline for virtualization, which includes a section on cloud computing as well. Yet in […]

The post Cloud Encryption and PCI thoughts appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.

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Eucalyptus continues its aggressive march through the cloud computing skyscape, with an agreement with upstart Appcara to integrate Eucalyptus private IaaS with public Amazon Web Services. Appcara has said its model-basaed approach competes directly with cloud management leader Rightscale, a company with which Eucalyptus also cooperates.

Appcara’s product, AppStack, “captures and assembles the entire application environment regardless of languages and development platforms and provides 100 percent automation throughout the application lifeycle,” according to CEO John Yung. “Users have found that AppStack has reduced their DevOps effort dramatically – turning painfully manual enterprise application deployment processes into highly automated workloads.”

For Eucalyptus’s part, SVP David Butler says, “Enterprise customers turn to Eucalyptus for open, scalable and fully compatible on-premise clouds to freely manage and migrate workloads based on business demand. By leveraging Eucalyptus’ industry leading on-premise IaaS cloud sofware, and compatability with AWS APIs, Appcara can provide even the most advanced enterprise IT applications with on-demand cloud deployment, real-time configuration and advanced operations.”

I’ll be talking to both companies (among others) at VMworld next week, and will report back on what I hear.

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In an unusual rapprochement, bitter rivals Apple and the Android mob including Google, Samsung, HTC and LG have teamed up to buy the Kodak patents on the cheap, according to the Wall Street Journal, a stratagem that had Kodak threatening to pull the sale only Kodak is boxed in.

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“Big Data” is everywhere. What does it mean? In this article we discuss the impact of cloud and big data technology have on the application performance monitoring space. The number of components, the diversity of the data, the analysis frequency and data granularity results into an extremely complex analytics and Big Data problem. We explore how each of these dimension impact the APM space and how it is shaping Netuitive Analytics product roadmap.

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