While the adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise offers all sorts of benefits, too many
organizations are forgetting about risks. Yes, the benefits of cloud computing are very real. I’m certainly
not a cloud denier (and they, like Flat Earthers, do still exist), but one costly misstep as you move to the
cloud could quickly eliminate all of those benefits you were hoping for.
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Can ICT Enable Growth & Reduce Violence?
I listened to remarks on CSPAN from the very controversial Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current Foreign Minister, during his recent appearance at a forum in Washington, DC.
He said he believed that if people focused on economic development in the Palestinian Territories enough to give it a per capita income (PCI) of US$10,000 then the peace process would, in essence, take care of itself.
The territories have a current PCI of $1,820, according to the United Nations. This ranks in the bottom third of the world, next to Sudan and the new country of South Sudan. Compare it to Israel at $29,300.
Or compare it to Lebanon ($9,200), Jordan ($4,400), Syria ($2,900), and Egypt ($2,650).
Research we’ve been conducting for the past two years shows that Jordan and Egypt have strong potential for development on the basis of ICT infrastructures that are relatively advanced, given their income levels. Syria also does well by regional standards. We haven’t covered Lebanon or the Palestinian Territories yet.
But would this magical – and given regional incomes, mythical – PCI number for the Palestinian Territories really bring peace? Countries throughout the world that have achieved this income level include Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela.
If we look not only at violence, but at the economic volatility that has at times almost paralyzed the developed world, we see Ireland, Portugal, and Greece far, far above that income level – as is the United States, of course.
ICT in general improves communications and access to the Worldwide Web, social media, and cloud computing. Strong ICT infrastructures, characterized by widespread, fast connections, can be a disruptive force, as we’ve seen with the Arab Spring, as well as with Chinese and American government efforts to limit or chill the Web’s frightening power.
We believe that the developing countries we’ve identified as having the most potential will, in fact, develop economically more quickly than the laggards in our research. We believe this will occur as political turmoil and ugly violence continue.
But at what point does economic development guarantee peace? Does it ever? Is the phrase “peace and prosperity” a dated concept.
It would be nice to think that things calm down and violence decreases at a certain income level, but that looks like a very tough idea to prove. That said, anyone who wishes an honest conversation on the topic would be welcome, in our view.
ITSM advances set to empower and engage users in 2013
Adam Holtby, ITSM Research Analyst, Ovum
Through discussions with vendors, clients, and research into technology trends and disruptors, Ovum has identified what it believes will be the key IT service management (ITSM) advances of 2013. More detailed information and analysis can be found in our recently published report, 2013 Trends to Watch: IT Service Management.
Technology is evolving to assist with changing business demands
Technology continues to advance, and we are finally starting to see some good ITSM tool innovations around technology disruptors such as social and mobile. For example, BMC recently announced MyIT, an enterprise IT helpdesk solution that was developed with the objective of empowering users through giving them more visibility and control over their IT services from any device.
As a market leader, it is encouraging to see BMC make such a bold move in embracing and investing in mobility and social technology. BMC was slower than …
Cloud Management Software Now Includes Support for VMware
Convirture has released a new version of its ConVirt Enterprise and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud software that can now be used to manage VMware vSphere and ESXi in addition to virtual and cloud technologies including Xen, KVM, Eucalyptus, OpenStack and Amazon EC2.
ConVirt is an open source-based tool that is used by IT organizations worldwide to manage virtual and cloud infrastructures. This new version adds VMware to the list of supported technologies. It provides sophisticated management capabilities to operators of heterogeneous data centers that employ multiple technologies and platforms, including major public and private clouds.
Multi-Year IT Contracts for Hybrid Cloud Delivery
Outsourcing the IT operations, support and associated infrastructure maintenance has been the norm for large enterprises over the last decade. Typically the multi-year IT outsourcing contracts cover the following aspects:
Application Development Services: These will be the set of resources and other costs, like environment, required to perform the custom development of various applications and sometimes customization and configuration of COTS products.
Application Testing Services: Even though testing is covered as part of development, to make this step more independent most enterprises outsource testing activities as a separate entity.
Evolve IP Helps Customers Avoid Downtime During Hurricane Sandy
A few weeks ago, Superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast, leaving devastation in its wake. Thousands of people were without power, food, and water. It quickly became clear that Sandy’s aftermath would bring life on the East Coast to a standstill for days as the region began to rebuild.
Early estimates of the damage put the business loss associated with the storm as high as $30 billion. But Grudi Associates, The John M. Glover Agency, and many others weren’t a part of that group. Evolve IP’s redundant cloud platform allowed them to run their businesses remotely as the storm raged on.
For example, InformationWeek Cloud picked up the story of how we helped Apria Health Care stay functional during the storm so that they could continue to provide their vital health services to customers in the days after the storm. Thanks to Evolve IP, Apria was able to deliver essential products to each customer, the most important being the personal oxygen tank.
Lean and Low in Las Vegas
Those of you who followed my blog for a while know that the idea of applying manufacturing best practices to cloud computing is a favorite topic of mine*. This week the topic popped up in a fireside chat (the popular term for keynotes delivered from a set of armchairs, often with no fire in sight) between Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogel and CEO Jeff Bezos at re:Invent, the first Amazon Web Services customer conference.
I won’t cover the conference here – many blogs and media sites already did – but in the chat Bezos made a number of interesting points on how principles of lean manufacturing are guiding Amazon’s overall endeavors and how cloud computing both supports and benefits from this approach. He discussed how – for developers- this approach turns the cost of infrastructure operations from an abstract overhead-like concept into a very visible direct cost they can directly influence. And how the cost of quality is always lower than the cost of non-quality, as fixing problems later – after it has shipped to the customer – is many times more expensive than doing things first time right. But also how cloud computing allows to continuously improve products and processes (similar to how factory workers at Toyota were empowered to stop the production line and jointly improve the process). He also stressed the importance of focusing on customers and their requirements (by continuously measuring and providing feedback loops) instead of focusing on competitors or winning.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York Registration Now Open
Recent IDC research shows that worldwide spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $44.2 billion by 2013. And a recent Gartner report predicts that the volume of enterprise data overall will increase by a phenomenal 650% over the next five years.
These two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in New York City at 12th Cloud Expo – being held June 10-13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York, NY.
As at every Cloud Expo, we are offering in New York City a vast selection of technical and strategic breakout sessions, General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, our signature discussion “Power Panels” and a bustling Expo floor complete with two busy Demo Theaters so that as a delegate you can kick the tires of solutions and offerings, and discuss one-on-one with all the leading Cloud and Big Data players what they are offering and how to make use of it in your particular situation.
Video Guidance, SinglePath Partner for Video Conferencing
Video Guidance, a video conferencing company, has formed a partnership with Single Path, LLC, a Chicago-based provider of technology solutions and managed IT offerings to Illinois- and California-based businesses. The strategic partnership will help Video Guidance grow by increasing its sales presence in its current markets and expanding its geographic reach across Illinois and California.
Strategic partners help Video Guidance – through its cloud-based services — create a more visually collaborative workspace for its customers. In the last decade, Internet, mobile and broadband technologies have redefined our way of life, and visual communication tools have become critical to a business’ efficiencies. And in an era of dispersed teams and reduced travel budgets, enhanced, strategic collaboration and applications are essential to maximizing the benefits of today’s sophisticated technology.
“Our joint partnerships utilize and maximize resources to offer more comprehensive collaboration and visual services to businesses and organizations,” said Michael Werch, president of Video Guidance. “The program is designed to help value-added resellers (VARs) succeed in the highly lucrative video conferencing market, enabling them to take advantage of high-margin sales opportunities with our best-in-class video conferencing solutions.”
Sendmail, Mimecast Partner for Hybrid-Cloud Email Security, Archiving, Management
Sendmail and Mimecast today announced a new strategic partnership that provides additional enhanced options for integrating and configuring email management solutions, which are needed to meet the growing hybrid-cloud email deployment requirements of large global enterprises.
This strategic partnership allows global enterprises to combine the proven on-premises Sentrion Email Integration Platform with Mimecast’s leading in-cloud Unified Email Management in a hybrid-cloud architecture for complete email security, archiving and business continuity with any on-premises or in-cloud email system.
“Gartner has long maintained that enterprises moving email to the cloud may have unique requirements that cannot be entirely fulfilled with cloud-only provisioning,” said Matt Cain, Vice President, Gartner Inc. “Large organizations therefore may require a flexible on-premises/cloud combination that can support a variety of unique email deployment options for mailboxes, security, archiving, routing and policy management.”
Many large organizations are looking to benefit from the cost, flexibility and other gains of cloud-based email deployments, but email-to-cloud migrations cannot be done without also managing the large number of machine-generating emails from business systems that rely on on-premises email infrastructure. Adding to the challenges for global enterprises are the wide range of security, regulatory compliance and corporate email policy requirements.
“Our customers have been asking for scalable cloud email applications that can easily integrate with our on-premises Sentrion Email Integration Platform with single provider support,” said Glen D. Vondrick, Sendmail President & CEO. “We are impressed by the proven Mimecast platform which offers the integration opportunity to deliver the hybrid-cloud architecture options enterprises need in order to consolidate multiple point products, reduce number of vendors, and further simplify the management of business email complexity.”
Sentrion is the de facto standard on-premises email infrastructure platform deployed by major Fortune 1000 enterprises around the globe to manage the complexity of policy-based routing and integration of machine-generated email with human collaboration email. Mimecast’s Unified Email Management platform is the only cloud-based email management solution designed specifically to deliver a broad range of email management capabilities in a tightly integrated, high performance SaaS platform. Mimecast in the cloud supports more than 6000 businesses worldwide.
“Sendmail’s proven success in providing on-premises email infrastructure to Fortune 1000 organizations makes them an ideal global enterprise partner for Mimecast,” said Peter Bauer, CEO, Mimecast. “Businesses are being driven toward evaluating and adopting cloud-based email solutions to control cost and complexity which can be quite challenging in high volume machine generated email environments. By combining Sentrion on-premises with Mimecast in the cloud, organizations can garner the advantages of the cloud while continuing to meet their business systems requirements. The option of a hybrid configuration means no matter what size of business and no matter how complex the requirements, we can enable the ideal email management solution.”
Sentrion Cloud Apps powered by Mimecast are available now from Sendmail. Those applications include: Mimecast Email Security, Mimecast Email Archiving and Mimecast Email Continuity. Deeper enterprise-specific integration between the two platforms is currently underway.
