In a world of ever-accelerating business cycles and fast-changing client expectations, the cloud increasingly serves as a growth engine and a path to new business models. Dynamic clouds enable businesses to continuously reinvent themselves, adapting their business processes, their service and software delivery and their operations to achieve speed-to-market and quick response to customer feedback. As the cloud evolves, the industry has multiple competing cloud technologies, offering on-premises and off-premises cloud platforms for both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In parallel, cloud standards are also evolving, including community standards like OpenStack and CloudFoundry. Most organizations who are adopting the Cloud today are ending up adopting it in complex ‘dynamic-hybrid’ environments. There is physical infrastructure that now co-exists along with the new dynamic-hybrid on-premises and off-premises Cloud hosted environments.
Archivo mensual: octubre 2014
More Mainstream Businesses Depend on Open Source
If you’re an executive that’s concerned about the high-cost of proprietary software, you’re not alone. If your IT team pushes back whenever Line of Business leaders ask them for feature enhancements that goes beyond the limits of the commercial software packages they’ve licensed, then you already know that frustration.
Are you wondering if there’s an alternative to this legacy business technology scenario? Consider Open Source Software (OSS) and follow in the footsteps of the previously enlightened.
North Bridge Venture Partners recently announced the results of the eighth annual investigation into OSS trends. The latest market study findings point toward the increased role that OSS solutions have in today’s enterprises.
PCI DSS: What You Need to Know By @GiladPN | @CloudExpo
Every organization should follow a proactive rather than a reactive approach to protect against threats, risks, and vulnerabilities to which if their IT infrastructure is exposed can lead to data loss, regulatory penalties, lawsuits, and damaged reputation. Moving on the same lines, to reduce credit card fraud via its exposure, a standard known as Payment […]
The post PCI DSS: What You Need to Know appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.
How cloud doesn’t have to mean shadow IT takes hold
Picture credit: PennyLamKK/Flickr
Inspired by the approach of independent developers, marketers want to be able to get their apps and other online properties, such as campaign microsites or new web products, live as quickly as possible. The same applies to other disciplines such as HR, logistics or sales. These business users bypass the IT department altogether and – armed with a credit card – go straight to the developers, buy some cloud instances, and away they go.
This has become known as shadow IT, where IT applications, devices and systems are purchased and used within the organisation, without the IT department’s knowledge or approval.
These buyers might think that shadow IT is a good thing. It means they can do it themselves and get around bothersome procurement channels. Cloud computing provides a cost-effective channel for those who want to get something up, prove the concept, grow it as demand increases or take it down if it doesn’t work.
The issue is that this provides a number of risks to the enterprise, in the form of data security, privacy, systems reliability and disaster recovery, to name but a few. The Heartbleed Open SSL bug is an example of how a security flaw can impact organisations and is a reminder of the importance of having an IT ecosystem that is managed properly in the open and not in the shadows.
The prevalence of cloud doesn’t have to mean that shadow IT takes hold: IT and various business departments, such as marketing, can work together effectively.
IT and various business departments can work together effectively to innovative and empower users
IT needs to think of itself as an enabler, not a barrier to innovation. It’s critical that there is a risk management capability in place to ensure that IT is compliant with the required policies, but there also needs to be an acceptance that users want to move quickly and innovate without feeling held back.
While cloud arguably gives departments too much rope, this doesn’t have to be the case. There are three aspects to cloud that IT can embrace for their own benefit to take cloud out of the shadows.
1. Agility fosters collaboration
Cloud inherently has appeal to marketers and other business users because they can scale up and down according to demand. But this agility can be interpreted as a threat to IT, which wants to maintain a degree of control. Again, it doesn’t’ have to be like this. We’re big advocates of DevOps, which encourages and agile IT approach and fosters collaboration between different disciplines. It’s not just a question of having the right tools or systems in place, but the right culture.
2. Governance doesn’t evaporate into the cloud
IT, quite rightly, wants to ensure that risk in minimised with any IT roll-out Ensuring that customer data is kept securely and is stored according to the home country’s data laws is just one example of an area of concern. For example, when Marketing shops for cloud instances for its new advertising campaign app on the open market, chances are things like customer data compliance go out of the window.
Does cloud give IT departments too much rope? It doesn’t have to be the case
We need to accept that this is the way the business wants to work and provide the tools for them to do it. IT can offer its own cloud store environment that takes compliance issues such as data protection, DR and security into account. Again, this positions IT as the trusted advisor.
3. IT can help avoid the ‘hidden costs of cloud’
Headline prices aren’t the full story – there are often hidden costs in the fine print. For example, it takes a trained eye to spot the implications for moving data around in the cloud. Ingress of data might be free, but extracting it can be costly. Similarly, ramp-up costs can add up, especially when seemingly minor decisions upfront turn into unnecessary ongoing expense. Selecting the wrong storage model or the wrong server price level, for example, can affect operational budgets long term.
Casting a light on the shadows
IT leaders have the expertise to act as the broker to provide users across the business –marketing, HR, finance and operations and others – with the ability to develop the applications they want, but in a secure and cost effective way. Cloud technology can provide the platform, IT leaders have the experience – I think that’s a powerful combination.
Cloud service providers and end users: Let’s lose the rigidity of the SLA, argues exec
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
A senior executive at cloud services provider Claranet has claimed that most cloud services providers and end users are relying too much on the standard service level agreement.
Paul Marland, Claranet director of account management, believes that cloud service today is far more dynamic. Contracts can – and should – change dependent on the customer’s need, and the classic SLA prohibits that.
“The vast majority of SLAs don’t really get to the heart of what’s important to customers – or, at the very least, fall short of guaranteeing what customers really need and expect, beyond uptime and availability,” Marland said.
“As businesses have come to rely more heavily on third parties to deliver their IT, and as solutions have become more complex, ‘good service’ can’t simply be reduced to the pure metrics of service availability,” he added.
Marland argues it’s not just a numbers game for end users, and that performance is key. The SLA might stipulate a five nines uptime, and the service provider may be adhering to that, but it doesn’t mean emails are being sent as fast as they could be, or pages are loading fast enough to take advantage of click-throughs.
“These performance-based issues have proven to be something of a bugbear for the service provider industry,” he admits. “[It’s] a grey area that falls beyond the remit of the traditional SLA, but remains key to the overall customer experience.
“The industry tends to measure against technical metrics, but it’s important to remember that it’s the end user’s actual experience that counts.”
Another big problem with SLAs is that if – or when – they invariably fall, figures and claims have to be reassessed and CSPs can feel the brunt of customers’ ire. When Autotask’s systems fell over for several hours back in July, the company admitted to CloudTech that it had put them a little bit below four nines in the affected zones. Some providers offer a 100% uptime agreement – iomart being one example, as well as Mimecast before it fell last year – yet the issue remains a thorny one.
As a result, OpenStack solutions and partnerships are the order of the day for a lot of vendors. Doug Clark, UK&I cloud leader at IBM, cited that as a main issue when speaking over IBM and SAP’s major enterprise cloud partnership earlier this week. You can use SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud on IBM Managed Services, or SoftLayer, and there isn’t anything tying you down to it.
Marland notes that if the SLA is technically exceeding customers’ expectations yet the CSP is still getting complaints over service, it points to a SLA that’s too generic, and doesn’t fit the specific performance objectives of the end user.
Why Cloud Computing May Fail Miserably
Without wasting any of your time, let me be just as straightforward as I can. Cloud computing may fail miserably and all the hype associated with it may just disappoint all the technology pundits, and although it may not seem something that is going to happen anytime soon, let me give you just five reasons why i think this is a likelihood
CIO Focus Interview: Stuart Appley, Shorenstein
We’re starting a new CIO Focus Interview Series on the blog to get insights from some of the top thought leaders in the industry. For our first interview, I spoke with Stuart Appley, CIO at San Francisco based Shorenstein, to pick his brain about the current and future IT landscape. You can hear more from Stuart on Twitter.
CIO Focus Interview: Main Challenges
Ben: Could you give me a little background on your company as well as your role as CIO within the organization?
Stuart: Shorenstein is a real estate investment firm and owner and operators of commercial properties. Essentially, we act like a private equity firm by raising money from high net worth individuals. Instead of buying a company, we buy commercial buildings. We buy them and own and operate them for 10-15 years before selling them off and closing the fund. When we buy a building we typically manage it, so the other part of the business is being a property manager, investing in the property, doing redevelopment, etc. As CIO, I’m responsible for running the IT shop and IT’s long term strategic vision
Ben: What sort of unique challenges do you face as the CIO at your organization?
Stuart: A main challenge we face is that the company culture is a little older. This is something we are actively trying to change. We also have a diverse set of workers and a very distributed, mobile workforce. We have leasing agents out in the field, engineers checking equipment on the go, etc. Supporting the needs of this workforce is a challenge. I would say some of our users may not be as tech savvy as they are in other industries. We tend to hire a lot of senior level people, so our age base is a little higher than other companies. This makes it more difficult to get people to adopt technologies and bring them up to speed.
CIO Focus Interview: A look back at 2014
Ben: What was your main accomplishment in 2014 from an IT perspective?
Stuart: We just completed a large cloud ERP project. Doing this has allowed us to reduce a lot of application sets. This was a huge accomplishment because of the large amount of data and apps we have been moving in the cloud. Overall, the project, which lasted a little over a year, went smoothly.
Ben: How long have you been utilizing the cloud?
Stuart: 4-5 years, maybe even a little longer. Right now, we have 70% of our applications in the cloud. This includes LOBs apps that are standard, like Salesforce, and industry specific ones like Intralinks.
Ben: Did you have any pushback from the CEO, CFO or board of directors when you made the pitch to go cloud?
Stuart: No, it really wasn’t an issue with them. I was able to make the case that we should outsource things that we do not have a core competency in, and they were completely on board. Buy vs. Build.
CIO Focus Interview: Looking Ahead
Ben: What are you looking to accomplish in 2015?
Stuart: A main focus of ours is to rationalize cloud storage. We have a lot of content management systems right now – about 5-6. It’s time to rationalize that and get it down to 1-2. Another big focus we have is leveraging the beginning of a digital strategy we have been creating. For example, there are a lot of documents that need to be manually signed. We want to automate the signing of documents to save time and increase efficiency.
Ben: Anything else?
Stuart: We’re also going to review our data center and determine whether we want to move things to public clouds or private. We have listed out apps and services and plan to determine where each one would be the best fit. Finally, I want to continue to focus on mobility and try to push ease of access anywhere, anytime.
Ben: Throughout your career, what concept or technology would you say has had the most drastic impact on IT?
Stuart: I would say the idea of the consumerization of IT. This concept has transformed the whole industry. Users go home and use consumer apps and then carry those same expectations into the work place. In their mind, that ease of access should be available anywhere and everywhere across the board. To me, it’s a great thing for IT because it is forcing us to deliver. We have higher expectations and have a high bar to match.
Ben: How do you view IT?
Stuart: IT needs to be an advisor to the business. There is a lot of innovation that is happening with cloud vendors and we shouldn’t try to match that. The challenge is helping users understand that we support them going out and looking at other options. At the same time, we want them to come to us so we can let them know if there are any security concerns or if it will need to integrate with other apps that already exist in the environment. We need to be a consultant to the business and not a centralized just-say-no organization.
Are you a CIO/CTO interested in participating in our CIO Focus Interview series? Email me at bstephenson@greenpages.com
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Burden of Security at ‘Dev’ in #DevOps By @Parasoft | @DevOpsSummit
The move to the cloud brings a number of new security challenges, but the application remains your last line of defense.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Arthur Hicken, Evangelist at Parasoft, to discuss how developers are extremely well-poised to perform tasks critical for securing the application – provided that certain key obstacles are overcome.
Three in four CFOs and CIOs fear business will lag if they’re not clued up on cloud
Picture credit: Doug88888/Flickr
Research published today by Canopy and Vanson Bourne shows that three quarters of chief financial officers think their organisations are not ready for digital business transformation, with a similar number worried they’ll become uncompetitive by the end of 2015.
This translates as CFOs missing out, on average, €67m of revenue last year due to not having the right cloud solutions in place, according to the research, of 950 CIOs, CFOs and business decision makers in mid-market and enterprise firms in Europe.
Here’s what else the survey found:
- Two in five (41%) of respondents admitted frustration with onboarding customers due to the poor responsiveness of IT tools
- Improving customer service (67%) is most important to fast-track digital transformation, ahead of improving mobility (45%) and using digital channels for selling (42%)
- Two thirds (64%) admitted that a lack of cloud investment was “holding back vital digital projects”
The future should be rosy for financial execs, according to the research. CFOs estimated that if enhanced cloud capabilities were in place in their company, double digit growth could be achieved in 2015 – a €123m revenue boost on average. The vast majority (90%) of respondents said they needed to embrace cloud based applications and infrastructure to deliver digital transformation.
“One of the keys to unlocking digital transformation is cloud computing,” said Jacques Pommeraud, Canopy CEO, in a statement. “From the work we’re doing with clients, we’re seeing that it has the power to create revenue by making the customer journey effortless across any device, enables faster customer sign-ups so they’ll spend sooner and support real-time analytics to make more accurate targeting decisions.
“The most innovative clients use the power of cloud and large scale analytics to generate new sources of revenue, for example in manufacturing for the area of preventative maintenance,” he added.
These results are particularly interesting, given Salesforce announced Wave, its new analytics cloud, at Dreamforce earlier this week. Meanwhile, research from the NCC Group found that three quarters (72%) of CIOs at financial services firms feared the cloud because of data concerns.
You can read more on the Canopy results here.
IBM and SAP team up to run HANA Enterprise Cloud in major deal
Picture credit: TechGenStaffer/Flickr
SAP and IBM have announced a major partnership with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud being delivered through IBM’s cloud.
The two firms, who have had a fruitful partner relationship for over 40 years, gives users the choice to run SAP’s HANA in-memory database across either SoftLayer, the IaaS firm acquired by IBM last year, or IBM’s cloud managed services.
Doug Clark, UK & I cloud leader at IBM, notes the previous collaborations the two companies have, with IBM already hosting SAP architecture for a lot of its clients. “To term SAP in ISVs is probably doing them a huge disservice,” Clark tells CloudTech.
“We are trusted by a lot of clients who live or die by that SAP system being up and running,” he adds. “And I think [it’s] what this is a really nice reflection of. You get to steady state when you’re working with a partner like SAP, and I think what’s really nice about this is [it’s] both of us moving to a new place.”
Even though the two companies have partnered up in the past and are happy to do so again, they’ve both got their separate agendas in enterprise cloud. IBM chief exec Ginni Rometty is driven to become the leader in enterprise cloud, and SAP famously went on record for its ambitions to become “THE cloud company.”
“We do a lot of great stuff together, we do stuff in parallel without bumping into each other, we’ve got our own strategies, but this actually is another convergence point on those strategies,” says Clark.
The two companies aim to bring different elements to the table; SAP will bring “the power of real-time”, as the press material puts it, while IBM brings the open architecture of IBM Cloud Managed Services and SoftLayer. HANA running off IBM will also enable organisations to integrate existing technology investments with new workloads.
For Clark, who has spoken at length in the past about the merging of cloud, mobile and social, as well as the interesting plays IBM is making with Watson, it’s about “balancing the two sides of the scales.”
“This is us maintaining a phenomenal future position with SAP, as well as working in the new exciting space with mobile, and social, and all of that analytics piece, and being able to grab the really strong benefits of both,” he says.
“This is SAP’s biggest news sitting on one of IBM’s biggest investments.”