Migrating from VLANs to the public cloud is not trivial.
So public cloud adoption should be a no-brainer, right? Oh wait, but Andy omitted security in the public cloud – how can I trust that my customers’ sensitive data is secure in the public cloud?
I agree, the message wears thin that enterprise businesses are apprehensive to store sensitive customer data in the public cloud, and thus hesitant to adopt the cloud at all. (By the way, it was also very refreshing in Jassy’s keynote to see NASA’s JPL use of the public cloud, as the Netflix story also gets old.)
Maybe it’s the network ?
Enterprises might not be able to migrate their applications to the public cloud, because of how their datacenter servers are connected and secured. A customer came over to our booth at AWS re:invent and while very excited about the AWS public and our announcement, wanted to know “What do I do about my VLANS? My physical and virtual servers are isolated at layer 2? And my servers have two networks: one network for data and applications, the second network only for administrators – how do I architect this in AWS?”
RW Baird analyst Colin Sebastian takes Amazon Web Services for a “potentially under-appreciated asset” although he thinks it’ll do $1.5 billion in revenue this year.
It takes a lot of capital outlay to support, roughly $500 million or about 50% of total 2010 capex, Sebastian thinks, and says its profitability is unproven.
Amazon doesn’t break out AWS numbers but has put its IaaS market share at about 60% and AWS boss Andy Jassy said this week that the cloud unit has the potential to be Amazon’s biggest business, outgrowing its online retail parent.
Use of cloud for DR solutions is becoming more common, even the organizations which are not using cloud for mission critical production applications are moving towards using cloud for application DR.
Faster Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Typically DR requires lengthy manual processes to fully restore the business applications at the DR site. Having backup data and servers at the DR site is easy, however, restoring the entire application or service takes time. E.g. full application restoration requires starting services in specified order, performing dns and other configuration updates etc. In Cloud, the IaaS APIs provide ability to use automation solutions like Kaavo IMOD to fully restore the business applications automatically without manual intervention. As a result organizations get predictable recovery and reduced RTO. Automating the service or application recovery can reduce RTO to minutes from hours or days.
There is no doubt that Big Data holds infinite promise for a range of industries. Better visibility into data across various sources enables everything from insight into saving electricity to agricultural yield to placement of ads on Google. But when it comes to deriving value from data, no industry has been doing it as long or with as much rigor as clinical researchers.
Unlike other markets that are delving into Big Data for the first time and don’t know where to begin, drug and device developers have spent years refining complex processes for asking very specific questions with clear purposes and goals. Whether using data for designing an effective and safe treatment for cholesterol, or collecting and mining data to understand proper dosage of cancer drugs, life sciences has had to dot every “i” and cross every “t” in order to keep people safe and for new therapies to pass muster with the FDA. Other industries are now marveling at a new ability to uncover information about efficiencies and cost savings, but – with less than rigorous processes in place – they are often shooting in the dark or only scratching the surface of what Big Data offers.
One of the major issues facing cloud service providers is the expense of building out infrastructure without knowing how or when revenues will follow. As a result, cloud providers are reevaluating their approach to hardware and software investments and engaging with technology and networking vendors to develop creative pricing models that are aligned with cloud business principles and engineered to reduce risks.
In a perfect world, cloud service providers would pay for infrastructure only after a customer has made a purchase – in order to maintain a tight correlation between revenues and expenses. In the real world, however, implementing this type of model is easier said than done. This was especially true during the ‘iron’ age, when hardware and software were highly coupled and there were very few alternatives to big vendors that focused on selling high-dollar, high-performance networking gear.
Tel Aviv-based start-up SiSense Ltd raised $8 million and bought a ticket to California, where it’s set up shop across the street from Oracle, a definite competitor.
See, SiSense, which obviously has a sense of humor, has a business intelligence tool dubbed Prism that it calls the “world’s smallest Big Data analytics solution.” It can crunch a terabyte of data on a sub-$750 laptop with 8GB of RAM.
The company’s Elasticube technology with its in-memory columnar data store, strong data compression, parallel processing and advanced query optimization is supposed to offer analytical processing power previously available only with high-end solutions.
It claims non-technical users can analyze 100 times more data at least 10 times the speed of current in-memory analytics solutions.
Amazon Web Services used re:Invent, its very first customer and partner conference this week in Vegas, to announce the coming of a cloud data warehouse service called Redshift meant to undercut and disrupt the pricey “old guard” brands of Oracle, IBM, Teradata, EMC Greenplum and HP.
Redshift literally represents a shift in Amazon’s targeting.
It’s going up-market looking for customers among the big corporates that have supposedly overcome their doubts about running mission-critical apps in the public cloud and are now down to figuring out which ones to move first and how quickly.
The use of the term ‘Service’ is somewhat overloaded. Everyone will have heard or used the terms Business Services, IT Services, Software Services, and now Cloud Services, and yet often there is much confusion and misunderstanding in their use.As my colleague David Sprott suggested in a CBDI Journal Report, «Everything is a Service» . In that report David suggested that the idea that «everything is a service» could be developed to clarify the taxonomy for Cloud Services and Services in the form of a Unified Service Model that would deliver convergence of business and IT perspectives.Consequently, I have penned a research note available on Everware-CBDI site , that provides a concept model that explores the basic concepts of Service and Service-Orientation taking into account this broad perspective including Business Service, IT Services, Software Services, Cloud Services and even Human Services.
Another one of Andreessen Horowitz’s seemingly endless supply of gold-tinged start-ups whose future is supposed to be theirs to lose has come out of start-up hiding to proclaim the existence of its newfangled SaaS-style data-warehouse-as-a-service for Big Data analytics running initially on Amazon.
It’s called BitYota – a name derived from the combination of the smallest element of computer storage and the yotta, the biggest number, or 1024 – and besides Andreessen Horowitz BitYota’s $12 million in seed and Series A funding comes from Globespan Capital, the Social+Capital Partnership, Dawn Capital, Crosslink Capital, Morado Ventures and individual investors like Yahoo founder Jerry Yang; Yahoo board member and former eBay COO, angel investor Maynard Webb; investor and financial writer Graham Summers; and MapReduce BitYota-like start-up ClearStory Data founder and Marc Andreessen buddy Sharmila Mulligan, who’s evidently spreading her bets on Big Data analytics.
Which of the recent big acquisitions within the Cloud and/or Big Data space have most grabbed your attention as a sign of things to come? In this Lunchtime Power Panel at the 11th International Cloud Expo, chaired by Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, Treb Ryan, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloud Business Unit, at Dimension Data; Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore; Rags Srinivasan, Director of Product Management at Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group; John «Jay» Jarrell, President and CEO of Objectivity; Aaron Hollobaugh, VP of Marketing & Communications at Hostway Corporation; and Praveen Kankariya, Founder and CEO of Impetus Technologies discussed this topic and more.