Customers must find innovative ways to leverage cloud technologies that suits their requirements.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended IBM’s Cloud Innovation Analyst Forum in Chicago. The event kicked off with a panel discussion where company customers, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Top Coder and Colleagues in Care, discussed their experiences with solutions powered by IBM cloud technologies. The benefits that the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee gained in reducing SAP client set-up time by 90% was especially impressive and went right into the heart of the problem of supporting 80,000 students in multiple campus settings. Reducing backup time by 99% overcame time constraints and helped reduce their risk as well.
Interestingly, some of the analysts in the audience expressed concern about whether this was really a cloud solution. In fact, we often hear that using virtualization and application service provider (ASP) or other hosting models does not qualify as a cloud solution. To an extent, these concerns are right as SaaS providers do utilize different architecture models, like web services fine-tuned to provide multi-tenancy applications with a low entry point for consumers. As an example, SalesForce has entry points as low as $50 a year for basic contact management capability that can be enhanced with full web service capabilities for approximately $300 a year.

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Cut through the cloud Computing clutter and make business sense of Big Data. Join us in New York in 10 days’ time and attend the largest Cloud Computing and Big Data event in the world – the 10th International Cloud Expo at the Jacob Javits Center on June 11-14, 2012.
As the volume of digital content grows to 2.7 ZB‚ up 48% from 2011, Cloud Expo has been extended to focus additionally on Big Data. There are also Special Events galore, from Cloud Computing Bootcamp (all 4 days) and “Cloud Essentials” Certification (2 days) to CloudCamp, BigDataCamp, Forecast 2012, and Deploycon PaaS Summit (all one day only).
A massive 93% of financial decision makers believe that Cloud Computing will be important to the success of their businesses over the next couple of years, according to research – and Big Data analytics is being called out by IDC as a “must have” competency in 2012.
These two Enterprise IT game changers – Cloud Computing & Big Data – will be side by side all four days at the Javits Center in New York City. Come meet with top Cloud & Big Data players who have answers that might save your business millions.

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Right before the long weekend Dell was supposed to be negotiating to buy Quest Software.
Quest is looking for an offer better than the $2 billion Insight Venture Partners, the private equity house, bid in early March and Quest accepted barring a superior offer.
Bloomberg says it knows from unnamed sources that Dell is among “several companies that made offers” during Quest’s so-called “go shop” period. And Quest has all but said it expected to get the superior offer it’s looking for.
Whether that offer will come from Dell or from any of a handful of companies that could theoretically include HP, IBM, BMC, CA, Microsoft (Quest’s wares have a Microsoft bias) or Oracle is anybody’s guess. Insight offered $23 a share; JPMorgan Chase says it’s worth $28.

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Users and administrators alike have come to rely on standard NAS functions to create, manage, share and protect file-based data throughout its lifetime. However, this functionality is limited to a single site. Globally distributed enterprises must deploy islands of storage across sites, inhibiting optimization, centralized management, and load balancing. Ideally, administrators should be able to install a single cloud-integrated, file-based storage system that grants visibility of all files to all users at all sites at any time, while preserving local NAS security, file locking, access control, encryption, and consistency.

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Users and administrators alike have come to rely on standard NAS functions to create, manage, share and protect file-based data throughout its lifetime. However, this functionality is limited to a single site. Globally distributed enterprises must deploy islands of storage across sites, inhibiting optimization, centralized management, and load balancing. Ideally, administrators should be able to install a single cloud-integrated, file-based storage system that grants visibility of all files to all users at all sites at any time, while preserving local NAS security, file locking, access control, encryption, and consistency.

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Management and governance seem to be emerging topics in the cloud-computing world, as companies who’ve now committed themselves to the cloud focus on traditional enterprise IT headaches, er, issues.

Enterprise cloud computing has its roots in web services (the hot topic of 2004) and services-oriented architecture (SOA, the hot topic of 2007), and nothing was more prominent or less understood than issues involving governance back in those “early days.”

enStratus, which provides cloud infrastructure management services, has redoubled its efforts in explaining some of these issues, as many enterprise IT managers prepare themselves for Cloud Expo in New York.

The company has specifically focused on logging in a new study. “Logs contain important information on performance, security, and user activities, and provide critical information about what the system is doing,” according to the enStratus study. “Anyone who has ever had to deploy an operating system or application knows just how important logs are. With migration to the cloud, logging and monitoring become even more important since you are giving up some control to the cloud services provider.”

Yes, giving up that precious control, the main sticking point in getting enterprises to migrate to third-party cloud vendors. Given what will always be the messy nature of most multi-component, enterprise cloud structures, no one should expect this issue to dissipate somehow.

“Logging needs cover an incredibly broad range of possibilities,” according to enStratus. “Many groups within enterprise organizations have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that they need to track in order to get their jobs done effectively, and in some cases legally – and these vary drastically from group to group.”

The company cites compliance regimes such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX, which regulates public-company financial reports) and PCI (the Payment Card Industry security standards), and general audits as cases that rely heavily on logging and change control within it.

Automated performance management is also a big cloud topic – as the enStratus study states, “Just having logs isn’t very useful unless they are being reviewed, and responses provided. By having a system monitoring the logs, automated alerts can be generated on conditions that are important to the organization. This can be very useful for the security, operations and applications teams.” Additionaly, the study says that “it can be just as important to receive an alert when expected actions don’t happen as when unexpected events do happen.”

I’m just scratching the surface here, but in a nutshell, as the enStratus study says, “It is important to have a strategy to get the logs from the cloud provider to their centralized log servers and cover the API logging gap. By managing these two concerns, organizations can ensure that they have the necessary logs to safely conduct business while taking advantage of the operations and economic benefits of the cloud.”

read more

Management and governance seem to be emerging topics in the cloud-computing world, as companies who’ve now committed themselves to the cloud focus on traditional enterprise IT headaches, er, issues.

Enterprise cloud computing has its roots in web services (the hot topic of 2004) and services-oriented architecture (SOA, the hot topic of 2007), and nothing was more prominent or less understood than issues involving governance back in those “early days.”

enStratus, which provides cloud infrastructure management services, has redoubled its efforts in explaining some of these issues, as many enterprise IT managers prepare themselves for Cloud Expo in New York.

The company has specifically focused on logging in a new study. “Logs contain important information on performance, security, and user activities, and provide critical information about what the system is doing,” according to the enStratus study. “Anyone who has ever had to deploy an operating system or application knows just how important logs are. With migration to the cloud, logging and monitoring become even more important since you are giving up some control to the cloud services provider.”

Yes, giving up that precious control, the main sticking point in getting enterprises to migrate to third-party cloud vendors. Given what will always be the messy nature of most multi-component, enterprise cloud structures, no one should expect this issue to dissipate somehow.

“Logging needs cover an incredibly broad range of possibilities,” according to enStratus. “Many groups within enterprise organizations have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that they need to track in order to get their jobs done effectively, and in some cases legally – and these vary drastically from group to group.”

The company cites compliance regimes such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX, which regulates public-company financial reports) and PCI (the Payment Card Industry security standards), and general audits as cases that rely heavily on logging and change control within it.

Automated performance management is also a big cloud topic – as the enStratus study states, “Just having logs isn’t very useful unless they are being reviewed, and responses provided. By having a system monitoring the logs, automated alerts can be generated on conditions that are important to the organization. This can be very useful for the security, operations and applications teams.” Additionaly, the study says that “it can be just as important to receive an alert when expected actions don’t happen as when unexpected events do happen.”

I’m just scratching the surface here, but in a nutshell, as the enStratus study says, “It is important to have a strategy to get the logs from the cloud provider to their centralized log servers and cover the API logging gap. By managing these two concerns, organizations can ensure that they have the necessary logs to safely conduct business while taking advantage of the operations and economic benefits of the cloud.”

read more

The more you focus on the business benefits of Cloud, the more likely you’ll be leaning toward public over private deployment models. Furthermore, this mind shift isn’t all about security risks. Once you work through the issues, you’ll likely come to the same conclusion: there’s generally little or no solid business reason to build a private Cloud.
Perhaps the most interesting contrast between the perspectives of these two audiences was their respective opinions about private Clouds. The techies at the Bangalore conference, having drunk too much of the vendor Kool-Aid, were generally of the opinion that public Clouds were too risky, and that their organizations should thus focus their efforts on the private deployment model. The Dallas business crowd, in contrast, generally held that the public approach was the way to go, with some folks even going so far as to claim that public Cloud was the only true approach to Cloud Computing.

So, should any organization build a private Cloud? Perhaps, but only the very largest enterprises, and only when those organizations can figure out how to get most or all of their divisions to share those private Clouds. If your enterprise is large enough to achieve similar economies of scale to the public providers, then—and only then—will a private option be a viable business alternative.

read more

The more you focus on the business benefits of Cloud, the more likely you’ll be leaning toward public over private deployment models. Furthermore, this mind shift isn’t all about security risks. Once you work through the issues, you’ll likely come to the same conclusion: there’s generally little or no solid business reason to build a private Cloud.
Perhaps the most interesting contrast between the perspectives of these two audiences was their respective opinions about private Clouds. The techies at the Bangalore conference, having drunk too much of the vendor Kool-Aid, were generally of the opinion that public Clouds were too risky, and that their organizations should thus focus their efforts on the private deployment model. The Dallas business crowd, in contrast, generally held that the public approach was the way to go, with some folks even going so far as to claim that public Cloud was the only true approach to Cloud Computing.

So, should any organization build a private Cloud? Perhaps, but only the very largest enterprises, and only when those organizations can figure out how to get most or all of their divisions to share those private Clouds. If your enterprise is large enough to achieve similar economies of scale to the public providers, then—and only then—will a private option be a viable business alternative.

read more