Have telcos (and their shareholders) really grasped how the advent of mainstream cloud computing could ultimately transform their industry? In most cases, I think not. In general, telcos’ top management teams have yet to articulate a compelling vision of where their company will play in a hyper-connected, cloud-centric world.

Clearly, cloud computing – the provision of hardware and software on a pay-as-you go basis – depends on rock-solid connectivity. Telcos provide connectivity, so they should be pivotal players in the cloud market. But right now many of them seem to be on the periphery, particularly here in Europe. In January 2012, research firm Informa said that European operators accounted for only 7% of the $13.5 billion of cloud investments by operators globally in 2011. “European operators are being outgunned in cloud infrastructure,” wrote Carmille Mendler, principle analyst at Informa, at the time.

Analysts at Citi Research take a similar view. “In Europe, some telecom operators are lagging behind their US counterparts,” they wrote in a just published report in cloud computing. “In many cases their approach to cloud remains too fragmented and sometimes defensive rather than driven by a strategic vision.”
The reasons for European telcos’ cloud caution seem to be manifold: Regulatory uncertainty and inconsistency, economic woes, privacy concerns and (probably) short-termism. For most European telcos, cloud computing isn’t going to move the revenue needle in 2012 or 2013.

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Your applications are getting more distributed, virtualized and pushed into the cloud today. But as the world progresses to multi-cloud deployments and sophisticated software-defined data centers, will your legacy load balancers and application? Next generation ADCs should be as dynamic as the application is, be able to apply application-specific optimizations and policies and deliver advanced layer 7 features and services that map to the requirements of today’s applications.

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A key point that Microsoft makes in their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure materials is that IT architecture is evolving from device-centric to user-centric approaches.
Fundamentally this means increased portability and mobility of your apps and data across multiple devices, and it’s an effect that will be accelerated through parallel innovations from the world of Cloud Identity.
Cloud Identity standards are defined by organizations like the Kantara Initiative, who have a telco working group who specialise in this field.

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Research commissioned by Fujitsu and Microsoft and published by Connection Research has revealed that CIOs in Australia are “embracing the realities” of the cloud.

In the foreword to the report, entitled “Insights Quarterly: Cloud in Australia”, authors Craig Baty and Greg Stone describe cloud computing as “infectious” and add that “cloud has arrived, and will continue to grow in functionality and popularity”.

The key takeaways from the report, which polled 179 CIOs across Australia, were:

• Cost was the biggest driver in moving to the cloud – lower operational costs and lower capital expenditure was most important to approximately 21% of respondents
• Email and messaging was the service migrated to the cloud most frequently – 22.6% of respondents were on the way to utilising it
• Data security (48.5%) was the most important factor in choosing a cloud provider

Each question was ranked in degrees of importance, leading to a set of …

Bob Gourley, editor of CTOvision as well as  founder and CTO of Crucial Point, LLC, was recently interviewed by WashingtonExec, where he shared his views on emerging information technology, government needs, and Big Data. The interview is reproduced below:   How does Bob Gourley, founder and CTO of Crucial Point, LLCand […]

This post by AlexOlesker was first published at CTOvision.com.

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Here is an interesting article from over at wired about proposed privacy law and court warrants for cloud data, along with this one over at information week. Both got me thinking about some things that I hear when out and about talking with IT professionals and their concerns around clouds.

Common themes at the recent modernizing data protection and new realities of cloud and virtualization event series that I was involved with pertained to cloud concerns. Some organizations are already using clouds to some degree while others are taking a cautious approach. Some are all in, while others will take longer for various reasons. Likewise some are using a mix of public, private and hybrid to compliment their environments for collaboration, shared storage, compute, content distribution, backup, archive or BC and DR among other things. These environments range from SOHO or small SMB to ROBO to workgroup to enterprise, education and government of various size.

Often the conversations would evolve around gaining confidence with clouds as well as virtualization. In the case of clouds, given that some of the services as well as products, solutions or technologies are still young, there is still a learning and maturing curve. There are also other factors including the amount of hype and FUD around clouds has some people more skeptical or cautious to move forward. Granted there are also the true cynics which tend to be offset by the cloud crowd cheerleaders thus canceling each other out.

For the non cheerleaders and non cynics, hurdles to cloud adoption (in whole or in part, public, private or hybrid) tend to start with the letter C.

My message has and continues to be that of do not be scared of clouds and virtualization, however be ready, informed and decide what your concerns are. By determining your concerns, you can then work on figuring out what to do about those.

Here is a list of common cloud concerns and comments that I hear:
Cloud cheerleader hype
Cloud critics and cynics FUD
Confidence in cloud products or services
Certainty in cloud data protection or security
Cloud certifications and standards
Compatibility and interoperability
Classes and continuing education
Confidentially, privacy and security
Costs of cloud services or products
Country where cloud data is stored

There are many other items that can be added to the list that start with the letter C, however there are also some that start with P. For example, People, Products, Process, Procedures, Practices, Paradigm, Public or Private and Protocols among others.

Its one thing to be scared of something and not know what or why you are scared. It’s another thing to know or figure out what or why you are scared or concerned and then be able to do something about it. For example learn what standards such as SNIA CDMI among others exist and how those could be of help along with other tools or best practices from others.

Thus dont be scared of clouds or virtualization, however do your homework, decide your concerns and then find what can be done about those. If you need help, drop me a note.

In the meantime, here is some more material:
Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking
More modernizing data protection, virtualization and clouds with certainty
Cloud conversations: AWS Government Cloud (GovCloud)
Amazon cloud storage options enhanced with Glacier
Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) publishes two new cloud usage models
Data protection modernization, more than swapping out media
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the NetFlix Fix?
What do VARs and Clouds as well as MSPs have in common?
Only you can prevent cloud data loss
The blame game: Does cloud storage result in data loss?
Cloud conversations: Loss of data access vs. data loss
Clouds are like Electricity: Dont be Scared
Poll: What Do You Think of IT Clouds?

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

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What Role Does Open-source Play in Cloud Computing Innovation? is a guest post that I have written on GigaOM to show how open-source is playing an important role in driving and supporting the transition to cloud computing. According to our experience, the availability of open-source cloud management tools like OpenNebula is accelerating the pace of innovation on the datacenter side.
Since we started the OpenNebula project in 2005, we have helped many organizations develop value by building innovative cloud services and solutions to meet their user and customer needs in new ways or to meet new market needs. The guest post looks at cloud innovation from different perspectives, including some specific examples.

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Funny thing about the hype cycle in high tech, things rarely turn out the way cheerleaders proclaim it will. Mainframes did not magically disappear in any of the waves that predicted their demise. The reason is simple – there is a lot of code running on mainframes that works, and has worked well for a long time, rewriting all of that code would be a monumental undertaking that, even today, twenty years after the first predictions of its demise, many organizations – particularly in financials – are not undertaking.
Don’t get me wrong: There are a variety of reasons why mainframes in their current incarnation are doomed to a small vertical market at best in the very very long run, but the cost of recreating systems just to remove mainframes is going to continue to hold them in a lot of datacenters in the near future.
But they do need to be able to communicate with newer systems if they’re going to hang around, and the last five years or so have seen a whole lot of projects to make them play more friendly with the distributed datacenter.

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In the past few weeks I visited several Cloud and Big Data conferences that provided me with a lot of insight. Some people only consider the technology side of Big Data technologies like Hadoop or Cassandra. The real driver however is a different one. Business analysts have discovered Big Data technologies as a way to leverage tons of existing data and ask questions about customer behavior and all sorts relationships to drive business strategy. By doing that they are pushing their IT departments to run ever bigger Hadoop environments and ever faster real-time systems.
What’s interesting from a technical side is that ad-hoc analytics on existing data is allowed to take some time. However ad-hoc implies people waiting for an answer, meaning we are talking about minutes and not hours. Another interesting insight is that Hadoop environments are never static or standalone. Most companies take in new data on a continuous basis via technologies like flume. This means Hadoop may reduce jobs needed to be able to keep up with the data flow, either by adding more hardware or by optimizing them.
There are multiple drivers to Big Data (actually there are a lot) but the two most important ones are these: Analytics and Technical Need for Speed. Let’s look at some of those and the resulting takeaways.

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