“Cloud computing in the enterprise is all about workloads,” said Ric Telford is Vice President of IBM Cloud Services, as IBM today announced its intent to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. – the well-respected provider of a wide array of options for hosting applications in the cloud.
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Why the Cloud Will Supplant On-premise Security
The cloud will soon supplant on-premise security initiatives. IT is at a crossroads: the acceptance of cloud-based computing as the chief business driver.
Erasmus Wilson, the celebrated Oxford professor once proclaimed, “When the Paris Exhibition [of 1878] closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.” History is littered with those who refused to embrace the obviousness of the future. Didn’t Digital founder Ken Olsen prognosticate “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” in 1977. (His company was broken up for parts after its acquisition by Compaq in 1998.)
There are many of us who have been around IT long enough can even remember how storing 1MB on a 3.5” hard case floppy disk was cutting edge IT. Yes, I remember punch cards too, but the point is that IT grows up. It advances, evolves. Thirty years on from those halcyon days, IT is facing its latest crossroads: the movement away from on-premise solutions and the acceptance of cloud-based computing as the chief business driver.
Cloud Expo New York: The Cloud of Tomorrow
Before we talk about the cloud of tomorrow, Kevin Clarke, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering for Verizon Terremark, describes, in his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, what core characteristics compose the cloud of today, and discusses three fundamental features: independent architectures, multi-tenant infrastructures and the concept of ‘different controls.’
While the cloud is able to house different applications in terms of complexity and criticality, most enterprise applications are not apt for virtualized environments, such as cloud computing. Clarke explores the challenges that exist in running enterprise applications, or what he calls the “hard stuff” and the ideal features future cloud offerings should provide enterprises. These include security, dependencies, application management and performance.
Want to Go Cloud? What’s the Use Case?
By Lawrence Kohan, Senior Consultant, LogicsOne
This is the first of a two-part blog series intended to provide practical, real world examples of when it makes sense to use the cloud and when it does not.
We’re well into an exciting new era in the technology world. The buzz-words are flying around at light speeds, and talk of “Cloud” and “software-defined-everything” is all the rage.
Advances in virtualization, which allows software processes to be decoupled from underlying hardware is giving way to amazing possibilities for moving around workloads as needed, either between racks in a datacenter, or even between datacenters! In addition, the concept of “Cloud” is very exciting in the possibilities is offers business to leverage these advances by being able to move workloads offsite for greater availability, redundancy, disaster recovery.
Indeed, the promise of the Cloud as a whole is to provide IT as a service. It’s a way of offering companies resources on a metered usage basis, so that they can consume as needed, grow or reduce their resources as needed, and only pay on a per use basis for what they consume, as needed. The hope is to free up a business and their IT staff from worrying about the mundane, daily details and repetitive administrative tasks and burdens of keeping the business functioning and allows them to be more strategic with their time and efforts. In the Cloud Era, servers and desktops can be provisioned, configured, and deployed in minutes instead of weeks! The time saved allows the business to focus on all other areas of the business to make it more profitable, such as their marketing and advertising strategies, application/website development, and the betterment of their product and services.
Cloudy Conditions Ahead
All of this sounds like a wonderful dream. However, before jumping in, it is important to understand what the business goals are. What is it you intend to get out of the Cloud? How do you intend to leverage it to your best advantage? These questions and answers must come first before any decision is made regarding software vendors or Cloud service providers to be used. The promise of the Cloud is tremendous gains in efficiency, but only when it is adopted and utilized correctly.
Register for our upcoming free webinar on June 12th on what’s missing in hybrid cloud management today. Speakers include Chris Ward from GreenPages, Praveen Asthana from Gravitant, and David Bartoletti, a top analyst from Forrester Research.
To Host or Not to Host?
For starters, let’s look at a simple use case: Whether or not to host a company’s e-mail in the Cloud.
Pros:
- Hosting email will be billed on a per-usage basis, either by number of user mailboxes, number of emails sent/received, or storage used.
- Day-to-day administration, availability, fault tolerance, backups are all handled by the service provider. Little administration is needed aside from creating user accounts and mailboxes.
- Offsite-hosted email still has the same look-and-feel as on-premise email, and can be accessed remotely, in the same ways, from anywhere. Most users don’t even know the difference!
Cons:
- Company is subject to outages and downtime windows of the service provider. (In such a case, as long as it is not an unplanned outage or disaster, steps should be taken to ensure continued e-mail delivery, but systems may be unavailable for periods of time, usually on weekends or overnight)
- Initial migration and large data transfers can be an administrative burden.
There are factors that can either be positives or negatives depending on the business size and need. For example, a small startup company with only several people needs to be extremely budget conscious. In their case, it would certainly make more sense financially to outsource their e-mail for a monthly fee instead of looking to install and maintain their own internal email servers, which after hardware and software costs and licensing would cost 5 figures, not to mention needed at least one dedicated person to maintain it. This is certainly not a cost-effective option for a small, young company trying to get off the ground.
Download this free whitepaper to learn more about how organizations can revolutionize the way it manages hybrid cloud environments.
At the same time, a very large enterprise with thousands of mailboxes may find the process of migration to be an expensive, time consuming administrative burden. While offsite email would offer good availability and safeguards against system failure, perhaps even above and beyond what the enterprise currently utilizes, it is also a substantial risk; if the Cloud Provider has an outage that could affect the enterprise’s email access. The same risk would apply to a small business as well; however, the smaller and more localized the business, the more likely they are to adapt to an e-mail outage and resume intra-office communications via secondary means—a contingency plan that is more difficult to act upon for a larger global enterprise. And, yes, the enterprise that hosts e-mail internally has the same risk of an outage, however that enterprise can respond to an internal e-mail outage immediately and be able to ascertain how long the outage will be, instead of being at the mercy of the Cloud Provider’s timetable and troubleshooting efforts.
Therefore, in our sample “hosted e-mail” use case, it would make more sense for a smaller business to consider the option of moving e-mail services to the Cloud, and may not provide much value, if any, for the enterprise.
In the second part of this two-part blog series, I will cover when is a good time to utilize cloud for medium to large businesses. In the meantime, would love to hear your thoughts!
Webinar June 12th 11am-12pm EST “What’s Missing in Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage” Speakers from Forrester, GreenPages, and Gravitant. Register here!
CIO Outlook: Dealing with Legacy Applications
Legacy apps are surely the albatross of the modern cloud-enabled IT department – you put them there, and now you have to live with them.
Short of scrapping millions of dollars of worth of investments, something needs to be done with these apps, especially when cloud adoption is altering the efficiency and cost landscape for IT.
The first thing is to consider is why the move needs to take place. The reality for most companies is that there is a finite amount of space they can utilize in the data center. Companies have certain apps that they want to run locally, which is often the most mission critical aspects of their business. If its healthcare that’s EMR, if tis retail that’s the point of sale platform. These applications need as low latency as possible since there will always be someone in the organization that’s doing something very important and needs that data as quickly as possible.
The case for block-level cloud storage
Before block storage in the cloud, when businesses needed to provision large amounts of storage – for server data, for example – they’d need to requisition and pay for huge server instances, even if the capacity and compute power far exceeded their needs.
Organizations now buy storage in “blocks” to exactly fit their needs, regardless of the size of their cloud server. The old way, when after you bought a server you would need to upgrade the entire system if you wanted to add more hard drive space, is over. Now you can just buy space as you go.
But which type of block storage is best for your business? That depends on what type of data you need to store and how frequently and easily you need to access that data.
There are two options for cloud block storage depending on what type of information you need to store. Standard …
Wearable tech will form “human cloud”, argues Rackspace
A report from Rackspace Hosting has concluded that, with the rise of wearable technology, it will drive the rise of the “human cloud”.
Cloud computing has become an integral facet of the rise in wearable tech, with the rich data available at a user’s command all being easily stored in the cloud.
As a result the report, ‘The Human Cloud: Wearable Technology from Novelty to Productivity’, examined the responses of 4000 UK and US adults, as well as collaborating with experts from the Centre for Creative and Social Technology (CAST). The key takeaways were:
- 82% of wearable tech users in America, and 71% in Britain believed that these devices have “enhanced their lives”
- More than four in five (87% US, 81% UK) respondents believe that wearable tech has improved their personal abilities
- Just under half (47%) of wearable tech users “felt more intelligent” whilst 61% “felt more informed”, with …
CloudPassage Gets Patent on Cloud Security
CloudPassage, the security SaaS start-up, has gotten a big, embracing US patent on its Halo cloud infrastructure security technology. It’s patent No. 8,412,945 B2.
It’s reportedly the first company to get a US patent on universal cloud infrastructure security.
The important questions around uptime guarantees
Some manufacturers recently have made an impact with a “five nines” uptime guarantee, so I thought I’d provide some perspective.
Most recently, I’ve come in contact with Hitachi’s guarantee. I quickly checked with a few other manufacturers (e.g. Dell EqualLogic) to see if they offer that guarantee for their storage arrays, and many do…but realistically, no one can guarantee uptime because “uptime” really needs to be measured from the host or application perspective. Read below for additional factors that impact storage uptime.
Five Nines is 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, or 25.9 seconds a month.
Four Nines is 52.6 minutes/year, which is one hour of maintenance, roughly.
Array controller failover in EQL and other dual controller, modular arrays (EMC, HDS, etc.) is automated to eliminate downtime. That is really just the beginning of the story. The discussion with my clients …
Zynga Falters, Cuts Staff & Facilities
Zynga, the high-profile cloud-based games maker, is in trouble deep enough
to raise questions about its continued survival.
It can’t keep up with the defection of its user base to mobile rivals – which
is impacting its bookings again this quarter – and so it’s going to cut back by
firing 520 people, roughly 20% of its workforce, more than it’s done since
starting to lay people off last year.