Monthly Archives: January 2016

hybrid cloud, Opinion, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Simplivity

Deciding between private and public cloud

cloud computing machine learning autonomousInnovation and technological agility is now at the heart of an organization’s ability to compete.  Companies that rapidly onboard new products and delivery models gain competitive advantage, not by eliminating the risk of business unknowns, but by learning quickly, and fine-tuning based on the experience gathered.

Yet traditional IT infrastructure models hamper an organizations’ ability to deliver the innovation and agility they need to compete. Enter the cloud.

Cloud-based infrastructure is an appealing prospect to address the IT business agility gap, characterized by the following:

  1. Self-service provisioning. Aimed at reducing the time to solution delivery, cloud allows users to choose and deploy resources from a defined menu of options.
  2. Elasticity to match demand.  Pay for what you use, when you use it, and with flexible capacity.
  3. Service-driven business model.  Transparent support, billing, provisioning, etc., allows consumers to focus on the workloads rather than service delivery.

There are many benefits to this approach – often times, cloud or “infrastructure as a service” providers allow users to pay for only what they consume, when they consume it, as well as fast, flexible infrastructure deployment, and low risks related to trial and error for new solutions.

Public cloud or private cloud – which is the right option?

A cloud model can exist either on-premises, as a private cloud, or via public cloud providers.

In fact, the most common model is a mix of private and public clouds.  According to a study published in the RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud Report, enterprises are increasingly adopting a portfolio of clouds, with 82 percent reporting a multi-cloud strategy as compared to 74 percent in 2014.

With that in mind, each workload you deploy (e.g. tier-1 apps, test/dev, etc.) needs to be evaluated to see if it should stay on-premises or be moved offsite.

So what are the tradeoffs to consider when deciding between private and public cloud?  First, let’s take a look at the considerations for keeping data on-premises.

  1. Predictable performance.  When consistent performance is needed to support key business applications, on-premises IT can deliver performance and reliability within tight tolerances.
  2. Data privacy.  It’s certainly possible to lose data from a private environment, but for the most part, on-premises IT is seen as a better choice for controlling highly confidential data.
  3. Governance and control.  The private cloud can be built to guarantee compliance – country restrictions, chain of custody support, or security clearance issues.

Despite these tradeoffs, there are instances in which a public cloud model is ideal, particularly cloud bursting, where an organization experiences temporary demand spikes (seasonal influxes).  The public cloud can also offer an affordable alternative to disaster recovery and backup/archiving.

Is your “private cloud” really a cloud at all?

There are many examples of the same old legacy IT dressed up with a thin veneer of cloud paint.  The fact is, traditional IT’s complexity and inefficiency makes it unsuitable to deliver a true private cloud.

Today, hyperconverged infrastructure is one of the fastest growing segments in the $107B IT infrastructure market, in part because of its ability to enable organizations to deliver a cloud-operating model with on-premises infrastructure.

Hyperconvergence surpasses the traditional IT model by incorporating IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor onto commodity x86 “building blocks”.  For example, SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure is designed to work with any hypervi­sor on any industry-standard x86 server platform. The combined solution provides a single, shared resource pool across the entire IT stack, including built-in data efficiency and data protection, eliminating point products and inefficient siloed IT architectures.

Some of the key characteristics of this approach are:

  • Single vendor for deploying and supporting infrastructure.  Traditional IT requires users to integrate more than a dozen disparate components just to support their virtualized workloads.  This causes slow deployments, finger pointing, performance bottlenecks, and limits how it can be reused for changing workloads. Alternatively, hyperconvergence is architected as a single atomic building block, ready to be deployed when the customer unpacks the solution.
  • The ability to start small and scale out without penalty.  Hyperconvergence eliminates the need for resource allocation guesswork.  Simply start with the resources needed now, then add more, repurpose, or shut down resources with demand—all with minimal effort and cost, and no performance degradation.
  • Designed for self-service provisioning. Hyperconvergence offers the ability to create policies, provision resources, and move workloads, all at the VM-level, without worrying about the underlying physical infrastructure.  Because they are software defined, hyperconverged solutions can also integrate with orchestration and automation tools like VMware vRealize Automation and Cisco UCS Director.
  • Economics of public cloud. By converging all IT infrastructure components below the hypervisor and reducing operating expenses through simplified, VM-centric management, hyperconverged offerings deliver a cost model that closely rivals the public cloud. SimpliVity, for example, is able to deliver a cost-per-VM that is comparable to AWS, including associated operating expenses and labour costs.

It’s clear that the cloud presents a compelling vision of improved IT infrastructure, offering the agility required to support innovation, experimentation and competitive advantage.  For many enterprises, public cloud models are non-starters due to the regulatory, security, performance, and control drawbacks, for others, the public cloud or infrastructure as a service is an ideal way to quickly increase resources.

Hyperconvergence is also helping enterprises increase their business agility by offering all the cloud benefits, without added risks or uncertainty. Today technology underpins competitive advantage and organizations must choose what works best for their business and their applications, making an approach combining public cloud and private cloud built on hyperconverged infrastructure an even more viable solution.

Written by Rich Kucharski, VP Solutions Architecture, SimpliVity.

Content & Applications, Infrastructure as a Service, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Software as a service

Microsoft maps out 2016 BizTalk Server, Azure Stack and cloud integration plans

AzureMicrosoft has unveiled its plans to integrate its cast of cloud services and servers in the coming year. Cloud users can now download a roadmap for the direction of its integration products such as the BizTalk application-integration server, Azure Stack and the Logic Apps included in the Azure App Service offering.

The initiative is the idea of new Azure CTO Mark Russinovich in a bid to keep customers aware of the changes that are being made now that many integration processes are out of their domain. Traditionally, integration has been conducted on the customer’s premises or through a business to business arrangement, but in the cloud era the systems they want integrated are typically outside of their control, Russinovich said in the company blog. “Everything from sales leads to invoicing, email and social media, is going to be well beyond the corporate firewall,” he said.

As modern integration goes from corporate computer systems to an increasingly mobile world, there needs to be a change of approach on both ends. On a technical level, this change is unpinned by application programming interfaces (APIs) within lightweight, modern, HTTP/REST-based protocols using JSON, Russinovich said. On a cultural level, Microsoft is to open more channels of communication with its cloud users through updates such as this.

Before the tenth release of BizTalk Server, in Q4 2016, it will release a Community Technology Preview and a beta of the product in Q3. BizTalk Server 2016 is to align with Windows Server 2016, SQL 2016, Office 2016 and the latest Visual Studio. The latest BizTalk release will straddle both the on-premise and cloud worlds, supporting SQL 2016’s AlwaysOn Availability Groups whether they are hosted on Azure or in house.

BizTalk Server will also have better interfaces with Salesforce.com and Office 365, as Microsoft bids to improve the hybrid experience. New, improved BizTalk adapters for Informix, MQ and DB2 have also been promised, along with better PowerShell integration.

Halfway through 2016 Microsoft will host another integration summit, Integrate 2016, as the vendor signals its intent to take its Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) responsibilities seriously too.

According to the roadmap Microsoft should imminently release a preview of a planned Logic Apps Update with Logic Apps becoming generally available in Q2. Azure Stack will be available in Q4.

Appointment, Colt, Corporate, ETNO, News & Analysis

Colt gears up for cloud with new CTO appointment

Network Function VirtualisationColt has announced that its newly appointed Chief Technology Officer Rajiv Datta is to be given the brief to drive the service provider’s future cloud strategy.

Datta’s duties are described as ‘the creation of next generation of products and services, including SDN-based networks and digital customer experience’.

Datta has joined Colt’s Executive Leadership team to be led by Carl Grivner who took over as CEO on 1 January. Datta was recruited from AboveNet Communications, where he was chief operating officer for the fibre infrastructure provider as its annual revenues grew from $190m to $500m. New Colt CEO Grivner said Datta was recruited for his track record of transforming business.

Competition from cloud-based services such as Skype has affected the revenues for all European telcos, according to Reuters, which reported how Colt exited the wholesale market for voice calls in 2014.

However, according to a recent report from the European Telecoms Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), the year 2016 should see a return to growth in this sector, thanks in part to a thinning out of players, such as Colt, which also took the decision to pull out of the IT services market.

With an estate of 34 carrier-neutral data centres in Europe and seven managed facilities in Asia Pacific, Colt is to concentrate on cloud and data centre services. However, the data centre market is entering its own phase of consolidation and in November BCN reported market leader Equinix had bought its rival TelecityGroup. In this climate the change management skills of Datta will be invaluable, according to Colt CEO Grivner.

“Rajiv’s track record of transforming business performance will be invaluable in creating the levels of focus, speed and innovation that we need,” he said.

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iPaaS – Integration Platform as a Service | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Gartner describes iPaaS as:
“a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations.”
Their Magic Quadrant, which can be downloaded courtesy of Mulesoft, defines
Service Description: What qualifies as a true Cloud service, iPaaS Functionality.
Use Cases and Buying Centers: iPaaS primarily addresses a need for Cloud Service Integration integrating on-premises applications and data, with SaaS and other Cloud services.
Market Trends: Gartner has identified at least 30 iPaaS vendors and anticipates a highly competitive market, with key growth sectors like IoT Integrations

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Hybrid Cloud – Taming the Digital Dragon | @CloudExpo #Cloud

In the Gartner white paper Taming the Digital Dragon, they define the Hybrid Cloud model as an enabling blueprint for digital transformation and leadership.
They give it such an elaborate name because their definition goes far beyond the normal industry use of the term, a mix of on-premise and public Cloud computing, whereas Gartner instead defines a Hybrid Cloud business model.

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acquisition, energy, News & Analysis, Salesoforce, Software as a service

Salesforce buys SteelBrick from California and wind power from Virginia

Cloud giant Salesforce.com has announced two new acquisitions, one intended to boost its bottom line and the other to shrink its carbon footprint.

The acquisition of California based start up SteelBrick gives it a quoting and billing system for SMEs that runs within the Salesforce cloud platform. Meanwhile, it has announced an agreement to source 40 megawatts of green power, from a new West Virginia wind farm, through a virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA).

SteelBricks, which announced the take-over on its company blog, makes configure-price-quote and subscription-billing apps for small and medium-size enterprises. It had recently added subscription billing functions after buying UK-based cloud app maker Invoice IT. The apps automate the processes between researching customers and collecting payment and clients include Silicon Valley cloud vendors Cloudera and Nutanix.

Salesforce already part owned SteelBrick, having funded the start up through investment arm Salesforce Ventures. In December it announced plans to acquire the rest of SteelBrick for $360 million. Salesforce said it aims to close the deal by the end of April.

Having seen how Salesforce pioneered the shift to enterprise cloud computing, SteelBrick CEO Godard Abel said the company founder Max Rudman had been on a six year mission to simplify the process of selling. Abel was brought in as CEO having previously founded BigMachines, acquired by Oracle in 2013.

Meanwhile, San Francisco-based Salesforce is to buy an electricity supply from a West Virginia wind farm approximately 2,700 miles away. The two have signed a 12-year wind energy agreement for 40 megawatts (MW) of power to be provided through a virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA).

The electricity generated under the agreement is expected to be 125,000 megawatt hours annually, which exceeds Salesforce’s data centre electricity consumption in its full fiscal year 2015. The wind farm is expected to be operational by December 2016 and will deliver clean energy to the same regional electricity grid that currently powers the majority of Salesforce’s data centre load.

This announcement follows Salesforce’s recent commitments to achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 and to power all its global operations with renewable energy.

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How growing hybrid cloud usage will double in two years

(c)iStock.com/kemalbas

Cloud enables IT agility, empowers DevOps teams and helps to transform legacy business models. The fifth annual Future of Cloud Computing survey investigates key trends in corporate cloud usage. This year’s insightful survey findings offer perspective from cloud service practitioners across all industry sectors.

“Cloud has been gaining momentum year­-over-­year since the Future of Cloud Computing survey was launched five years ago. Looking at the adoption rates and trends at such a detailed level, it’s undeniable that the most successful technology leaders of today and tomorrow are scaling in the cloud,” said Jim Moran, General Partner at North Bridge.

“Last year, we discussed the second cloud front and the rise of cloud­-native companies. This year, we’re seeing the pervasiveness of cloud disrupt industries across the board as companies look to maximize and implement cloud as a strategic and integral technology,” Moran added.

“We’re also seeing the emergence of the cloud as the only way businesses can truly get more out of their data including analysing and executing on it in real-­time. This will be a huge opportunity, but as the survey showed, because data rarely moves between clouds companies must first learn how to interconnect disparate data sources into new applications.”

Savvy business leaders are no longer debating whether or not to use cloud, but how pervasively they will use it in their digital transformation plans. The latest survey results highlight record levels of corporate adoption of cloud computing, both for business functions and in areas such as content management and application development in the cloud.

Even the most traditional IT teams are finally evolving. Some are taking back technology strategy from the forward­-looking line of business leaders that led the way to progress. Therefore, North Bridge believes that digital technologies – delivered from the cloud – are becoming differentiating factors for more businesses.

Cloud is the business transformation catalyst

  • Significant processing, systems of engagement and systems of insight are moving to the cloud ­­– 81.3 percent of sales and marketing, 79.9 percent of business analytics, 79.1 percent of customer service and 73.5 percent of HR & Payroll activities have already transitioned to the cloud.
  • IT is moving significant processing to the cloud with 85.9 percent of web content management, 82.7 percent of communications, 80 percent of app development and 78.9 percent of disaster recovery now clou­d-based.
  • While business users have been a fan of cloud’s ease of use, accessibility and scalability since 2011, the importance of cloud agility has jumped from fourth to second in importance within five years.
  • Among all survey respondents, the top inhibitors to cloud adoption are security (45.2%), regulatory/compliance (36%), privacy (28.7%), vendor lock-­in (25.8%) and complexity (23.1%).
  • Concerns regarding interoperability and reliability have fallen off significantly since 2011 (15.7% and 9.9% respectively in 2015). However, the cost of cloud services are now three times as likely to be a concern today, versus five years ago.

Raised expectations for public and hybrid cloud

  • Today, three quarters of company data in significant volumes is living in private or public clouds. However, company data in hybrid cloud systems is forecast to double over the next two years.
  • Corporate cloud computing strategies are focusing on public (up 43.3%) and hybrid (up 19.2%) while private cloud has taken a significant back seat in comparison (down by 48.4%).
  • SaaS is the most pervasive cloud technology used today with a presence in 77.3 percent of all organizations, an increase of 9 percent since 2014.
  • Accordingly, ROI expectations are high with 78 percent expecting to see results within three months. Fifty eight percent expect ROI in less than three months for PaaS services.
  • Among users taking the survey, the biggest factors preventing use of public cloud offerings are security (38.6%), privacy (29.8%) and expertise (22.8%). Regardless, the outlook for ongoing cloud service adoption is very bright.
IE on Mac, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer on Mac, Microsoft Edge, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop for Mac, run Internet Explorer on Mac, Windows on mac

How to Test IE on Mac

Full disclosure: I’m not a web developer. I do, however, consider myself something of a DIY front-end web “meddler” (for lack of a better word). Basically, all that means is that I’ve set up/created enough smaller WordPress websites that I know my way around most basic-to-intermediate HTML, CSS, and PHP. Despite my lack of formal […]

The post How to Test IE on Mac appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Office 365, Office 365 with Parallels RAS, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, Remote Application Server

How to Use Office 365 with Parallels Remote Application Server

Featured image by Raysonho under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.   If you use Parallels Remote Application Server to provide shared computers to users in your organization, you can install Office 365 ProPlus on those computers. But, you have to use the Office Deployment Tool and enable shared computer activation to do the […]

The post How to Use Office 365 with Parallels Remote Application Server appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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2016 cloud computing forecast: Private, hybrid, and automation

(c)iStock.com/iStockFinland

As we look forward to 2016, there is a lot to reflect on and forecast in cloud. Below you will find my top predictions for the year ahead.

RIP private cloud

The biggest missed story of 2015 has been the profound failure of the private cloud.

Just a few years ago, the private cloud was IT’s solution to remaining relevant to their business partners. I remember attending OpenStack Boston 2011 at the height of the private cloud movement, where everyone seemed convinced of the inevitability of the self-managed private cloud. But after years of incredible innovation in the public cloud and disarray in private cloud, 2016 will be the year that the private cloud as a primary strategy will finally go to its grave.

I expect some big shake ups in the private cloud, especially in the OpenStack community. Unless the private cloud substantially changes its pace of innovation, it will become a speed bump for enterprises on their way into the public cloud.

Google still doesn’t figure it out

If there was ever a company that should own the public cloud, it would be Google. They were building cutting-edge cloud infrastructure while the rest of us were still talking about our type 1 hypervisors. They even introduced the term “cloud computing” into our lexicon. I don’t know about you, but with the exception of a handful of mobile companies that built their businesses on AppEngine, I rarely run into a Google cloud customer.

While I believe Google has the vision, financial resources, and technical capacity to be a top cloud provider, I predict they will continue to lose more ground in 2016. To take liberty with the famous Wayne Gretzky quote, in the process to skating to where Google thinks the puck will be, companies like Amazon and Microsoft are busy putting the puck in the net.

Hybrid cloud hype unleashed

Recent industry news would make it hard not to predict 2016 to be the year of the hybrid cloud. But before doing this, let’s remind ourselves of the last year of the hybrid cloud: 2012. Back then industry experts were predicting the hybrid cloud to be the future of enterprise cloud computing, with the private cloud as the foundation and the public cloud used for bursting and new/unproven workloads. So with this historical reminder, I predict 2016 to be the year of the hybrid cloud hype, where products rebrand themselves as powering and/or enabling the hybrid cloud, and container hype reaches new heights. Expect legacy data centre and virtualisation products to attempt to breath new life into their ageing product lines with the term “hybrid cloud”, and existing public cloud vendors to reach into the data center to get a little of the hybrid shine. Ultimately, hybrid cloud is essentially the toll booth on the way to the public cloud.

End of shadow IT

Public cloud adoption in the enterprise was fuelled, to a large extent, by shadow IT – effectively “rogue” lines of business that worked around their slow-moving IT departments. With shadow IT, enterprises indirectly embraced an incredible amount of innovation in SaaS, cloud computing, mobile, and open source. This innovation has come at a risk to the business, since it typically worked around the IT business policies put in place to mitigate risks.

I predict 2016 to be the end of shadow IT. Two things have changed. IT has embraced and provided leadership in many of the disruptive changes they ignored over the last several years, and enterprises desperately need a lean and agile IT again to help propel their businesses through the current state of technology turmoil. The resurgence of enterprise IT will drive changes in product functionality and how vendors market, sell, price and deliver their services.

Cloud automation goes mainstream

We saw the emergence of business-level automation of the cloud with products from companies like VMTurbo and ourselves. This emerging market is being driven by what I call the “complexity gap”, where the complexity of the building and managing cloud infrastructure is outpacing the ability of management software and services to contain this complexity.

The future of the cloud will not be DevOps engineers writing low-level scripts to automate parts of our infrastructure. Instead it will be business-level automation, with enterprises inputting the policies by which they want their business systems managed and smart software executing these policies in support of the business. I predict 2016 to be the year business-level automation of the cloud goes mainstream.

Telecom makes big moves in the cloud

I think telecom companies will finally make big moves in the cloud…no, just kidding. Remember everyone predicting telecom providers would be the real winners in the cloud? Glad we can finally put this one to bed.