It had always been a dream to start a company with my childhood best friend, Rian Gauvreau, but we hadn’t been able to truly find a business model that worked for us. In 2007, cloud computing was just beginning to make waves, and while many recognized the opportunities that the cloud presented for business, most were quick to go for the “one size fits all” model seen in traditional enterprise technology solutions.
That same year, we began to see a need for a platform within the legal industry that could increase efficiency, saving lawyers both time and money.
Ingram Micro Honors Veterans with a $10,000 Gift to Veterans 360
On Veteran’s Day, hundreds of military veterans, active-duty service members and retirees were recognized and celebrated along with family members at the third annual Ingram Micro Veterans Day ceremonies held across three Ingram Micro locations from Santa Ana, California to Indianapolis and Buffalo.
Cloud best practices: Compliance, campaigns and SLAs
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
The cloud computing track at Apps World Europe yesterday threw up a series of interesting case studies, opinions and analysis.
John Finch, CIO of the Bank of England, spoke in the keynote session and revealed the bank’s use of cloud technologies only extended to the public-facing front end; John Pillar, CTO of Discover & Deliver spoke of a huge cloud-based IT project at former employer Marks & Spencer, and a morning panel session examined SLAs and mobile cloud best practice.
Matthew Finnie, CTO of virtual data centre provider Interoute, spoke in the panel session. Debates around SLAs and compliance came up because of what Finch, the previous speaker, had discussed – yet Finnie admitted if he were CIO of the country’s central bank, he’d be reticent to take any chances at all.
“Their risk profile is so extreme,” he tells CloudTech. “There’s just downsides, there’s no real upsides. Who are you competing against? There’s no market dynamic.”
There were a couple of best practice tips which emerged from the sessions. The questions one asks on data and compliance are the same from five years ago, so there’s no excuse for missing it off. Where’s the exact address of my data going to be? Who’s going to be able to access it?
Above all though, Finnie noted, bringing up the age old SLA debate – which the Interoute CTO observed is far more to do with statistics than technology – highlights an issue of firms expecting as good as or better performance if they move to the cloud from a static data centre.
“We’ve seen it,” he notes. “Customers move out of a single data centre and then into the cloud and say [they] want to get the same availability…and oftentimes they do.”
“The question then becomes – why don’t you try and maximise? You’ve got multiple options. When you move into a distributed computing model, you’ve got a lot more options in terms of how you can architect it, if the application lets you, as opposed to the traditional data centre where your options are fewer and possibly more expensive.
“Even though they say [they’re] moving onto cloud, they’re mentally thinking about a silo type model,” he adds.
In the afternoon session, Discover & Deliver CTO Pillar examined a Christmas campaign Marks & Spencer had run last year to name the dog which had starred in its big advert. The retailer’s IT department, with the surge of social media voting, was expected to cater for upwards of 97% of the UK population in five minutes. The firm had to enlist help from Microsoft to hammer the site enough to test those figures.
As it was entirely cloud-based, however, it wasn’t as much of a problem for the infrastructure folks. There was a “small bottleneck”, but it was quickly fixed. “As all the environments are treated as cloud, and the software was built in a decoupled way, it just scaled out,” Pillar noted.
The Philosophy of Network-as-a-Service By @MartenT1999 [#Cloud]
In the world of Anything-as-a-Service (I will leave the acronym to your imagination), Network-as-a-Service is not a new term. In fact, it even has its own wikipedia page which will tell you it has been used for many years now, well before the current set of service related terms in IT have become popular.
Like most high tech industries, we get somewhat carried away when we have some new terminology and quickly overuse and overload them, watering them down to be meaningless or at least highly confusing. But when you cut through the clutter a bit, the as-a-Service terminology most certainly articulates a shift in thought process and behaviors on how we provide and consume IT resources.
CTO Focus Interview: Rick Blaisdell, Motus
In the second installment of our CTO Focus Interview series (view part I with Stuart Appley here), I got the chance to sit down with Rick Blaisdell, CTO at Motus, at a coffee shop in Portsmouth, NH. Rick is an experienced IT pro with more than 20 years experience in the industry. Some of his specialties include SaaS, cloud computing, virtualization, software development and business process improvement. Rick is a top thought leader in the industry. He has a very successful blog, Rick’s Cloud, and his opinions and insights are very well respected on Twitter. Definitely an interesting guy to talk to – enjoy!
Ben: Fill us in on what you do and your IT experience.
Rick: I’m currently the CTO for Motus, a mobile technology company that builds solutions for mobile employees. I also advise technology companies on becoming more efficient, scalable and moving physical workloads to the cloud and streamlining their development processes. Small technology companies need direction with best practices; most of these companies have not yet invested heavily in physical infrastructure so it is easier for them to move to, and embrace, cloud technologies. Mid-size and larger companies have more complex issues when moving to the cloud as most of their infrastructure is physical with complex workloads that require assessments, partners and advanced planning before moving to the cloud. I help these organizations with these types of decisions.
Ben: What are your main goals when heading into a new company?
Rick: My main objective is to migrate companies from CapExt to OpEx. I spend a lot of time discussing the advantages of moving to the cloud. The ultimate goal is to remove internal employee workloads to SaaS and external customer facing production workloads to IaaS and PaaS. Internally it is critical to get your data out of your closet. An enterprise private of hybrid managed cloud solution with process and controls around the data is often the solution for most companies. Migrating 100% of the workloads to the cloud may not be feasible for all companies, although if you are a small business or new technology startup that should be the goal.
Ben: Do you often get pushback from C-level executives about utilizing the cloud?
Rick: The C-suite understands the high level benefits and business value of utilizing the cloud. One of the unknown barriers of moving to the cloud often comes from within a company’s own internal IT fears. The IT team has been focused on keeping physical environments running, security, patching and maintenance. Shifting to the cloud removes physical resources into virtual resources and now with managed solutions, shared experts are responsible for making sure your environment has the highest level of SLA’s and security. The internal IT team sees this as a threat and in some cases will find out how to slow cloud adoption. The C-Suite wants to be efficient and grow by concentrating on what’s core to the business, not spending energy hiring employees to maintain hard drives. The challenge is educating and retraining these employees to be able to take on new tasks that accelerate the core mission of the company.
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Ben: Which area of technology interests you the most?
Rick: The Internet of Things fascinates me, where there are billions of objects like toothbrushes, wearable technology, home appliances and tracking devices collecting data. Most technology companies in the near future will have some sort of IoT device. I recently wrote a blog post highlighting some cool internet of things startups.
Ben: What’s your view on the concept of Anything-as-a-Service?
Rick: Things are shifting to the “as a service” mentality. People like the pay as you go model. Everything is being added to the XaaS stack. Overall, I embrace the financial advantages of this model. All the companies I have worked with end up being more secure and efficient while saving money after migrating to SaaS, PaaS, DaaS, MCaaS services.
Ben: Throughout your career, what concept or technology would you say has had the most drastic impact on IT?
Rick: Virtualization would be my first answer. High density cloud environments cost less, are more efficient, are easier to scale and can be as secure as any physical environment. This has had a major impact on IT.
Ben: Where do you see IT in the next 5-7 years?
Rick: That is a long way out, my guess is that workloads will be fully commoditized, think of Priceline when you search for hotels today, this is where the world is headed, providers with services large and small available at discounts that meet your SLA’s, security, time frame all being managed and seamlessly migrated between each other. If this doesn’t happen, I will buy you dinner 
Are you a CIO/CTO interested in participating in our Focus Interview series? Email me at bstephenson@greenpages.com
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
It Takes a Village: The Rise of Crowd-Powered IT Services [#Cloud]
When was the last time you went to your favorite office superstore to buy a piece of packaged software?
Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud storage have completely changed the consumer computing market. Other than Microsoft Office and a few resource-intensive applications for photo and video editing, everything else is either running in the cloud, delivered and managed from the cloud, or storing data in the cloud.
The same trend is coming to enterprise IT. While many organizations have moved their packaged software to IaaS providers like AWS and Azure, many more will simply adopt pure SaaS offerings. These new services align with user and organizational demands, and their pay-as-you-go pricing model fits current business budgeting and purchasing needs. They also get IT departments out of the costly business of building, maintaining, and securing datacenters.
Cloud Computing Security Issues and Challenges By @GiladPN [#Cloud]
The US Federal Communications Commission has recently reported that “theft of digital information has become the most commonly reported fraud, surpassing physical theft.” Businesses can do a lot to protect themselves. The FCC issued a Tip Sheet for small businesses to promote employee security training, firewalls, securing of WiFis, and more. But for business operating in (or migrating to) cloud environments; data security, cloud computing security issues, and challenges take on new meanings and require new strategies.
What I Learned at Cloud Expo
The 15th International Cloud Expo and 2nd ThingsExpo finished up last week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. There were many exhibitors, many attendees, and many great sessions. Discussions were lively throughout, continuing after hours after each of the three days of the show.
Here’s what I learned:
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are a reality. This may seem obvious to anyone in the industry, and it was confirmed throughout each day last week. Cloud is not going to be a ubiquitous utility anytime soon, as might have been thought a few years ago. The market for private cloud – derided as cloudwashing a few years ago – will continue to grow rapidly, as it turns out that many enterprises have funny ideas about controlling their data and securing it on-site.
Public cloud is just getting started. This statement may seem to contradict my first statement, but it reflects the reality that cloud computing is not a zero-sum game. With only 5 to 10 percent of enterprise IT in the US employing cloud computing in any form so far, there is a limitless horizon for growth, and the instant testability and near-instant scalability provided by the public-cloud companies will benefit from hundreds of billions of dollars of this growth. Now, if only Amazon would tell us how much of its business is from public-cloud services, we can have a real benchmark from which to grow.
Homebrew is back. It was cute how presenters from behemoths such as Google and Cisco showed up with handcrafted things for the Internet of Things. Decades from now, when the world is paved with sensors, these days will be remembered fondly as the time when old-fashioned homemade engineering, the Makers movement, and entrepreneurial ingenuity delivered a number of very clever beacons, monitors, and wearable thingys in forms that reminded one of the days of playing “Daisy, Daisy” on an Altair 8800 in the early days of the PC revolution. Stanley Kubrick and Ed Roberts live!
The IoT is moving at warp speed. Another statement that may seem contradictory to the one preceding it, this observation is based on many conversations I had with attendees. Whereas most new computing waves are greeted first with skepticism then with cautious inquiry, the vibe about the IoT is that of a nascent Gold Rush. The first few years of Cloud Expo were characterized by people asking about the “what” of cloud, then the “why,” and then the “how.” Now, IT managers, representing significant budgets at big companies, have jumped straight to the “how.” They’re ready to deploy; no time to question what or why. At least that’s what I got from talking to people.
Big Data is creating jobs. We’ve struggled a bit with this term, as I guess it’s hard to define. But there was a lot of talk about the need for data scientists—as soon as we can define what a data scientist is. Think of data collection, monitoring, analysis, and actions based on the analysis, and you have the modern data-driven corporation. This has been the case for a long time. In the era of Big Data, everything is just a magnitude or two larger and more intense. Jobs are ensuing.
Oh yes, and DevOps. Because DevOps. That is all.
Why growing cloud commoditisation still won’t rain on the data centre’s parade
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
By Nick Razey, CEO, Next Generation Data
Rackspace’s recent decision to discontinue its pure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering in favour of “managed cloud” services is further evidence that it is the cloud rather than the data centre providers most at risk of becoming commodities – as I originally predicated here back in May.
Take Rackspace’s exit from IaaS as a sign of things to come. Many more Cloud services are already well on the way to being commoditised and their providers will see their margins increasingly competed away.
During the past couple of years Rackspace has been attempting to compete with low-price competitors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft with its Azure Service and Google in the IaaS market. But now they are going back to their roots as a managed provider rather than attempting to be a carbon copy of Amazon. That’s how they made it in the early days. The business model of a managed cloud provider is much different to the approach taken by AWS and Google which offer pay-as-you-go IaaS on-demand services.
Some cloud pundits believe Rackspace’s move is a sign of broader changes in the market. The pure IaaS market is now perhaps between Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM who have the financial muscle to invest in research and development and new data centres, and can also afford to do so without offering high-margin support services on top.
In contrast, the data centre product comes in many different ‘non-standard’ varieties such as where it’s located affecting price of real estate and wages, tier level, type of colo space required, total power capacity and what’s available per rack, connectivity choices, service levels, and so on.
All of these directly influence both the quality of the product and its price, therefore keeping modern purpose designed data centres well clear of the ‘commodity zone’. And because of the high upfront investment required for land, power, planning and construction, data centre operators expect long term contracts with customers for ensuring cast iron returns on investment.
So for most data centre operators the forecast remains good – there’s still no sign of the cloud’s growing commoditisation raining on their parades.
vOneCloud: The Simplest Alternative to vCloud [#Cloud]
The OpenNebula Project has just announced the Beta release of vOneCloud, a CentOS Linux virtual appliance for vSphere that contains all required OpenNebula services optimized to work on existing VMware vCenter deployments. vOneCloud is for companies that want to create a self-service cloud environment on top of their VMware infrastructure without having to abandon their investment in VMware and retool the entire stack. vOneCloud deploys an enterprise-ready OpenNebula cloud just in a few minutes where the infrastructure is managed by already familiar VMware tools, such as vSphere and vCenter Operations Manager, and the provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy cloud features are offered by OpenNebula.