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Random Saturday Morning Cloud Thoughts

Half a dozen random cloud thoughts on a hot and cloudless Saturday morning in Illinois

1. Mobile will end the bleeding in the media industry, as apps rather than advertising drive revenue. Online ads will be dead within five years.

2. “Cloud crash” has already replaced “computer error” as the catch-all explanation for human screw-ups. It will grow in popularity as local governments and businesses make their inevitable, yet painful move to cloud computing.

3. Amazon joins cigarette and fast-food companies as being able to blame customers for problems legitimately. But in Amazon’s case, the problem is customers don’t buy enough, rather than too much.

4. Tired of “SEO Gurus?” Well, brace yourself for the great transmogrification to “Mobile SEO Gurus.’ MoSeRoos.

5. VMware and its open-source competitors have not begun to fight. Prepare for the Gigantic Cloud Clusterfail in 2014 when organizations realize they’ve got more on-site spaghetti than ever.

6. Windows 8 will be the biggest news in mobility next year, if it makes big deals with the carriers. Can it do so in an era when it can no longer be a monopolistic bully?

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Olympic Cloud, CloudViews Unplugged, Cloud-Based EHR, and More…

IT spending is on the rise, according to this New York Times article. Recent figures published by Gartner state that IT spending will increase by 3% from 2011, more than was previously predicted. Cloud computing is one of the main contributors to the increased spending as more companies start to adopt the technology. Spending on public cloud services is predicted to rise from $91b in 2011 to $109b in 2012. Still, cloud services represent only a fraction of the $3.6 trillion that is predicted to be spent on IT in 2012.

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Cloud News

  • IT spending is on the rise, according to this New York Times article. Recent figures published by Gartner state that IT spending will increase by 3% from 2011, more than was previously predicted. Cloud computing is one of the main contributors to the increased spending as more companies start to adopt the technology. Spending on public cloud services is predicted to rise from $91b in 2011 to $109b in 2012. Still, cloud services represent only a fraction of the $3.6 trillion that is predicted to be spent on IT in 2012.

  • The Olympics may be the perfect event to showcase the power and scalability of cloud computing, but unfortunately, that won’t be happening in London this year, according to this ZDnet blog. CIO for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, Gerry Pennell, revealed that cloud infrastructure isn’t mature enough to support the games, but he predicts that we’ll see cloud computing being utilized in future events.

  • Microsoft announced a pre-beta version of the Service Management Portal which provides a Windows Azure-like Infrastructure-as-a-Service experience for users, whether they are using Microsoft’s cloud or not, according to this GigaOM article.

  • Cloud computing may add as many as 14 million new jobs worldwide by 2015, according to this Forbes.com article.

Featured Content on Cloud Commons


Gartner Report: Cloud Sourcing: Lessons Learned from Early Adopters

Cloud offerings continue to grow in maturity and volume. CIOs look at them as an alternative in their IT value chain. Gartner recently assesses organizations that purchased cloud-based service offerings. This report by Gartner (compliments of Cloud Commons® Ecosystem) shares some early lessons from their experiences.

Feature article


Survey Says – We’re More Comfortable with Cloud, Yet Same Worries Persist

By George Hulme, Independent Writer

George Hulme

A survey released just prior to the 2012 GigaOM Structure Conference had a number of interesting results about cloud services adoption. It seems organizations are concerned about security, compliance, and cloud lock-in, but certainly not enough to curb adoption.

785 respondents including industry experts, users and vendors participated in the survey. Respondents were asked about such cloud issues as business drivers, objections, and its business impact. One potential ding of the survey is that 65 percent of respondents were vendors, and only 35 percent were classified as customers. So the results may skew heavily toward what vendors would like to see market realities to be, rather than what they are. Plus, cloud vendors are certain to be cloud champions (one would certainly hope so, anyway).

Here are a number of the headline findings from the survey I found interesting. Read the full article.

Cloud Views

  • In the July episode of CloudViews Unplugged, Andi Mann and George Watt of CA Technologies wrap up the month’s cloud news in 10 minutes. This month’s episode topics include Europe’s cloud, Oracle’s cloud, Google Coordinate and IaaS, Facebook and more!

  • Is cloud-based EHR taking the healthcare industry by storm? In this Cloud Commons blog, George Hulme discusses a recent article which declared that cloud-based EHR is having a huge impact on the health industry, but the data may not be there to back the claim.

  • Should you design your cloud for failure? In this Forbes blog, Reuven Cohen discusses the recent outage of Amazon Web Services due to a lightning storm on the east coast that brought down popular websites including Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram. Reuven suggests that businesses should rely on more than one cloud provider and an automated fail-over process to ensure business continuity.

  • A recent survey conducted by Rackspace revealed that 91% of IT decision makers think cloud computing is a positive thing, according to this ZDNet blog. The survey also revealed some of the top concerns when it comes to cloud including adding additional computing power and vendor lock-in.

MSP Corner

  • A recent report from AMI Partners reveals that US SMBs will invest $34 billion in cloud services in 2012, according to this MSPmentor article. This article takes a look out how MSPs should be positioning themselves to take advantage of the increased interest in cloud among SMBs.

  • With HostingCon just around the corner, many MSPs that are evaluating cloud services and strategies will be heading to the event in Boston, according to this Talkin’ Cloud blog. The blog also details some of the current trends for MSPs and their involvement with cloud.

Upcoming Cloud Events

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Accel Partners, Business Processes, DocuSign, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Scale Venture Partners, Venture Funding

DocuSign Gets $47.5 Million for Document Signatures Via Cloud

Image representing DocuSign as depicted in Cru...

DocuSign has secured $47.5 million in funding from premier investors, public funds, and strategic tech-industry leaders. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the funding. Accel Partners and a large, global institutional investor joined in the funding round. Comcast Ventures and SAP Ventures provided additional investment joining existing tech industry partners salesforce.com and the National Association of REALTORS®. The company will use the funds to accelerate growth of the DocuSign Global Network via increased customer-focused R&D, deeper vertical industry solutions, and faster international expansion. The company also announced that Kleiner’s Mary Meeker, a noted Internet-industry expert, has joined its board of directors.

DocuSign’s legally binding, secure, cloud-based platform helps consumers and businesses of all sizes and industries collect information and sign documents online – eliminating the hassles, costs, and lack of security in printing, faxing, scanning, and overnighting documents to capture information and signatures. Companies use DocuSign to create better customer experiences and save money by automating and streamlining their business processes.

“This financing demonstrates the value the market places on innovative technologies that drive fundamental business transformation – particularly those with immediate ROI, viral adoption, and nearly unlimited application,” said Keith Krach, chairman and CEO, DocuSign. “DocuSign empowers anyone to sign anything, anywhere, anytime.”

“DocuSign has created a compelling and rapidly growing business by re-imagining an age-old basic service – signing documents,” said Mary Meeker, general partner, Kleiner Perkins. “DocuSign’s easy-to-use eSignature platform is transforming the way documents are processed and delivered, with record speed and efficiency. This financing highlights the appeal of the eSignature Transaction Management market and the value of DocuSign’s global, viral network.”

“We’re investing in DocuSign because electronic signatures have gone from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’, and DocuSign is the clear global leader in this industry,” said Philippe Botteri, Accel Partners. “We expect DocuSign’s growth to be exponential given the viral nature of their platform and the rapid adoption of mobile devices and tablets which makes DocuSigning that much more convenient.”

Global enterprises, business departments, individual professionals and consumers are standardizing on DocuSign with 60,000 new users joining the DocuSign Global Network every business day. Today, that network includes 20 million users who have DocuSigned more than 150 million documents in 188 countries – including employees at 90% of the Fortune 500. DocuSign is used to finish business faster across nearly every industry – including financial services, insurance, technology, healthcare, manufacturing, communications, real estate, consumer goods and higher education – and every business department – including sales, procurement, HR/staffing, legal, and customer support.

DocuSign’s growing customer base of 1.4 million paying users include companies like American Airlines, AON, Ariba, Auto Insurance Specialists (AIS), Bayer, BECU, BNY Mellon, Boston Scientific, BMW Financial Services, Box, California Closets, CB Richard Ellis, CenturyLink, Cisco, Comcast, Costco, Cox, DuPont, eBay, Expedia, Extra Space Storage, Haagen-Dazs Shoppe Company, HP, IKON Financial Services, Legal & General America (Banner Life and William Penn Life Insurance), LinkedIn, Madison Capital, Medtronic, Pinney Insurance, Siemens, Sony, TD Ameritrade Institutional, Toyota, Transamerica, United Automobile Insurance Services, Wellmark, Xerox, Yahoo!, and Yamaha.

DocuSign investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures, Sigma+Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Second Century Ventures, WestRiver Capital LLC, salesforce.com, and the National Association of REALTORS®. To learn more about DocuSign, visit www.docusign.com.

 


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SHI International Goes Back to the Future with New Cloud Briefing Center

SHI International Corp. is going back to the future with its imaginative New York City Briefing Center, which was unveiled on Thursday at 1 Penn Plaza. The center is a futuristic office straight out of the pages of science fiction and delivers an immersive, interactive experience to give visitors a comprehensive view of SHI’s innovative cloud computing services, technologies, and capabilities.
The Briefing Center features bright white walls reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey”; automatic glass doors that can transition from clear to opaque and even display images; and 3-D projectors that will put the world of traditional presentations to shame. A customizable 3-D tour of SHI’s cloud architecture creates an immersive experience from the moment visitors step through the door. It offers clients a look inside SHI’s next-generation data center and cloud solutions to help them find the best fit for their organization’s cloud computing needs.

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CloudPassage Extends Halo to Cloud-y Windows Servers

Starting July 24, CloudPassage will extend its SaaS Halo cloud server security to cloud servers running Windows in public and hybrid cloud environments.
The company found in a recent survey that 74% of cloud users are running a mix of both Windows and Linux servers in the cloud.
It estimates that Windows servers, which are exposed to exploits such as the recent RDP vulnerabilities announced by Microsoft, make up more than 40% of the public IaaS market. Halo guards against attacks in the cloud and protects RDP and other sensitive services, while automating other Windows cloud server security tasks.

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ActiveState’s PaaS Supports .NET

ActiveState has wheeled out Stackato 2.0, its revved application platform for creating a private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
It fancies it’s a “Ferrari,” claiming it’s “screamingly fast, can turn on a dime, and grips the road in any weather.” That’s good. Maybe that way it’ll be able to pull away from the pack. The PaaS market is starting to look like the New York subway at rush hour.
Anyway, the Canadian outfit figures the widgetry redefines PaaS for the enterprise and extends Stackato’s position in “PaaS polyglot compatibility,” a fancy way of saying it can be built out of any language on any stack on any cloud.

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MapR Claims Title as De Facto Standard for Hadoop

The champagne has been flowing over at MapR since Google announced the integration of its Distribution for Hadoop with Google Compute Engine, the start-up’s second big win in a row.
Amazon Web Services’ has extended its Elastic MapReduce (EMR) service to include MapR as the only Hadoop distribution Amazon is offering, selling and supporting as a service.
Coupled with the Google win, a clear slight to Cloudera, the original Hadoop commercializer, MapR figures it’s the de facto standard for Hadoop in the cloud.
The combination of the new Google Compute Engine and MapR enables users to quickly provision large MapR clusters for Big Data analytics on-demand in the cloud.

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Establish secure remote access with limited staff and budgets

With some of the recent breaches of restaurant chains, I’ve got to think that many of them were related to poor remote access practices. I say this because in all of my years of consulting, I have found that very weak controls around the remote access is a lot more common than one would think.

Even today you will commonly find things like POS Servers directly accessible on the Internet via VNC, RDP, or pcAnywhere. I have even seen SQL databases that contain credit card data made directly accessible over the Internet.

Sometimes the organization itself is to blame. Usually because they just don’t know any better. For many, this has been the standard way to connect with their restaurants or stores remotely. They may lack the skills needed to setup secure remote access.  Other times, and this is also very common, a vendor or service provider is …

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Windows Server Painted Azure

Microsoft has colored Windows Server 2012 Azure and white-boxed it for service providers and hosting outfits disenfranchised by Amazon, creating in the process a cloud operating system that it can rattle under the nose of the vCloud-pushing VMware.
What it’s done exactly is add Azure-y features to Windows Server so service providers can build Azure-like infrastructure clouds out of their Windows Server data centers and offer turnkey cloud services. They don’t have to use Microsoft’s infrastructure. They can have their own branded IaaS clouds.
A newfangled Service Management Portal built into Windows 8’s new Metro user interface can deliver Azure-like services like automated web site hosting, high-scale web sites and Windows or Linux virtual machine hosting. The widgetry’s extensible APIs let developers connect their hosted applications to other people’s specialized services, their own on-premise resources and Windows Azure if they want.

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Removing Cloud Barriers in Europe

The European Commission acknowledges that Europe must become more ‘cloud active’ to stay competitive in the global economy. And while public cloud adoption in the EU is increasing, it is fragmented in some areas and lags the US by some 3- 5 years. IDC’s recent study “Cloud in Europe: Uptake, Benefits, Barriers, and Market Estimates” assesses the European cloud market, identifies key cloud barriers, and makes straightforward recommendations on how to remove them.

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