Category Archives: Cloud computing

Cloud computing, Featured, Software Defined Networking, software defined storage

2015 Predictions: Cloud and Software-Defined Technologies

As we kick off the new year, it’s time for us to get our 2015 predictions in. Today, I’ll post predictions from John Dixon around the future of cloud computing as well as from our CTO Chris Ward about software-defined technologies. Later this week, we’ll get some more predictions around security, wireless, end-user computing& more from some of our other experts.

John Dixon, Director, Cloud Services
On the Internet of Things (IoT) and Experimentation…
In 2015, I expect to see more connected devices and discussion on IoT strategy. I think this is where cloud computing gets really interesting. The accessibility of compute and storage resources on the pay-as-you-go model supports experimentation with a variety of applications and devices. Will consumers want a connected toaster? In years past, companies might form focus groups, do some market research, etc. to pitch the idea to management, get funding, build a team, acquire equipment, then figure out the details of how to do this. Now, it’s entirely possible to assign one individual to experiment and prototype the connected toaster and associated cloud applications. Here’s the thing; the connected toaster probably has about zero interest in the market for consumer appliances. However, the experiment might have produced a pattern of a cloud-based application that authenticates and consumes data from a device with little or no compute power. And this pattern is perhaps useful for other products that DO have real applications. In fact, I put together a similar experiment last week with a $50 Raspberry Pi and about $10 of compute from AWS — the application reports on the temperature of my home-brew fermentation containers, and activates a heating source when needed. And, I did indeed discover that the pattern is really, really scalable and useful in general. Give me a call if you want to hear about the details!

On the declining interest in “raw” IaaS and the “cloud as a destination” perspective…

I’ve changed my opinion on this over the past year or so. I had thought that the declining price of commodity compute, network, and storage in the cloud meant that organizations would eventually prefer to “forklift move” their infrastructure to a cloud provider. To prepare for this, organizations should design their infrastructure with portability in mind, and NOT make use of proprietary features of certain cloud providers (like AWS). As of the end of 2014, I’m thinking differently on this — DO consider the tradeoff between portability and optimization, but… go with optimization. Optimization is more important than infrastructure portability. By optimization in AWS terms, I mean taking advantage of things like autoscaling, cloudwatch, S3, SQS, SNS, cloudfront, etc. Pivotal and CloudFoundry offer similar optimizations. Siding with optimization enables reliability, performance, fault tolerance, scalability, etc., that are not possible in a customer-owned datacenter. I think we’ll see more of this “how do I optimize for the cloud?” discussion in 2015.

2015 predictions

Chris & John presenting a breakout session at our 2014 Summit Event

Chris Ward, CTO

On SDN…

We’ll see much greater adoption of SDN solutions in 2015.   We are already seeing good adoption of VMware’s NSX solution in the 2nd half of 2014 around the micro segmentation use case.  I see that expanding in 2015 plus broader use cases with both NSX and Cisco’s ACI.  The expansion of SDN will drag with it an expansion of automation/orchestration adoption as these technologies are required to fully realize the benefits of broader SDN use cases.

On SDS…

Software defined storage solutions will become more mainstream by the end of 2015.  We’re already seeing a ton of new and interesting SDS solutions in the market and I see 2015 being a year of maturity.  We’ll see several of these solutions drop off the radar while others gain traction and I have no doubt it will be a very active M&A year in the storage space in general.

 

What do you think about Chris and John’s predictions?

If you would like to hear more from these guys, you can download Chris’ whitepaper on data center migrations and John’s eBook around the evolution of cloud.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Cloud computing, Data center, Featured, Private Cloud, SDN

Gartner Data Center Conference: Success in the Cloud & Software Defined Technologies

I just returned from the Gartner Data Center conference in Vegas and wanted to convey some of the highlights of the event.  This was my first time attending a Gartner conference, and I found it pretty refreshing as they do take an agnostic approach to all of their sessions unlike a typical vendor sponsored event like VMWorld, EMC World, Cisco Live, etc.  Most of the sessions I attended were around cloud and software defined technologies.  Below, I’ll bullet out what I consider to be highlights from a few of the sessions.

Building Successful Private/Hybrid Clouds –

 

  • Gartner sees the majority of private cloud deployments being unsuccessful. Here are some common reasons for that…
    • Focusing on the wrong benefits. It’s not all about cost in $$. In cloud, true ROI is measured in agility vs dollars and cents
    • Doing too little. A virtualized environment does not equal a private cloud. You must have automation, self-service, monitoring/management, and metering in place at a minimum.
    • Doing too much. Putting applications/workloads in the private cloud that don’t make sense to live there. Not everything is a fit nor can take full advantage of what cloud offers.
    • Failure to change operational models. It’s like being trained to drive an 18 wheeler then getting behind the wheel of a Ferrari and wondering why you ran into that tree.
    • Failure to change funding model. You must, at a minimum, have a show back mechanism so the business will understand the costs, otherwise they’ll just throw the kitchen sink into the cloud.
    • Using the wrong technologies. Make sure you understand the requirements of your cloud and choose the proper vendors/technologies. Incumbents may not necessarily be the right choice in all situations.
  • Three common use cases for building out a private cloud include outsourcing commodity functions, renovating infrastructure and operations, and innovation/experimentation…but you have to have a good understanding of each of these to be successful (see above).
  • There is a big difference between doing cloud to drive bottom line (cost) savings vs top line (innovation) revenue expansion. Know ‘why’ you are doing cloud!
  • On the hybrid front, it is very rare today to see fully automated environments that span private and public as the technology still has some catching up to do. That said, it will be reality within 24 months without a doubt.
  • In most situations, only 20-50% of all applications/workloads will (or should) live in the cloud infrastructure (private or public) with the remaining living in traditional frameworks. Again, not everything can benefit from the goodness that cloud can bring.

Open Source Management Tools (Free or Flee) –

 

  • Organizations with fewer than 2500 employees typically look at open source tools to save on cost while larger organizations are interested in competitive advantage and improved security.
  • Largest adoption is in the areas of monitoring and server configuration while cloud management platforms (i.e. openstack), networking (i.e. open daylight), and containers (i.e. docker) are gaining momentum.
  • When considering one of these tools, very important to look at how active the community is to ensure relevancy of the tool
  • Where is open source being used in the enterprise today? Almost half (46%) of deployments are departmental while only about 12% of deployments are considered strategic to the overall organization.
  • Best slide I saw at the event which pretty much sums up open source….

 

Gartner Data Center Conference

 

If this makes you excited, then maybe open source is for you.  If not, then perhaps you should run away!

3 Questions to Ask Your SDN Vendor –

  • First, a statistic…organization which fail to properly integrate their virtualization and networking teams will see a 3x longer MTR (mean time to resolution) of issues vs those who do properly integrate the teams
  • There are approximately 500 true production SDN deployments in the world today
  • The questions to ask…
    • How to prevent network congestion caused by dynamic workload placement
    • How to connect to bare metal (non-virtualized) servers
    • How to integrate management and visibility between the underlay/overlay
  • There are numerous vendors in this space, it’s not just VMware and Cisco.
  • Like private cloud, you really have to do SDN for the right reasons to be successful.
  • Last year at this conference, there were 0 attendees who indicated they had investigated or deployed SDN. This year, 14% of attendees responded positively.

 

If you’re interested in a deeper discussion around what I heard at the conference, let me know and I’ll be happy to continue to dialogue.

 

By Chris Ward, CTO. Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisWardTech . You can also download his latest whitepaper on data center transformation.

 

 

Azure, Backup, Cloud computing, Featured, Microsoft, recovery, Storage

Fun Facts about Microsoft Azure

facts about Microsoft AzureLooking for some helpful facts about Microsoft Azure? For those out there that may be confused about the Microsoft Azure solutions offered to date, here is the first in a series of posts about the cool new features of the Microsoft premium cloud offering, Azure.

Azure Backup, ok… wait, what? I need to do backup in the cloud? No one told me that!

Facts about Microsoft Azure

Yes Virginia, you need to have a backup solution in the cloud. To keep this high level below I attempted to outline what the Azure backup offering really is. There are several protections built into the Azure platform that help customers protect their data as well as options to recover from a failure.

In a normal, on premise scenario, host based hardware and networking failures are protected at the hypervisor level. In Azure you do not see this because control of the hypervisor has been removed. Azure, however, is designed to be highly available meeting and exceeding the posted SLAs associated with the service

Hardware failures of storage are also protected against within Azure. At the lowest end you have Local Redundant storage where they maintain 3 copies of your data within a region. The more common and industry preferred method is Geo-Redundant storage which keeps 3 copies in you’re region and 3 additional copies in another datacenter, somewhere geographically dispersed based on a complex algorithm. The above protections help to insure survivability of your workloads.

Important to note: The copies in the second datacenter are crash consistent copies so it should not be considered a backup of the data but more of a recovery mechanism for a disaster.

Did I hear you just ask about Recovery Services in Azure? Why yes, we have two to talk about today.

  • Azure Backup
  • Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery – This scenario both orchestrates site recovery as well as provides a destination for virtual machines. Microsoft currently supports Hyper-V to Azure, Hyper-V to Hyper-V or VMware to VMware recovery scenarios with this method.

Azure Backup is a destination for your backups. Microsoft offers traditional agents for Windows Backup and the preferred platform, Microsoft System Center 2012 – Data Protection Manager. Keeping the data in the cloud, Azure holds up to 120 copies of the data and can be restored as needed. At this time the Azure Windows backup version only protects files. It will not do Full System or Bare Metal backups of Azure VMs.

As of this blog post to get a traditional full system backup there is a recommend two-step process where you use Windows Backup which can capture a System State backup and the enable Azure Backup to capture this into your Azure Backup Vault.

There are 2 other methods that exist but currently the jury is out on the validity of these offerings. They are VM Capture and Blob Snapshot.

  • VM capture – which is equivalent to a VM snapshot
  • Blob Snapshot – This is equivalent to a LUN snapshot

As I said these are options but considered by many too immature at this time and respectfully not widely adopted. Hopefully, this provides some clarity around Azure and as with all things Microsoft Cloud related, Microsoft issues new features almost daily now. Check back again for more updates on what Azure can do for your organization!

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Cloud & IT Management, Cloud computing, Data center, Hosting, Server (computing), Virtual private server, Virtualization

Riding on the Cloud – The Business Side of New Technologies

For the last couple of years “The Cloud” has been a buzzword all over the business and IT world.

What is The Cloud? -Basically, it is the possibility to use remote servers to handle your processing, storage and other IT needs. In the olden days you only the resources that you physically had on your computer; these days that’s not the case. You can “outsource” resources from another computer in a remote location and use them anywhere. This has opened so many doors for the world of business and has helped bring new companies into the internet.

Why? Because of how much it reduces the cost of being on the internet. A server is a costly piece of equipment and not everybody can afford it. Between the initial cost and upkeep of the hardware, you could easily spend a few thousand pounds every year.

The cloud has brought on the Virtual Private Server, which gives you all the benefits of an actual server without the hefty price tag. A hosting company will rent out a piece of their processing capabilities to your company and create a server environment for you. You only pay for what you use and you don’t have to worry about things like hardware failure, power costs or having room for a couple of huge server racks.

But what if your business grows? One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is that it can grow along with your business and your needs. It’s highly scalable and flexible, so if you ever need some extra storage or extra bandwidth, it’s a really easy fix that does not require you to purchase new equipment.

Since your own personal business cloud is by definition a remote solution, this means that you can access it from anywhere and everywhere as long as you have an internet connection. Want to make changes to your server? You can probably do it without leaving your house, even from the comfort of your own bed.

The same applies to your staff. If anyone ever needs to work from home or from another machine that’s not their work computer, all of the important files and resources they could possibly need can be hosted in the cloud, making those files accessible from anywhere. If someone’s office computer breaks there’s a backup and no data is lost.

The Cloud also makes sharing files between members of your staff a lot easier. Since none of the files are hosted on a local machine everybody has access to the files they require. Files update in real time, applications are shared and you can create a business environment that’s exponentially more effective.

Of course, the cloud still offers security and access control so you can keep track of who can see which files. A good cloud services provider also provides protection against malware and other security risks, to make sure that no pesky interlopers get into your files.

If your business is growing and so are your IT needs, then the cloud is an option worth exploring. Embrace the future, adopt new technologies and take your business to the next level.

Cloud computing, Featured, SMB

What To Move To the Cloud: A More Mature Model for SMBs

what to move to the cloudMany SMBs struggle with deciding if and what to move to the cloud. Whether it’s security concerns, cost, or lack of expertise, it’s oftentimes difficult to map the best possible solution. Here are 8 applications and services to consider when your organization is looking to move to the Cloud and reduce their server footprint.

 

What to move to the cloud

1. Email

Obviously in this day and age email is a requirement in virtually every business. A lot of businesses continue to run Exchange locally. If you are thinking about moving portions of your business out to the cloud, email is a good place to start. Why should you move to the cloud? Simple, it’s pretty easy to do and at this point it’s been well documented that mail runs very well up in the cloud. It takes a special skill set to run Exchange beyond just adding and managing users. If something goes wrong and you have an issue, it can often times be very complicated to fix. It can also be pretty complicated to install. A lot of companies do not have access to high quality Exchange skills. Moving to the cloud solves those issues.  Having Exchange in the Cloud also gets your company off of the 3-5 year refresh cycle for the hardware to run Exchange as well as the upfront cost of the software.

Quick Tip – Most Cloud e-mail providers offer Anti-Spam/Anti-virus functionality as part of their offering. You can also take advantage of Cloud based AS/AV providers like MacAfee’s MXLogic.

2. File Shares

Small to medium sized businesses have to deal with sharing files securely and easily among its users. Typically, that’s a file server running locally in your office or at multiple offices. This can present a challenge of making sure everyone has the correct access and that there is enough storage available. Why should you move to the cloud? There are easy alternatives in the cloud to avoid dealing with those challenges. Such alternatives include Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or using a file server in Microsoft Azure. In most cases you can use Active Directory to be the central repository of rights to manage passwords and permissions in one place.

Quick Tip – OneDrive is included with most Office 365 subscriptions. You can use Active Directory authentication to provide access through that.

3. Instant Messaging/Online Meetings

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Instant messaging can oftentimes be a quicker and more efficient form of communication than email. There are many platforms out there that can be used including Microsoft Lync, Skype and Cisco Jabber. A lot of these can be used for online meetings as well including screen sharing. Your users are looking for these tools and there are corporate options. With a corporate tool like Lync or Jabber, you can be in control. You can make sure conversations get logged, are secure and can be tracked. Microsoft Lync is included in Office 365.

Quick Tip – If you have the option, you might as well take advantage of it!

4. Active Directory

It is still a best practice to keep an Active Directory domain controller locally at each physical location to speed the login and authentication process even when some or most of the applications are services are based in the Cloud. This still leaves most companies with an issue if their site or sites are down for any reason.  Microsoft now has provided the ability to run a domain controller in their Cloud with Azure Active Directory to provide that redundancy that many SMBs do not currently have.

Quick Tip – Azure Active Directory is pre-integrated with Salesforce, Office 365 and many other applications. Additionally, you can setup and use multi-factor authentication if needed.

5. Web servers

Web servers are another very easy workload to move to the cloud whether it’s Rackspace, Amazon, Azure, VMware etc. The information is not highly confidential so there is a much lower risk than putting extremely sensitive data up there. By moving your servers to the cloud, you can avoid all the traffic from your website going to the local connection; it can all go to the cloud instead.

Quick Tip – most cloud providers offer SQL server back-ends as part of their offerings. This makes it easy to tie in the web server to a backend database. Make sure you ask your provider about this.

6. Back Up 

A lot of companies are looking for alternate locations to store back up files. It’s easy to back up locally on disk or tape and then move offsite. It’s often cheaper to store in the cloud and it helps eliminate the headache of rotating tapes.

Quick Tip – account for bandwidth needs when you start moving backups to the cloud. This can be a major factor.

7. Disaster Recovery

Now that you have your backups offsite, it’s possible to have capacity to run virtual machines or servers up in the cloud in the event of a disaster. Instead of moving data to another location you can pay to run your important apps in the cloud in case of disaster. It’s usually going to cost you less to do this.

Quick Tip – Make sure you look at your bandwidth closely when backing up to the Cloud. Measure how much data you need to backup, and then calculate the bandwidth that you will need.  Most enterprise class backup applications allow you to throttle the backups so they do not impact business.

8. Applications

A lot of common applications that SMBs use are offered as a cloud service. For example, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. These companies make and host the product so that you don’t have to onsite. You can take advantage of the application for a fraction of the cost and headache.

In conclusion, don’t be afraid to move different portions of your environment to the cloud. For the most part, it’s less expensive and easier than you may think. If I was starting a business today, the only thing I would have running locally would be an AD controller or file server. The business can be faster and leaner without the IT infrastructure overhead that one needed to run a business ten years ago.

Looking for more tips? Download this whitepaper written by our CTO Chris Ward “8 Point Checklist for a Successful Data Center Move“

 

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

Cloud computing, Featured

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!

CTO Focus InterviewBen: 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.

{Download our latest whitepaper – 8 Point Checklist for a Successful Data Center Move }

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

Cloud computing, Featured, IoT

Cloud Computing in 2020: Looking into that Crystal Ball

Cloud Computing in 2020Recently, @thedodgeretort of Enterprise CIO Forum held a Twitter chat about what cloud computing in 2020 will look like. I decided to write up a quick blog sharing my thoughts on the topic. Looking into the crystal ball, I see a few things happening with cloud by 2020 — call it 5 years out. First, cloud will transform into more of a utility and a grid of computing power. Second, we’ll see a much deeper manifestation of the core characteristics of cloud computing, especially with regard to flexible capacity, consistent access, and high portability. Third, I anticipate a lot of activity in machine-to-machine transactions and communications (call it IoT if you like). Fourth: superesilient applications. Fifth: compute traded as a commodity. And finally, within 5 years, I think IT and the overall business will come together to actually take advantage of these technologies. Read on for more detail.

Cloud Computing in 2020

 

1. A utility and computing grid

In 5 years, large companies will still hang on to their datacenters to run some services. However, with security more robust, I think that corporations will make available their own computing resources as much as they consume cloud resources – just like some households generate their own electricity and sell it back to the grid. I think Cisco’s Intercloud concept has an angle on this.

2. Flexible capacity, consistent access, and high portability

A cloud/compute socket just like an electrical socket. Standardized applications and connectors that “plug in” to the grid and are removed just as easily. Virtualization has the first stab at this, encapsulating the OS, data, and applications neatly in a VMX and VMDKs. Containers are the next stab. Redhat has an angle on this with their CloudForms PaaS. Raw compute power becomes more and more of a commodity as portability improves; meaning downward pressure on IaaS prices will remain to some degree (see #4).

3. IoT or machine-to-machine communications/transactions

One machine determines that it needs to acquire more compute power to complete its work. It makes a “deal” to go out and acquire that compute power, uses it, and gives it back to the grid. Or, on the flip side, a machine that knows when it can stand idle and rent its own power. Another angle on this, a virtual machine or application has knowledge of its SLA, and moves to the provider who can deliver on that SLA at the least cost. Love it or hate it, Apple’s Siri has an early angle on this. From what I’ve read about the technology, queries to Siri find their way back to Apple datacenters, not only to obtain answers, but to improve the accuracy of queries for all Siri users.

4. Superesilient applications

As prices for cloud trend downward and portability improves (see #2 and #5), disaster recovery will take a new shape. Instead of running on a 2-site/2-region DR architecture, applications will run on a 5, 10, 20, or 30-site “DR” architecture, with all nodes being active. Does it matter where your application is running at that point? Potentially, it’s running all over the east coast, or all over the country. Some services from AWS already have an angle on this with services that are redundant across regions (a.g., S3, elastic load balancing, etc.), not to mention things like DNS on the Internet. I think it will become cost-effective to do this, in general, within 5 years.

5. Compute traded as a commodity, just like crude oil

This might be a stretch in 5 years, but with the trend of IaaS being more commoditized and portability improving, we’ll see a day when compute power is traded in a commodities market. In the channel, this is already fairly common – IaaS providers are eager to cut favorable deals with resellers who agree to purchase large chunks of infrastructure upfront, only to resell at a later date.

6. IT and the business coming together

DevOps was the first marriage of two groups that had been previously at odds (oftentimes). Within 5 years, I think maturity in IT will improve to the point that they become as focused on the business as any other traditional LOB. IT becomes an Innovation Center — they are focused on the business, and behave proactively. Corporate IT shifts its focus from requirements to possibilities. See my previous posts on the emerging idea of a cloud architect who will be important in this shift.

 

To sum up… we’re just at the beginning of possibilities in cloud computing.

 

To hear more from John, you can download his eBook, “The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department“

Photo credit http://bestpaperz.com/ct/8766019-crystal-ball.html

CIO Focus, Cloud computing, Featured

CIO Focus Interview: Stuart Appley, Shorenstein

We’re starting a new CIO Focus Interview Series on the blog to get insights from some of the top thought leaders in the industry. For our first interview, I spoke with Stuart Appley, CIO at San Francisco based Shorenstein, to pick his brain about the current and future IT landscape. You can hear more from Stuart on Twitter.

CIO Focus Interview: Main Challenges

 

CIO Focus Interview: Stuart AppleyBen: Could you give me a little background on your company as well as your role as CIO within the organization?

Stuart: Shorenstein is a real estate investment firm and owner and operators of commercial properties. Essentially, we act like a private equity firm by raising money from high net worth individuals. Instead of buying a company, we buy commercial buildings. We buy them and own and operate them for 10-15 years before selling them off and closing the fund. When we buy a building we typically manage it, so the other part of the business is being a property manager, investing in the property, doing redevelopment, etc. As CIO, I’m responsible for running the IT shop and IT’s long term strategic vision

Ben: What sort of unique challenges do you face as the CIO at your organization?

Stuart: A main challenge we face is that the company culture is a little older. This is something we are actively trying to change. We also have a diverse set of workers and a very distributed, mobile workforce. We have leasing agents out in the field, engineers checking equipment on the go, etc. Supporting the needs of this workforce is a challenge. I would say some of our users may not be as tech savvy as they are in other industries. We tend to hire a lot of senior level people, so our age base is a little higher than other companies. This makes it more difficult to get people to adopt technologies and bring them up to speed.

 

CIO Focus Interview: A look back at 2014

 

Ben: What was your main accomplishment in 2014 from an IT perspective?

Stuart: We just completed a large cloud ERP project. Doing this has allowed us to reduce a lot of application sets. This was a huge accomplishment because of the large amount of data and apps we have been moving in the cloud. Overall, the project, which lasted a little over a year, went smoothly.

Ben: How long have you been utilizing the cloud?

Stuart: 4-5 years, maybe even a little longer. Right now, we have 70% of our applications in the cloud. This includes LOBs apps that are standard, like Salesforce, and industry specific ones like Intralinks.

Ben: Did you have any pushback from the CEO, CFO or board of directors when you made the pitch to go cloud?

Stuart: No, it really wasn’t an issue with them. I was able to make the case that we should outsource things that we do not have a core competency in, and they were completely on board. Buy vs. Build.

 

CIO Focus Interview: Looking Ahead

 

Ben: What are you looking to accomplish in 2015?

Stuart: A main focus of ours is to rationalize cloud storage. We have a lot of content management systems right now – about 5-6. It’s time to rationalize that and get it down to 1-2. Another big focus we have is leveraging the beginning of a digital strategy we have been creating. For example, there are a lot of documents that need to be manually signed. We want to automate the signing of documents to save time and increase efficiency.

Ben: Anything else?

Stuart: We’re also going to review our data center and determine whether we want to move things to public clouds or private. We have listed out apps and services and plan to determine where each one would be the best fit. Finally, I want to continue to focus on mobility and try to push ease of access anywhere, anytime.

Ben: Throughout your career, what concept or technology would you say has had the most drastic impact on IT?

Stuart: I would say the idea of the consumerization of IT. This concept has transformed the whole industry. Users go home and use consumer apps and then carry those same expectations into the work place. In their mind, that ease of access should be available anywhere and everywhere across the board. To me, it’s a great thing for IT because it is forcing us to deliver. We have higher expectations and have a high bar to match.

Ben: How do you view IT?

Stuart: IT needs to be an advisor to the business. There is a lot of innovation that is happening with cloud vendors and we shouldn’t try to match that. The challenge is helping users understand that we support them going out and looking at other options. At the same time, we want them to come to us so we can let them know if there are any security concerns or if it will need to integrate with other apps that already exist in the environment. We need to be a consultant to the business and not a centralized just-say-no organization.

 

Are you a CIO/CTO interested in participating in our CIO Focus Interview series? Email me at bstephenson@greenpages.com

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Asia/Pacific Rim, Cloud computing, EMEA, FaceTime, GeeksPhone, Google Apps, Google Docs, Payment, Skype, Tools

How can technology help when working abroad?

Those who have chosen to spend time living and working abroad are actually very lucky these days. The rapid development of modern communications technologies means that it is so much easier to keep in touch with people, no matter where you are, than it used to be even ten years ago. When somebody moves abroad, the ability to keep in touch is essential for both the worker and those remaining at home.

How has technology changed?

Before the onset of smartphones, laptops and the Internet, the only real way of keeping in touch with family and friends while working abroad was the telephone and letters. This usually meant that contact was infrequent, and most people would go for weeks without hearing from loved ones.

The Internet has changed a great deal for those who are away from home. Email has made it so much easier to drop somebody a line and has become a popular way to communicate not only with family and friends but also with work colleagues – even those in the same building! This has been followed rapidly with additional technologies such as smartphones and Apps that mean workers do not have to be at their desk to keep in touch. Financial technologies developed by organizations such as  Trans-Fast Remittance LLC mean that money can be transferred from one country to another in seconds – important for those who work abroad and want to send money home.

Cloud computing

Cloud technologies are becoming increasingly popular for businesses and private use. Cloud services mean that the location of the worker is far less of a factor than it used to be. Technology such as Skype means that people can keep in touch easily. Skype video chats are great for keeping in touch with family but are also ideal for the workplace. Meetings can be held via Skype and similar Apps. It is free to download and ensures easy communication.

Google Apps and Google Docs are a type of cloud computing. A worker can create a document using this software and it is held on Google’s cloud service. Another worker can easily access it from their own office, even if they are thousands of miles away. FaceTime is another option for communication while abroad. A way of making video calls, it has become very popular with younger people for keeping in touch while they are traveling.

Google and Apple are just two developers that have embraced the concept of cloud computing and are applying it to their new products all the time, continuously developing each one further. The development of cloud services and new ways to keep in touch is only going to continue as competition grows in this sector. Those who work abroad will see it become even easier to communicate in the years to come.

Communications technologies such as cloud computing have developed very rapidly, and their continual evolvement means that consumers should expect to see the Apps that they already know very well develop even further as well as the introduction of new software.