“Despite the lock-in…it’s really not about the money but about the features and the product offering.” So states a blogpost I just read from a company that is dissatisfied with one major cloud vendor and is moving to another.

Yet cloud vendor lock-in — what I like to call Vendor Lock-In 2.0 — seems to me to be a major issue facing our industry.

I say this as I experience my own cloud build-out. I’ll be spending a lot of my time this year implementing a number of cloud-based solutions at a small enterprise near by current base in northern Illinois. We are already hosted by one of the major cloud vendors, and upping the number and size of our instances with this company.

Then, last week, I met with the company’s matriarch, to discuss the company existing, ancient workflow and how we could use PaaS and then other -aaS within the cloud to bring the company from the 19th to the 21st century. This is a family-owned business, started a couple of generations ago. The matriarch alleged she knew very little about technology, and listened to me patiently for a few minutes.

She then pounced: «can I move all this to another vendor if I’m not happy?»

«Well, not really.»

«Why? Is this a technical issue?»

«Yes, sort of.»

«But the vendors could make this easy for me if they wanted to, right? I can plug everything in this building into the same socket. But your cloud vendors won’t let me do this with their cloud services, right?»

And there you have it. We’re moving forward, albeit more slowly and cautiously than I’d like. My clients wasn’t worried about security – she assumes a massive cloud infrastructure vendor will do a better job than we could ever do locally. She wasn’t worried about the price per se – she knows it’s prohibitive to buy our own iron. She wasn’t even worried about downtime – she’ll make that stuff roll downhill to her titular CIO.

But for this company, it is about the money if she has to, in essence, develop everything twice. It’s also about not being trapped, anymore than having a single option for any other part of this business. The local Chinese restaurant is great, but not a place we go to every day.

I’ve written a little bit about the «metadata» problem, and it looks like I should write some more about it.

But as a customer — not a writer — I must ask: «what are the major cloud vendors doing to fix this? Why do you think Vendor Lockin 2.0 is any more appealing than the original version?»

read more

The PaaS market is filled with noise. «Platform as a Service» is surrounded with blind men around the elephant, each with their own definition PaaS. This is further compounded by the fact that the Application Platforms landscape is changing quickly as well. We keep hearing that «Developers» want control of the code, access to the nuts and bolts of the service they intend to consume. The same «Developers» seem to be adopting PaaS because of the tremendous speed and scale advantage. And the same «Developers» seem to be clamoring over the security and architectural compliance matters. There’s even talk of developer cloud mutiny! There are use cases that are simplified to the usage of a Private PaaS, but that’s only addressing the matter from a hosting and Data Control standpoint, beyond which the concern should be how the Platform Stack is built and provided to the developers. However, there’s a context to every statement.

read more

It is tempting to see a hybrid cloud as merely a collection of clouds, versus the seamless integration of clouds and data centers. Yet hybrid cloud is a game changer that offers tremendous new potentials for a new generation of solutions… not merely low cost IT infrastructure.
The current popular forms of cloud can be difficult to enter and even more difficult to depart. Plenty of risk-prone and frustrating manual processes are in between the promoted and real economics of public cloud. In the case of cloud and even with the occasional outage, the journey may be much riskier and costlier than the destination. That may be the major reason enterprises have been hesitant to invest in migrating their apps into public clouds.

read more

If your business has made the leap into the cloud, then it is very likely that IT processes have become transparent and business productivity is improving.

The whole idea behind the concept of cloud computing is to remove the backend maintenance and inconsistencies that may happen with even the best in house server systems.

Users should have less functionality issues, as many that would formerly stem from any number of hardware or software related issues are mostly eliminated as cloud computing generally only requires a web access through a browser and a functional computer.

Unless an organisation purchased a subscription through an underdeveloped cloud service provider, business has the tools it needs to optimise processes. So now the question remains, is your cloud service being utilised to its fullest potential?

As of this point in time, no cloud is impervious to disaster. There are events that can cause serious problems …

Using the cloud to store your data via virtual datacentres is great! You can have lots of space for a cheap price, which you can access virtually anywhere. You don’t get issues such as threat of contracting aggressive malware and snooping software etc. However, having an account on the cloud does not mean total safety, and it is easy to forget this. Here are 10 tips to ensure total security, even if our entire data has been put there.

1. Passwords

This should seem obvious, but try and create a unique username and password for every account. At least, create a unique password including various symbols. Cracking a password takes significantly longer where symbols and upper-case are used, compared with a lower-case alternative.

2. Security Questions

Choose a question which isn’t obvious, something which can’t be found on Facebook for instance. Choose a question and answer it …

The CCN has now started a Meet Ups group to organize a regular schedule of networking sessions for entrepreneurs and corporate users to learn more about Cloud Computing.
The first of these is Efrem Habteselassie, Founder of one of Canada’s most exciting Cloud start-ups, Cloud Search Portal.
As the name suggests the venture demonstrates the fundamental value of the Cloud – A hosted version of very powerful software so that you can access it in an on demand, utility manner, harnessing the benefits without having to be troubled with the challenges of installing and managing it all yourself.
In this case the powerful software is Search technology, like that of Google, but in this case based on the Microsoft Sharepoint FAST system.

read more

The Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering supports running Windows virtual machines and Linux virtual machines in the Cloud. In this article, I provide step-by-step guidance for running a new Linux virtual machine in the cloud using our Windows Azure platform.
Windows Azure runs Linux VMs as a first-class citizen on our cloud platform, with support in the Preview offering for four common Linux distributions.
If the standard Linux platform images don’t meet your exact needs, there’s several options for leveraging or customizing other images for Windows Azure VMs …

read more