Cloud computing, Featured

Is Cloud Computing Ready for Prime Time?

By John Dixon, Senior Solutions Architect

 

A few weeks ago, I took part in another engaging tweetchat on Cloud Computing. The topic: is cloud computing ready for enterprise adoption? You can find the transcript here.

 

As usual with tweetchats hosted by CloudCommons, five questions are presented a few days in advance of the event. This time around, the questions were:

  1. Is Public Cloud mature enough for enterprise adoption?
  2. Should Public Cloud be a part of every business’s IT strategy?
  3. How big of a barrier are legacy applications and hardware to public cloud adoption?
  4. What’s the best way to deal with cloud security?
  5. What’s the best way to get started with public cloud?

 

As far as Question #1, the position of most people in the chat session this time was that Public Cloud is mature enough for certain applications in enterprises today. The technology certainly exists to run applications “in the cloud” but regulations and policies may not be ready to handle an application’s cloud deployment. Another interesting observation from the tweetchat was that most enterprises are indeed running applications “in the cloud” right now. GreenPages considers applications such as Concur and Salesforce.com as running “in the cloud.” And of course, many organizations large and small run these applications successfully. I’d also consider ADP as a cloud application. And of course, many organizations make use of ADP for payroll processing.

Are enterprises mature enough for cloud computing?

Much of the discussion during question #1 turned the question on end – the technology is there, but enterprises are not ready to deploy applications there. GreenPages’ position is that, even if we assume that cloud computing is not yet ready for prime time, then it certainly will be soon. Organizations should prepare for this eventuality by gaining a deep understanding of the IT services they provide, and how much a particular IT service costs. When one or more of your IT services can be substituted for one that runs (reliably and inexpensively) in the cloud, will your company be able to make the right decision to take advantage of that condition? Also, another interesting observation: some public cloud offerings may be enterprise-ready, but not all public cloud vendors are enterprise-grade. We agree.

Should every business have a public cloud strategy?

Most of the discussion here pointed to a “yes” answer. Or that an organization’s strategy will eventually, by default, include consideration for public cloud. We think of cloud computing as a sourcing strategy in and of itself – especially when thinking of IaaS and PaaS. Even now, IaaS vendors are essentially providers of commodity IT services. Most commonly, IaaS vendors can provide you with an operating system instance: Windows or Linux. For IaaS, the degree of abstraction is very high, as an operating system instance can be deployed on a wide range of systems – physical, virtual, paravirtual, etc. The consumer of these services doesn’t mind where the OS instance is running, as long as it is performing to the agreed SLA. Think of Amazon Web Services here. Depending on the application that I’m deploying, there is little difference whether I’m using infrastructure that is running physically in Northern Virginia or in Southern California. At GreenPages, we think that this degree of abstraction will move in to the enterprise as corporate IT departments evolve to behave more like service providers… and probably evolve in to brokers of IT services – supported by a public cloud strategy.

Security and legacy applications

Two questions revolved around legacy applications and security as barriers to adoption. Every organization has a particular application that will not be considered for cloud computing. The arguments are similar for the reasons why we never (or, are just beginning to) virtualize legacy applications. Sometimes, virtualizing specialized hardware is, well, really hard and just not worth the effort.

What’s the best way to get started with public cloud?

“Just go out and use Amazon,” was a common response to this question, both in this particular tweetchat and in other discussions. Indeed, trying Amazon for some development activities is not a bad way to evaluate the features of public cloud. In our view, the best way to get started with cloud is to begin managing your datacenter as if it were a cloud environment, with some tool that can manage traditional and cloud environments the same way. Even legacy applications. Even applications with specialized hardware. Virtual, physical, paravirtual, etc. Begin to monitor and measure your applications in a consistent manner. This way, when an application is deployed to a cloud provider, your organization can continue to monitor, measure, and manage that application using the same method. For those of us who are risk-averse, this is the easiest way to get started with cloud! How is this done? We think you’ll see that Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) is the best way.

Would you like to learn more about our new CMaaS offering? Click here to receive some more information.

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Windows Azure Mobile Services

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS). It’s a brilliant technology that allows you to stand up powerful OData compliant services to support your Windows 8 Store Apps, Windows Phone 8 Apps, and even iOS apps in just a few minutes. It’s hard to oversell the sheer awesomeness of this stuff.
I’m currently working on a bunch of code that will shortly become a sample project highlighting both WAMS and Windows 8 Apps (look for a project called “FamilyPig” coming soon). In the process of building that, I ran into a couple of questions – one of which I’ll cover here, and give some guidance to people who might be running into a similar question.
One of the cool features that makes WAMS super easy to work with is the concept of “dynamic schema”. In a nutshell, that means that if you have an existing table, and you throw a Plain Old CLR Object (POCO) at it using the InsertAsync method (of the IMobileServiceTable interface), WAMS is smart enough to look at the object coming in, and make sure that it has all the columns that it needs in the underlying Windows Azure SQL Database table to store the record (assuming that “dynamic schema” is enabled on the mobile service). If the column does exist, it gets created on the fly. Very, very cool. Note, what’s actually happening under the covers is that your POCO object is being converted to a JSON object for transmission over the wire, and WAMS is pulling apart that JSON object to look at the columns.

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Houston, We Have Cloud

The data centers of the future may look more like NASA ground control – governance inside, resources out
One theme has remained consistent throughout the evolution of cloud thus far – enterprise IT wants to retain control of both its data and access to to it.
This is not an unreasonable demand. After all, it is enterprise IT – and its leadership – that will pay the price should customer data leak or regulations not complied with. Despite the growing view that cloud security is a joint, shared responsibility between customer and provider, it is enterprise IT that must put into place the mechanisms for both controlling and proving control over data and access, not cloud providers or integrators. The provider can offer services designed to provide that control, but it is not the one that must implement the polices or report on their effectiveness.

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Cloud Conversations: Gaining Cloud Confidence | Part 1

This is the first of a two-part industry trends and perspectives series looking at how to learn from cloud outages (read part II here).

In case you missed it, there were some public cloud outages during the recent Christmas 2012-holiday season. One incident involved Microsoft Xbox (view the Microsoft Azure status dashboard here) users were impacted, and the other was another Amazon Web Services (AWS) incident. Microsoft and AWS are not alone, most if not all cloud services have had some type of incident and have gone on to improve from those outages. Google has had issues with different applications and services including some in December 2012 along with a Gmail incident that received covered back in 2011.

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Does mobility and the cloud equal total compatibility?

Over the last fifteen or so years, we have seen computing make the transition from the fixed and immovable desktops and servers, through to chunky underpowered laptops, through to less chunky but more powerful laptops using Wi-Fi connectivity, through to smartphones, 3G, tablets.

We are now nearing a state of complete computing mobility. More recently, we have seen cloud computing grow exponentially with cloud hosting and remote data storage services such as Dropbox taking centre stage.

It is predicted that in 2013, there will be significant merging between the cloud and mobile computing.

The cloud and mobility have already merged in certain markets however, but under a different guise. Where ‘mobility’ has meant the access and input of data in any place and at any time, whether in business or public, it follows that there should be a convergence of such mobility with the extensive array of cloud services.

There …

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Amazon Web Services starts to assert itself

By Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software

At the end of November 2012, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held its first partner and customer conference in Las Vegas. Dubbed AWS “re: Invent”, the event was a success. It enabled AWS to assert itself as a large and influential player in the IT marketplace.

However, as well as AWS’s strengths, it also highlighted some of its traditional weaknesses. These include poor communications and an inability to put forward messages adapted to the needs of enterprise executives.

A growing footprint but needs more transparency

AWS shares as little information about itself as it can get away with. As the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market matures, it becomes increasingly awkward for the organisation to be so closely guarded.

Nevertheless, the conference itself, in its size, energy, and quality of networking opportunities, was a good reminder of the growing influence that AWS yields in the IT …

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Step-by-Step: Build a SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud on Windows Azure

Now that SharePoint Server 2013 has been released, I frequently get asked about ways in which a SharePoint 2013 lab environment can be easily built for studying, testing and/or performing a proof-of-concept. You could certainly build this lab environment on your own hardware, but due to the level of SharePoint 2013 hardware requirements, a lot of us may not have sufficient spare hardware to implement an on-premise lab environment.
This makes a great scenario for leveraging our Windows Azure FREE 90-day Trial Offer to build a free lab environment for SharePoint 2013 in the cloud. Using the process outlined in this article, you’ll be able to build a basic functional farm environment for SharePoint 2013 that will be accessible for approximately 105 hours of compute usage each month at no cost to you under the 90-day Trial Offer.

This makes a great scenario for leveraging our Windows Azure FREE 90-day Trial Offer to build a free lab environment for SharePoint 2013 in the cloud. Using the process outlined in this article, you’ll be able to build a basic functional farm environment for SharePoint 2013 that will be accessible for approximately 105 hours of compute usage each month at no cost to you under the 90-day Trial Offer.

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2013 – The Year of the (Trusted) Cloud

Every year has threatened to be “the year of the Cloud” but my main prediction for 2013 IT industry developments will be that yes, this is the year that it cements its role as the most major of technology disruptions.
It’s hard for Cloud to be defined in such a delineated manner, as it has been underway as a technology trend for many years, there is a wide spectrum of categories of what’s involved which are all continually evolving and also customer adoption has also been underway for many to various extents.
So it’s already been the Cloud for quite some time and so a bit late to make it the Year Of.

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Software Sales in the Cloud

Businesses live and die by their ability to sell. Despite common belief, the key to successful selling in the cloud doesn’t rely on the technology infrastructure behind the scenes — the real key is in billing.
In essence, a cloud solution is an agreement between the vendor and the user. The ability to monetize that agreement is the heart of how to sell in the cloud. The more customers using your solution, the more revenue you create. To ensure a steady and predictable revenue stream the back end systems need to be able to support it.
The temptation with any sales process is to sell the sizzle; however, in a cloud environment, function is what’s important. Simplicity is key – from account creation to managing payment processes, billing, and user management, making these processes as simple as possible will make signing up new customers much easier.

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Are You Stuck in a Cloud?

Ultimately cloud computing will be driven by customer needs for control and enabled by a new generation of hybrid cloud solutions.
Today public and private cloud operating models offer islands of IT operating efficiency that can be highly desirable for applications and services specifically designed for the cloud or which are already virtualized. Yet for the vast majority of multi-tier applications the cloud is still a pipe dream of promises and expectations. The problem isn’t with the cloud service providers per se, but rather with the vast gulf of manual processes required to migrate and operate apps (and their services) into and between data centers, colocation facilities and various public clouds.

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