The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently published a useful and informative report on cloud computing that provides key guidance for companies using or considering cloud services in the UK. The guidelines intend to help organizations comply with the 1998 Data Protection Act (DPA), and they offer welcome assistance for private and public enterprises struggling to avoid stiff non-compliance penalties from the watchdog agency.
The ICO emphasizes that cloud customers are responsible for ensuring data protection, whether they know it or not. Many businesses simply don’t realize that data protection is their responsibility when processing is outsourced to a third party (i.e., a cloud provider).
Cloud Computing: Aryaka Offers Global Application Delivery
Aryaka, the WAN Optimization as-a-Service start-up, is now offering what’s called Application Delivery-as-a-Service, which, it says, is purpose-built for the cloud.
It lets a company’s expanded circle of users – home office workers, mobile users, customers and partners – get optimized, consistent access to centralized enterprise applications and cloud resources from anywhere in the world.
That means both inside and outside the enterprise firewall.
The new widgetry accelerates Internet application response times by connecting users to the closest Aryaka POP so they can quickly access applications and critical data.
Evolving to a Broker of Technology Services: Planning the Solution
By Trevor Williamson, Director, Solutions Architecture
A 3-Part Series:
- Part 1: Understanding the Dilemma
- Part 2: Planning the Solution
- Part 3: Executing the Solution, again and again…
Part 2: Planning the Solution
As I wrote before and continuing with part 2 of this 3-part series, let’s talk about how we plan the solution for automating IT services and service management within your organization so that you can develop, deliver, and support services in a more disciplined way—which means that your customers will trust you. Of course this doesn’t mean that they won’t pursue outsourced, cloud, or other third-party services—but they will rely on you to get the most out of those services. And once you do go through this process, some of the major benefits for implementing an automated service management infrastructure are:
- Improved staff productivity that allows your business to become more competitive. Your time is too valuable to be spent fighting fires and performing repetitive tasks. If you prevent the fires and automate the repetitive tasks, you can focus on new projects and innovation instead. When you apply automation tools to good processes, productivity skyrockets to a level unachievable by manual methods.
- Heightened quality of service that improves business uptime and customer experience. Consistent execution according to a well-defined change management process, for example, can dramatically reduce errors, that in turn improves uptime and customer experience because in today’s age of continuous operations and unrelenting customer demand, downtime can erode your competitive edge quickly. Sloppy change management can cause business downtime that prevents customers from buying online or reduces the productivity of your workforce.
- Reduced operational costs to reinvest in new and innovative initiatives. It’s been said that keeping the lights on—the costs to maintain ongoing operations, systems, and equipment—eats up roughly 80% of the overall IT budget rather than going to new or innovative projects. With more standardized and automated processes, you can improve productivity and reduce operational costs allowing you the freedom to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Improved reputation with the business. Most self-aware IT organizations acknowledge that their reputation with business stakeholders isn’t always sterling. This is a critical problem, but you can’t fix it overnight—changing an organization’s culture, institutionalized behaviors, and stereotypes takes time and energy. If you can continue to drive higher productivity and quality through automated service management, your business stakeholders will take notice.
A very important aspect of planning this new infrastructure is to look toward, in fact assume, that the range of control will necessarily span both internal and external resources…that you will be stretching into public cloud spaces—not that you will always know you’re there until after the fact—and that you will be managing them (at least monitoring them) with the same level of granularity that you do with your traditional resources.
This includes integrating the native functionality of those off-premises services—reserving virtual machines and groups of machines, extending reservations, cloning aggregate applications, provisioning storage, etc., and connecting them to an end-to-end value chain of IT services that can be assessed, monitored and followed from where the data resides to where it is used by the end user:
It is through this holistic process—rationalized, deconstructed, optimized, reconstituted and ultimately automated—that the system as a whole can be seen as a fully automated IT services management infrastructure, but believe me when I say that this is not nor will it ever be an easy task. When you are looking to plan how you automate your service management infrastructure, you need a comprehensive approach that follows a logical and tightly controlled progression. By whatever name you call the methodology (and there are many out there) it needs to be concise, comprehensive, capable, and, above all else, controlled:
1. Identify the trends, justify the business case, and assess your maturity. Before investing in an automated service management infrastructure, you have to assess the opportunity, build the business case, and understand the current state. This phase will answer the following questions:
o Why is automated service management important to my business?
o What are the business and IT benefits?
o How prepared is my organization to tackle this initiative?
2. Develop your strategic plan, staffing plan, and technology roadmaps. You translate what you learn from the prior phase into specific automated service management strategies. The goal of this phase is to help you answer these key questions:
o Do I have the right long-term strategic vision for automated service management?
o What are my stakeholders’ expectations, and how can I deliver on them?
o What technologies should I invest in and how should I prioritize them?
3. Invest in your skills and staff, policies and procedures, and technologies and services. This phase is designed to execute on your automated service management strategies. This phase will answer the following people, process, and technology questions:
o What specific skills and staff will I need, and when?
o What policies and procedures do I need to develop and enforce?
o Should I build and manage my own technology capabilities or use external service providers?
o What specific vendors and service providers should I consider?
4. Manage your performance, develop metrics, and communicate and train. Finally, to help you refine and improve your automated service management infrastructure, the goal in this phase is to help you answer these key questions:
o How should I adjust my automated service management plans and budgets?
o What metrics should I use to track my success?
o How should I communicate and train stakeholders on new automated service management policies and technologies?
These phases and the associated questions to be answered are just a taste of what is required when you are thinking of moving toward an automated service management infrastructure—and of course GreenPages is here to help—especially when you are in the planning stages. The process is not painless and it is certainly not easy but the end result, the journey in fact, is well worth the time, effort and investment to accomplish it.
Next…Part 3: Executing the Solution, again and again…
If you’re looking for more information, we will be holding free events in Boston, NYC, and Atlanta to discuss cloud computing, virtualization, VDI, clustered datacenters, and more. We’ll have a bunch of breakout sessions, and it will also be a great opportunity to network with peers.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Analyzing Big Data with Quirrel
Quirrel is designed to allow anyone to perform complex analysis of large, multi-structured data sets without the need to write code.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, John A. De Goes, CEO & CTO of Precog, will walk Cloud Expo delegates through the basics of Quirrel, the «R for Big Data» language. All participants will be provided with an online learning environment where they can follow along and learn the core syntax and features of the Quirrel analysis language. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to load, filter, correlate, group, and aggregate data using Quirrel.
The role-playing game: How enterprise IT should prepare for cloud adoption
By Paul Moxon, Senior Director, Product & Solutions Marketing
I’m often asked, “What’s the biggest thing standing in the way of enterprise IT getting on board with cloud adoption?”
My response is always the same: “The biggest thing standing in the way of enterprise IT cloud adoption is IT’s unwillingness to accept that business units (BUs) are already adopting the cloud.”
By 2012, BUs are eager to flout IT authority and circumvent IT constraints in order to solve problems now rather than see their requests languish in IT’s backlog of special projects, hostage to unreasonable wait times.
Those days are over.
IT now has two options: Get on board or get left behind.
I’m seeing this exact scenario in our customer organisations as well. Customer BUs approach IT seeking solutions, without ever involving IT in the preliminary decision making process. They prefer instead to drag IT …
Cloud Computing: Yottabyte & the Software-Defined Data Center
Yottabyte, a two-year-old Michigan start-up with awfully big shoes to fill given its very big name, claims to have what every boy wants these days, a cloud operating system.
It says the widgetry lets it create cloud-based data centers that incorporate storage, compute and network using a public, private or hybrid cloud model, a claim that sounds vaguely familiar.
It fancies that unlike competitive point solutions, it may be the first provider to really embrace the scope of what it calls the data center challenge. It figures customers want compute, network and storage in a single solution; they want to virtualize machines and applications; and they want to deploy hybrid clouds.
It says that’s a tall order, historically requiring multi-vendor solutions and typically resulting in tough compromises in performance or scalability.
Citrix provides evidence that its strategy is delivering
By Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, IT Software
At the recent Citrix Synergy conference in Barcelona, more than 4,000 delegates heard Citrix’s latest mobile and cloud-enabled-world message. The announcements in Mark Templeton’s keynote this year were based on evidence of what Citrix has, or will in the near term, deliver, and were less visionary in nature than previous announcements.
The four key announcements were: project Avalon, which will act as the cloud orchestration layer; storage zones, which will allow users to select where data is stored; MBX technology applied to Cloud Gateway, which will wrap controls and security around applications; and advances in HDX technology to support greater use of video. While project Avalon is a glimpse into the future direction of Citrix, the other three technologies are all recently released and available.
Project Avalon considers a future where Windows remains the dominant enterprise technology
The premise behind …
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: App Performance in the Clouds – Lessons Learned
We face the challenge of monitoring and managing performance in clouds every other day. Not only is application performance management different in a cloud, but all clouds are not equal either.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Michael Kopp, technology strategist at Compuware, will show how to do APM in several different Clouds (Azure, EC2, VMware private Clouds) and how it differs from more traditional environments. He will cover performance monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning. Finally he will explain why the very goals for optimizing performance are no longer the same when talking about public clouds.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Deep Dive on Building and Architecting Your Cloud
Clouds have what you need: reliable and highly resilient compute, networks and storage. But achieving true scale and efficiency requires designing and building your cloud from the ground up.
In their session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Kedar Poduri, Director of Product Management, Cloud Platform Group, at Citrix Systems, and Anantha Kasetty, Senior Sales Engineer, Cloud Platform Group, at Citrix Systems, will discuss the core capabilities and newest innovations in the Citrix CloudPlatform and the best practices for deployment of your cloud.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Lessons Learned from 100 IaaS Cloud Deployments
Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack, has been the platform of choice for more than 100 public and private production clouds.
In his Lunchtime Focus Keynote at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Shannon Williams, VP Cloud Market Development at Citrix, will provide an insider view as one of the co-founders of Cloud.com and will talk about his deployment experiences and provide tips for designing an open, scalable and highly efficient cloud that can support both traditional and purpose-built cloud workloads from a single solution.