Archivo de la etiqueta: cloud

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

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

diciembre 5, 2014 Chris Ward

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….

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

diciembre 3, 2014 David Barter

Looking 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 computing, Featured, SMB

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

noviembre 19, 2014 Chris Chesley

Many 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, IoT

Cloud Computing in 2020: Looking into that Crystal Ball

octubre 22, 2014 John Dixon

Recently, @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

octubre 15, 2014 GreenPages Blog

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

Ben: 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

Cloud computing, Featured

So You Want to Be a Cloud Architect? Part II

octubre 8, 2014 John Dixon

In Part I of this cloud architect series, we highlighted that business skills are at least as important as technical skills for the cloud architect. Here in Part II, we’ll propose three levels of cloud architect, describe the specific skills needed for each level, and make a suggestion on how to obtain these skills.

Levels of the Cloud Architect

At GreenPages, we think of three different levels of cloud architect. Through many client conversations, it has become clear that there are common perspectives on cloud:

Moving to cloud or “cloud as a bucket”
Cloud as a DevOps enabler, to take advantage of cutting edge development concepts
Cloud as a management paradigm, particularly to enable self-service and request management
A service rationalization strategy

So, the three levels of the cloud architect include the Integration, Developer, and Principal.

The Integration Architect has the ability to capture requirements, develop a bill of materials, and help an organization migrate their services to cloud providers. I’d want an integration Architect on staff to help me with a datacenter consolidation/modernization/rationalization project.
The Developer Architect builds on the skills of the Integration Architect and focuses on the ability to transform an organization’s development community to use cloud services efficiently. I’d want a Developer Architect on staff to take on a DevOps transformation project.
The Principal Architect builds on the Integration and Developer levels by focusing on improving the business’s ability to compete, through the use of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, XaaS) as well as the capabilities of cloud and DevOps. IT Service Portfolio skills are important here to understand an IT organization and what it does for the business as a consumer. Analysis and measurement of the business’s activities/processes/revenues/expenses is also important in this role. An individual in this role might lead a team of cloud architects to transform or build an entire business – perhaps a business that provides cloud services. Further, the individual in this role focuses on possibilities more than analysis of requirements.

{Download John’s eBook “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department“}

Training and Certification

So, which specific skills or certifications are needed for each level?

In a quick look at Coursera, I came across two courses, offered free of charge, that would be helpful for the cloud architect.

On a sidenote, I think Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a great thing and a nice use of cloud technology (the “flexible capacity” characteristic). Looking ahead, I expect that one would be able to obtain, from a MOOC, all of the training they need to become a cloud architect (amongst other things).

Available from a MOOC for $0.00

Microeconomics Principles, 8 Weeks
Programming for Everybody, 10 weeks

GreenPages certifies these levels of cloud architects by validating past certifications and industry experience. We also provide a training course to bring together the skills from various certifications and make them relevant for the cloud architect. Instead of needing to know the complete details of every aspect of these certifications, I think there are some core concepts that are highly applicable to the work of a cloud architect. Consider ITIL v3 in particular. While it is helpful to know how Incident and Problem Management processes work, the cloud architect absolutely needs to know the details of Service Strategy for one. Why? Not to understand which cloud services are available, but to help their organization develop their portfolio of IT services – some of which may be great candidates to source to a cloud service. On a related note, why are we hammering the idea that a cloud architect needs to have all of this business expertise? Well, once IT is defined in terms of the services it delivers, the cloud architect can then analyze that portfolio to identify which services provide the business with a competitive edge, and which services do not (I like to call the latter “commodity” services). The cloud architect may make sourcing recommendations based on this analysis. The table below lists the concepts from various certifications that are important for the cloud architect.

In Part III I’ll go into more depth on two things:

The training course that we provide to tie all of this together
The roles and responsibilities of a cloud architect

I’d love to hear your feedback on the role of the cloud architect, especially anything additional that you think the role needs to have. Leave comments below!

Cloud computing, Featured, Virtualization

So You Want to be a Cloud Architect? Part I

octubre 1, 2014 John Dixon

Lately, I’ve been taking a look at the role of a cloud architect. What does that role look like? How does one acquire the necessary skills? Where do aspiring cloud architects turn for training? Is it possible to acquire the skills to be an effective cloud architect by taking a course or two? Rick Blaisdell wrote a great blog about a month ago called “Top Cloud Skills Employers are Looking For” that I would highly recommend reading.

Cloud Architect Training, Today

I recently wrote a blog about a Forbes article I read by Jason Bloomberg about the concept of cloudwashing. I think this idea applies very well to the cloud training offerings out there today. If you take a look, many of the cloud training courses that currently exist from established vendors are simply rebranded with “Cloud” as a highlight.

The Valuable Cloud Architect

The cloud architect should possess a healthy combination of the following skills:

Technical –especially virtualization with a splash of programming and automation
IT operations – in particular the concept of IT services and an IT services portfolio
Understanding of your business, its initiatives, its challenges, etc.

Technical Skills of the Cloud Architect

Technically speaking, cloud architects need to bring their past experience to bear, validated by the following certifications:

Current VCP
ITIL v3 Foundations
At least one vendor certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solution Architect)
Basic knowledge of programming and automation(2)

Technical competence is more of a pre-requisite for a cloud architect. It should be assumed that a cloud architect has some hands-on experience with these items. As they say, these technical skills are necessary but not sufficient for the complete cloud architect. Having acquired these certifications, an architect would probably be hip to the recent progression of IT that occurred since virtualization became mainstream. If you’ve read this far, you’d probably agree that virtualization alone does not mean cloud computing. However, many of the fundamental characteristics of cloud borrow from virtualization and are practical due to virtualization.

Other Core Skills of the Cloud Architect

Maybe the role of the cloud architect is less technical than we think. Business and market knowledge is absolutely critical for the cloud architect, for several reasons:

Products, features, and prices are changing day to day in the market for cloud services – why is this happening and what will happen tomorrow?
The traditional corporate IT market is, effectively, now a competitor in this market for IT services
Using cloud concepts, new companies are being formed and are growing rapidly – some of these companies may challenge your own business – how can the cloud architect understand them and improve their company’s competitive advantage, recognize partnership opportunities, bring products to market more rapidly using cloud and other emerging technology?

The third point is a bit of a departure from what we’ve seen as a cloud architect. This says that a cloud architect should really be a specialist in business issues. More than that, we think that Corporate IT should look to transform to specialize in the business rather than specialize in providing IT services. IT departments should be an Innovation Center for the business. More on that in a future post.

The market for cloud computing is changing every day. Established providers like Amazon Web Services introduce new features and products while also dropping prices. Established companies like Microsoft up their game quickly. New companies form to carve out a niche or challenge an established provider. Barriers to entry are low. Economists call this an active competitive marketplace. What does this mean for consumers? Consumers enjoy significant downward pressure on prices for cloud services (especially for commodity IaaS). This also means many new products from which to choose. For this reason, we think the modern cloud architect also needs to have some knowledge of the following:

Consulting Experience (particularly, how to assess an organization)
Relationships Between the Customer and Provider(1)
Essentials of Behavior in a Competitive Market(1) – specialization, substitutes, complements, network effects

I’ve seen a few posts lately suggesting that individuals in corporate IT need to retool. Here is one of those posts. I definitely agree with the author that IT administrators need to shift focus to services rather than servers. What this post leaves out is a recommendation of which new skills are needed. Which skills or certifications should an IT administrator or architect acquire? How do they get them? Later in this series, I’ll propose a training path for the new role of Cloud Architect, why certain skills are important, and how to acquire them.

For Part II, I’ll propose three different types of cloud architect, outline the responsibilities that individuals in this role might have, and describe a path to obtain the skills needed to deliver in this new role. Leave a comment below with your thoughts & stay tuned for part II.

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

Photo credit = http://www.patheos.com/blogs/deaconsbench/2011/10/what-they-didnt-ask/

Cloud computing, cloudwashing, Featured

Forbes Cloudwashing Article: A Few Key Points

septiembre 12, 2014 John Dixon

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

I came across an article from a couple of months ago by Jason Bloomberg in Forbes entitled, “Why Implement Cloud When Cloudwashing Will Suffice?” The article briefly describes adoption of cloud computing and the term “cloudwashing” – what vendors and customers are tending to do in order to get started with cloud computing. The article makes a lot of good points. Below, I highlighted a few of the points that stood out the most to me and added in some of my own thoughts.

“Cloudwashing typically refers to vendors’ and service providers’ exaggerated marketing, where they label a product as “Cloud” even when such designation is either completely false or at best, jumping the gun on a future capability … But it’s not just vendors and service providers who Cloudwash – executives often exaggerate the truth as well … some CIOs are only too happy to put OpenStack or CloudFoundry on their Cloud roadmaps, secure in the knowledge that they will now be able to present themselves as forward-looking and Cloud savvy…”

I’ve seen this firsthand in various conversations. And I don’t think it’s malicious or wrong – I think it represents a limited understanding of cloud computing. I like to point back to recent history and the days of datacenter consolidation. The whole thing was pretty straightforward…we installed some software on servers (vSphere, Hyper-V, or similar) and went to work virtualizing servers. From that, I derived benefits that were easy to understand – fewer servers to administer, less power consumed, vastly improved time to provision new servers, etc. We didn’t have to do much measurement of those things either. Who needs measurement when you consolidate, say, at least ten servers onto one. The whole thing was very comfortable. I think “cloudwashing” is a good term, and it feels like an attempt to replay datacenter consolidation in terms of cloud computing. And…It’ll be BETTER! After all, it is cloud, so the benefits must be greater!

Not so fast though. Mr. Bloomberg makes a key point later in the article, and I agree 100%.

“The underlying story [of cloud computing] is one of business transformation. Cloud Computing does not simply represent new ways of procuring IT assets or software. It represents new ways of doing business. Cloud, along with other Digital Transformation trends in IT including the rise of mobile technologies, the Internet of Things, and the Agile Architecture that facilitates the entire mess, are in the process of revolutionizing how businesses – and people – leverage technology. And as with any revolution, the change is both difficult to implement and impossible to understand while it’s happening.”

I think the author is absolutely correct here. Cloud Computing is a new capability for the business. One of the most exciting prospects of the whole cloud computing scene is this: it allows a business to take on more risk, fail fast, learn, and begin again. Call that the Deming Cycle or P-D-C-A, or whatever you like. Cloud computing has made real the fantastic growth of companies like Uber (valuation greater than Hertz and Avis combined) and Airbnb (in 2014, estimated to book more “hotel stays” than Hilton). Two crazy ideas that were no doubt implemented in “the cloud.”

Cloud is difficult to implement – if you think of it like any other technology project. Where do you start? How do you know when you’re done? Maybe it is not an implementation project at all.

“The choices facing today’s executives are far more complex than is it Cloud or isn’t it, or should we do Cloud or not. Instead, the question is how to keep your eye on your business goals as technology change transforms the entire business landscape.”

I couldn’t agree more with this. I think that IT organizations should specialize in its company’s core business, rather than administering systems that do not provide competitive advantages. At GreenPages, we’re currently bringing to market a set of Professional and Cloud services that will help organizations take advantage of cloud computing that I’m pretty excited about. To learn more about the evolution of the corporate IT department and what it means for IT decision makers, check out my ebook.

What do you think of Jason’s take on cloudwashing?

Cloud computing, Featured, XaaS

X as a Service (XaaS): What the Future of Cloud Computing Will Bring

agosto 15, 2014 John Dixon

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

Last week, Chris Ward and I hosted a breakout session at Cloudscape 2014, GreenPages’ annual customer Summit. We spoke about cloud service models today (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), as well as tomorrow’s models — loosely defined as XaaS, or Anything-as-a-Service. In this post, I’ll discuss XaaS: what it is and why you might want to consider using it.

First, what is XaaS? Is this just more marketing fluff? Why do we need to define yet another model to fully describe cloud services? I contest that XaaS is a legitimate term, and that it is useful to describe a new type of cloud services — those that make use of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS all neatly delivered in one package. Such packages are intended to fully displace the delivery of a commodity IT service. My favorite example of XaaS is desktop as a service, or DaaS. In a DaaS product, a service provider might assemble it with the following:

Servers to run Virtual Desktop Infrastructure from a provider such as Terremark (IaaS)
An office suite such as Microsoft Office365 (SaaS)
Patching and maintenance services
A physical endpoint such as a Chromebook or thin client device

The organization providing DaaS would design, assemble, and manage the product out of best-of-breed offerings in this case. The customer would pay one fee for the use of the product and have the all-important “one throat to choke” for the delivery of the product. At GreenPages, we see the emergence of XaaS (such as DaaS) as a natural evolution of the market for cloud services. This sort of market behavior is nothing new for other industries in a competitive market. Take a look at the auto industry (another one of my favorite examples). When you purchase a car, you are buying a single product from one manufacturer. That product is assembled from pieces provided by many other companies — from the paint, to the brake system, to the interior, to the tires, to the navigation system, to name a few. GM or Ford, for example, doesn’t manufacture any of those items themselves (they did in days past). They source those parts to specialist providers. The brakes come from Brembo. The interior is provided by Lear Corp. The Tires are from Goodyear. The navigation system is produced by Harman. The auto manufacturer specializes in the design, marketing, assembly, and maintenance of the end product, just as a service provider does in the case of XaaS. When you buy an XaaS product from a provider, you are purchasing a single product, with guaranteed performance, and one price. You have one bill to pay. And you often purchase XaaS on a subscription basis, sometimes with $0 of capital investment.

You can download John’s “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department” eBook here

So, secondly, why would you want to use XaaS? Let’s go back to our DaaS example. At GreenPages, we think of XaaS as one of those products that can completely displace a commodity service that is delivered by corporate IT today. What are commodity services? I like to think of them as the set of services that every IT department delivers to its internal customers. In my mind, commodity IT services deliver little or no value to the top line (revenue) or bottom line (profit) of the business. Desktops and email are my favorite commodity services. Increased investment in email or the desktop environment does not translate into increases in top-line revenue or bottom-line profit for the business. Consider that investment includes financial and time investments. So, why have an employee spend time maintaining an email system if it doesn’t provide any value to the business? Two key questions:

Does investment in the service return measurable value to the business?
In the market for cloud services, can your IT department compete with a specialist in delivering the service?

When looking at a particular service, if you answer is “No” to both questions, then you are likely dealing with a commodity service. Email and desktops are two of my favorite examples. Coming back to the original question… you may want to source commodity services to specialist providers in order to increase investment (time and money) on services that do return value to the business.

We’ll expand this discussion into the role of corporate IT in a future post. For now though, what do you think of XaaS? Would you use it to replace one of your commodity services? Maybe you already do. I’m interested to hear from you about which services you have chosen to source to specialist providers.

Facts about Microsoft Azure

What to move to the cloud

Cloud Computing in 2020

CIO Focus Interview: Main Challenges

CIO Focus Interview: A look back at 2014

CIO Focus Interview: Looking Ahead

Levels of the Cloud Architect

Training and Certification

Cloud Architect Training, Today

The Valuable Cloud Architect

Technical Skills of the Cloud Architect

Other Core Skills of the Cloud Architect

The cloud news categorized.