Tag Archives: flexibility

Hidden Benefits Of Cloud Computing

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There are many benefits of cloud computing that don’t necessarily make the headlines or the 30-point bold bullet in the PowerPoint slide, but they are still important when considering using a cloud service.

It’s pretty apparent to anyone in the technology world that cloud computing is an established and accepted approach to the delivery of computer software and infrastructure as a service. From music and movie streaming services such as Netflix and Pandora, to personal storage offerings such as iCloud and SkyDrive, to business software platforms such as Force.com, Azure, and Amazon Cloud, the cloud concept has permeated everywhere into our computing lives. There are even a series of Cloud Computing for Dummies books available, as perhaps the greatest testament to its mainstream acceptance. And as network bandwidth reliability and availability continues to improve throughout the world, cloud computing will only continue to grow and expand.

As the cloud computing concept emerged and was beginning to take hold, many notable benefits were presented and touted by cloud proponents to, what was, a skeptical audience at the time. The primary benefits that were identified are widely accepted as truth today: reduction in fixed software, hardware, and infrastructure costs; ease of accessibility from multiple locations and devices; built-in upgrade paths that are relatively seamless to end users; and flexibility and scalability of the platform as user counts grow. These advantages had significant impacts to the decision makers who were considering cloud services and have proven to provide benefits that far outweighed the risks and concerns at the time.

But as these cloud services have developed and matured, a number of other “hidden” benefits have also emerged, which are just as significant in their own right. Some of these fall on the “soft side” of the cost/benefits scale, but are still contributing advantages with using cloud computing:

  • Focus – By delegating the management of your IT “plumbing,” it creates opportunity to focus your IT staff on more effective ways to help your business, such as proactively addressing end user needs and exploring innovations that might benefit your organization in different ways.
  • Free to Try – While this is a no brainer in our new world of apps and online offerings, many businesses don’t realize the relative cost and effort savings in leveraging free to try cloud-based business software. Not having to set up servers, and install and configure software can be a big help in saving time as well as grief and aggravation.
  • Going Green – The reduction in hardware and infrastructure means less energy costs for your company. This might be viewed as a small benefit on an individual business level; however, the cumulative effect of many organizations reducing their energy consumption can add up to a significant impact to our carbon footprint. While these costs have been moved on to the cloud hosting provider, dynamic scaling of cloud instances allows systems to scale up and down in accordance with demand. This, in turn, offers a tangible energy savings.

These are just a handful of the benefits of cloud computing that don’t necessarily make the headlines or the 30-point bold bullet in the PowerPoint slide, but they are still important when considering using a cloud service.

Author: Mike Yamarik
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The Concept Of Private Cloud Is Fundamentally Flawed

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Saleforce.com’s chief scientist has slammed the concept of private cloud, claiming that the whole point of cloud computing is that resources, costs and risk are shared between multiple parties.

Speaking at the Cloud Computing World forum in London today, JP Rangaswami said that cloud provides the scalability and flexibility that organisations need to survive in the modern age. However, organisations that choose to adopt private rather than public cloud will miss out on the benefits.

“Whenever anyone uses that phrase to you, just ask them who are you sharing costs with. If all the costs you’re sharing are just with you, you’re just kidding yourself, it ain’t a cloud” said Rangaswami.

“The only way it has value is if someone else is taking the risk, and you can step it up or down. This isn’t just a question of infrastructure; IT is not just about hardware. Your processes have to be able to scale, your ability to put things on and take things off has to be able to scale – everything you do has to be able to scale in both directions.”

Rangaswami said that organisations have to move from thinking about scalable efficiency to thinking about scalable learning. While in the past, the focus was on reducing costs as a business grew, trends in globalisation, offshoring and outsourcing are forcing now companies to work differently.

In particular, companies will have to employ social strategies, as increased competition and reduced barriers to entry make it harder to get a strong return on investment, according to Rangaswami.

“The reason for the social enterprise is because your return on assets is low. You had better connect up your customers, because if you don’t they are going to remain connected up and leave you out of it,” he said.

“In five years time they’re going to be here and you’re not. The social enterprise is as much a survival play as anything else, because of the incredible level of change that is taking place.”

Rangaswami pointed to companies like Facebook, which puts the individual at the centre of the distribution network rather than at the edge, as a model of how businesses will have to operate in the future. He said that if the Web was big in 2004, Facebook is going to be bigger.

“Businesses used to be hierarchies of product and customer, they are now networks of relationship and capability,” he said.

“We have learnt how to value product and customer over 600 years, but we have very little knowledge about how to value a relationship or how to value a capability, which is why we’re really ill-equipped to deal with the changing world in this paradigm of the information age.”

Author: Sophie Curtis
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The Drive To Public Clouds

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The farthest-reaching changes in the IT industry often occur when a single new development simultaneously responds to the needs of both consumers and business users. Perhaps the best-known example of this kind of wave was the original PC: office workers used PCs during the day for their business tasks and then used the machine when they got home to play games (and often vice versa). The Web was also adopted in equal measure by consumers and business users when it first broke into the mainstream, which was a key factor in its incredibly rapid rise. The same will happen with cloud computing, once the public cloud providers close the loop between business and consumer services.

In 2012, both consumers and large companies will step up their adoption of public clouds. From the standpoint of end users, public cloud computing will be seen as enabling greater mobility, gradually leading to “ubiquitous” computing in which they no longer have to be concerned about where their data is actually located. At the same time, the economics of public cloud computing will become sufficiently attractive to IT managers in enterprise environments that they will no longer be able to avoid considering it, at least for certain workloads. This kind of lockstep between consumers and business users will cause big changes across the IT industry.

Users who put their data in the cloud expect that they will be able to access the data on any device, from anyplace in the world. Because there is only one copy of the data (and hopefully a backup copy somewhere), users hope that they will no longer need to synchronize laptops with other devices like iPads and smartphones. In 2011, many consumers were subtly introduced to the convenience of cloud storage when Apple introduced automatic synching of data between iPhones, iPods, and other devices with its iCloud service (the capability was introduced transparently with an update of Apple’s iOS operating system). Since the iPad dominates the tablet market, and the iPhone is one of the most popular smartphone models, other tablet and smartphone providers will soon need to include similar capabilities to remain competitive. As a result, the huge base of consumers storing their music and photos in multitenant clouds will promote the acceptance of cloud storage from a theoretical capability to a real and useful service. The rise of cloud computing will eventually speed the convergence of “mobile” and “social” trends, in which data sharing between trusted parties will become the normal approach for exchanging information.

In datacenters, the economics of public cloud computing will become increasingly attractive to IT managers. Continuing concerns about potential security risks will prevent organizations from entrusting their most sensitive workloads to public clouds, but for many other workloads, the flexibility and potential cost benefits of cloud deployment will outweigh its risks. In 2012, the use of public clouds will go beyond early adopters and enter the mainstream for certain applications. As public clouds become part of standard IT operating procedures, some business issues with service providers will rise to the forefront. Customers will increasingly focus on issues such as service level agreements (SLAs) and portability between cloud services. Companies planning a cloud deployment will narrow their focus to providers who have the technical ability to deliver on SLAs and can provide security in the cloud. Vendor lock-in with cloud service providers will become a greater concern as customers grapple with the decision of whether to embrace proprietary solutions that deliver unique benefits, or more open solutions that may have limitations. Some cloud vendors will tout their relative openness and present vendor lock-in as a major reason customers should not buy from their competitors.

Throughout 2012, cloud services will become an increasingly big business as companies complete their trials and begin to roll out full-scale enterprise applications to the cloud. Amazon AWS will become the first billion-dollar cloud venture. Towards the end of 2012, the cloud business will begin to see a shakeout as larger, better-financed companies cherry-pick the best companies and push out the weaker start-ups. It will become much clearer by the end of the year which service providers can deliver for the long haul, and which can’t. On the user side, most deployments will be noneventful and successful, but some high-profile events will occur that highlight the problems that happen when cloud is not deployed correctly. To fully reap the benefits of cloud computing, IT workers will need to reassess their skills and go for training in new areas. In the meantime, companies that want to deploy a private cloud may have a difficult time finding IT workers with the right mix of skills to design, deploy, and manage a cloud.

Author: Tony Iams
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The Significance Of Hyper-V On Windows 8

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Microsoft’s confirmation that client versions of Windows 8 will include its Hyper-V hypervisor could turn out to be one of the most interesting and significant aspects of the upcoming platform.

With a baked-in Type 1 hypervisor, various kinds of use cases that have been mooted for virtualisation will become possible, such as running separate corporate and personal desktop environments side by side simultaneously on the same machine.

This kind of virtualisation is now familiar on servers, where multiple workloads can be consolidated onto one system. However, it is almost unknown on client systems, with the notable exception of Citrix’s XenClient platform, which is intended to let enterprises manage laptops in the manner just described.

But whereas XenClient requires the laptop vendor to integrate the hypervisor into the system at build time, Windows 8 with Hyper-V should make it much easier to implement such a configuration.

Hyper-V’s Live Storage Move feature, as mentioned in the Building Windows 8 blog, also enables virtual machines to be independent of the underlying storage, even allowing the disk image that makes up the VM to be moved from one drive to another without shutting it down.

While Microsoft said the capability can be used for rapid deployment purposes, it also opens up the possibility of greater flexibility in the way virtual desktops are used. Imagine checking out your virtual desktop from the datacentre onto a laptop so you can use it on a business trip, then checking it back in when you return to the office, for example.

Baked-in virtualisation support also means that Windows 8 might be able to support use cases that have been suggested in the past, such as a dedicated virtual partition for security services, which have largely failed to make it into mainstream adoption.

It also gives developers more flexibility for building test environments, as Microsoft points out on the Building Windows 8 blog.

The snag, of course, is that Hyper-V on Windows 8 will require the latest hardware; it relies on a virtualisation feature called Second Level Address Translation supported in current 64-bit processors from Intel and AMD.

Hyper-V support looks like being a significant addition to Windows 8, and many in the industry will be watching with interest to see what Microsoft is going to do with the technology.

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Why You Don’t Need a Cloud Computing Strategy

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As with any new exciting technology, companies commonly look towards creating a “strategy” around the movement in order to ensure their investments achieve the greatest ROI. In the 1990s, it was all about how companies needed a “Linux” strategy; the last decade has been dominated with companies needing a “virtualization” strategy; and the trend I’m seeing today is everyone talking about needing a “cloud computing” strategy.

While this new saying is good news for large vendors who quickly rebrand existing and/or legacy technologies to go along with the momentum, it can also cause a number of challenges. The main one is that it can introduce risks and new costs with minimal ROI for companies building out cloud strategies outside of their normal IT practice. So, to get it right the first time, rather than looking at the cloud as a separate replacement strategy, companies need to look at it from the bigger picture as a complete IT strategy.

Here are five key things to think about when identifying areas for cloud adoption and driving a successful IT strategy:

1. Understand the cloud and its benefits to your business: Think business, not technology – not all clouds are created equal. There are many choices, from hosted applications to hosted infrastructure – Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); some run on premise, some run off. Each have significant benefits but only when viewed in the context of how they fit in with your current operations. You need to understand how each of these can augment your IT strategy to achieve the benefits of efficiency and agility.

2. Build off your existing operational choices and be application specific: If existing services such as CRM and e-mail are functioning well you will gain very little by transitioning them to the cloud. In fact, these types of changes could prove confusing and incite end user rejection. However, if you are just implementing these services for the first time the cloud may give the benefits and cost savings that you need. This same rule applies to IaaS clouds. Rather than trying to replace existing infrastructure that is already working, identify workloads that are dynamic or new that constantly require attention on infrastructure to reap the benefits.

3. Think small, but plan big: Start out with a pilot. 2010 was the year of defining the cloud and 2011 will be the year of cloud implementation. James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research, recently predicted that many will try to deploy a private cloud, but many will fail. The key is to start small and identify areas where you can extend your existing strategy with new technologies to understand their impact. For IaaS clouds, the easiest is to start with your current virtualization strategy, as the cloud uses virtualization as a core technology. Whether it is development, testing, or new web application environments, the cloud can quickly and easily be implemented with a high likelihood for success.

4. Evaluate all of your options – think agility: There are many options when implementing a cloud solution. The choice between a public or private cloud should be made based on factors such as cost, security, availability and control. Each deployment model has pros and cons; the goal is to optimize for your business requirements. If you are choosing to build your own, private cloud, vendors can help you achieve this. Portability and flexibility are important elements to consider. You need to choose a solution that works within your system, but also does not lock you into a specific environment. Additionally, a solution that gives you the ability to migrate to public clouds in the future will prove to be valuable.

5. Acknowledge the immaturity of cloud computing, but don’t let it hold you back: Cloud computing is a new paradigm in IT. It has a few issues including data security and compliance, but new advancements every day continue to take the cloud to the next level. Across the industry, there are more companies and developers working on advancing this segment than many of the traditional/legacy apps. As such, you do not want to get behind the curve of the next wave of innovation. By acknowledging its immaturity and picking applications and workloads that can handle the risk, you get the benefit of getting ahead of the movement and truly understanding the technology as it matures and how it can become an incredible weapon in your IT strategy.

Cloud computing is an exciting new movement that promises to bring many benefits to companies of all size. By taking simple steps to understand how to integrate it into your existing “business strategy” versus treating it like a separate strategic project will increase the likelihood of success and simplify the transition to this new form of IT service.

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Cloud Computing And The Small Startup

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David Fearon looks at the basic justifications for cloud computing in life at the sharp end of business.

I’ll be covering some of the ins and outs of practical cloud deployments in later posts, but for this first one I wanted to make some points from my latest experiences starting up a small business project.

From those experiences I can tell you it’s entirely possible to run an independent venture on a very small budget, with people on every corner of the globe, at very little cost and with astonishing utility when it comes to everyday communications. In fact with the limited budget we’ve had in our start-up, cloud-based applications and storage have made the impossible not only feasible but incredibly cost-effective to boot.

We’re basing all business-related file storage and communications infrastructure in the cloud. That means cloud-based email and collaboration tools, and not a single exclusively local copy of anything on our respective laptops and desktops. Pretty much the only exception to this is the occasions one of us is working on something they feel reticent about showing to the rest of the team before it’s a fully fleshed-out concept.

Backup is a special exception which I’ll cover in a later post, but the thrust of it is the whole business lives in the cloud, and we all have access to everything that the business as an entity produces. It makes for a workflow with the absolute minimum of interruptions.

It goes without saying that in many quarters this is considered heresy and far from The Way That Things Should Be. But small ventures are about getting things done, and getting them done fast, clean and well. When you have nobody but yourself to blame for failure, the path of best efficiency is often the one that you simply have to take. Trust plays a big part here. The broader point is that, as an IT person, you need to be aware of the risks of everything you do and the best way to do it within the parameters of acceptable practice.

Our start-up is one based primarily on IP (that’s the intellectual-property type of IP, not the internet protocol variety) and exploiting the application of specialist skillsets from a small but diverse team. This defines our modus operandi: extreme flexibility and the ability to get things done without delay come first. We’re dealing with what many small businesses must perforce deal with: the need to squeeze the very last drop of efficiency out of everything.

The point to bear in mind is that we’re not idiotic cavaliers; we’re aware of all risks, insofar as anyone can be aware of everything that could possibly go wrong. If the main thrust of the business were, for instance, manufacturing, retail or anything involving customer data that the law required us to protect, things would be structured differently.

Would I expect this frontiersman approach to be barrelling along unaltered in three years’ time? Absolutely not. If and when the venture in question flourishes, things will become more formalised as the team grows and the company becomes responsible for more than just itself.

The aspect of the business that I would expect to remain unchanged is its fundamental approach to basing all operations in the cloud wherever possible. It’s just insanely cost-efficient in so many areas. I’m increasingly of the viewpoint that when you’re at the sharp end, the old mindset of keeping everything local because of some ingrained sense of propriety is one that will bite you hard unless you have a clear, well-defined need to go that way.

In other words, local compute power and storage should become the exception for your business, not the rule.

If you want to be able to walk into your very own server room, run your hands along the machine racks and get a fuzzy feeling from the ceaseless dance of activity lights blinking in the darkness, please go ahead. If, however, you want to make maximum use of available revenue and resources, you might have to forgo that understandably human pleasure.

Go for a stroll in the sunshine instead, and bask in the reassurance that the racks, their power provision, cooling, disaster recovery and maintenance are someone else’s problem.

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Living in a VM World

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The big industry event about virtualization is VMworld, usually held in late Summer / early Fall. You don’t have to wait for VMware’s conference, however, to find yourself in VM World. We now live in it, every day.

It’s really quite amazing how quickly virtualization has swept through, and become ensconced in, IT. Data centers have–for decades–been famously conservative when it comes to introducing changes that might threaten to disrupt production applications. For years, whenever we’d ask operationally focused IT managers about introducing new control software–for workload management, service provisioning, automated orchestration, and so on–we always heard a deeply skeptical, go-slow attitude. That skepticism was mirrored by how gradually–some would argue, glacially–the software was adopted.

Until virtualization. VMware shipped its first server products in 2001. By 2003, its products were maturing and starting to get noticed. The idea of operating server workloads atop virtualized x86 was starting to spread. By 2005, there was widening excitement, along with strong uptake in secondary roles such as development and testing (“devtest”). By 2008, it was a wildfire, burning hot and spreading fast. And today–today virtualization is maturing into just how you do enterprise IT.

Virtualization of volume servers “crossed the chasm” with extraordinary rapidity. No, that’s not quite right–with astounding, amazing, incredible rapidity. Never before have data centers and IT operations changed so quickly, so thoroughly. Virtualization entered at the same speed PCs and the Internet did–from zero penetration and little interest on the part of IT departments to near ubiquity–in a decade. And it did so in the conservative data center domain.

When you’re in the middle of long-term change, there’s never an incontrovertible moment to declare “we’ve arrived!” We’re still in the process of becoming, right? We’re still moving toward full virtualization; many organizations will be working on it for at least another five years. On the other hand, many organizations have already virtualized broad swaths of their IT estate. It’s easy to find shops with thousands of virtual machines, some near their goal–100 percent virtualized. And even among those that have years to go, almost all have at least started the transition.

I think it’s fair to say that, whereas five years ago we were living in a world dominated by physical servers, today we’re living in a VM world. Seemingly everyone has thousands. Buying a server without virtualization is already like buying a mobile phone without text service, or a car without airbags. It’s now impossible to buy a new server that isn’t at least highly capable of virtualization; most are now thoroughly optimized for it.

Every proponent would like to claim that their technology or approach “changes everything.” That is always hyperbole. But virtualization comes close. It’s not just the new platform for deploying apps and managing services. It’s also dramatically raised the level of efficiency, flexibility, maintainability, and availability we’ve come to expect and demand for every application. That IT professionals were–given the right lever–able to effect such thrilling improvements in such a short time emboldens us to seek out and achieve great things elsewhere.

I’m really happy we now live in VM world. It’s nice here.

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