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Desktop Virtualization Facilitates Easy Migration To Windows 7 & 8

desktop-virtualization-windowsAfter a long wait, Windows 8 is finally here. The new operating system from Microsoft, features a number of business-friendly features that would be compelling for enterprise users and administrators. According to industry estimates, nearly half of the Indian organisations use Windows XP platform today, and as the OS reaches end of life in a year-and-a-half, analysts believe it will result in a demand uptick for newer platforms such as Windows 7 and 8.

Hence, the migration from Windows XP is one of the top IT priorities today, in the context of the emerging post PC era, the extinction of Windows XP support, and device proliferation at the workplace.

Although the roll-out of Windows 8 by enterprises will be phased and gradual, media reports state that select Indian enterprises have already downloaded 16 million copies for testing of the OS since September 2011 until its launch this year. As organizations undertake this migration, many are looking to streamline the process for both IT and users to reduce the complexity and costs associated with migrating client PCs to a new operating system.

However, while the decision to migrate is relatively straightforward, the process of migrating can be rife with IT complexity, end-user disruptions, and added costs. Desktop Virtualization in this context is a powerful technology that can facilitate this transition in a quick seamless way through the following four pivots:

Enhancing Consumerization of IT

For executives, work is no longer defined by a place. It’s something they do – wherever and whenever their organizations require. Modern executives need continuous access to enterprise data while being inherently agile. The role of an executive has changed from being hierarchical to being truly networked.

In this regard, executives who have adopted tablets can now get a consistent experience of Windows 7/8 through desktop virtualization even if the tablets are running on different operating systems (such as iOS, Android etc.) This also enables these mobile executives to access their desktops anywhere using their device, thereby improving efficiency and productivity.

Application compatibility

Applications built on a 16-bit architecture will cease to work while upgrading to 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows 7 or 8.  This can be challenging from a business continuity perspective as many business critical programs will be dependent on their erstwhile architecture framework.

Similarly, it could be a gargantuan activity to re-platform applications built and designed for Internet Explorer 6 browsers with Windows 8. In this case, desktop virtualization facilitates on-demand application facility where IT can virtualize the IE6 and deliver it from data center onto the new OS with no differentiation in user experience. In addition, applications that require 16-bit architecture can be virtualized and delivered in the same way to numerous end points.

Hardware Upgrade

Migration to Windows 7 and 8 comes with having to open purse strings towards hardware upgrades in an organization. Such roll-outs are also associated with downtime as they are completed in a phased approach, consuming months of IT staff time and multiple days of downtime for end users. Desktop Virtualization enables the OS and applications to be delivered virtually, while the hardware resources of the end-point remain unused. As a result it doesn’t necessitate a hardware upgrade, eliminating the scenarios of cost expenditure and downtime.

In fact, the procedure entails merely deploying the Windows 7/8 solution at the data center, and all the user has to do is simply log out and re-login. When they log in to the desktop virtualization client, their systems are up and running on Windows 7/8 with all their requisite applications. Another major advantage of embracing desktop virtualization is that it reduces operating expenses by centralizing desktop maintenance and brings down the desk-side support needs. By making it possible to deliver virtual desktops to thin clients or tablet devices, this enables the company to save costs on power and cooling.

Security and User Preferences

During an upgrade, it may be required to re-chart the entire settings for each of the end users owing to the host of new security and user preferences available with Windows 7 & 8 as compared to Windows XP. As a natural consequence, security of data becomes a concern while allotting privileges to each of the employees as the company data resides on user end-points.

With desktop virtualization, the organization can manage this transition in a secured manner as the data doesn’t shift out of company’s data center, and therefore doesn’t reside on the end points.

In a nutshell, the challenges around application compatibility, agility of desktops to support new environments and data security can be very well addressed through desktop virtualization during migration from Windows XP.

 

Author: Atul Ahuja
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5 Hidden Costs of Cloud Migration

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Cloud computing promises a low cost of entry and fast return on investment, but that ROI can fall short of expectations if hidden costs are left out of the equation.

A new white paper from global IT association ISACA, “Calculating Cloud ROI: From the Customer Perspective,” takes a close look at the true costs of cloud migration and offers a practical framework for calculating returns on migrating to the cloud.

The free white paper outlines five hidden costs that enterprises may fail to anticipate when moving quickly to cloud-based services:

1. Cost of bringing services back in-house due to regulatory change (e.g. stricter data privacy laws)
2. Cost of implementing and operating countermeasures to mitigate risk
3. Unexpected expenses involved in initial migration of systems
4. Loss of internal IT knowledge providing competitive differentiation
5. Lock-in with specific cloud provider or proprietary service model, which may slow down future adoption of open standards-based services

“Cloud computing represents significant changes to the delivery of traditional IT services, and its advantages have been well documented for a number of years. However, any movement to a new IT delivery model should identify the proposed benefits and the cost to achieve these over its entire life cycle,” said Vaughan Harrison, President of the ISACA Wellington Chapter and Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers New Zealand.

“Organisations should consider the impact of moving to a cloud environment by identifying potential movements in its current strengths and weaknesses, the ability to achieve future aspirations, cost of service movements and changes to its risk profile. This does not need to be a complex analysis; however, it should be thorough enough to enable an informed and supported decision.”

Enterprises are increasingly turning to public, private or hybrid cloud models to achieve such benefits as shifting cost from capital to operational, becoming more agile, and redeploying IT resources to higher-value-added activities.

While these benefits are achievable, this latest guidance from ISACA details a 12-step process that takes a frank look at the complexity of cloud computing options and the importance of making an informed decision about long-term costs and payback.

An example of positive ROI as a result of cloud migration is global organisation CA Technologies, which uses a private cloud to enable resource pooling and on-demand and scheduled resource acquisition, and to support data centre consolidation and standardisation.

“Early in our deployment we consolidated 44 locations and were able to drive millions in real estate savings and in productivity gains, as well as a 25 percent reduction in budget,” said George Watt, vice president of strategy, CA Technologies, who led the cloud deployment.

“Yet, our newfound agility was the unsung hero. From our perspective, one of the most important steps in calculating ROI is ensuring second-order costs are considered so there is a legitimate understanding of the complete cost of cloud and non-cloud options.”

To help more companies effectively calculate the ROI for their cloud initiatives, the “Calculating Cloud ROI” white paper offers the following practical tips:

 

  • Balance the need to be accurate with the need to reach a decision. An overly complex ROI calculation can make it hard to understand why a decision was made or measure its effects. Do as thorough a job as possible, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

 

  • Cloud is not right for every organizational need. The type of cloud service selected—and the decision to use cloud computing services—depends on the specific enterprise’s risk appetite.

 

  • ROI is a good start, but other financial indicators should also be calculated. ROI coupled with total cost of ownership (TCO), net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR), or payback period will provide a more accurate financial picture across the life span of the cloud investment.
  • It is far easier and less costly to change a decision when it is still on the drawing board. The time an enterprise spends considering the ROI of various options and selecting the best fit for its needs is time well spent.

Business Market Plays Cloud Computing Catch-Up

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The big spenders on technology are businesses and government agencies. They buy about 75 percent of the computing goods and services sold worldwide. Yet it is increasingly evident they are not driving the new ideas, excitement and powerhouse technology companies in ascent these days.

“The cutting edge of innovation is on the consumer side — digital technologies for consumption activity, play, entertainment and social-networked communication — and not in corporations anymore,” observed Timothy F. Bresnahan, an economist at Stanford.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in cloud computing, the technology industry’s buzz term for customers’ accessing information held in big data centers remotely over the Internet from anywhere, as if the services were in a cloud.

In the early days of computers, technology advanced because of government-financed research projects and work in corporate laboratories. Hobbyists developed the first personal computers, but it was only when I.B.M. entered the field in 1981, lending its seal of approval, that the PC industry really took off. Selling to businesses paved the way for the leading PC software and chip suppliers, Microsoft and Intel, to become giant corporations.

But marquee companies of the Internet era have made their names and fortunes mainly in the consumer market — both the first-generation Web winners like Amazon and Google, and the second-generation successes like Facebook and Twitter. And they have grown big and grown fast by offering search, shopping and social-networking services in the cloud.

Cloud computing, though, is more than a hyper-efficient means of distributing digital services. The cloud model is animated by a set of Internet technologies for juggling computing workloads in data centers far more efficiently than in the past — potentially reducing costs by about half, analysts say.

Yet to date, the large, established technology companies — and their businesses and government customers — have trailed in cloud computing. The marketing of the cloud, analysts say, is way ahead of real offerings by suppliers and its adoption by business customers.

But there are some recent signs of change. Last week, I.B.M. introduced a range of cloud services, including paying for computing resources like processing and storage on a metered pay-for-use formula, almost as if modeled on an electric utility. I.B.M. will offer customers an à la carte menu, in which they pay for different levels of guaranteed security, support and availability.

I.B.M., a bellwether in the corporate technology market, forecasts that it will have $7 billion in cloud revenue by 2015. Of the total, $4 billion will be customers shifting to cloud delivery from the company’s traditional software and services, and $3 billion is expected to be entirely new business.

“We’re moving to where the puck is going in this industry,” said Steven A. Mills, I.B.M.’s senior vice president for software and hardware. “And we’re more than willing to make this transition.”

In another industry move announced last week, Dell said that it would invest $1 billion over the next two years to build 10 new data centers and expand customer support, largely for cloud offerings.

The largest single customer for computing goods and services, the United States government, endorsed the cloud model this year. Vivek Kundra, the White House chief information officer, wrote a “Federal Cloud Computing Strategy” report, and identified $20 billion, or one quarter of the government’s total spending on information technology, as “a potential target” for migration to the cloud.

That document has certainly caught the attention of the government’s technology suppliers, like Lockheed Martin, the largest. “We’re keenly focused on cloud computing,” said Melvin Greer, a senior fellow at Lockheed Martin.

Still, the outlook is for an evolutionary shift toward the new technology spanning several years, even a decade or more, analysts say. People set the pace of technology adoption, and corporate data centers are filled with people whose skills and livelihoods are based on older technology and ways of doing things.

But technology managers, surveys show, are also genuinely concerned about security, reliability and liability if confidential corporate data resides on another company’s computers — and getting locked into proprietary clouds, controlled by one company. Standards groups are moving to set technical rules for sharing data across different clouds, including a working group established last week by the IEEE, a professional electronic and computer engineering organization.

“Cloud computing will become the new foundation for corporate information technology — it’s inevitable,” said Frank Gens, chief analyst for IDC, a technology research firm. “But there are a lot of concerns, challenges and inertia that will slow things down.”

There are also insurgents, like Amazon, that could speed things up in corporate cloud computing. Five years ago, the online bookseller and retailer decided to start a side business, offering computing resources to businesses from its network of sophisticated data centers. It called the new unit Amazon Web Services. It is a pay-for-use utility model, with customers paying from pennies to millions of dollars a month, says Adam Selipsky, vice president for product management.

Today, the customer ranks include Netflix, NASA, drug companies and major banks, which use Amazon’s data centers to remotely run Web applications that do tasks like tracking customer movie requests or running credit-risk simulations.

The Amazon cloud strategy, Mr. Selipsky says, mirrors its tactics in online retailing: build scale and efficiency, then cut costs and prices to gain market share. Amazon Web Services, he said, has reduced prices a dozen times in the last three years. “Most of that has been in the absence of competition,” Mr. Selipsky said, “because competitors have been so slow to emerge.”

Yet competition in the cloud market is intensifying. And that competition is taking shape across a number of fronts. It includes vendors offering basic computing resources like Amazon and Rackspace, joined by telecommunications giants like AT&T and Verizon that have entered the cloud business; companies offering ready-to-use applications tailored for businesses like Google’s online e-mail, document and collaboration services; Microsoft’s online version of its Office and collaboration tools; and Salesforce.com’s online customer management and collaboration tools.

Several companies also have built development environments on which programmers can build cloud software applications. Google has App Engine, Amazon has BeanStalk, Microsoft has Azure, Salesforce.com has Force.com, and VMware has Cloud Foundry, which was introduced on Tuesday. By 2014, IDC estimates that 30 percent of total spending on software applications in the corporate market will be for cloud applications.

Revenue from business cloud services — infrastructure resources, software applications and developer tools — was $22.2 billion last year, less than 2 percent of total technology spending, IDC estimates. But cloud revenue is growing at more than 25 percent a year, and will reach $55.5 billion by 2014, the research firm estimates.

Salesforce.com, founded in 1999, began selling customer-relationship software to businesses as an Internet service long before the industry began talking of cloud computing. Things built slowly at first, but Marc Benioff, founder and chief executive of Salesforce.com, says the turning point has come.

“What’s being called the cloud now is the future of enterprise software, but when I started in 1999 no one believed that,” said Mr. Benioff, who recently raised the company’s revenue forecast by 25 percent. “Sometimes you do have to wait them out.”

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Hybrid Cloud Computing Explained

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A few years ago, the IT world was focused on public cloud computing. In 2010, after IT directors expressed concerns over public cloud security issues, the focus shifted to private clouds. And now, because everyone wants operational flexibility, hybrid clouds are at the top of the wish list.

Several recent cloud surveys confirm these high levels of interest in hybrid cloud. A Unisys survey in January 2011 indicated that 21% of IT organizations are focusing on hybrid clouds, and a 2010 Sand Hill Group survey of over 500 IT managers indicates that hybrid cloud use will triple over the next three years.

Examining hybrid cloud architecture

So what is a hybrid cloud? For starters, it is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. The private cloud can be an on-premises private cloud or a virtual private cloud located outside the enterprise data center. In the illustration below, we provide one of the simplest macro views of a hybrid cloud — a single on-premises private cloud and a single off-premises public cloud:

The black circles in the illustration represent active virtual server images and the white circles represent virtual server images that have been migrated (using safe connections). The arrows indicate the direction of migration. Enterprise users are connected to the clouds using safe connections, which can be virtual private networks (VPNs) or secure HTTP browsers.

A hybrid cloud could also theoretically consist of multiple private and/or public clouds. The enterprise data center denoted in the illustration may have active servers (virtualized or physical) that are not included in the private cloud.

What is driving hybrid cloud computing?

Hybrid cloud interest is powered by the desire to take advantage of public and private cloud benefits in a seamless manner. Some of the risks associated with public and private clouds, however, can also be issues in hybrid clouds. The benefits and risks of public, private, and hybrid clouds include:

Public cloud benefits:

o Low investment hurdle: pay for what you use
o Good test/development environment for applications that scale to many servers

Public cloud risks:

o Security concerns: multi-tenancy and transfers over the Internet
o IT organization may react negatively to loss of control over data center function

Private cloud benefits:

o Fewer security concerns as existing data center security stays in place
o IT organization retains control over data center

Private cloud risks:

o High investment hurdle in private cloud implementation, along with purchases of new hardware and software
o New operational processes are required; old processes not all suitable for private cloud

Hybrid cloud benefits

o Operational flexibility: run mission critical on private cloud, dev/test on public cloud
o Scalability: run peak and bursty workloads on the public cloud

Hybrid cloud risks:

o Hybrid clouds are still being developed; not many in real use
o Control of security between private and public clouds; some of same concerns as in public cloud

Addressing the hybrid cloud challenge

The challenge of hybrid computing is to provide seamless operation across platforms, cloud application programming interfaces (APIs) and hypervisors. Users prefer to use their data center tools to manage hybrid cloud environments. Ideally, they want to be able to create applications, or move existing applications between the clouds in a hybrid cloud environment, without having to change anything serious like networking, security policies, operational processes or management/monitoring tools. This is a problem because, due to issues around interoperability, mobility and differing APIs, tools, policies and processes, hybrid clouds generally increase complexity.

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Evaluating Cloud Computing Services

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Selecting a cloud computing provider is becoming increasingly complex. As cloud environments mature, many cloud providers attempt to differentiate themselves by focusing on specific aspects of their offerings, such as technology stacks or service-level agreements (SLAs). In short, not all cloud providers are created equal.

At the same time, enterprises are beginning to rely on cloud providers for hosting mission-critical applications, which raises the stakes for selecting the right cloud service. So how do organizations navigate this multifarious landscape? Below you’ll find a few key factors for evaluating services as well as some resources to use.

Performance

One of the main concerns for enterprises that are considering cloud computing is performance. Achieving high-speed delivery of applications in the cloud is a multifaceted challenge that requires a holistic approach and an end-to-end view of the application request-response path.

Performance issues include the geographical proximity of the application and data to the end user, network performance both within the cloud and in-and-out of the cloud and I/O access speed between the compute layer and the multiple tiers of data stores. A number of services and research reports such as CloudSleuth and CloudHarmony have recently attempted to measure the performance of cloud providers from various locations and with different application use cases.

Technology stack

Several cloud providers have focused their services on a particular software stack. This typically moves them from being Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers to the realm of Platform as a Service (PaaS). As one would expect, the different stack-specific clouds align with the most popular software stacks out there.
Examples include Heroku and Engine Yard for Ruby on Rails; VMforce and Google App Engine (GAE) for Java/Spring (GAE also supports Python), PHP Fog for PHP and Microsoft’s Windows Azure for .NET.

If your application is built using one of these stacks, you may want to consider these cloud platforms. They can offer tremendous savings in terms of time and expense by shielding you from having to deal with lower level infrastructure setup and configuration. The flip side is that they often require developers to follow certain best practices in architecting and writing their apps, which creates a higher degree of vendor lock-in.

Service-level agreements and reliability

Some cloud providers offer guarantees for higher levels of service as a way to separate themselves from the pack. In Rackspace: The Avis of Cloud Computing, I describe how Rackspace has higher levels of cloud service SLAs to compete with Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla of cloud computing.

Note that SLAs are often merely an indication of the consequences when the service fails and not the service’s actual reliability. A great example of this is GoGrid’s 10,000% Guaranteed SLA. In other words, GoGrid offers a 100% uptime guarantee. Should it fail to meet that level of availability, it will compensate the customer with 100 times the fee paid for the downtime.

Although the SLA is a good indicator of any provider’s level of commitment, knowing the real uptime levels of a particular cloud provider is a trickier proposition. Most vendors have a status page that acts as a dashboard for the health of their services, but these generally display only stats from a few days ago at the earliest. To get actual long-term numbers for reliability and availability, it’s better to rely on customer testimonials and comparison services such as CloudSleuth and CloudHarmony.

APIs: Lock-in, community and ecosystem

Another critical aspect of selecting a cloud provider is the application programming interface (API) it exposes for accessing the infrastructure and performing operations such as provisioning and de-provisioning servers. The API is important in a number of ways.

First, an API that is supported by multiple providers and vendors reduces lock-in because migration from one provider to another — or simultaneously working with multiple providers — requires less change to the application and is, therefore, easier.

Second, an API that is widely supported by a community of developers and vendors has an entire ecosystem around it of complementary services and capabilities. The APIs offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the various VMware cloud offerings have large ecosystems built around them, which includes tools for governance (such as enStratus), monitoring and management (such as Cloudkick and RightScale) and a slew of other services that complete their cloud service.

VMware itself does not have a cloud service, but various providers use the VMware stack and APIs — specifically vCloud — such as Terremark and Savvis.

Both Amazon and VMware — and perhaps Windows Azure as well — allow customers to implement in-house clouds using their stack and APIs, thus enabling an easy way to manage and run applications on what some call a hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud is a cloud that is both hosted by a provider and runs in the company’s on-premise data center. In the case of Amazon, this can be done through Eucalyptus, a startup that provides a software stack for implementing private clouds using the AWS APIs.

A recent development in the space is worth mentioning. Rackspace, jointly with NASA and supported by many vendors and cloud providers, has open sourced its software stack in a project called OpenStack. Along with being the closest to what might be considered an industry standard, this move creates a viable alternative to the Amazon and VMware ecosystems.

Security and compliance

Two of the biggest barriers for companies considering cloud computing continue to be security and compliance. In a recent Zenoss Inc. survey conducted during the second quarter of 2010, nearly 40% of respondents listed security when asked about their biggest concerns about cloud computing. The second most common answer was management, which received only 26.5% of the responses. The Zenoss survey is consistent with a number of other surveys related to cloud computing.

The real concern for enterprises is not actually security threats but rather their inability to achieve compliance with security-related standards such as PCI. In response, many cloud providers are now touting their security and compliance chops with SAS-70 Type II audits, security white papers and other measures.

Banking on the opportunity, cloud provider Logicworks, has dubbed its offering the Compliant Cloud and has recently announced the Level 1 PCI accreditation of its cloud.

Cost

A straightforward way to compare cloud providers would appear to be cost, but it turns out to be anything but. The problem is that there is no consistency among providers in regards to the resources customers actually receive and pay for. Providers offer virtual machines (VMs) that vary widely in memory capacity, CPU clock speed and other features. Furthermore, the units that are actually provided to customers are often virtualized, creating even further confusion as to what the customer is actually getting and how it might be affected by other customers on the same cloud.

Amazon has EC2 Compute Units, Heroku offers Dynos and other vendors have created their own measurement units. The only truly reliable way to measure the cost-performance of different cloud providers at this point is to conduct an experiment with the same application or prototype on multiple providers and compare the results.

Conclusion

Choosing the best cloud provider for an application is a multidimensional problem. As the number of cloud providers increases, and as many of them focus on specialized needs and use cases, more choices require more focused examinations. Fortunately, services are emerging that help compare cloud services so that customers can tell which provider is best suited for which application.

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Moving to the Cloud: How Hard is it Really?

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Cloud computing has long been touted as a way to help entrepreneurs conduct businesses by housing data and computer hardware over the Internet.

While using the cloud is pretty straightforward, getting a cloud infrastructure in place can take some time and work. Thankfully, there are many cloud computing services companies that can help build the right infrastructure for your business to migrate data, hardware and software to the cloud.

“The last thing small businesses want to do is bring in a consultant,” said Ron Braatz, CEO and founder of LiftOff, the Crofton, Md-based cloud computing company. “Small companies, even with decent IT resources still need help taking the leap.”

Cloud computing, whether its hosting e-mail, software or storage over the Internet, is gaining traction as more and more businesses discover the cost benefits of not keeping the technology in house. While some cloud computing applications are as simple as setting up a username and password, other applications require the secure migration of data, which can necessitate the help of a consultant.

Take e-mail for an example, which, according Braatz , is the biggest piece of cloud computing that a small business needs help setting up.

“E-mail migration to the cloud is one of the most popular things,” he said. “It requires successful planning to get all e-mail up in the cloud.” Braatz also noted any missteps in migrating e-mail could hurt the productivity of the business. “Some companies try to do it themselves and then fumble while some get through without making errors.”

Once LiftOff is hired by a small business, an expert will visit and lay out a plan to move the company to the cloud. Migration time depends on the size of the company and amount of data, but Braatz said it’s not nearly as long as installing hardware and software at a physical location

“If it’s a small company with five users the company could be completely migrated to the cloud within four hours,” said Braatz. “If the company tries to do it themselves, it could take them four weeks.”

BMC Software (NASDAQ:BMC), in conjunction with SalesForce.com recently launched RemedyForce, to help entrepreneurs make the leap into the clouds. The new cloud offering is built on Force.com, Salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud computing platform, and helps companies manage their IT.

With RemedyForce, it can take customers minutes to get started, but noted that with other cloud applications, small businesses may need help integrating, according to BMC’s Chief Technology Officer Kia Behnia.

“There isn’t a one size fits all answer, it depends on the cloud service the customer is using,” said Behnia.

According to Behnia, when small businesses are deciding on a cloud service provider, he suggests checking the financial viability of the company to make sure it will be around for the long haul. Entrepreneurs should also verify security credentials of providers and the availability of the service, given secure data will be housed with them.

“Cloud computing has become very relevant in the speed and agility it provides businesses, but it does come with some unintended consequences. The customer has to think about who the provider is and whether the provider will be in business for the long haul,” said Behnia.

At the end of the day, he said that small businesses thinking of hiring a consultant to help move to the cloud shouldn’t expect to spend tons of time getting the job done. “It’s pretty quick in most cases,” said Behnia. “We are definitely talking days and weeks not months and years compared to what the traditional systems have been facing.”

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Top Tips for Cloud Computing in 2011

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Luxoft has predicted that cloud computing, whether used in a storage capacity or to greatly decrease carbon footprints, will experience significant growth, in both the public and private sectors over the next 12 months, specifically in the area of internet services.

The following tips have been developed by Vice President of Technology Strategy at Luxoft, Vasily Suvorov, to help businesses looking to use cloud computing effectively over the next 12 months.

Know where you stand right from the beginning

Cloud computing is emerging as one of the hottest technologies for IT, with an increasing number of organisations looking to the cloud to simplify and streamline their technology infrastructures while holding the line on costs. However, diving in with both feet isn’t always the best approach. Having a plan right from the start is crucial to getting the most out of the transition – and minimising the risk. Consider the following tips before making your first move.

Define what it means to you

There is no single all-encompassing definition of cloud computing. Before doing anything, decide which one of the various categories of cloud computing – Including SaaS (software as a service), cloud-based storage, infrastructure in the cloud, or platform as a service – most closely matches your specific needs.

“When you say cloud, it’s an umbrella term,” says Vasiliy Suvorov. “You need to decide which cloud offering you want before you go any further.”

Compare features and prices

Researching the alternatives is largely dependent on how complex the implementation will be. Simple cloud storage-based offerings, for example, are priced on a per-megabyte/gigabyte, per-month basis, along with additional charges for submitting or migrating your data onto the vendor’s platform. More involved application- and platform-based solutions will necessitate more complex pricing and feature comparisons.

Decide where you are on the cloud computing continuum before you begin applying selection criteria to features and prices.

Plan for the future

You may just be getting started, but vendor lock-in is a very real risk if you’re not careful. A key lesson for IT in this fast-moving market is to build a longer-term roadmap than you think you might otherwise need.

“As vendors and the market in general become more mature and their offerings become more commoditised, there will be more opportunities,” says Suvorov, who adds that the price/feature curve will continue to sweeten. “You may want to move elsewhere as prices come down. The scenario needs to be analysed for exit, as well, as you want to be able to move data out just as easily as you move it in.”

Check your tools

Tools that support conventional infrastructure don’t always translate into the cloud. Make sure you have the right tools in place to take advantage of cloud-based solutions.

“All cloud offerings except storage require extensive toolsets provided by third parties to integrate the data, integrate the physical to the virtual, support scalability, and provide monitoring capabilities,” Suvorov says. “Make sure you have administrative toolsets that cover the entire cloud-based ecosystem.”

Change your security roadmap

Cloud-based solutions force new approaches to managing IT security. While this is crucial for any organisation, it is especially so for those in sectors such as financial services, health care, and government, which are subject to greater regulatory oversight.

“Right now, no standardisation for security exists between different cloud providers,” Suvorov explains. “It depends on what cloud you use and who you work with.”

Suvorov adds that some providers, especially SaaS vendors, are more advanced than others.

“Whoever you go with, the important thing is to make sure you’re in control of who has access to your applications and all the data that’s going in and out of them,” he says. “Remember, that’s your accountability, not theirs.”

Prepare your people

This is perhaps the most important tip of them all. Although most IT shops can easily handle simpler cloud deployments such as storage with minimal retraining, more complex scenarios such as application migration may require different skills.

“If you’re deploying your apps into the cloud, in an environment where you need scalability, where you need to involve those IT resources who are responsible for maintaining and even developing your apps, then it gets a little more complicated,” says Suvorov, adding that IT staff may need to learn new APIs as they begin tuning apps for the cloud and integrating data on both sides of the firewall.

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5 Most Surprising Things about the Cloud in 2010

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2010 was the year “cloud computing” became colloquialized to just “cloud,” and everyone realized “cloud,” “SAAS” and all the other xAAS’s (PAAS, IAAS, DAAS) were all different implementations of the same idea — a set of computing services available online that can expand or contract according to need.

Not all the confusion has been cleared up, of course. But seeing specific services offered by Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix, VMware and a host of other companies gave many people in IT a more concrete idea of what “the cloud” actually is.

What were the five things even experienced IT managers learned about cloud computing during 2010 that weren’t completely clear before? Here’s my list.

1. “External” and “Internal” Clouds Aren’t All That Different

At the beginning of 2010 the most common cloud question was whether clouds should be built inside the firewall or hired from outside.

Since the same corporate data and applications are involved — whether they live on servers inside the firewall, live in the cloud or burst out of the firewall into the cloud during periods of peak demand — the company owning the data faces the same risk.

So many more companies are building “hybrid” clouds than solely internal or external, according to Gartner virtualization guru Chris Wolf, that “hybrid” is becoming more the norm than either of the other two.

“With internal clouds you get a certain amount of benefit from resource sharing and efficiency, but you don’t get the elasticity that’s the real selling point for cloud,” Wolf told CIO.com earlier this year.

2. What Are Clouds Made of? Other Clouds.

During 2010, many cloud computing companies downplayed the role of virtualization in cloud computing as a way of minimizing the impact of VMware’s pitch for end-to-end cloud-computing vision — in which enterprises build virtual-server infrastructures to support cloud-based resource-sharing and management inside the firewall, then expand outside.

Pure-play cloud providers, by contrast, offer applications, storage, compute power or other at-will increases in capacity through an Internet connection without requiring a virtual-server infrastructure inside the enterprise.

Both, by definition, are virtualized, analysts agree, not only because they satisfy a computer-scientific definition, but because they are almost always built on data-centers, hosted infrastructures, virtual-server-farms or even complete cloud services provided by other companies.

3. “Clouds” Don’t Free IT from Nuts and Bolts

Cloud computing is supposed to abstract sophisticated IT services so far from the hardware and software running them that end users may not know who owns or maintains the servers on which their applications run.

That doesn’t mean the people running the servers don’t have to know their business, according to Bob Laliberte, analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. If anything, supporting clouds means making the servers, storage, networks and applications faster and more stable, with less jitter and lag than ever before, according to Vince DiMemmo, general manager of cloud and IT services at infrastructure and data-center services provider Equinix.

Without bulletproof infrastructure, cloud computing is slow, he says, and end users won’t accept slow.

4. Tiny Things Make Big Differences

Virtualization enables many applications and operating systems to run on the same piece of hardware while thinking they each own the server themselves. The problem with that, according to IDC analyst Gary Chen, is that they all think they have the network interface and input/output bus to the processor to themselves, too.

On a server with a lot of guest OSes, the bottleneck to performance is no longer the speed with which data can move back and forth between the server and external storage; it’s the number of bits that can go through the data bus at one time, he says.

That’s one reason Virtual I/O is becoming a hotter topic, leading to what Forrester analyst John Rymer calls “distributed virtualization” — in which I/O, memory and other components are abstracted from each other as well as the guest OSes, and the definition of “server” changes to mean whatever resources an application needs right now.

5. “Year of Virtual Desktop, Wasn’t”

2010 was supposed to be the Year of the Virtual Desktop, as Microsoft, Citrix and VMware all competed to capture what analysts expected to be a wave of adoption from end-user companies.

Virtual desktops were a hot topic in 2010, but growth wasn’t nearly as big as analysts or vendors expected.

Instead of standardizing on virtual desktops and moving all their users immediately to make migration to Windows 7 easier, most companies adopted one of an increasing number of flavors of the technology, but only in places where it made most sense.

“We’re seeing a lot of tactical projects, but not a lot of strategic ones,” according to IDC analyst Ian Song.

That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of growth or adoption of even DAAS versions. But 2010 was no tidal wave, Song says.

The two biggest reasons, he says, were the complexity and comparatively low ROI of desktop virtualization compared to virtual servers.

Another was the increasing focus even inside the enterprise of tablets, smartphones and other non-PC devices that have to be virtualized to become secure, reliable clients for enterprise applications.

“We’re expecting to hear a lot about that from Citrix and VMware and a lot of the phone companies after the first of the year,” Song says. “It’s going to be big.”

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