Tag Archives: strategy

Research Brings Cloud Costs Back To Earth

Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology are looking for ways to reduce the high cost of internet data storage and retrieval in cloud computing.

While cloud computing – which relies on remote, rather than local servers – offers almost unlimited capacity for data storage and processing, current usage charges mean the costs are expanding at the same near-limitless rate.

Social media such as Facebook and Flickr are simple examples of cloud computing, but the drain on resources from these sites doesn’t compare to the volumes of high-end data generated by the world’s research institutions, healthcare systems and industries.

Government agencies such as the Australian Taxation Office, Bureau of Statistics, and Treasury are all potential heavy users of cloud computing services, and the costs to them are high and rising. An estimated $1 billion could be saved if the Australian government develops a data centre strategy – the core for cloud computing – for the next 15 years.

This is why, using funding from an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, researchers from Swinburne’s Centre for Computing and Engineering Software Systems (SUCCESS), are developing more cost-effective models for cloud computing’s heavy users.

Professor Yun Yang and Professor John Grundy (from Swinburne) and Dr. Jinjun Chen (now with the University of Technology, Sydney) have been exploring the management of raw data and intermediate data sets, which are generated from processing this initial data.

“The trade-off is going to be between storage cost and computation cost,” Professor Grundy said. “Finding this balance is complex, and there are currently no decision-making tools to advise on whether to store or delete intermediate datasets, and if to store, which ones.”

To overcome this, the researchers have developed a mathematical model which factors in the size of the initial datasets, the rates charged by the service provider and the amount of intermediate data stored in the specified time.

“The formula can be used to find the best deals for storing data in the cloud,” Professor Yang said.

They have also developed an Intermediate Data-dependency Graph (IDG) which helps users decide whether they are better off spending money on storage or computation for intermediate datasets.

“IDG records how each intermediate dataset is generated from the one before it and shows the generation relationship between them. This means if a deleted intermediate dataset needs to be regenerated, the IDG could find the nearest predecessor of the dataset. This can save computation cost, time and electricity consumption,” Professor Grundy said.

The researchers have been evaluating these solutions by simulating a pulsar survey used to crunch information from radio telescopes.

“Searching for pulsars – rapidly spinning stars that beam light – is a typical scientific application,” Professor Yang said. “It generates vast amounts of data – typically at one gigabyte per second. That data will be processed and may be reanalysed by astronomers all over the world for years to come.

“We used the prices offered by Amazon cloud’s cost model for this evaluation. For example, 15 cents per gigabyte per month for storage, and 10 cents per hour for computation.”

From one set of raw beam data collected by the telescope, the pulsar application generated six milestone intermediate datasets. The model generated three different cost scenarios. The minimum cost for one hour of observation data from the telescope and storing intermediate data for 30 days was $200; for storing no data and regenerating when needed, $1000; and for storing all intermediate data, $390.

This gave the researchers options for which data to keep, and which to delete. “We could delete the intermediate datasets that were large in size but with lower generation expenses, and save the ones that were costly to generate, even though small in size,” Professor Yang said.

These are only a few of the solutions the researchers have come up with so far. To cater to different sectors, the group is also working on models that will allow users to determine the minimum cost on-the-fly, and as frequently as they wish.

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Zynga’s Cloud Computing Advantage

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Zynga was created in 2007 with the idea that “play — like search, share and shop — would become one of the core activities on the internet.”

Just 5 years later, the company has about 150 million monthly unique users in 166 countries, and has just filed for what could become one of the most important IPOs of 2011.

There’s little doubt that Zynga is one of the fastest and most interesting growth stories on the Internet, and it may be interesting to analyze how the company succeeded in supporting its customers’ strong demand while keeping a flexible and cost conscious architecture.

The answer, predictably, is cloud computing. Here is how Zynga describes its infrastructure in its IPO filing:

“Our games run on a complex distributed system, or what is commonly known as cloud computing. We own, operate and maintain elements of this system, but significant elements of this system are operated by third parties that we do not control and which would require significant time to replace. We expect this dependence on third parties to continue. In particular, a significant majority of our game traffic is hosted by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which service uses multiple locations.

We have invested extensively in developing proprietary technology to support the growth of our business. We have created a scalable cloud-based server and network infrastructure that enables us to deliver games to millions of players simultaneously with high levels of performance and reliability.

Our physical network infrastructure utilizes a mixture of our own datacenters and public cloud datacenters linked with high-speed networking. We utilize commodity hardware, and our architecture is designed for high availability and fault tolerance while accommodating the demands of social game play.

We have developed our architecture to work effectively in a flexible cloud environment that has a high degree of elasticity. For example, our automatic provisioning tools have enabled us to add up to 1,000 servers in a 24-hour period in response to game demand.

We intend to invest in and use more of our own infrastructure going forward, which we believe will provide us with an even better cost profile and position us to further drive operating leverage.”

Derrick Harris, at GigaOM, has an interesting commentary on Zynga’s approach to the cloud:

“Zynga has been touting its Z Cloud infrastructure for more than a year, which reverses the conventional approach to hybrid cloud computing. Whereas many analysts initially assumed companies would use private clouds as a gateway to public clouds, Zynga uses Amazon EC2 as a staging ground before ultimately moving games onto private cloud resources. Essentially, Amazon’s cloud lets Zynga scale elastically and determine average traffic load and other metrics, so that it can optimize its internal infrastructure for each game’s specific needs.

The goal of this strategy is efficiency: Zynga doesn’t have to invest in more resources than necessary upfront, nor does it have to worry about underprovisioning resources or otherwise inadequately configuring them when it brings games onto its private cloud. In many cases, private clouds can cost less than public clouds for applications with fairly stable usage patterns, and they help companies meet various requirements around security and compliance. Zynga uses Cloud.com for its private cloud infrastructure, as well as RightScale as a management layer that makes for a uniform experience in terms of managing both public and private resources.”

Zynga’s architecture is also build about close proximity to its main partner, Facebook.

According to peeringDB, Zynga’s main peering points in the US are located in several Equinix data centers on the East and West Coast of the USA (Ashburn and S. Jose/Sunnyvale, respectively).

According to industry sources, and as reported by Data Center Knowledge, Zynga is also leasing wholesale data center space from Digital Realty and Dupont Fabros Technology.

Zynga was also the subject of an interesting mention, during Equinix’s analyst meeting, made by Pete Ferris, the company’s Chief Sales Officer.

“Since the beginning, Zynga had very clear that, in order to succeed in its effort to “sell virtual pigs” to customers, it needed to reach the widest audience possible and make the gaming experience as pleasant as possible – in other words, supporting strong growth (reaching the largest possible number of lurkers) was key to the potential success of the company.

In order to make it possible, Zynga had to look for the right partners, infrastructure providers like Equinix and Amazon that had the financial strength to keep growing their data center resources and support the company’s potential strong growth requirements. In Equinix’s case, Zynga’s main partner was just a cross connect away, and the facilities also offered the largest number of US networks and ISPs to connect to, with the added opportunity to reach the most important Asian (on the West Coast) and European (on the East Coast) providers. Networking and growth problems solved, with just one provider.”

Zynga is a very interesting success story on its own, but it may also be analyzed to support the investing theory that there are some key infrastructure providers to these stories (both very successful or not) that will keep benefiting from the growth of the Internet.

These companies will also, most probably, be able to use their “first mover” advantage to strengthen their leadership, as they leverage their magnetic influence in the market to become the “place to be” for most new start ups, among which you’ll probably find the next Zynga, but that will all contribute to these providers’ revenues and profits.

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Getting Feds Comfortable With Cloud Culture

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Technology leaders in the White House have promoted greater use of cloud technology at the federal level almost from the start of the Obama presidency. Now the administration has issued its strongest backing yet for cloud technology with the release of the Federal Strategy for Cloud Computing.

Officials are using the strategy not only to pull together various cloud initiatives into a coherent package, but also as a directive to federal agencies to actively pursue cloud solutions. The strategy, released Feb. 8, raises the bar for federal cloud adoption. The strategy is designed to:

* articulate the benefits, considerations, and trade-offs of cloud computing
* provide a decision framework and case examples to support federal agencies in migrating toward cloud computing
* highlight cloud computing implementation resources
* identify federal government activities and roles and responsibilities for catalyzing cloud adoption.

“The federal government’s current information technology environment is characterized by low asset utilization, a fragmented demand for resources, duplicative systems, environments which are difficult to manage, and long procurement lead times,” said Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer.

Accelerating Adoption

“Cloud computing has the potential to play a major part in addressing these inefficiencies and improving government service delivery. The cloud computing model can significantly help agencies grappling with the need to provide highly reliable, innovative services quickly despite resource constraints,” Kundra said.

To accelerate the currently modest pace of federal cloud migration, the strategy directs agencies to intensify their cloud initiatives.

“Following the publication of this strategy, each agency will re-evaluate its technology sourcing strategy to include consideration and application of cloud computing solutions as part of the budget process. Consistent with the Cloud First policy, agencies will modify their IT portfolios to fully take advantage of the benefits of Cloud computing in order to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost,” Kundra added.

Under the “Cloud First” policy, federal information technology managers have been directed to consider cloud solutions as their first option in expanding or upgrading their IT capabilities. Each agency has been required to identify three ‘must move’ services and create a project plan for migrating each of them to cloud solutions and retiring the associated legacy systems. Of the three, at least one of the services must fully migrate to a cloud solution within 12 months and the remaining two within 18 months.

The existing deficiencies and inefficiencies of federal IT systems are such that nearly 25 percent of the federal resources devoted annually to IT could be more productively deployed to a cloud environment, according to the strategy. With the total annual value of those resources estimated at US$80 billion, about $20 billion could be shifted to cloud-based systems. The agencies with the most cloud potential based on the annual resource re-deployment estimate are the Department of Homeland Security at $2.4 billion; Treasury at $2.4 billion; Defense at $2.2 billion and Veterans Affairs at $2.2 billion.

While that potential is certainly an eye-popping number and may have validity over the long term, the immediate level of federal cloud investment may be significantly less.

“Those estimates involve a broad range of factors including infrastructure, software support, maintenance, and even power requirements. I think it will be a long, long while before it hits that level on an annual basis,” Kevin Plexico, executive vice-president at INPUT, an IT consultancy, told the E-Commerce Times.

Strategy Addresses Computer Culture

Still, the potential for federal cloud investments will be strong and will grow at a fast clip over the next five years, Plexico said at the Cloud/GOV 2011 conference held by the Software & Information Industry Association in Washington Feb. 17. According to INPUT, total Cloud-related expenditures by federal agencies will grow from $440 million in 2010 to $1.44 billion in 2015. In terms of cloud components, spending for applications will grow from $230 million to $750 million between 2010 and 2015. Infrastructure spending will grow from $130 million to $570 million, and platform spending will jump from $80 million to $120 million during the period.

In presenting the results of a 2010 INPUT market analysis, Plexico told attendees at the conference that only 19 percent of federal IT managers said they have a cloud solution in place. Thus the agencies have a long way to go before maximizing cloud potential.

The strategy document also addressed various issues related to cloud implementation at the federal level, including the need to facilitate cloud adoption with improved procurement mechanisms and what agencies need to do in preparing themselves to utilize cloud computing effectively.

“The most important aspect of the strategy document was that it re-emphasizes the Cloud First policy and keeps up a steady drumbeat for cloud adoption,” Dan Burton, senior vice president for global public policy at Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), told the E-Commerce Times. “While there may be some agency reluctance in moving to the cloud regarding technical issues, the strategy emphasized that there are no inherent barriers to the cloud. In that sense, the strategy addressed a cultural shift in perception as well as technology issues. It gives permission and encouragement for cloud adoption,” he said

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IT Consumerisation: An Opportunity

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The last 24 months have brought an explosion of new devices, Web applications and social-media platforms. Chief information officers (CIOs) are under pressure from other employees, including senior executives, to open corporate networks to consumer devices and allow access to more of the Web. This migration of consumer devices like smart phones and tablets into enterprise computing is making CIOs very nervous.

The risks to data security are obvious and real, and the loss of control – compared to the days when IT departments could pick and choose technologies – is distressing.

Why is this evolutionary process inevitable? There are five trends that have brought us to what I see as a point of no return on consumerisation.

1. The rise of social media as a business application.

For knowledge workers, social networks have become necessary and ideal tools for building work relationships and conducting business. For example, Dell has employed Salesforce.com’s Chatter for more than 90,000 Dell employees. Being able to follow opportunities is a key feature of this application, so social connections literally mean sales connections.

2. The blurring of work and home.

According to a telecommuting forecast by Forrester, 41 per cent of employers plan to implement telecommuting options this year and 43 per cent of the American workforce – more than 63 million workers – will telecommute occasionally by 2016. IT departments need to develop policies to deliver and secure sensitive data on both IT-owned and employee-owned devices.

3. The emergence of new mobile devices.

The mobile era has arrived. By next year global smart-phone shipments will exceed personal-computer shipments for the first time in history. In the wake of such a seismic shift, employees are showing up at work with their personal devices with increasing frequency

4. Shifting business models require tech-savvy employees.

According to McKinsey and Company, “word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 per cent of all purchasing decisions.”

5. Employee expectations of corporate IT are changing.

Desirable applicants don’t want to give up their devices, weakening the recruitment and retention abilities of companies who refuse to accommodate them.

As these trends collide, consumerisation moves from being something we have talked about for years to a crucial business decision.

Today’s consumerisation trends are yet to peak. Businesses that react thoughtfully and decisively now will reap benefits for the rest of the mobile era and beyond.

Articulate your company’s end-user workplace and technology philosophy and use that as a basis for setting a consumerisation strategy. Recognise that IT-security and data-protection policies that restrict the use of personal devices and social-media applications may actually increase security and data-loss risks.

Liberalise rules that prohibit business use of employee-owned technology in your own environment, starting with smart phones. Launch enterprise applications that mimic the best aspects of consumer communication and social media within your worker community.

Develop a business case for incremental investment by linking end-user technology strategy with human-resource planning, facilities planning and business strategy. Consider desktop virtualisation and other new technologies to reduce security and data-loss risks as the demand for consumerisation grows. Confront the software-licensing implications of consumerisation to ensure compliance. Finally, avoid end-user stipends; the goal is to allow employees to use the devices they already prefer, not to shift purchasing decisions on to them.

The heart of the consumerisation trend is human desire; people want to work the way they live, using the Internet to facilitate relationships and communication. It’s also the foundation for the next wave of business.

Companies that adapt quickly and thoughtfully to change the relationship between employees and the IT department will be better able to attract talent, execute new business models and enhance competitiveness. So why fight it?

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How Cloud Computing is Changing Corporate Strategy

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When it comes to outsourcing, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Coming up is not just more outsourcing, although that will happen. As the industry evolves, and as new technology comes into play–based in the cloud–IT services will become different in kind. They will have a lot to do with strategy; and the changes may fundamentally change the economics of some industries, resulting in new winners and losers.

That’s the message I heard in Mumbai earlier this month at the annual leadership forum of the IT-services trade association.

NASSCOM, the National Association of Software & Services Companies, brings together the stars of Indian and global outsourcing-companies like Accenture, Cognizant, Infosys, GENPACT, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, WNS, and Zensar. (Amazing how many of these have become recognizable brands.) The crowd in Mumbai was happy: They sense economic recovery in the short-term and momentum in the long. NASSCOM predicts the industry will triple by 2020, with sales jumping to $225 billion from $75 billion today. (They were less than $1 billion in 1996.) Only some of that increase is taken out of the paychecks of workers now in America or Europe. A lot comes from the sheer growth of emerging-market economies: If India and China continue to grow 8% or more a year, their GDPs will have doubled by 2020, with demand for IT services keeping pace. Some presumably will come from rising prices: India’s still cheap-I got a shoe repaired for under $5–but the gap is closing especially for high-end work.

The big deal, though, is the growth of cloud computing. The cloud will rain money on the industry. Why?

It’s a new toy, a big service offering just coming into its own, growing faster than 16% a year, according to Gartner. Companies have only begun to migrate vast amounts of data to cloud-computing service providers, with plenty more to go.

It’ll shake up the software industry. All the big business software companies-SAP, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, you-name-it-are trying to get out of the glass house and into the cloud. As in any effort to achieve dematerialize, they are meeting with varying degrees of success. They are also meeting new competitors-not just the Infosyses and TCSs of the world, nor just the Googles, but rivals like Amazon and cloud-native companies like Salesforce.com. Already thousands of merchants pay Amazon Web Services an estimated three quarters of a billion dollars. Anybody want to bet on the win-rate of incumbents vs. insurgents when confronting a disruptive innovation?

It’ll spawn lucrative intermediary businesses, like data security. While the keynote speakers at any conference intone great thoughts, down among the booths in the expo you see who’s paying for the canapés and wine at the reception. On that basis I can tell you that security in the cloud is a big deal; protection will become even bigger as more outfits hang the family jewels up there. Meantime, the outsourcing companies are moving up-market, which is why they call their industry IT services these days. This isn’t just re-labeling. Reflecting the change, the CEO of one mid-sized company told me he just totally reorganized its sales force to separate hunters (who seek new targets) from farmers(who cultivate long-term relationships). In addition, all kinds of specialists are bound to emerge-even broker/market-makers that switch your stuff from vendor to vendor during the day.

It’ll redefine–maybe–the very idea of the corporation. To see how, consider the implications of cloud computing for small and medium-sized businesses, who can now get world-class IT on a global scale without spending a dime in capital expenses, as BNET has written about. Futurist Paul Saffo once called the Internet “a full-employment act for entrepreneurs.” It just got better-and the little Davids of business have another slingshot to use against the Goliaths. If Quicken put an accountant in a box for small business, imagine what it can mean to have customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, real-time financials, analytics, and much, much more.

But the cloud also allows big companies to sharpen how they seek a strategic edge. As the economist and writer John Kay points out, there are two broad schools of “the theory of the firm”–i.e., why companies come into being and what gives them the right to win. One has to do with transaction costs; the other with capabilities. The first builds from the fact that sometimes it’s easier and cheaper to perform an activity within a hierarchy–the economic logic of vertical integration–while at other times it’s better to go out to the market. To Ronald Coase and disciples like Oliver Williamson, the sum of these make-or-buy decisions defines the boundaries of a company and shapes the struggle for competitive advantage. You can do smarter, more things in the cloud than you could with Outsourcing 1.0. That significantly widens the domain in which make-or-buy decisions can come up, and hence will lead to another round of re-slicing, re-dicing, re-sewing, and reassembling the component activities of an enterprise.

As that happens, companies will pare down to a handful of differentiated, interconnected capabilities–a few things they do better than anyone that customers care about. That’s the second broad theory of the firm: A company is essentially a bundled fasces of capabilities and access to capabilities. The strategic value of capabilities is going up, relative of the advantages of mere scale, geographic reach, or the ability to get a cost advantage from operations that customers don’t much care about. Indeed, just about the only remaining advantage to scale these days is the ability to tap into a broad knowledge base and leverage it over a large customer base-in other words, even economies of scale and scope are becoming capabilities-driven.

The cloud is ready for you. Are you ready for the cloud?

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No Need For a Cloud of Confusion

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It may sound like a PR ploy, but “cloud computing” truly is a different way of using technology resources, and more firms are adopting it.

If your head hasn’t been lost up in the cirrus or cumulus, you’ve probably heard of cloud computing over the last few years.

“The cloud” has figured prominently in President Obama’s technology initiatives, in the business plans of familiar tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and even in a New Yorker cartoon last month — depicting a parachutist struggling to use a laptop.

It’s also been the occasional butt of skeptics, such as Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

“It’s databases and operating systems and memory and microprocessors and the Internet. And all of a sudden, it’s none of that — it’s ‘the cloud,’” Ellison said — in a speech you can still pull down from the YouTube section of the cloud.

Oracle now offers “Premier Cloud Services,” but Ellison had a point. For a decade, Oracle had rented its enterprise-resource-management system to corporate customers who didn’t want to invest in their own hardware, software and IT personnel — a key advantage of using the cloud. So had other firms that pioneered “software as a service,” one of the buzz phrases of the cloud era.

Not a ploy

Still, that doesn’t mean cloud computing is a nebulous idea or marketing ploy. Advocates such as Patrick Harr, Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of global cloud strategy, argue that recent technological and business developments make “the cloud” a truly different way of using computer resources.

“The cloud is the great equalizer,” Harr said in an interview. It offers companies and consumers access to user-friendly services that might otherwise require large expenses for software, hardware and training. And that access can often be available from anywhere on the Internet.

For businesses, it also offers access to resources that otherwise would be unthinkable.

Harr said DreamWorks Studios uses HP’s cloud services for rendering films — the hugely data-intensive process that brings together all of the digital elements of a full-scale animation. Even with powerful computers, rendering a segment of a movie can take days, he said.

“If I’m generating a new movie, I only do this once or twice a year,” Harr said. “As a company, I don’t want to go out and buy thousands of servers for that.” Thanks to HP’s cloud services, DreamWorks doesn’t have to.

If you are still confused, here are answers to some basic questions.

What is cloud computing?

Ellison isn’t wrong: It’s databases, operating systems, memory, microprocessors and the Internet, all rolled into a package. But with the cloud, the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts.

Harr said two key advances distinguish cloud computing from earlier versions of remote hardware and software rental and mark “a fundamental technological shift.”

One is “multi-tenancy,” in which many businesses can take simultaneous advantage of a huge pool of powerful resources such as HP’s tens of thousands of servers. A small business might just require a tiny portion of resources — perhaps just a section of a single server that hosts a dozen “virtual machines,” each emulating a stand-alone computer. A large business might use hundreds of servers.

The other key is automation of crucial tasks, such as responding to a sudden need for extra resources. With in-house technology, a retailer might be overwhelmed by a holiday surge in demand, or a media company by a video that goes viral and generates millions of hits. With the cloud, extra resources can be deployed rapidly and seamlessly.

Who offers cloud services?

The list is long and growing. It’s headed by giants such as Google, HP and Amazon, but includes niche providers as well — sometimes via partnerships between software and hardware companies.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in Malvern, Pa., last week to launch a new Microsoft Technology Center, a 17,500-square-foot facility that includes a server farm and is part of the software giant’s cloud-centric strategy.

“When you use a cloud-based service, there’s nothing you have to install or deploy,” said Karen Del Vescovo, Microsoft’s district general manager. “This provides you access to the information and the backup from anywhere.”

Microsoft says 70 percent of its software developers are working on cloud-related products and services — a figure that will rise to 90 percent within a year.

Who uses the cloud?

Consumers who use Gmail or other Web-based mail services are essentially cloud users. So are interactive gamers or people who use photo services like SnapFish or Flickr, which provide anywhere, anytime access to your digital pictures, even at Grandma’s.

For now, old habits and computers still bundled with e-mail and document software may keep consumers using traditional programs. But small businesses increasingly see value in the cloud as a way to control information-technology expenses — and headaches.

Swedesboro, N.J.-based L&L Kiln Manufacturing Inc. and a sister company use Intuit’s QuickBase for database services, Batchbook for contact management, and Google’s Gmail and Google Docs for e-mail and document management, all at an annual cost of about $3,600.

L&L President Stephen Lewicki said the services have improved workflow and collaboration. But he also says much of the benefit is indirect and intangible — including a reduction in technology hassles at businesses where few employees have high-tech skills.

“There are certain things that I can do in the cloud that are much more efficient,” Lewicki said. “And it never breaks, so I never have to worry about it.”

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Hosted Desktop Strategy Questions

One of the challenges of evaluating cloud computing and the use of hosted desktops in the small business enterprise is understanding not only the business case ROI, but the operational impact. Here are 30 questions to assist you in thinking through the issues associated with deploying hosted desktops.

First some definitions:

VDI, Virtual Desktop infrastructure = Dedicated Virtual Desktop (hosted desktop)

There are two kinds of VDI: server-hosted and client-side. A Server-Hosted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a dedicated remote desktop solution providing remote access to Windows XP/Vista/Win7 or Linux desktops. The virtual machines are run from within the data center. The virtual infrastructure increases the system’s independence, availability and manageability.

The following questions should be part of the analysis to deploy a hosted desktop strategy:

1. What are the use cases? And does the use-case require Virtualization?

2. What do I want to achieve?, lowering TCO?, business enabler, overall cost of ownership and cost reducer?

3. What is the business case?

4. What’s the user experience using Multimedia, NextGen, Video/Voice, 2D/3D applications? What do users expect from the hosted desktop?

5. What endpoints do we support and facilitate and what is the role of these devices in the end-user experience?

6. Secure Access and Secure networking, how do users, with a variety of endpoints (rich, thin, zero-clients and mobile devices) connect to the hosted desktop?

7. What is the impact of Secure Access and Secure Networking solutions on mobile devices while connecting to the hosted desktop? What is the user experience with these solutions?

8. Do we need to manage the endpoints?

9. How is the hosted desktop managed? OS deployment, application distribution, patch management etc. etc. Is client management mandatory?

10. Do we need image management?

11. How are Windows applications delivered within the hosted desktop? Unattended or manual Installation, Application Virtualization or the applications are part of the (golden) image? What is the strategy?

12. Are User Installed Applications inside the hosted desktop needed?

13. What is the performance and storage impact of Application Virtualization?

14. What is the impact on storage and how does it affect the business-case?

15. Do you need local or centralized storage?

16. Do we focus on stateless (pooled, shared) and/or stateful (assigned, private) images?

17. What is the impact on storage, manageability, security, legal and business-case?

18. What is the impact of client management solutions in a stateless VDI scenario?

19. How do we design, build and maintain the (golden) Image(s)?

20. Windows 7 or Windows XP as core hosted desktop OS platform? x64 or x86?

21. How does the solution scale? What do we need from a scalability point of view?

22. How do we size the hosted desktop and corresponding infrastructure and what are the best-practices for optimizing the hosted desktop?

23. What is the performance and bandwidth impact on the network infrastructure; LAN, WAN, wLAN?

24. How do we design, build and maintain the user’s profile and his workspace?

25. Licensing; Operating System, Client Access Licenses and (Business) Applications?

26. Do we need to backup (and restore) the hosted desktops?

27. Is Anti-Virus needed? Inside the VM or as service module on the Hypervisor? What is the performance impact of AntiVirus?

28. Is the IT organization mature enough to support and maintain the complete technology stack? What is the knowledge and skill-set of the IT-department?

29. Is separation of Operating System, Application and User Preferences inside and outside the hosted desktop part of the overall strategy?

30. Bottom Line: What’s your current desktop strategy?

meshIP can assist you with the strategy and deployment of hosted desktops and other cloud services.

Hosted Desktop Strategy Questions

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