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Hybrid cloud image via Shutterstock

By Brian Gracely (@bgracely)

While rapid technology changes are commonplace in enterprise IT, being able to shift IT processes or adjust IT skills is much more difficult. CIOs would love to be able to adapt their use of technology to keep up with every new business opportunity, but internal processes are often bottlenecks to that success. Finding new ways to increase the pace at which IT can keep up with business demands is always at the top of CIOs’ goals.

For the last few years, we’ve heard many technology companies talk about how enterprise IT will evolve to deliver cloud computing services for their business. In most cases, these journeys to cloud evolution begin by modernizing internal data centers through virtualization and automation, creating a private cloud environment. Over time, as the need for new applications or business models emerge, a combination of private cloud and public ploud (Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft Azure, etc.) services could be combined to create a hybrid cloud environment for the business.

While this model for cloud evolution has been favored by many organizations that want to continue to leverage existing skills and assets, a new wave will soon be coming at them as cloud providers (Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Virtustream, VMware, etc.) are all preparing offerings that would place their technology within enterprise data centers.

• Amazon AWS – Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) connects internal Data Center resources with public Amazon AWS resources via VPN technologies.
• Rackspace – Rackspace Private Cloud delivers similar OpenStack technology that is used in the Rackspace public offerings in a packaged bundle that can be operated within a private data center.  Rackspace provides deployment blueprints and optional support services.
• Virtustream – xStream Enterprise Cloud delivers a software/appliance for enterprises to run in existing data centers. This technology aligns to their public Cloud services offering.
• VMware – vCloud Connector – VMware currently offers the ability to connect vCloud instances from enterprise to cloud provider. In addition, at VMworld 2012, the company announced that it would soon begin shipping a version of its CloudFoundry PaaS platform that can be deployed and operated within an enterprise.
• Microsoft – Microsoft has made several announcements over the last two years regarding an on-premise version of its Azure platform, but actual details of how and when this will be available have yet to materialize.

All of these offerings are attempting to create hybrid cloud environments that can be consistently operated, regardless of where the application workload resides.  Being able to adjust from existing, siloed IT operational models to more dynamic cloud operational models has been one of the challenges for many organizations.

The public cloud offerings have gained the attention (and revenues) of development groups looking for greater agility and availability of infrastructure resources. But these moves highlight that IT organizations (as a whole) are still more comfortable with on-premise resources in this stage of their cloud evolution. Cloud providers are attempting to capture that sentiment with these on-premise offerings, and all of these offerings could significantly increase the pace at which customers move their IT organizations to adopt cloud operating models.

These new offerings will not only offer more choice, but they may significantly disrupt how the underlying technology is acquired. VARs, SIs and traditional service providers must now re-evaluate their roles in providing value to IT organizations that once looked to them to help navigate the technology and process transitions within IT.

Will these new, hybrid operational models be the tipping point for CIOs that have previously struggled to evolve their internal processes to the faster pace of public cloud computing?

Brian Gracely is Director of Technical Marketing at EMC. He is a 2011/2012 VMware vExpert, holds CCIE #3077, and has an MBA from Wake Forest University. Brian’s industry viewpoints and writings can also be found on Twitter (@bgracely), his blog “Clouds of Change,” and the weekly podcast “The Cloudcast”.

But what’s their angle? Some think Amazon may be taking notes from unlikely places, that “maybe it’s Amazon pushing the cloud like a drug dealer – get ‘em hooked they stay hooked.” But others know better, as James Staten reports:

Before you jump to the conclusion that the free tier is just a promotion and loss leader for Amazon and thus they will never make it permanent, let me point out that the free tier will actually make money for AWS. It does this in two ways. First, if you know you can shrink your application down to the free tier, you have less incentive to switch platforms and that means AWS can count on you as a customer and can count on revenue when you’re busy. The free tier is teeny, tiny.

What do you think of Amazon’s new symbiotic relationship?

The Fine Print

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage
• 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancer with 15 GB data processing
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, 1M I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10k snapshot Get Requests and 1k snapshot Put Requests.
• 5GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20k Get Requests, and 2k Put Requests
• 30 GB of internet data transfer (15 GB in & 15 GB out)

Additional freebies will also be made available to current Amazon customers as well as trial users:

• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB storage
• 100k Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service
• 100k Requests, 100k HTTP notifications and 1k email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service
• Free access to the AWS management console to build and manage your application

Once your twelve month free subscription is up, you begin paying-as-you-go.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Theft of information assets was reported by 27.3% of companies over the past 12 months, up from 18% in 2009. In contrast, reported incidences of theft of physical assets or stock declined slightly from 28% in 2009 to 27.2% in 2010, according to the survey [from the Kroll Annual Global Fraud Report].

So with all of these numbers scaring the enterprise into holding tighter to their users’ information than ever before, is it actually the cloud’s fault? There’s a booming “no” coming from vendors such as Amazon Web Services’ Steve Riley, Rackspace’s Bret Piatt, and founder of Mashery Oren Michels.

One of the theories on where cloud security propaganda comes from is IT execs who don’t want to part with their major IT budgets. “A big security breach that happened in the cloud doesn’t mean a security happened because of the cloud,” Michels clarified.

But just as Randy Bias says that the cloud isn’t a solo services deal, people want to know to what extent additional services are available to help in the deperimeterization of the operating system and the application that happens when moving to the cloud. In other words, how do you harden your application before deployment?

Steve Riley, Senior Technical Program Manager for Amazon Web Services, presented the alternative: If your extremely valuable data is stored in your single data center, the risk of loss is extremely high. Moving to an infrastructure that specializes in minimizing risks means that a single outage goes mostly unnoticed because there are other copies that can quickly be routed to. The key to data security is building to withstand failure and accepting guidance to create your application so that there are fewer risks.

Moving past the “we know what we’re doing” that many vendors tout in the face of questions about their security practices, Amazon Web Services outlined exactly how they ensure your data stays safe, from all angles.

How Does Amazon Web Services Protect Your Data?

• No physical access. No tours of the data centers, all activity logged and monitored.
• They employ the Zen hypervisor with some changes, such as security groups. AWS operates with the mindset that the virtual machines you deploy are your machines. Their operators have no access to your virtual machine.
• There’s no VM to VM path; they enforce traffic via isolation. They know exactly where your data is and do not allow the possibility of overlap or leakage.
• One of the features, security groups, allows you to construct your firewall rules at the console. Rather than opening up your webservers to the internet, you can create a tier above – with all of your security tools – that’s dedicated to scanning incoming traffic before reaching the webserver.
• Virtual Private Cloud: If you’d like to create a virtual private cloud with Amazon, your machines will be stored in AWS, but the end user assigns the IP address via the VPN from the router on your network to the router on AWS’s network. The only way your machines in the AWS can reach the internet is by routing out to your network then back out to the internet. Riley got excited at Amazon’s plans to increase the number of routers that lead into the VPC.
• Amazon S3: In their storage offering, intended for storage and distribution, data analysis, or disaster recovery, they employ separate policies for the container and the object within. The users are expected to define the policies separately, or all at once in the bucket policy.

Riley even had an answer for managing all of the different ways to secure your information: “Encryption is the best possible way to keep sensitive data secure.” Though data encryption has a community of skeptics, Riley proposed creating a flat file with all of your encryption codes, encrypt that file with AWS encryption to which Amazon never grants itself access, and the AWS encryption is deleted with each instance.

How other providers are walking the talk

I’ve since followed up with Rackspace’s Bret Piatt and Mashery’s Oren Michels about how they, too, are demonstrating to their customers that they are securing their data in the cloud and other services. Check back for their responses.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

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