Making employees buy their own IT tools sounds like a crazy idea.  Thirty years ago, IT systems were so expensive that most access was through a dumb terminal, which was essentially nothing more than a session screen that allowed you to type in commands that were sent to the computer.   The computer was of course housed in some data center attended by tens of administrators day and night.  Then the PC – remember it is not called the Personal Computer for nothing — revolution of the 1990’s shifted the paradigm again, so that each user had their own software on their own system.  The corporate systems were still accessed through special terminal emulation software, but Microsoft got fat on selling millions of Windows and Office licenses to their enterprise customers.

Over the past 40 years nobody has questioned the wisdom of having a company purchase and control the hardware and software that employees use to do their jobs.  The wide availability and acceptance of consumer devices is opening up the opportunity of resetting the equation again.  It is not only possible, but there are many benefits from taking this approach.  There are precedents in the construction industry.  Most construction workers are expected to bring their own tools.  It makes perfect sense when working with dangerous equipment.  You want to be completely comfortable with the tools so you can focus on doing your job well.  This even extends into the engineering and architectural professions; I have a complete set of drafting tools from my years as a Registered Architect.

From the enterprise perspective, support costs can be substantially reduced.  Keeping track of thousands of devices is a known exercise in futility.  A major broadcasting organization finally paid for an inventory of their workers’ systems a few years ago and found an extra 3000 undocumented systems in the organization.  Another company had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about employee owned devices and now has to semi-support about 11,000 of them.

From the employees’ perspective, using a single device that is used for both home and work, means eliminating nerd belt syndrome – two or more devices hanging from their waist or taking up space in carrying bags.  There is nothing worse than hearing a ring from one of the devices and trying to figure out which one needs to be answered!

Rather than attempting to halt the demand, the smarter path is to embrace BYOD’s by providing a safe and secure framework for their use.  This framework should have two complementary components: a BYOD policy and the technology framework and administration software to enforce it.  An official corporate BYOD policy would not be dissimilar to the corporate security policy.  To make it easier, some companies just incorporate their BYOD device policies directly into their standard security policy that all employees are expected to adhere to.  The key to successful enforcement is the implementation of the proper MDM software.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

You would think that cloud technology would have standardized long time ago.  While network standards that shape the Internet have been widely accepted throughout the industry, cloud standards have had a much slower adoption path.  Sadly the current state of cloud standards is, after 15 years, still far less mature than it ought to be.  As cloud infrastructure technology matures, increased interest by the enterprise and emerging vendors is driving a renewed effort to create viable standards that will benefit everyone.

For companies looking for integration and the capability to build hybrid clouds, various standards and proprietary and open APIs have been proposed to provide interoperability up and down the three layers of the cloud stack.  The first and so far only, cloud-oriented standard that has been ratified is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which was approved in September 2010 after three years of processing by the DMTF.  OVF’s open packaging and distribution format offers some platform independence by allowing migration between some platforms, but it does not provide all the tools needed for full cloud interoperability.

I think we can all agree that everyone benefits from technology standards in the long-term – the operative word is long-term.  You would think that everyone would agree that cloud infrastructure technology standards should be given high priority, but creating compelling proprietary systems and discouraging standards gives early adopter companies competitive advantage in the short-term.  Think about Amazon and VMware’s vast technology and market leads in the cloud services and enterprise infrastructure systems respectively.  They have little motivation to support any standards that have the potential to undercut their monopoly market positions.

Users of cloud are asking when will cloud computing standards mature enough so that more companies will feel comfortable implementing cloud architectures and using cloud services without feeling locked in.  Ironically, while the commercial cloud offerings have been growing, built on the very standards that created the Internet itself, Amazon and others have been reluctant to publish their architectures.  Application Programming Interfaces (API), which hide the underlying architecture, are all well and good, but they do not guaranty true interoperability.  Downstream vendors quickly find that they need to build API interfaces for all the different services they need to support; adding significantly to the development and maintenance costs.  To address this and transparently transfer workloads among the different vendor based on predefined business rules, there needs to be much more comprehensive standards.

One obvious question to ask is if there is an opportunity for the commercial cloud systems to become standards.  After all, there have been precedents where formerly proprietary formats, such as VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) which was developed by VMware, have become de facto standards simply by being widely adopted by the industry.  One could even argue that platforms such as Amazon’s AWS are already standards.  However, as many companies have found to their chagrin, while it has a vast variety of services, easy to use tools, and a significant technological head start on the competition, it is more of a cloud world roach motel.  Lots of companies have found it easy to get applications running quickly, but changing providers or taking the applications back in-house as requirements change is fraught with unexpected perils.  Amazon’s backing of Eucalyptus does not address that problem directly, but it does offer a viable option for companies that want to build what Amazon euphemistically calls, on-premise services.

In conclusion, the good news is that the cloud industry is finally reaching consensus that the time to build cloud interoperability standards is long overdue.   The biggest need remains for interoperability standards to allow virtual machines to be migrated between clouds transparently and for more robust hybrid cloud solutions.  For the moment companies that want to use multiple platforms or a mix of public and private options are stuck with complex architectures and emerging orchestration tools such as enStratus and Rightscale to bridge the gap.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

It is official.  Cloud computing is finally mainstream enough to earn its own NIST definition.  On the surface it is simple enough; by NIST standards the definition is pretty short – only 2 pages.  It has five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service.  The three service models are well-known: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and the four deployment models are public, private, community and hybrid.

None of this should be news to anyone who has been following the cloud for a few years.  What I find interesting is how IT operations-centric this perspective seems.  From the vendor messages at VMWorld last summer, the MIT CIO Symposium in May, and the most recent Boston CloudCamp,  you would think that Cloud Computing is primarily a new way of building IT infrastructure to run IT operations more efficiently.  Certainly, if you listen to the big consulting company of your choice, all you need to do to achieve your IT operations cost reduction goals, is sign a multi-million dollar deal and they will sell you a shiny new private cloud data center.  I will grant that it does achieve that goal (with a few asterisks of course), but if it was just a way to manage IT operations better, faster and cheaper, Cloud computing would not be all that exciting.

In my mind, Cloud computing and its companion technologies, mobile access and social networking tools are really a new paradigm of delivering IT tools and services to the enterprise.  Cloud shifts the focus away from essentially boring operations and systems by turning them into utilities.  Once the operations layer is abstracted away, users can focus on services, the essence of what we use computers for, to build better tools.  Yes, we have all heard that before.  Some of the older folks might even say Cloud is the new timeshare, but it is far more than that if we can push past the old way of thinking about the enterprise.

To really take advantage of the Cloud, take a look at what is happening in the consumer cloud space.  While some corporations are still dipping their toes in the water, some really exciting mass market tools and services are emerging.  Gmail, Skype and Flikr have become the new de facto standards for social communications, while Facebook and Linkedin are giant real-time experiments in the power of social networking writ very large.  Love it or hate it, Groupon and its ilk are bringing sophisticated mass customization marketing techniques and tools to small businesses.  Groupon would not even been able to exist if it were not for the Cloud.  It leverages the Cloud infrastructure to build out its systems, taps into its markets using the techniques of the social media pioneers, and delivers its services through mobile devices.  Clearly it is working in the consumer space.

These new architectures can translate back into the more cautious enterprise by using a combination of risk analysis and Agile methodologies.  You can can use them to rapidly create test cases within the enterprise setting to quickly determine if a feature is useful or desirable.  Some very successful companies have taken this new approach to heart.  Not surprisingly, Google uses it to build new tools, but long before the Internet, Capital One successfully used these methods to bring credit services to the masses, reaping huge profits along the way.  The good news is that the techniques are sophisticated, but they are not out of reach of any enterprise willing to shake off the status quo, build a culture that encourages lateral thinking, and truly rewards bold achievement.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

Andy Oram recently proposed in, Reaching the pinnacle: truly open web services and clouds, that Cloud services can be and should be free based on Open Source software.  My question in response, can the cloud be really “free”, or is free just going to be as elusive as the free GMail, Google and Facebook services that we all enjoy.  As we well know, none of these services are really free; we are just paying for them by giving away valuable information about our habits to people who want to sell us yet more stuff — Farmville is the perfect example of this phenomenon.  As long as people accept the broadcast TV model with ads in exchange for “free” access, then the balance is maintained.  However, the broadcast TV industry found to its chagrin that a good percentage of consumers are perfectly willing to pay for similar services without the advertisements, much to the delight of Comcast and HBO.  Certainly at the enterprise level, companies have always been willing to pay a premium for IT services, without the ads so to speak.

The final form that cloud services will take and how they will be paid for is rapidly evolving.  Until now computing and IT systems were too complex and fragile to lend themselves to the cloud model.  However as costs have come down and efficiency has gone up, the model is starting to make much economic sense.  Now we are left to figure out a good payment model.  Utilities are never going to be free, but the methods of payment do vary.  There are a number of utility payment models that can be used, the municipal services model, like water, fire and police, the telecommunications model, and the broadcast TV model.

The broadcast TV model is already well established in the consumer space.  People seem to be more than willing to share their deepest private web-surfing habits in exchange for free mail and social media sharing.  I do not see this as a viable model for the enterprise.

Another option is the water model — some municipalities were playing with this approach with the municipal WiFi mesh networks that were all the rage a few years ago.  The reality was that for the most part except in small communities, they never got off the ground due to cost.  This might or might not ever be a viable model for IT services.

The approach which seems to be the one that is currently favored is the Telecommunications approach.  In my opinion for all the cloud hype, what is really going on are utility companies (telecommunications companies in particular) turning computing into a utility.  This model works out to be advantages to everyone, the telecommunications giants and the major cloud vendors make their profits on a service that has reliable “rent roll” as it is called in the business, while the consumers pay for what they need without the brutal upfront capital expenditures required of building their own cloud.

Why is this advantageous to the companies?  Because, as with any other utility, the behind the scenes infrastructure that is needed to run the services is quite complex and expensive, but at the same time the new cloud architectures lend themselves to be sold in elastic quantities so that customers can buy what they need to consume.  Building the infrastructure to run a web server for a tiny personal site is expensive and does not make much economic sense at the individual level.  All this sounds great, but you are giving over your IT infrastructure to, as Ernestine says, TPC (The Phone Company).  More companies are willing to do it simply because it is vastly cheaper than the alternative and the bean counters like moving IT to the expense side of the balance sheet.  Consumers like it because they can access services they never could before for relatively short money.  The risk is that the services that Telecoms provide are generally good, but they are expensive and they are mostly deployed in areas where the companies will make the most profit, so rural and sparsely populated areas get poor coverage.  This is the classic “last mile” problem.  Government subsidized coverage for unprofitable areas might be the way to solve this dilemma. This was an approach that has been successful in the past for enabling access to telephone and electrical services to under-served populations.

In the end, IMHO, as long as we live in a society that values profit and big business over the good of society, I see the telecommunications model as being the most likely to survive.  The question then becomes, how to we ensure that there is equal access to the cloud goodies for all of society and who pays for that access?

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!