From the Enterprise perspective, now has never been a better time to invest in cloud services. Enterprises are broadly adopting all types of cloud services at multiple levels in the organization. Initial predictions were for the enterprise to favor private and community clouds over public services, but the hottest trends in Cloud adoption has been Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-based business applications which are projected to grow from $13.4 billion in 2011 to $32.2 billion in 2016, a 19.1% five-year CAGR! The rapid adoption of SaaS applications of all flavors by the enterprise has been a surprise to many, but the vastly reduced costs due to the pay as you go pricing models, and high degree of service delivery flexibility has overcome any perceptions of needing to trade price for reduced feature sets. Unsurprisingly, the most often added cloud-based application services are Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM), with Web Conferencing, teaming platforms and social software suites nipping at their heels.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) continues to appeal to companies that want to replace in-house and traditional data center models for the cloud hardware abstraction approach. Gartner is predicting Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), cloud management & security devices, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are growing from $7.6B in 2011 to $35.5B in 2016, a CAGR of 36%. A word of warning for companies that think just because the Amazon cloud is easy to use, it is easy to build and manage. Building a private cloud still requires a degree of expertise that few enterprises have in-house. In the next year or so expect more companies to see the value of using the services of cloud consultants to avoid painful and expensive mistakes when building private clouds; or alternatively using emerging enterprise focused public cloud services such as Bluelock or Terremark.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) which still does not quite know what it wants to be when it grows up, is lagging with only about $1B in revenue in 2012, but as the market matures, expect to see rapid uptake as companies recognize the value of standardized tools that can ease the pain of Cloud application deployments. Some of the newer PaaS tools like the ServiceMesh Agility Platform combine the features of a SDLC workflow engine, production support and orchestration across different cloud platforms.

New Cloud Technology Directions

Ultimately, innovation is the marriage of technology and organization change. The dilemma is how to pull innovation into IT core functionality without disrupting the flow of new ideas, when the modern enterprise understanding of IT is focused on operational excellence and cost control. The CIO should be leading the cultural change to the new flat organization by leveraging cloud and mobile application in new and interesting ways. The trick is to create tools for people to quickly test and validate their ideas so they can implement new ideas that work within the enterprise framework. Cloud tools can be used to deliver on that promise, but is the enterprise up to that challenge?

This is not the first time wrenching technology innovation has changed how companies do business, and it certainly will not be the last. Companies able to use disruptive technologies, such as cloud computing, effectively will leave companies who do not have that ability in the dust. By recognizing the seeds of change and embracing them, the smart company can leverage cloud services by using the efficiencies of pooled IT resources at the same time allowing greater flexibility to meet the challenges of the global economy. This combination of combining commodity utilities with innovation allows companies to compete effectively using the efficiency and flexibility strategies simultaneously.

Challenges, Always Challenges…

Consumers intuitively get cloud and have been more than willing to embrace it warts and all as it has matured. They are highly price sensitive and will easily sacrifice features in exchange for low cost. On the other side of the market spectrum, the more conservative enterprise market is still struggling with the basic model. Some companies worry that the emerging cloud companies are too small to do business with, while others are concerned with how to incorporate new technologies into existing technology portfolio investments. To address their concerns, at the same time as Cloud technology continues to mature and standards develop , innovation around service delivery and breakthroughs in storage technologies are making it ever more enterprise ready. The pace of cloud vendor consolidation has already picked up as the traditional enterprise vendors such as HP and IBM has rushed to add enterprise ready cloud services to their portfolios. This should alleviate the fears of even the most technology adverse companies.

A final word for any remaining cloud technology skeptics, as with any innovative force, the cloud is just a tool to drive change, not an embodiment of change itself. Enterprise cloud consulting leaders, have firsthand experience with how companies willing to ride the Cloud revolution will not only survive in today’s hyper-competitive world, but thrive. I cannot wait to see where the next wave takes us!

About the Author
Beth Cohen, Beth Cohen is a senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, Inc., focused on delivering solutions to help enterprises leverage the efficiencies of cloud architectures and technologies. Previously, Ms. Cohen was the director of engineering IT for BBN Corporation, where she was involved with the initial development of the Internet, working on some of the hottest networking and web technology protocols in their infancy.

As I mentioned my previous post on the recently concluded OpenStack Summit held in San Diego October 2012, OpenStack needs to be taken seriously by anyone who is interested in building a public or private cloud.  For the more technically inclined the latest Folsom release has several new modules and features of interest to the enterprise and cloud service provider alike:

Quantum – Software Defined Networking (SDN), the latest darling of the cloud world is moving forward quickly with some really valuable features including L2 to L3 tunneling and a network API.  Expect to see lots of new development here.  On a side note, there was a great panel on the future of SDN moderated by Ken Pepple from Cloud Technology Partners, with people from Midokura, Big Switch and HP Cloud Services talking about their vision of the future for SDN.

Cinder – Now that Cinder has been spun out as its own named project, new features include intelligent location of Virtual Machine image storage, real snapshots, live migration, and more capability for large scale simultaneous VM initiations.

Keystone – New features includes support for role-based identify management (RBAC), PKI functionality, tools to add integration capability with enterprise grade account management systems such as Active Directory and other LDAP based systems.  Rumors of Kerberos support coming were floating around.

Documentation and security are both finally being taken seriously, with a half day documentation track on Monday morning and a full day of security related sessions on Thursday.  There was recognition among the lead techs that the developers who are creating OpenStack are not the users.  This resulted in much discussion regarding new features to make it easier to do deployments, upgrades (finally!) and manage it by operations folks.  There even was some discussion of IaaS/PaaS integration and how the VM’s work with the platform, a long overdue recognition that the IaaS and PaaS layers of the cloud stack are intimately related.

On the subject of operations, the tools to manage OpenStack are still weak, but they are no longer non-existent.  Ceilometer and heat among others look promising, but the better operations management tools are still mostly part of separate distributions such as Cloudscaling, Nebula, StackOps and others rather than being part of the product core.  While I do see the reasoning behind this thinking, at the very least we really need to have some standardized installation tools.  There is little benefit for every instance and distribution to reinvent the wheel.

One final note, one thing that was quite noticeable was that the Grizzly design sessions had a very different vibe from previous summits.  While some were packed with lots of discussions about new features, more often the Technical Project Lead and a few others ran the show with little input from the other participants in the room.  As the number contributors grow, the community is going to need to work hard to avoid having the immediacy of the Summit be diluted.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of meat already, but as can be seen by this tiny sampling of the current hot projects, there is still much work to be done.  The good news is the OpenStack community is ready willing and capable of delivering the goods in the coming months and years.

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

“Everything is mobile, everything is in the cloud.”

At the recent MIT CIO Symposium the theme was Beyond the Crossroads, the intersection of cloud computing, social media and mobile applications.  On the surface, the connection with these three themes would seem obvious to a technology savvy audience.  As proven over the past 150 years, first mover advantage can offer lasting benefits for a company that is smart about taking educated risks.  You would think that the enterprise would be embracing cloud and mobile technologies that have proven to be so successful in the consumer market.

However after spending a day listening to industry leader CIO’s primarily in the technology sector, what struck me was how much these supposedly leading lights in technology were stuck in the old school not invented here mentality.  The most exciting technology I saw all day was at the Innovation Showcase held long after most of the 900 attendees had left for the day.  Too bad, because these companies, such as Hadapt , a company that is creating the next generation of distributed database tools, and Apperian, a company building tools for managing enterprise mobile applications in the cloud, are demonstrating that there is plenty of room for innovation for the enterprise beyond the crossroads.

Meanwhile back at the main program, the discussion in the keynote panel on Opportunities and Strategies in the Digital Business World revolved around how the CIO needs to be thinking about how they can become the CEO of the company.  In the companies I have seen, you do not get to be in the top spot by being bold and innovative, rather a demonstrated ability to cut costs and produce short-term gains for investors wins every time.

According to Brian Halligan, CEO & Co-founder, Hubspot,  ”Cloud and mobile is not the future, it is a couple of years ago.  IT needs to be deflationary, destructive and disruptive.”  The CIO should be leading the cultural change to the new modern flat organization by leveraging the cloud and mobile application in new and interesting ways.  Instead the reality is that real innovation happens at the edges in the marketing dept, etc., or more often, completely outside of the typical enterprise where conformity and process thinking is encouraged over creativity and originality.  The Cloud moves IT from a capital intensive function to an operational expense activity.  The venture folks understand that paradigm; no right minded startup today is building an internal IT infrastructure.  At the same time, the typical corporate CIO is more challenged by the business manager with a credit card and a grunge against the poor service they have been getting from the IT function.

The dilemma is how can you pull innovation into the IT core functionality without disrupting the flow of new ideas, when the modern understanding of IT at the enterprise is focused on operational excellence and cost control?  Innovation is the marriage of the technology and organization change.  You do not see innovation in IT about 98% of the time because there has been zero input to how the IT tools are actually going to be used.  The trick is creating ways for people to quickly test and validate their ideas so they can implement new ideas that work within the enterprise framework.  The new tools can be used to deliver on that promise, but is the enterprise up to that challenge?  What do you think?

About the Author

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

As the world starts climbing out of the worse recession in 60 years, the pressure to deliver more for less has never been more intense.  Business executives are being asked to increase the productivity and efficiency of their organizations and drive ever higher profit margins.  In response, IT managers who have been producing miracles and driving down the cost of IT services while increasing the efficiency of companies for over 10 years, need to add yet more skills to their already overflowing laundry list.

Ironically, while IT does hold down labor costs and streamline business operations, and is clearly vital to any company’s survival, IT managers are still being asked to squeeze out yet more efficiency, while retaining the flexibility demanded of the modern commercial organization.  This pressure has given us: just in time inventory management and streamlined supply chains, decision support systems to allow for faster strategic business decisions based on real-time information about business performance, the virtual IT organization, global right sourcing, and a plethora of on-line business models and IT services to choose from.  If cloud technologies and outsourcing are viewed as more efficient services delivery models that offer flexibility and an expense cost model, the savvy IT manager can embrace the possibilities without sacrificing a leadership role in the organization.

For the IT manager who needs to achieve this level of services sophistication, it is no longer enough to be broadly literal in all the many technologies that make up the modern IT infrastructure.  Now it is even more important that the average IT executive gain a deep understanding of their company’s industry and organizational objectives, combined with an ability and understanding of IT portfolio management, project management, contract management, politics and leadership.  With this formidable combination of skills, an IT leader is ready to apply their strategic understanding of their company’s business to choosing the right IT services to their organization.

So, how are you going build those vital business skills, without sacrificing your technology currency?

About the Author

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

Last week I attended a great little Unconference called CloudCamp Boston.  For those who are interested separating the hype from the reality of cloud computing this was the happening place to be.  Unlike the previous Boston CloudCamp, where the attendees were  mostly tire-kicking enterprise architects or vendors who were seeing their core markets drying up as so many of their customers, if they were not buying cloud services yet, are hesitating on investing on what is increasingly seen as the legacy technologies of client/server based applications.

This time the majority of attendees were serious engineers and architects, who have the skills and vision to turn the enterprise cloud buzz into working IT infrastructures that will save companies substantial money, while delivering on the elasticity without compromising security or performance.  With the CloudCamp’s 120 some odd visionary IT architects, the nine top hot topics were in no particular order:

• Interoperability – Now that cloud is here, how are we going to get all the applications to work together in our IT portfolios?
• Security – The perennial favorite.  Now that we cannot pin down the exact location of the data, how can we protect it from the legal, physical and business perspectives?
• Cloud Abstraction – A new topic.  The visionaries are starting to ask the hard questions about how much you can actual abstract your IT infrastructure without losing sight of the practicalities of running an organization on it.  I am starting to see so much abstraction with the multiple vendors and layers, it easy to lose sight of the fundamental issues.
• Enterprise Reference Model for Cloud – We need to develop a set of best practices for what belongs on the cloud and how to work in the cloud at the enterprise level.
• Cloud to Cloud Data Integration – Related to interoperability, but this asks how we can automate pushing data through different cloud apps on the fly, a very sophisticated question indeed.
• Bandwidth – Now that we have moved to the cloud to save money of infrastructure, have we just shifted our headaches and costs to your friendly local telecommunications provider?  Is there a case for WAN optimization on the cloud?
• Reconciling Public Cloud Infrastructures with Enterprise Requirements – Is the Enterprise forced to move to the private cloud model, that IBM, HP and EMC’s Acadia are prompting, or are there ways to capitalize on the public cloud without compromising data security and integrity?
• Cloud Migration Best Practices – Developing business processes that allow mapping a cloud strategy to the business strategy.  What metrics make the most sense, ROI, value, culture, comfort level with outsourcing solutions in general.  What is the actual migration process look like?
• Missing Technologies and Gaps – Very interesting topic that gets to the heart of the fact that we cannot rely on older technologies to cloud scale.

In the coming weeks, I will be writing more on some of these topics.  I for one was very impressed with the passion and knowledge that the attendees brought to the proceedings.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.

Somehow I am getting a sense of déjà vu on cloud security.  Don’t get me wrong folks, but the cow is already out of the barn.  After all, more than 69% of all consumer Internet users have used at least one cloud service in the past year and that doesn’t include the nearly 100% of all consumers who are using web mail services such as Gmail, Yahoo and others of their ilk.

On the other hand, businesses and enterprises are not rushing to jump on the cloud computing band wagon in the same kinds of numbers.  So what is holding companies back from taking the very real advantages that cloud offers?  We can argue that business requires a higher level of security and validation than the average consumer, but the simple answer is really a large dose of inertia, fear and doubt.  That is, all the usual reasons that businesses use as excuses to wait for the consumer products and service to prove their worth before committing precious corporate IT resources.

In a survey conducted by IDC in August 2008 and June 2009, concerns about security topped the list of challenges for 88.5% of the respondents, followed closely by performance (88.1%) and availability (84.8%).   Clearly security is a major impediment to a cloud architecture implementation for many organizations.  It will need to be properly addressed before cloud architectures will be fully embraced by the business community.

Cloud security issues can be divided into three major categories, business, regulatory and technical.  Business issues generally can be quantified as risks to the business in whatever form.  Major business concerns for the enterprise include:

• Legal issues related to the control and protection of intellectual property and sensitive business information
• The difficulty of establishing end to end business data validation
• Regulatory issues related to data ownership and proper handling procedures
• A perception of increased potential for data and business loss
• Risk of reduced data or systems availability
• Proper integration of the mix of secured data residing both in the cloud and on the internal corporate networks

The major global regulatory issues that influence technical and business decisions around cloud computing architectures include:

• Rising consumer data protection laws around the world
• PCI Compliance and the need to ensure end to end data protection
• Banking regulations

It is clear that many of the business and regulatory issues can be addressed with properly secured cloud architectures, applications, networks and systems, but cloud and network security is quite complex.  It encompasses such diverse disciples such as networking, application development, database architectures and designs, hardware architectures, and systems design.  Many standard network security best practices developed for the enterprise are inadequate to handle the new cloud architectures.  However, by taking a network services approach to the architecture of cloud services, there are many advanced methods that can be used to address cloud security issues and allay most if not all of the business owners concerns.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.

Every day seems to bring yet another deluge of cloud-related press releases, articles, analyst opinion, and, somewhere among the confusion, some honest-to-goodness useful information.  While there is always some hyperbole with any new technology direction, there is more to the concept of cloud computing than vapor (pardon the inevitable pun).

Once you strip away the fluff, cloud computing represents the next step along the continuum in the evolution of utility computing.  It promises to have a substantial impact in the way that organizations provide IT services in the future to consumers and the entries alike.  From the consultant’s perspective, cloud computing, at a minimum, represents another option in terms of providing a flexible level of service more closely aligned with your exact requirements.  In the Service Provider Model (SPM), service levels are defined based on business requirements and IT delivery capabilities.  On the “demand” side, attributes such as availability, recoverability, and performance form the basis for the service definitions.   From the “delivery” side, IT is responsible for determining the most efficient means of providing a given service level. A key attribute for both demand and delivery is, of course, the per-unit cost at each level of service.

Cloud computing opens up additional delivery options for organizations in planning and providing IT services.  The advantages promised by cloud computing – the ability to quantify operational costs of infrastructure, dynamic resource allocation and improved flexibility, must be weighed against potential risks, such as the availability and control of data, performance impact on applications, potential for vendor lock-in in developing a services strategy.

Incorporating cloud computing into an IT strategy impacts a wide range of IT functions, and an expertise in the areas of data center consolidation, virtualization, security, and data management and protection can provide a unique perspective to determining the right approach to planning and implementing cloud services. If  you are feeling lost in all the hype, look for a vendor independent provider of IT services, to assist you in determining the appropriate IT services strategy for your organization.

Over the coming months, we’ll have more to say on this topic, but for those seeking a decent primer on the subject sans the hype,  a good place to start might be the UC Berkeley paper, “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf).  While it has sparked some debate, it frames the subject and its key components quite well.

About the Author

Jim Damoulakis, CTO of GlassHouse Technologies,

Last time, I talked about how the consumer markets are driving innovation.  This week I will follow up on those ideas and look into the reasons for this continued trend.  In a nutshell it can be summarized as available resources and reduced risk tolerance by businesses.

Since 2001, the business market has bifurcated into two very divergent directions, the large enterprise sector and everyone else.  The usual suspects, IBM, HP, Oracle, etc. continue to cater to the large enterprise, profiting on million dollar contracts and cozy deals.  None of these companies make money on revolutionary products.  They are best at creating better, more feature-rich versions of existing products that appeal to their generally risk-adverse enterprise customers.

Revolution and true innovation rarely, if ever, comes out of established companies.  They have so much invested in their existing products; they cannot afford to jeopardize their enterprise customer base comfortable with the status quo, in the risky pursuit of something revolutionary. No, the most fertile ground for true innovation is going to remain with companies that have nothing to begin with and therefore nothing to lose.  Look to the well documented history of the development of the computer hard-drive for a perfect example of how companies selling better products with more storage and features lost the marketing war to emerging companies with cheaper, smaller alternatives with fewer features.

Apple Computer is the rare exception that proves the rule; and their famously wild relationship with Wall Street is well-known. Apple has clearly bet heavily on the consumer market as their future direction.  The only company that seems to be able to defy my predictions and successfully develop their products to the entire spectrum of the business market, while maintaining a large consumer base at the same time, is Microsoft.  Starting with their brilliant idea to package a common set of desktop automation tools into Microsoft Office, which has now been installed in over 800 million systems worldwide, and continuing with their latest office productivity tools, SharePoint and Communicator, Microsoft remains very much in command of the business desktop.  Their products uniquely appeal to consumers, small business and the enterprise alike, yet, I would argue that most of their innovation – such as it is, is focused on the broad mid-sized business market, rather than the consumer (with the exception of Xbox) or the enterprise.

Ironically, the smart IT vendors, such as Cisco, HP and Microsoft, figured out long ago where the innovation was coming from and regularly snap up promising startups with the intention of incorporating their ideas into their product offerings.  Despite this understanding, these companies continue to struggle to translate all the great intellectual property they purchase into products that appeal to their risk adverse enterprise customers.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.  IT infrastructure consulting services.