February 3, 2014
Volume XLVI, Issue 12
Cloud Computing's Sunny Forecast
Excerpted from BusinessNewsDaily Report by Sara Angeles
Cloud computing has evolved into a powerful business tool for both big name corporations and small businesses alike. Whereas costs and lack of service options once limited cloud accessibility for small businesses, today's cloud environment and future outlook show that cloud computing is more affordable than ever.
Kirill Bensonoff, founding partner at ComputerSupport.com, and Calvin Wilder, CEO of SmartBooks, recently held a webinar called 2014 Cloud Trends Every CFO Needs to Know, discussing where the cloud is going and what that means for small businesses.
Bensonoff and Wilder identified price trends among cloud providers, as well as security concerns that are relevant amidst recent NSA spying revelations. The two also discussed the cloud services available to small businesses, the rate at which these services are growing, and the biggest players leading the market.
One of the glaring trends in cloud computing is the downward trend in prices, making cloud computing more affordable than ever for small businesses. Leading the price wars is Amazon's cloud service.
"Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the pre-eminent infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud provider, with about 60 percent of the IaaS market share," Bensonoff said in a follow up. "They have been leading the downward price trends, with over 30 price cuts since 2006."
AWS also lowered some of its prices by 80 percent in 2013 and already had a major price cut on its Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2014. Microsoft Azure, Google, Rackspace, and other cloud providers followed suit and matched Amazon's prices, Bensonoff said.
"This trend will continue throughout the year and beyond," he said, and this is good news for small businesses. "With falling prices, business can take advantage of storage and computing available in the cloud."
In another growing trend in cloud computing, users have increasing concerns about compliance issues and how businesses are protected from prying eyes.
"Security is a major factor when choosing a cloud vendor or deciding whether or not to move into the cloud," Bensonoff said.
Security concerns include regulatory matters. Cloud providers must ensure that they themselves, along with the services they provide, comply with regulations such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
But in 2013, businesses became even more concerned about data security and privacy issues after Edward Snowden's revelations regarding the NSA's electronic surveillance program, PRISM.
"There is a threat of the government looking at your data, as we recently learned via Snowden, and folks are thinking twice about putting their intellectual property into the cloud," Bensonoff said. That has turned some users off of US-based services. "Some are thinking about moving it abroad."
However, not all businesses are allowed to use overseas cloud providers. "There are issues for those that do any work for the government and are under ITAR regulatory compliance. They have to be hosted on US soil," Bensonoff said.
Bensonoff and Wilder also identified the cloud services currently available to small businesses, naming the platforms that are leading the market:
Among the different cloud platforms, IaaS grew 45 percent from 2012 to 2013, making it the leader in cloud growth. Currently a $15 billion business, it is expected to grow to $31 billion by 2015. IaaS providers include AWS, Windows Azure, and VMware.
PaaS, on the other hand, is the smallest cloud segment, at $1 billion in 2013, though some think it can overtake IaaS in the coming years. PaaS clouds include Google App Engine, OpenStack, and Heroku.
Furthermore, over half of today's organizations use software-as-a-service (SaaS), with 63 percent of companies using this platform in 2013. In 2012, SaaS was a $13 billion market, but is now predicted to grow to over $30 billion by 2016. Some examples of SaaS are Salesforce, Google Apps, and Office 365.
Additionally, emerging cloud players include desktop-as-a-service, (DaaS) such as Citrix; file-sharing services, such as Egnyte; virtual data centers like DinCloud; Java PaaS, such as CloudBees; and Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication, like OneLogin.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 The DCIA & CCA are proud to present CLOUD COMPUTING EAST (CCE:2014), a must-attend strategic summit in early May for business leaders and software developers, which will take place in Washington, DC.
This important gathering of thought leaders and first movers will thoroughly examine the current state of adoption and the outstanding challenges affecting three major increasingly related sectors of the economy, whose principals currently engaged in migrating to the cloud.
CCE:2014 will focus on the gCLOUD (The Government Cloud), hCLOUD (The Healthcare Cloud), and fCLOUD (The Financial Services Cloud).
Plenary sessions will feature principal representatives of such industry leading organizations as Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Verizon providing delegates with a real insider's view of the latest issues in this space.
gCLOUD case studies will expose the truth about cloud computing and the public sector. What really happened when a local municipality tried to streamline operations by moving just a few basic functions to the cloud? Why was the FedRAMP experience of one major cloud provider with government bureaucracy such a total shocker?
gCLOUD speakers will include representatives of such organizations as ASG Software, Clear Government Solutions, DST, HP, IBM, Ipswich Public Library, NASA, The City of New York, QinetiQ-NA, SAP America, Tech Equity, Unitas Global, Verizon, Virtustream, and WSO2.
hCLOUD sessions will range from revelations of the astonishing experience of a medical imaging company new to this arena to a generous sharing of the deep wisdom from a patient-records-storing firm that was doing cloud computing before the name cloud was even coined.
hCLOUD speakers will include representatives of such organizations as AVOA, BP LOGIX, BrightLine, Dell, DICOM Grid, Level 3, NTP Software, Optum, ServerCentral, SYSNET Intl., and Vizix.
And fCLOUD keynotes and panels will uncover the real reasons banks and other financial institutions are now rushing to embrace the cloud after saying they'd never go near it.
fCLOUD speakers will include representatives of such organizations as BNY Mellon, Financial Force, Intuit, and Trilogy Global Advisors.
Other featured speakers will include authors, analysts, industry observers, and representatives of such organizations as ActiveState, Aspera, BUMI, CDAS, Edwards Wildman Palmer, Expedient, Juniper Networks, Kwaai Oak, M*Modal , Mobily, Numecent. The PADEM Group, Rackspace, SOA Software, Stratus Technologies, Trend Micro, V2Solutions, Veristor, Visionary Integration Professionals, and WikiPay,
The gCLOUD will examine the ways that local, state, and federal governments can improve services and protect citizens with cloud-based tools. It will also address liabilities and challenges that need to concern government agencies regarding cloud-based services, countering NSA-fallout gloom with energized and confident approaches that overcome concerns raised by the Snowden scandal.
The explosion of data, advances in security and reliability, and options for redundant storage; challenges to natural resource management, transportation, and utility grid monitoring; and the impact of cloud services on law enforcement and emergency responsiveness will be featured topics.
The hCLOUD will explore progress being made by the healthcare industry in adopting cloud-based solutions to become more efficient, collaborative, and interactively connected. It will also address legitimate concerns that healthcare organizations must address in implementing cloud-based services.
Managing private patient records; collecting clinical research data; big-data imaging, and remote patient monitoring will be covered.
The fCLOUD will discuss the ways that financial transactions and currency exchange, domestic banking and insurance services, as well as efficient investment decision-making are all being impacted by cloud computing. It will also address obstacles that need to be confronted by financial services organizations in migrating to the cloud.
International financial activities impacted by cloud computing; how banks and insurance companies are migrating to the cloud; and private equity and hedge fund investor use of cloud computing will be highlighted.
Speakers will include end-user organizations, public-sector thought-leaders, and private-sector cloud vendors, representatives of hospitals, clinics, multi-physician practices, and healthcare solutions providers, business and technology leaders from the financial services industry and executives and innovators from the cloud computing industry.
Please contact Don Buford, CEO, or Hank Woji, VP Business Development, at the CCA to learn more about attractive conference exhibition and sponsorship opportunities.
To review conference topics and apply to join the speaking faculty for this event, please click here. If you'd like to speak at this major industry event, please contact me, Marty Lafferty, CEO of the DCIA, at your earliest convenience. Share wisely, and take care.
IT Pros Want Training on Cloud, Mobility, Security
Excerpted from Baseline Report by Dennis McCafferty
A State of the IT Worker survey from ScienceLogic contains mostly good news: information technology (IT) employees expect that their organizations will spend more money on IT initiatives in 2014.
They also think that the enterprise network, IT applications, and the data center will likely emerge as the top areas of future investment.
The IT pros also confess that they make pretty good money. In fact, some of them even feel that they are overpaid, and they anticipate making even more next year.
But these workers are less encouraged by their preparation for what's ahead, especially when it comes to their educational grounding in cloud-focused developments.
"Cloud computing is at the top of every CIO's agenda," says Antonio Piraino, CTO of ScienceLogic, "but it's clear that many employees do not feel confident managing the new IT environment."
In addition to the cloud, tech professionals want more education on mobile computing and cyber-security, among other topics. An estimated 1,000 IT professionals took part in the research.
Cloud Computing Comes in Many Shades
Excerpted from BSN Report by Darleen Hartley
Cloud computing, like atmospheric phenomena, can be either a gray area or full of light and promise. The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), an international trade organization focused on commercial advancement of cloud computing and related technologies, sponsored discussions at CES that touched on the pros and cons of cloud computing.
Problems seen as barriers to embracing cloud computing are security, reliability, and for enterprise systems, lack of control by IT. Benefits to a business include scale and cost. Long term capital expenditure (CapEx) is being weighed against day-to-day operational expenses (OpEx) when a business considers moving to the cloud. Speakers touched on these topics and others.
Sam Rosen of ABI Research quipped that "CE" now stands for Cloud Electronics. The cloud must be viewed from two perspectives, that of the enterprise system and that of the consumer.
The consumer side of the cloud has evolved to include music, photos, video, gaming, and social networking. Yet, we were told that the connected home attempt has failed because standards are fragmented, vendor products are not interoperable, portability from business to home to auto is lacking, and user experience has been unsatisfactory.
Separately, however, music and gaming are big pluses for cloud use. Music streaming revenues from purchases, Internet radio, digital lockers, and on-demand have increased globally from zip in 2010, gradually increasing through 2013, to an enormous jump projected in the high volume areas of the world by 2018.
Cloud gaming is another positive arena. It has progressed from multi-player, such as Playstation Network, to a hybrid such as Zynga, to pure cloud activity.
On the enterprise side, benefits of the cloud for operators include scale due to architecture flexibility, speed of deployment, asset control, and catalog extension. However, Reza Rassool of Kwaai Oak, a start-up professional focusing on digital media and entertainment, discussed challenges. Specifically he pointed to performance which he related to Hooke's Law of elasticity and how the cloud responds to a load. Load times fluctuate. They affect bounce rates and can be part of the reason shopping carts are left standing in the aisle so to speak with uncompleted checkouts and lost sales. Bandwidth is called into question.
Rosen stated that the goal is to get content from anywhere to anywhere. Apple and Google lead the way, but Amazon is also a player. Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are competitors in the arena and bring different approaches to cloud computing. Organizations find that the cloud has a big impact on the character of IT.
The DCIA says that practices such as remote working, accessing work data from any device, and allowing access to real-time data streams are only possible with cloud computing technology.
Melody Yuhn, CTO at CSS Corp., a technology consulting and support company, indicated that mobile security and personal data sharing was a concern, as was bandwidth performance. David Hassoun from RealEyes Media, which specializes in streaming media echoed Yuhn's concern over security as did most on their panel. Andy Gottlieb of Aryaka, which offers cloud network as a service, also brought up bandwidth as being more of a problem for enterprise users than for consumers. Mobile devices work over a longer distance which has to contend with latency packet loss. Jay Gleason of Sprint agrees,"Wireless won't cut it on latency issues."
Larry Freedman, attorney with Edwards Wildman Palmer, expanded on the security concern noting that security differs for wireless and that the perception between wireless and wireline comes into play. Wireless enhances the value of the cloud with business. However in his words: the fiber optic supply and platform"kick butt over wireless". Freedman mentioned what effect the loss of government subsidies will have on telecommunications and cloud companies. Telco regulations are being re-evaluated.
Telcos could beneficially partner with a cloud company as seen with Sprint's recent announcement of its intent to add unlimited cloud storage to its suite of services. Gleason concurred that telcos are being squeezed for revenue. They need to be able to provide more services to the customer. Offering the cloud helps get them off the support line and turns them to other means of generating income, for example simply charging $5 to set up connected services. He acknowledged that the customer wants speed, they want it fast.
CIOs and CEOs who want to get on the cloud are concerned that data will available when they need it. Also what will the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) entail from their network service providers.
Additionally, IT has lost control over the desktop. Tablets are taking the place of PC's. Management wants the mobile provider to secure the mobile devices that contain personal and company proprietary information. Security and privacy are repeated concerns when you talk about cloud computing.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) illustrate those two items as being the biggest barrier to deploying the cloud, followed by cost and time involved.
Grant Kirkwood of Unitas Global a provider of enterprise private cloud and IT outsourcing solutions, pointed out the irony of the cloud — we have come full circle, what was an old approach in technology is new again. On topic, he said wireless raises challenges, such as spikes in loads and performance. He cited the need to build infrastructure as evidenced by 100,000 plus users at CES and the slow delivery times we all experienced at the show.
It is not that all pieces have to fit together he opined. What is needed is one whole solution. The future of cloud computing can't be denied. Mobile utilization is increasing, GPU based cloud solutions are growing, Wi-Fi will improve, and more industry consolidation and cooperation is expected. Challenges are being overcome, Benefits are being realized.
With the cloud, the sky's the limit.
It's Time to Protect Data in the Cloud
Excerpted from Daily Caller Report by Steven Titch
Tuesday's State of the Union address affords President Barack Obama another opportunity to address the government's massive overreach in collecting data about ordinary Americans in the name of protecting us.
Although Obama, a constitutional scholar, spoke at length in a January 17th address to the nation about balancing individual privacy and national security, even conceding that there is a "bias" within government to amass as much information as it can, he offered no guidance or framework to Congress as to how existing law can be strengthened to protect Americans from wholesale government intrusion into their online lives.
Fortunately, bipartisan efforts on Capitol Hill have been gaining ground. And while the scope of NSA and other government abuses defy a single solution, strengthening existing laws, particularly the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, is a great place to start.
Even before news of the NSA's surveillance programs broke last June, Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, and Mike Lee, R-UT, had co-sponsored revisions of ECPA to extend Fourth Amendment protections to private data stored on servers on the Internet, or as it's called current nomenclature, the "cloud."
ECPA sets out rules for law enforcement agencies that want to tap phone lines. When it was enacted nearly 30 years ago, there was no concept of cloud computing. Cloud computing makes it possible for users to, for example, access playlists and movies from multiple devices, because that content is stored on servers in data centers that could be anywhere in the world.
But there's much more to it than that. Cloud computing is driving the so-called "Internet of things." The latest tech buzzwords that shout from covers of "Wired" and "Popular Science" — smart homes, driverless cars, wearable computers — will all be possible because of cloud computing.
But to work efficiently, cloud computing needs large amounts of personal data. Much of it is anonymized in the process, such as when a GPS system can access highway location data about automobile speeds and car density, determine there is an accident three miles ahead and route you around the traffic. Still, it would be wrong to say systems always purge personal information.
That means companies involved in cloud technology will require a high degree of trust and goodwill from the marketplace if consumers are going to feel comfortable sharing data. One way the government can help increase this trust is to extend legal protections to data in the cloud, because it is where most of our data will inevitably reside.
The lack of specific Fourth Amendment protection is partly responsible for the massive scope of government intrusion into the Internet. NSA programs such as MUSCULAR and "Tailored Access Operations" were specifically aimed at defeating the encryption and firewalls that Internet companies use to safeguard user data. The NSA hopes to hide behind judicial interpretations that cloud data has no explicit legal protection. But this is a technicality to evade the principle. The intent of ECPA always was to prevent law enforcement agencies from the very sort of fishing expeditions the NSA has been doing.
Stronger legal safeguards would help repair the damage the government spying has done to the U.S. technology sector, the global leader in cloud computing. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a research institute that aims to promote public policies that advance technological innovation and productivity, estimates international concern and mistrust of US tech companies could cost the industry between $21.5 billion and $35 billion through 2016. Forrester Research, which provides analysis for financial firms and investors, believes the potential global industry cost could be much more — $180 billion worldwide over the same period.
A number of European banks no longer want to store data in the United States. Salesforce.com, which provides highly sensitive cloud-based sales leads and customer information, reportedly has lost a major European client. Both Salesfroce.com and Amazon, perhaps fearing "guilt by association," have felt the need to publicly state that they were not part of the these spying programs.
While real NSA reform may be a ways off, it would not require much political capital for President Obama to endorse ECPA revision. It would certainly accelerate action on the legislation and signal that the president understands the constitutional problems that government spying activities raise.
For its part, Congress, in revising ECPA, would send a message to Americans that their personal data is safe and that, in an age when "papers and effects" referred to in the Fourth Amendment are more likely to be PDF files locked away on an Internet server, the principles of due process set forth in the Bill of Rights still apply.
The Roles of Government in Cloud Computing
Excerpted from The WHIR Report by David Hamilton
Government plays a huge role in web hosting and cloud computing. Not only are world governments major consumers of cloud services, but they also are involved in other areas such as providing funding, engaging in research, providing education and training, and fostering local industry.
The South Korean government has made specific strides to boost its government cloud infrastructure and native cloud industry, including earmarking about $500 million towards Korean cloud computing in late 2009. Similarly, Taiwan's Government launched a cloud computing industry development program in 2010 designed to boost the country's ICT competitiveness globally, involving an investment of $744 million over five years.
In less direct ways, other governments have also tried to encourage new technology entrepreneurs. For instance, the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have helped established Enterprise Capital Funds as a way to provide venture capital to fledgling UK firms.
For governments, it's also important to have established standards around IT and security to simplify the procurement process. Initiatives like FedRAMP in the US and G-Cloud in the UK give clear guidelines for service providers, and streamline government agencies' decision process when it comes to cloud services. A country's governments — including different levels of government — also need to have common information exchange and data handling standards so that different government agencies are able to communicate. Many service providers are tailoring their services to meet these demands.
Governments also provide the regulation and legal workings that foster trust in cloud services. A 2012 study by the Cloud Security Alliance and ISACA found that government regulation was a top concern of enterprises. On one hand regulation could not be keeping pace with market changes (for instance, resulting in monopolies), but it could also be seen as placing limits on enterprises that make it more difficult to bring "bleeding-edge" innovations to market.
In 2013, lax government policy and lack of oversight led to a loss of trust in many US cloud services when the extent of the US government's international espionage operations became known by Edward Snowden's disclosures. Countries with more strict privacy laws, like Germany and Switzerland, have used this to their advantage by stressing that their services don't fall under the jurisdiction of other countries and are protected by local laws.
Many argue that the Presidential Policy Directive issued by President Obama in January helped resolve some tensions between citizens, the government, and service providers, while others say it doesn't go far enough.
Governments are playing an enormous role in shaping the cloud and hosting landscape as a consumer, an investor, and an overseer. It's true that there's sometimes an animosity between governments and tech companies — both having enormous power over the citizenry, and each thinking it knows better than the other.
Many worldwide governments already understand the importance cloud computing and hosting industries, but having these initiatives hit their mark will require the cooperation, understanding, and occasional pushback from the tech companies involved.
How to Manage Your New Data Center: The Entire Internet
Excerpted from Forbes Report by Dan Woods
The expansion of software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, mobile devices, and all variants of managed and cloud computing mean that the definition of the data center as an expensively provisioned room, with lots of power, a raised floor, incredible cooling is obsolete.
The entire Internet is your data center now. CIOs are playing catchup in learning how to manage this new world.
When a company had just a few SaaS applications that were not mission critical, and one or two APIs or cloud based apps, this was all manageable. Many firms are just leaving this stage, prompted by adoption of more SaaS apps, and especially by Microsoft Office 365, which is going to present a host of new challenges for many CIOs.
In addition, mobile devices mean that whatever the IT department provides may be used from anywhere in the world.
This means that at any moment a CIO must be able to answer the following questions:
Are all the applications and services in our control running properly? Are all the applications and services running in the cloud or as SaaS running properly? Is there a network problem in the network under our control? Is there a network problem in the public Internet? Is there a network problem in the network of the cloud or SaaS provider?
Most CIOs can answer question 1 reasonably well. Many can also answer question 3. But very few can get an answer to 2, 4, and 5 in a timely manner. Such questions cannot be answered with the technology used to run most data centers.
Pace of change is another problem. With virtualization and cloud technology, it is possible te create, expand, and contract infrastructure incredibly quickly. Much of the current generation of data center management technology is based on creating a model, a description of the systems being tracked. Often, when hard to answer questions can be answered in theory by existing technology, in practice they cannot because the models cannot be kept up to date.
So the situation you have at many data centers is that the stable part of the data center is well-run and highly instrumented. The dynamic part of internal infrastructure that evolves rapidly — usually the part that is virtualized or uses the public cloud — is far less well controlled and instrumented. And then the parts of the infrastructure that are completely off site like SaaS applications, are the most opaque.
In addition, the public Internet has become one of the most crucial elements of uptime and performance. When someone can't get to Salesforce.com, how do you know what's going on? Is it a network problem? Is it inside your network infrastructure, in the public Internet, at the SaaS provider? The arrival of Microsoft Office 365 will, where the number of users of SaaS will increase dramatically will make the ability to debug SaaS related network problems a crucial skill.
One thing to notice in this transition to more external resources is that the responsibility of the CIO has not been decreased. When something doesn't work, for whatever reason, no matter where it is, the CIO and the IT department are expected to figure out what is happening and make it right.
The upshot of all this is that in a real way, the entire Internet is becoming the data center. But the current set of tools and skills inside data center teams were not created to meet these responsibilities.
What most CIOs are facing is the need to systematically build a new set of skills that are based on a new set of tools. In subsequent articles I will examine technologies that are needed by CIOs to address the challenges explained above. The first three should be of interest to early adopters. Two are quite young (ThousandEyes and Boundary) and one is well on its way to crossing the chasm (SolarWinds). In future articles, I will cover the way that the big four of IT Operations Management — HP Openview, CA Unicenter, BMC, and IBM — and Microsoft are grappling with these challenges.
Remember, the services offered by these new products are secondary to getting a complete understanding of the problem you must solve: managing the entire Internet as your data center. There will be many ways to answer the needed questions, using the products mentioned or other methods. The most important thing is to be ready to answer the questions mentioned in this article when problems arise, as they always do.
20 Cloud Computing Stats Every CIO Should Know
Excerpted from Silicon Angle Report by Jack Woods
CIOs are tasked with the challenge of determining the best way to store massive amounts of data in a safe, easy-to-access, cost-effective manner. Organizations can choose to purchase and deploy on-premises enterprise storage systems, store their data with an external cloud computing service, or they can form hybrid models by combining to two.
In this post, we've put our focus on cloud computing and compiled 20 statistics that every CIO should look to store in their memory for future reference or for ground to stand on when bringing a cloud proposal to the rest of their executive teams.
1. By 2015, end-user spending on cloud services could be more than $180 billion (Tweet this) 2. It is predicted that the global market for cloud equipment will reach $79.1 billion by 2018 (Tweet this)
3. If given the choice of only being able to move one application to the cloud, 25% of respondents would choose storage (Tweet this)
4. By 2014, businesses in the United States will spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services (Tweet this)
5. Throughout the next five years, a 44% annual growth in workloads for the public cloud versus an 8.9% growth for "on-premise" computing workloads is expected (Tweet this)
6. 82% of companies reportedly saved money by moving to the cloud (Tweet this)
7. More than 60% of businesses utilize cloud for performing IT-related operations (Tweet this)
8. 14% of companies downsized their IT after cloud adoption (Tweet this)
9. 80% of cloud adopters saw improvements within 6 months of moving to the cloud (Tweet this)
10. 32% of Americans believe cloud computing is a thing of the future (Tweet this)
11. There's an estimated 1 exabyte of data stored in the cloud (Tweet this)
12. More than half of survey respondents say their organization currently transfers sensitive or confidential data to the cloud (Tweet this)
13. Cisco forecasts that global data center traffic will triple from 2.6 zettabytes in 2012 to 7.7 zettabytes annually in 2017, representing a 25 percent CAGR (Tweet this)
14. Global data center traffic will grow threefold (a 25 percent CAGR) from 2012 to 2017, while global cloud traffic will grow 4.5-fold (a 35 percent CAGR) over the same period (Tweet this)
15. From 2012 to 2017, data center workloads will grow 2.3-fold; cloud workloads will grow 3.7-fold (Tweet this)
16. 2014 is the first year the majority of workloads will be on the cloud as 51% will be processed in the cloud versus 49% in the traditional IT space (Tweet this)
17. 545 cloud services are in use by an organization on average (Tweet this)
18. 56% of survey respondents trust the ability of cloud providers to protect the sensitive and confidential data entrusted to them (Tweet this)
19. 59% of all new spending on cloud computing services originates from North American enterprises, a trend projected to accelerate through 2016 (Tweet this)
20. 38% of enterprises surveyed break out cloud computing budgets, while 60% include cloud-related spending as part of their enterprise-wide IT budgets (Tweet this)
While these stats don't provide and exhaustive view of the current cloud computing landscape, we hope it showed its emergence in today's information technology landscape. As a CIO, the next time you approach the rest of the executive team to discuss cloud storage, take a few (or all) of these stats with you to back up your argument.
When Your App Is in the Cloud
Excerpted from NY Times Report by Quentin Hardy
The telecommunications services business, worth about $1 trillion in annual, global sales, is starting to feel the effects of cloud computing, one of this era's most important advances in high tech.
For the most part, the gear for telecom work comes from incumbents like Cisco or Avaya.
The more software-based alternatives for what is called "unified communications" are things like Microsoft's Lync.
The telecom gear business has not been touched by the crushing economics of software delivered via cloud computing, the kind of low-price, high-versatility product that has caused so many problems for companies making business software, and for many traditional high-cost computer hardware makers.
But that's starting to change.
Twilio is a cloud-based business that produces the means to create any number of communications services, primarily through servers it rents at Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to Jeff Lawson, the company's co-founder and chief executive officer, the company has provisioned "millions and millions" of phone numbers in over 40 countries. Revenue last year was about $50 million, more than double the year before, he said.
Twilio generally sits in the background while larger companies use its technology to quickly create things like customer call centers, collaborative communications networks or text and image-messaging functions.
Another company, called Tropo, also allows for faster deployment of communications applications, while others create cloud-based call centers. Plivo may be Twilio's most direct competitor, with cloud-based voice services that can be added to apps. Netflix, among others, uses Plivo for its internal phone system.
When Uber texts clients to tell them their cab is five minutes away, or eHarmony links two strangers interested in dating, Twilio is in the background.
"Our average selling price is one penny a minute, versus multimillion-dollar boxes from the legacy equipment providers," Mr. Lawson said.
As with much of the cloud business, the initial attraction is making things cheaper and faster to do. Mr. Lawson said Twilio beats the incumbents by 90 percent or more on both counts, but it's hard to judge that claim independently (though even 50 percent would be impressive). A Cisco spokesman said the two products are not directly comparable, since Cisco's product can do many more things.
What usually happens next with these cloud products, however, is where it gets more interesting.
Software developers find new things they can do, once factors like speed and cost become less limiting. Think of cognitive computing and supercomputing as a service, or Snapchat, the disappearing image-sharing business hosted on Google's computers.
Put that capability on cloud-based applications, and you are likely to get a large number of new communications services.
Billing applications can have a feature that puts you directly in touch with a person if you want to dispute a charge, and the person on the other end of the call instantly sees the same charge. People at a sports event have had their season tickets scanned, and by linking that information to their mobile numbers, promotions for, perhaps, two beers for the price of one might be texted to their phones during the game. (How creepy this might seem is for society to work out.)
"Every company wants to do things with less friction and more customer awareness," Mr. Lawson said. "Communications companies have historically worked on a development cycle of decades — the cloud takes that to weeks."
Down the road, the most likely competition for Twilio is Google, Amazon or another cloud provider that wants to offer its own communications applications. Google has email, texting and video, but so far these are pretty diffuse offerings, and Google's cloud service has offered ways for developers to tie into Twilio.
AWS, which seems to be in an ever-increasing number of services and features, so far seems content to have Twilio inside its system, as one more thing developers on Amazon can use. They could partner with it, build their own version or copy it. What is unlikely to happen is for the phenomenon to stop.
The Tech behind Super Bowl XLVIII
Excerpted from Broadcaating & Cable Report by George Winslow
The biggest tech changes for this year's Super Bowl match-up between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks on February 2nd will be the scale of the production that Fox Sports is putting together, with coverage of various events from multiple venues on a slew of channels.
"Because we are programming for multiple channels, the scope of this thing is huge," explains Jerry Steinberg, Senior VP of field operations at Fox Sports. "It is no longer simply preparing for a huge game on Sunday."
The actual game will air on Fox in English and on Fox Deportes in Spanish, a first.
Viewers can also watch a live stream on FoxSportsGo.com and the Fox Sports Go iPad app in both languages.
But there will also be coverage of venues in New York City and New Jersey and a variety of Super Bowl themed programming, which started on January 26th on Fox, Fox Sports 1, some FOX Sports Regional Networks, Fox Deportes, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, FX, FXX, FXM, National Geographic Channel and MundoFox.
To support all that, the company has set up large facilities in both New York City and at the stadium.
At the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ Fox Sports will have more than 5,000 square feet of office and editing space and another 6,000 square feet of technical space, which will include four control rooms. At the stadium, Fox also has a glass enclosed set that expands to 20 by 20 feet.
In New York City, there will be a large 40 by 40 foot set with 8,100 feet of usable space that rises 44 feet above street level on Father Duffy Square in Times Square bounded by 46th and 47th Street and Broadway and 7th Avenue. It has 62 feet high towers with Fox Sports signage, a 16 foot high animated Cleatus robot, massive video boards and LED screens, and a simulated stadium on its roof.
To help shoot the fully enclosed two-story set, there will be a Techno crane that can extend between 14 and 50 feet in length.
Fox Sports will have a main broadcast compound on the Broadway pedestrian plaza between 47th and 48th Streets in Manhattan, which will have two mobile production trucks, an uplink truck and 10 production office trailers. There will be additional edit bays at the Millennium Hotel and a satellite compound on 47th street between Broadway and 8th Avenue, with two other production office trailers.
More than 600 crew members will be working on the productions in Times Square and at the stadium.
Besides the scale of the production, most of the changes are more evolutionary than revolutionary, with more robotic cameras, improved graphics and wider use of 4K cameras to produce higher quality replays, explain executives involved in the production.
This reflects the fact that network executives are generally reluctant to try out new technologies during the biggest sporting event of the year.
"You never want to take something out for the first time at a Super Bowl," Steinberg says. "Everything we're using at MetLife is something we have been using or testing throughout the year."
That said Fox executives point to several technologies that they hope will make the production even more compelling than normal.
For example, the ChyronHego TRACCAB Player Tracking System and Paint Sports Telestrator will help them better analyze the action with advanced on-air graphics, Steinberg says. These tools will allow Fox to label players and track their movement, speed and distance covered and to display a variety of other information.
UltraHD replays are another. CBS first used 4K cameras in last year's Super Bowl and by now they are a much more established part of the production.
Fox will use six of Sony's F55 cameras for its 4K replay system. Like last year, the replays are played out in HD but the greater number of pixels in the 4K images allows producers to zoom into the action to show whether a player stepped out of bounds in a way that would not be possible with HD cameras.
"This isn't a science project," Steinberg says. "In very crucial points of games, we've had replays that brought clarity to what happened and helped determine the outcome of the game."
Super Bowl XLVIII is the first outdoor game in a cold weather area and Fox will also be using technology to show the impact of the cold on the game.
As part of that effort, it has worked with Autodesk to develop Fox Weather Trax. This will illustrate airflow patterns and wind direction inside the stadium to show how those currents might influence passes or kicks. An example of how that will look can be found here.
Fox is also working hard to make sure bad weather, which can cause lenses to fog up or cameras to malfunction, won't mess up the production.
It will be using heating blankets to keep equipment warm and has designed sets to be fully enclosed. "We're prepared on a TV level and a human level," Steinberg says. "It is very important that our people are safe and working in the best possible conditions."
Key vendors for the production of the Super Bowl and the Game Creek Video trucks used to cover the game include Grass Valley, Sony, Pesa, EVS, Canon, Level 3, Vizrt, ChyronHego and Calrec.
Overall, Fox will be using nine Game Creek Video trucks for its productions in Times Square, the MetLife Stadium, and media day, with five trucks involved in the game, reports Pat Sullivan president and founder of Game Creek Video.
Most of the cameras used to shoot the game, which will total around 50, come from Sony, particularly the Sony HDC 1500 but also the Sony HDC 2500 cameras. Virtually all of the lenses will come from Canon.
About 14 cameras will be robotic, the most ever used to shoot a game broadcast by Fox Sports, Steinberg says.
For slow motion shots, Fox will use the Sony 3300 super slow motion HD cameras and Vision Research's Phantom HD high-speed camera, known as the X-MO slow-motion system. Overall about eight high-speed cameras will be used.
Typically Fox uses around 10 EVS replay systems for NFL game coverage, which will be expanded to about 18 for Super Bowl XLVIII, Sullivan says.
Their trucks use Grass Valley production switchers, primarily the Kayenne, but also Kayak units.
Pesa is providing a "vast amount of routing" equipment and infrastructure, Sullivan adds, with Calrec providing the main audio consoles.
Game Creek is also supplying an internal VoIP system that will supply the communication between Times Square and the stadium.
Super Bowl XLVIII will make the 25th anniversary of Level 3 providing video transportation services.
Fox will be using Level 3's Vyvx VenueNet+ technology for its coverage from various locations, including its Times Square operations and the MetLife Stadium, which is connected directly to Level 3's fiber-optic network.
The video will be sent using Level 3's JPEG 2000 compression services.
In addition to delivering the game and handling Fox Sports 1's coverage, Level 3 will also carry the pre-game and post-game feeds to all NFL operations centers; NFL Films in Mt. Laurel, NJ and NFL Network studios in Culver City, CA, NFL Network Master Control in Atlanta, as well as other broadcast networks and satellite teleport sites for global distribution.
Overall, Level 3 is expecting that more than 5,000 hours of video content will be acquired, encoded and transported across Level 3's Vyvx VenueNet+ platform as part of the Super Bowl coverage.
Coming Events of Interest
CCISA 2014 – February 12th–14th in Turin, Italy. The second international special session on Cloud Computing and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and its Applications within the 22nd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing.
Cloud Computing Conference for DoD & Government - February 19th-21st in Washington, DC. This 5th annual CCCDG seeks to build on the success of last year's event and refine its scope by addressing the newest developments in cloud computing for the public sector.
Interop Las Vegas - March 31st to April 4th in Las Vegas, NV. The leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire and inform the world's IT community. New in 2014: Cloud Connect Summit and the InformationWeek Conference.
CLOSER 2014 - April 3rd-5th in Barcelona, Spain. The Fourth International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2014) sets out to explore the emerging area of cloud computing, inspired by recent advances in network technologies.
NAB Show - April 5th-10th in Las Vegas, NV. From broadcasting to broader-casting, NAB Show has evolved over the last eight decades to continually lead this ever-changing industry. From creation to consumption, NAB Show has proudly served as the incubator for excellence — helping to breathe life into content everywhere.
Media Management in the Cloud — April 8th-9th in Las Vegas, NV. This two-day conference provides a senior management overview of how cloud-based solutions positively impact each stage of the content distribution chain, including production, delivery, and storage.
CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2014 - May 13th-14th in Washington, DC. Three major conference tracks will zero in on the latest advances in the application of cloud-based solutions in three key economic sectors: government, healthcare, and financial services.
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