June 18, 2012
Volume XXXIX, Issue 11
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 Call for Sponsors
& Exhibitors
The DCIA and CCA this week began offering industry-leading
firms opportunities to sponsor and exhibit at the inaugural CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) summit taking place November 8th-9th in
Santa Monica, CA.
This first-ever
business strategies summit for senior management responsible for decisions
associated with the adoption of cloud-based solutions will feature three
co-located conferences covering ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, NETWORK
INFRASTRUCTURE, and INVESTING IN THE CLOUD.
Major topics will
range from latest trends in
cloud solutions for high-value content production and distribution to pitfalls
to avoid in adopting cloud solutions for content development/delivery; from how
cloud migration is positively impacting broadband network operations and
businesses to the drawbacks of cloud deployments from broadband network
operators' perspectives; and from new updates on venture capital and
M&A activity in the cloud computing space to liabilities that need to
concern investors regarding cloud-based businesses.
There will also be analyses of newest cloud offerings for entertainment and industry's direction, and
problem areas affecting cloud adoption
in the entertainment sector; network
resource usage by data centers and new ISP cloud services, and challenges for
ISPs created by proliferation of cloud computing; and capital
structuring and strategic alliances for cloud computing firms, and problem
areas affecting investments/mergers of cloud services.
In addition, special
sessions will explore in-depth file-based production workflow leveraging cloud
computing for collaboration, dailies, editing, metadata, and pilots; the implications
on network infrastructure of third-party SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS deployments,
effects of various data centers, interconnection issues, and types of
architectures; and the differing investment implications public clouds,
private clouds, hybrid clouds, virtual private clouds, and community clouds.
And finally, panels will examine the entertainment
distribution side: cloud transcoding, storage, delivery, data, and analytics; cloud
mobility, virtualization, interoperability, and scalability; as well as green
computing, big data, and open source as these topical considerations impact
financing, VC criteria, and exit strategies.
Registration enables delegates to
also participate in any session at the three conferences being presented at
CCW:2012 on ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, and
INVESTING IN THE CLOUD.
CCW:2012 features one common exhibit hall. and all
networking functions (e.g., luncheon, refreshment breaks, evening cocktail
reception, etc.) are open to all attendees at no additional cost.
The Cloud Is Huge: Verizon's
Uppernet Demystifies Cloud Computing
Excerpted
from AdBeat Report by Laura Waldman
Welcome
to the Uppernet. Working for a SaaS company that leverages the power of
cloud computing, I am familiar with a lot of weak attempts at explaining what
the "Cloud" actually is. This amorphous image of a big fluffy air space
floating around is almost the exact opposite of what cloud computing
represents.
Finally, Verizon's Uppernet has hit the nail on the head by effectively communicating the
previously elusive intangible concept.
"Our cloud is not soft and fluffy, our cloud is made of
bedrock, concrete, and steel. Our cloud is the smartest brains combating the
latest security threats"¦and is scalable as far as the mind can see."
Well said. We couldn't agree more over at Nextpoint.
Watch the commercial here: Verizon
Uppernet.
The Audacity of
Oracle Cloud
Excerpted
from The Street Report by Dana Blankenhorn
When is a cloud not a cloud? When it's an Oracle Cloud.
Cloud computing has many elements.
Virtualization. We don't care
what operating system that program was written under. It will run in our cloud
because our hypervisor will make it do so.
Distributed computing. We don't
care that your data and software are too big for one machine, or that demand
might overwhelm one quite suddenly. Use the whole server room.
The ability to handle big data
sets. Analyzing haystacks to find needles? Cloud does that in a jiffy.
Oracle Cloud has all this. But
there are other things Oracle Cloud doesn't have. Commodity hardware? No. Open
source? No. Vendor choice? Definitely not.
So why was Larry Ellison smiling
and throwing out attacks on competitors like Muhammad Ali in his prime? That's
the audacity of Oracle Cloud.
If you think it would be tough to
leave your iPhone for Android, or Windows for the Mac, you know nothing about
the pain one of the Fortunate 500 feels in thinking about their database
vendor. For a big company, the database is the company. It's the crown jewels,
it's the money vault. Lose that and you might as well put out the "gone
fishing" sign.
Beyond the database are the key
applications that run on it. Your customer relationships. Your business
processes. Your enterprise planning. It may have cost millions to
build, but
it's worth billions, and would cost hundreds of millions to replace.
Oracle's database applications are the pinnacle of what's
called enterprise computing. What was once client-server has evolved into an
architecture. You increase capacity by buying a server. You pay for your
software with per-server license fees, and maintenance fees, every year.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 As the Distributed Computing Industry Association
(DCIA) and the Cloud Computing Association (CCA) ramp-up for our inaugural strategic summit, CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012, we
pause to celebrate the success of Sys-Con's tenth international developers'
conference, Cloud
Expo 2012.
Two unstoppable enterprise information technology (IT) trends - cloud computing
and big data - were the central themes at this event, which was held June 11th-14th
at the Javits Convention Center in New York, NY with an estimated 10,000
attendees.
The expo featured
industry keynotes, technical breakout sessions, and "power panels," as well as
a busy exhibit floor with leading solutions vendors displaying their latest
offerings.
The State of Cloud Computing was the topic of discussion in a power panel
recorded the day before the event opened.
The preview
highlighted recent IDC research showing
that worldwide spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching
$44.2 billion by 2013 and a recent Gartner report predicting that the volume of enterprise data overall will
increase by a phenomenal 650% over the next five years.
It was clear at
Cloud Expo that the cloud is now being adopted by mainstream companies,
organizations, and even national governments to leverage the power of data on
demand at a scale and pace never seen before in the history of the Internet.
Cloud Computing
Bootcamp, led by Larry
Carvalho, helped make sense of this hottest new technology that is still rapidly
evolving, while also continuously being peppered with hype. With prospective customers
finding it hard to determine what aspects technology will yield the greatest benefits,
Cloud Computing Bootcamp offered a practical understanding of the technology.
Citrix VP Peder
Ulander cut through the hype and clarified the ontology for cloud computing in
his Crash Course in Open
Source Cloud Computing,
focusing on the open-source software that can be used to build compute clouds
for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) deployments, and the complementary open-source
management tools that can be combined to automate the management of cloud-computing
environments.
Hadoop, MapReduce,
Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data is
the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help
organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into
massive volumes of information.
The time is now for
IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best - and most
cost-effective - for their organization. In The Growing Big Data
Tools Landscape,
David Lucas, Chief Strategy Officer at GCE, ran through what enterprises need to know about this growing set of
big data tools - including those being leveraged by organizations today as well
as new and innovative ones just arriving on the scene.
Blake Yeager,
Product Manager Lead for IaaS at HP Cloud Services, in Run and Operate Your Web Services at Scale took attendees through Hewlett-Packard's
(HP) next public cloud
infrastructure, platform services, and cloud solutions, showing how easy it can
be to spin-up instances of compute, storage, and content delivery networking
(CDN).
In Cloud Computing and Big Data - It's the
Applications, Tom
Leyden, Director of Alliances and Marketing at Amplidata, noted that, "While there is still a lot
of interest in Big Data Analytics, we see an increasing focus on Big
Unstructured Data. Object storage is the new paradigm to store those massive
amounts of free-form data."
IT Cloud
Management strategies enable organizations to maximize the business value of
their private clouds. Joe Fitzgerald,
Chief Product Officer & Co-founder of ManageIQ, discussed customer experiences and how
these tactical approaches increase agility, improve service delivery levels,
and reduce operating expenses in Cloud Computing: Enterprise Cloud Management.
Shannon Williams,
VP of Market Development for the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix and a
Co-founder of Cloud.com, in Architecting Your Cloud, discussed how CloudStack has been the
platform of choice for more than a hundred public and private production clouds,
and provided an insider's view of the company's experiences in designing the
right architecture to meet customers' clouds.
IT departments are
experiencing storage capacity needs doubling every 12-18 months, 50x the
amount of information and 75x the number of files. IT managers are dealing
with growing constraints on space, power, and costs to manage their data center
infrastructures. The Growth and Consolidation of Big Data in
the Cloud explored how Intel is helping businesses and users realize
the benefits of cloud computing technology by working to develop open
standards that operate across disparate IT infrastructures and by delivering
cloud-based architectures.
Securing Big Data Input addressed one of the most widely asked
questions about big data today: "How do we get valuable analytics from big
data?" As data continues to grow exponentially, so does the variety of data
(structured and unstructured) coming from humans, machines, and
applications. In order to pull valuable information from it all, proper
data gathering is critical, and the data itself needs to be timely and
accurate.
And in The Ever-Expanding Role of Big Data, William
Bain, Founder & CEO of ScaleOut
Software observed that,
"Security standards for moving data into and out of the cloud and for hosting
it within the cloud will dramatically help accelerate adoption of the cloud
as a secure computing platform, and additional standards for creating elastic
clusters that are physically co-located and use high-speed networking will
also help in hosting applications."
There is no
longer any question that the cloud computing model will be the prevailing
style of delivery for computing over the coming decades. Forrester Research predicts that the
global market for cloud computing will grow to more than $241 billion in
2020. Cloud - Vision
to Reality explored how greenfield application development projects can
be designed from the outset to benefit from cloud-computing features such
as elastic scalability, automated provisioning, and infrastructure level
APIs.
SHI, a $4 billion+ global provider of IT
products, and Rackspace Hosting, a
services leader in cloud computing, were Platinum Plus Sponsors of SYS-CON's Expo.
For developers, it was a must-attend event.
According to IBM's 2011 Tech Trends Report, 75% of respondents said
that over the next 2 years their organizations will begin to build cloud
infrastructure and in the next 24 months "developing new applications" will
be the top cloud adoption activity, overtaking the current top investment
areas of virtualization and storage.
Huge cloud-driven
opportunities for wealth creation exist today - but the race is to the swift.
The cloud-computing industry is one in which even a few months can make all
the difference.
DCINFO readers are
encouraged to sign-up now for the CLOUD
COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) summit being presented November 8th-9th in
Santa Monica, CA by the Cloud
Computing Association (CCA) and the Distributed
Computing Industry Association (DCIA). CCW:2012 features three co-located
conferences geared for management charged with addressing the key strategies
and business decisions critical to cloud computing adoption in the
entertainment, telecom, and investment sectors. Share wisely, and take care.
Cloud Expo: The Question Moves from
"What" to "Why" to "How"
Excerpted from Sys-Con MediaReport
by Roger Strukhoff
Cloud computing
has crossed a Rubicon of sorts, and is now being embraced by a majority of
enterprise IT shops - at least according to attendees and vendors at Cloud Expo in New York, NY.
I remember
interviewing Hal Stern (late of Sun and Oracle) a couple of years ago at the
event, when he said that people were asking him, "Why should I do
cloud?" rather than "What is cloud?" This year, the question
is "How should I do cloud?"
There is a mad
dash among big vendors, for one thing. IBM and HP have embraced the cloud fully, even to
the extent of offering traditional PaaS development services as part of their
infrastructure (IaaS) solution. Microsoft has re-launched Azure, in effect, working with new vendors to expand beyond
its PaaS roots to become an IaaS vendor designed to compete directly with Amazon. Oracle's Larry Ellison now speaks of cloud as if he invented it, as the database
monster now seeks to maintain grip on hundreds of thousands of enterprise IT
customers.
Meanwhile, the
Battle of the Stacks among Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and Citrix CloudStack is merely part of a larger
struggle for market share among the three Open Source companies against VMware, the company that triggered the move
toward cloud in the first place.
Cloud Expo had a
few highly interesting sub-events within it. In addition to its traditional
Cloud Computing Boot Camp and the RightScale conference, this time Cloud Expo hosted a day-long presentation from the Open
Data Center Alliance (ODCA), and the initial DeployCon event, which focused
on the pack of PaaS vendors who are rubbing against one another for supremacy
in this key space.
The word of the
day here was "multi-cloud." It turns out that enterprise IT is
complex, and that cloud is not going to eliminate that complexity, at least
with larger shops. However, it will continue the push in recent years to
eliminate silos, decouple and loosely recouple services, get a grip on
measuring things, and provide the vaunted "single pane of glass"
through which IT management can view and manage what's going on.
Cloud's potential
to offer apparently infinite elasticity and to remove some of the day-to-day
management headaches when moving things offsite remain as great future
opportunities for cloud. But it seems that customers are doing their best to
avoid Vendor Lock-In 2.0 and to work with multiple companies to get what they
need.
From what I saw at
Cloud Expo, the need for highly skilled IT worker bees and managers will only
increase as companies realize that they really need to know what they're
doing in the cloud; it's not just a buzzterm, not a panacea to IT complexity,
but rather, a foundational, transformational change.
Cloud is a State of the Business, not
just IT
Excerpted
from GigaOM Report by Mark Thiele
In my last
blog I posited that cloud and by extension cloud management was a strategic
versus tactical activity and as such should have the appropriate people
involved in definition gathering and decision making for a variety of
reasons. Now, I'd like to cover several examples of why cloud management is
strategic in nature and clarify why the CIO, and others outside of the purely
technical staff are critical to project and solution success.
Cloud isn't just a
more powerful engine in the same old car.
For a legacy IT
organization to adopt cloud solutions without significant organizational
realignment and improved business participation, the benefits would largely
be wasted. It's akin to thinking you can put a modern 500-horse power engine
in a 1970s economy car and get all the same performance and protection
characteristics you would enjoy in a 2012 model year luxury sedan.
In fact, the
introduction of cloud without organizational improvements would likely
increase enterprise risk and potentially cost. The real opportunity of a
cloud operating model comes from the alignment of technical solutions,
people, and process. So when a business opportunity presents itself, your
processes and technology will seamlessly keep pace with the natural development
of the initiative.
Keeping pace means
more than just creating a new pile of IT resources quickly, it means a
repeatable process that also provides the appropriate controls and governance
in order to minimize risk to your business, provided at the appropriate value
to the opportunity.
For those trying
to figure this realignment out, here are examples of how your cloud operating
model (which includes cloud management) can provide real differentiation in
the way IT solutions are delivered.
Contestability: an
economic theory that can save you money.
Can you easily
swap hardware? Hypervisors?
A real
cloud-operating model enables you to plug in different cloud providers,
different hypervisors, different hardware, different PaaS solutions,
different provisioning systems, monitoring systems, etc. Through true
contestability you have the opportunity of replacing key portions of your
infrastructure for better or lower cost solutions, without risking the larger
framework or architectural design of the environment.
Ask yourself these
questions. Under your current model: Can you use a mix of external providers
such as Amazon EC2, TerreMark, Savvis, and CSC?
Easily change from HP to Cisco hardware (or vice versa)? Switch from VMWare to HyperV
3 (or vice versa)? Can you easily adopt a new provisioning/scripting
framework like chef/puppet/cfengine? Reuse the policy enforcement and
auditing system you currently have while making any of the changes above?
Reuse your procurement portal and provisioning workflows while achieving the
above?
If your answer to
these questions isn't, "Yes, it would be easy and relatively inexpensive,"
then you aren't operating under a true cloud-operating model. Very few
companies have these kinds of capabilities, because until just recently the
management platforms needed didn't exist. But they are coming online and are
different from traditional enterprise software in that they were designed
from scratch to be abstractions above hypervisors and cloud providers.
Plus, there is
very little traction in this space from established vendors, the majority of
which all want to build vertically integrated solutions that specifically do
not allow this form of inter-platform competition.
It's easy to get
lost in the cool technology here and lose focus on how you would actually
achieve a vendor neutral platform and what the financial impacts would be. As
an example, let's start with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). It was
able to cut its IT spend by 10 percent by encouraging its vendors to compete
for workloads.
CBA did it by
implementing a cloud management solution and then performing expert vendor
management to allow it to quickly adopt new vendors and to gain leverage over
existing ones. In just two years it pulled this off using off-the-shelf
software and freed up $100 million a year going forward to reinvest in new
capabilities.
Think IaaS+.
Don't let business
processes slow down your cloud.
Many companies
implementing a cloud solution completely miss the boat on their first pass.
IT often focuses so hard on basic server provisioning that they lose site of
the bigger picture.
While server
provisioning is interesting, it's likely one of the smallest benefits. The
real advantages are obtained by moving up the stack and giving the business the
ability to deploy applications and solutions much faster.
The primary
examples are any company wanting to deploy Agile Development, DevOps, or PaaS
solutions. A great example of using a cloud management operating model is UBS
and its workplace automation solution. UBS implemented a cloud management
solution to deploy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) but not traditional
VDI.
Instead the UBS
version of VDI is a mixed set of services that are delivered to iPads and
Android devices backed by a set of traditional desktops to do the workflow
automation. The user almost never sees the desktop, and the desktops are
stateless. Further, depending on the user, it automatically routes them to a
freely available desktop in the correct country, running the correct software
and profile for that individual.
Complexity
reduction.
Another major
benefit of a cloud management platform is that it coalesces many different
solutions and products under a single umbrella. This complexity reduction can
directly translate into increased uptime and improved stability as well as
cost savings. A major financial institution with 15,000 servers was able to
save almost $30 million a year just in complexity management.
Reduced work
orders to configure solutions, fewer vendor products, fewer project managers
allocated to managing change and best of all fewer meetings. It all adds up.
This is why your cloud management strategy has to integrate many different
things.
It's not enough to
say you are just going to focus on deployment of a virtual machine (VM). You
need to focus on how you will deploy that VM's storage, networking, compute,
DNS entries, the software on the VM, and the firewalls in between. You also
need to consider where to deploy or what regulations will apply depending on
what you're deploying and where it's deployed, etc.
Leave out any of
these and instead of a single simple solution you have something that
requires project management, meetings, and more. Not having these systems
fully automated and managed by a policy configuration engine also means that
the risk of failure due to simple things like fat fingering mistakes go up
dramatically.
The lesson here is
the strategic use and management of cloud can help you scale your IT (and
your business), but first you have to get your IT and business ready to
scale.
Huawei Takes Data Centers to the Cloud
Excerpted
from IT-Online Report
Cloud
computing is a transformational and disruptive technology that will
fundamentally change the ways in which people live and do business. A
data center comprises the basic hardware medium for cloud computing and
requires new solutions that are able to accommodate cloud requirements and
meet related challenges.
Gartner and IDC predict that data centers will develop over the next five
years, and will increasingly focus on cloud computing virtualization,
efficient energy utilization and management and high-density design. As a
result, traditional data centers that do not keep pace will become obsolete.
Modernizing traditional data centers to support cloud computing is a
new challenge for many executives. In response, Huawei has launched its 4S high-density modular
data center that offers customers a simplified cloud computing solution that
can be placed in either indoor or outdoor environments.
Huawei's 4S Data Center infrastructures consists of eight sub-systems:
power distribution; refrigeration; integrated cabling; management system;
fire control; surge protection; cabinet; and decoration.
Unlike a traditional data center, Huawei's 4S Data Center solutions are
standardized and can be easily pre-installed, pre-tested, and quickly
assembled onsite.
Standard ports provide a clear engineering interface and easy
management, thereby minimizing onsite engineering while simplifying solution
planning and accelerating deployment.
Compared to a traditional data center, which takes two years to build, a
Huawei 4S Data Center can be constructed in 60% less time. An indoor 4S Data
Center requires a net height of just 2,8 meters without a raised floor, while
the outdoor 4S Data Center can be easily transported and powered up
immediately.
Three core modules - the data center, power supply and distribution,
and outdoor cooling modules - and two auxiliary systems - the decoration and
fire control systems - can be flexibly designed and installed as required.
The air conditioning module provides cool air, and uninterrupted power
supplies (UPSes) provide power on demand. Unlike the one-step planning and
excessive investment common to traditional data centers, each Huawei 4S Data
Center solution plan can be deployed and expanded in stages to avoid
extraneous investment and to allow flexible response to changes in services
and technology.
To meet the requirements for unified intelligent management for cloud
computing, Huawei integrates all management elements of L1 to allow for
remote and unattended operations as well as integrated monitoring and
efficient management.
This also enables the realization of visible network management and
interaction between the infrastructure facility and service layers so that
service changes can be dynamically detected to provide cool air and to
accurately calculate the electricity charge of each cabinet so that the
requisite power can be supplied.
The Huawei 4S Data Center solution reduces the total cost of operation
by 30% through a combination of energy conservation, time savings, and carbon
footprint reduction, due to the use of high-density 30kW cabinets, which can
be stacked.
Moreover, through the use of modular air conditioners that
intelligently provide cooling air on demand, efficiency can be improved by
30%. UPSes with a conversion efficiency of 96% can increase load rate by more
than 60%, reducing OpEx by 30%.
As of the end of
2011, Huawei had successfully delivered more than 230 data centers, including
16 cloud data centers, across the globe. Huawei is able to tap into its vast
experience in telecommunications and IT to provide optimal end-to-end
delivery design, full supply chain support and superior 4S Data Centers,
allowing customers to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the
cloud computing era.
Tennis Channel Selects America ONE Sports
and Octoshape Infinite HD-M
Octoshape and America ONE Sports announced have
again been chosen by Tennis Channel as the exclusive provider of video streaming services for the prestigious
111th French Open.
This year the
linear video is delivered to consumers via the Octoshape Infinite HD-M
Federated Multicast Broadband TV platform. This technology enables the
quality, scale, and economics of traditional broadcast technologies over the
public Internet. Telco and cable operators that are part of the Infinite HD-M
Federated network receive the signals via native IP Multicast in a way that
allows them to easily manage large volumes of traffic without upgrading their
Internet capacity.
America ONE Sports
is providing the onsite downlink services with ONE CONNXT, as well as the
enhanced multicourt video player experience. The encoded video signals are
acquired using the Octoshape Infinite Uplink technologies. The live and on-demand
stream coverage includes unique Octoshape features such as instant on, DVR
functionality, and picture-in-picture viewing. The player experience also
includes bonus features developed by America ONE Sports, such as live chat
and event stats.
"A high
quality, interactive experience is priority number one for consumers of
Tennis Channel content," said Robyn Miller, Senior Vice President,
Tennis Channel. "With America ONE Sports and Octoshape we achieve that
goal. This year we provide content efficiently allowing broadband providers
to fully meet consumer demand."
Tennis Channel has
the most hours of live French Open Coverage of any US television network,
approximately 75 hours overall. The network is available in more than 55
million homes during the tournament, the most prestigious annual clay-court
event in tennis. For those who do not currently receive Tennis Channel,
TennisChannel.com provides a live online stream that allows viewers to watch
all the normal coverage for free.
"The French
Open coverage by the Tennis Channel is a marquee event to showcase America
ONE Sports and ONE CONNXT Transport Services. The quality and viewer
experience is exceptional and truly adds a great deal of value to the French
Open," said Paul Dingwitz, CTO of ONE Media Corp.
"Supporting
the French Open for the Tennis Channel again this year is a testament to our
commitment to TV quality video," said Michael Koehn Milland, CEO of
Octoshape. "With our new Infinite HD-M platform, we can now also offer the
scale and economics of traditional broadcast TV distribution, over the
Internet."
Guide to Cloud for SMEs
Excerpted
from Computer World Report by Derek du Preez
The Open Group, a global consortium that
aims to help businesses achieve objectives through IT standards, has
published an extensive guide to cloud computing for small to medium sized
enterprises (SMEs) in a bid to provide clarity on what services should be
deployed in an over-crowded cloud marketplace.
Maximizing the
Value of Cloud for Small-Medium Enterprises defines an SME in the UK as a
company with fewer than 250 employees and earning less than $50 million.
The report argues
that cloud computing can help solve some of the traditional problems facing
SMEs today.
"From experience, many businesses,
irrespective of their size, lack business-IT alignment; hence IT planning
becomes a matter of trying to hit a moving target. To make matters worse,
small businesses struggle with a lack of skilled IT personnel, operational
insufficiencies, and poor IT management," the Open Group said.
"Cloud computing
won't be the answer to all of the above. But it can help simplify IT so that
SMEs stay business-focused."
The Open Group
believes that to overcome the IT-business alignment problem, IT departments
should move away from being reactive, whereby they take time to respond to
requests for IT services from the business, and instead offer the business a
pre-defined catalog of IT services that could be provisioned quickly and
easily.
However,
developing an "off-the-shelf" catalog of IT services in house is costly and
requires a significant investment in capital and time. As such, cloud
computing becomes an interesting option for SMEs.
The report states,
"Instead of internally building these services upfront, why not source these
services from somewhere else? The service provider can work with an
economy-of-scale effect not available at the individual SME level and serve
hundreds of SMEs."
"IT organizations
of SMEs should consider the idea of becoming an IT service broker where
services are provided to consumers through a pay-per-use arrangement and an
as needed business model while sourced from outside from cloud service
providers."
The Open Group
believes that the cloud computing model can also help SMEs attract additional
revenue. By sourcing IT services from outside the organization, SMEs benefit
from a reduced time-to-market, which will gain them new customers that might
have gone to competitors previously, and in turn prevents those competitors
from becoming stronger, it said.
It also points to
the benefits of moving from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure
(OpEx), when procuring IT services from the cloud.
"IT organizations
don't have to invest in IT assets anymore, but instead "rent" them from cloud
service providers. But only as long as they are needed by the consumers,"
reads the report.
"Reducing and/or
optimizing costs is the keyword here, and the adoption of cloud computing can
support this objective."
Despite the
benefits of the cloud for the SME market, The Open Group does also highlight
that organizations need to consider the security implications when adopting
cloud as a delivery model.
It asks SMEs to
consider: What if IT organizations decide to decommission the cloud services?
How will data be transferred from the cloud service provider back in-house or
to another service provider? How has access to sensitive data? SMEs are
responsible for security and data integrity, but are the cloud providers
willing to undergo external audits and certifications? Is data being
segregated properly?
"This guide
reminds us that, with cloud, smaller budgets are no longer a hindrance to a
SME's ability to compete in the market. This is because, with cloud, instead
of SMBs operating workloads such as desktops, storage and communications
through physical in-house servers, they are hosted on centralized virtual
servers in a data center, which means the cost of investments is more
affordable; the deployment and set-up times are rapid and less complicated
than traditional configurations; and solutions are more scalable, secure and
agile," the consortium concluded.
How "Systems Thinking" Is Making the
Cloud Transparent
Excerpted
from GigaOM Report by James Urquhart
Given my current
obsession with understanding everything I can about how cloud computing is
beginning to look, feel and behave like a variety of other complex adaptive
systems, I've started paying close attention to the widespread practice (outside
of IT, it seems) of systems thinking.
Defined in Wikipedia as "the
process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole,"
systems thinking represents a modeling, analysis and design discipline that
carefully explores "macro" aspects of highly interdependent systems. Systems
thinking is heavily utilized in such fields as the social sciences,
organizational dynamics, and industrial engineering to evaluate, model,
and/or design how systems are composed and how they behave.
Systems thinking
is difficult for those that have been educated to always apply reductionist
thinking to problem solving. The idea in systems thinking is not to drill
down to a root cause or a fundamental principle, but instead to continuously
expand your knowledge about the system as a whole.
It's one of the
fascinating questions that faces anyone trying to model a system: What are
the system's boundaries? When everything is so highly interdependent
(economies are linked to governments are linked to societies are linked to
individual people, etc), how do you know where to start modeling, and where
to stop?
In her classic
book on systems thinking, the late Donella H. Meadows articulated
brilliantly the challenge that "systems thinkers" are faced when scoping the
problem they need to address:
"The lesson of
boundaries is hard even for systems thinkers to get. There is no single,
legitimate boundary to draw around a system. We have to invent boundaries for
clarity and sanity; and boundaries can produce problems when we forget that
we've artificially created them..."
"There are no
separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a
system depends on the purpose of the discussion - the questions we want to
ask."
She goes on to
say:
"The right
boundary for thinking about a problem rarely coincides with the boundary of
an academic discipline, or with a political boundary. Rivers make handy
borders between countries, but the worst possible borders for managing the
quantity and quality of the water. Air is worse than water in its insistence
on crossing political borders. National boundaries mean nothing when it comes
to ozone depletion in the stratosphere, or greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, or ocean dumping."
This, I think, is
a critical observation for people building large scale cloud-computing
applications and services that integrate with other applications and services
in the cloud. Understanding where the boundaries of source code and data
models lie is relatively straightforward, but understanding the boundaries of
operations - monitoring, compliance, decision making, liability and so on in
cloud-based applications - is not so straightforward.
In fact, I would
argue that the nature of cloud-systems boundaries will themselves be highly
dynamic, in part because of the comings and goings of technologies and
services (not to mention politics, economics, and so on). However, it is also
true that it will take time to discover the full extent of those systems for
each application or service you operate, as everything is so interconnected.
This is different
from what we experienced with so-called "traditional IT", as we could
typically maintain control of all but a few elements of our application
systems, and the applications were generally quite isolated. We strived for
stability, and that included stable boundaries. It is clear to me that this
is becoming increasingly impossible.
There is also an
interesting corollary to the problem of boundaries that must be considered
when planning any application or service that might be consumed by outside
parties. If you do not necessarily know which third-party services affect
your "system", it stands to reason that you also do not know which external
systems or applications your offering affects.
In other words,
how do you know the application systems that you may ultimately impact if
anyone can consume your service at any time? Are you making it easy for them
to design "around" you for their own resilience?
All of this leads
me to what I think is the key conclusion that has to be reached about the
future architecture of our shared cloud computing "system:" transparency is
essential. Without a steady stream of feedback data from whatever sources we
determine - over time - have a significant impact on the operation of our
applications, we are doomed to be unable to properly find the right
"boundaries" for those applications.
Information about
the functioning state of infrastructure (like compute nodes and networks),
services (like data stores and platform services) or even other applications
(like SaaS or your partners' applications) will be critical to evolving the
automation that successfully enables resiliency. And, as I noted in my keynote at
last month's excellent Gluecon in
Colorado, one key goal in these systems is resiliency.
Will such
transparency happen? I believe it already is. Just this
week, Amazon Web Services announced
a method for downloading billing information for their services. At one point
in time, it was postulated that Amazon would never do this. However,
customers have spoken, and the need to access real time costs of Amazon's
services programmatically has forced transparency.
Regardless, it is
important to start thinking about your applications and services in the cloud
as systems, not just stand-alone components. The challenge before you is to
determine what the boundaries of those systems are, and how to design, build
and operate your software to thrive within those boundaries.
Security Risks Impact even Businesses that
Stay out of the Cloud
Excerpted
from eWeek Report by Robert Mullins
There's a lot that businesses still have to ask their cloud
service providers before signing up for service, especially about how secure
their cloud environment is, the chief operations officer of the Cloud Security
Alliance (CSA) said at a cloud conference in Santa Clara, CA.
John Howie explained the security risks associated with
cloud computing and the ways businesses can protect themselves and their data
at the Cloud Leadership Forum held June 13th-14th. Howie warned that some cloud
providers actually turn around and have customer workloads managed by yet
another cloud provider. He also warned against using free consumer-grade cloud
services for enterprise-grade computing.
The Cloud Security Alliance is a nonprofit organization that
provides free information to its membership of 150 companies and 35,000
individuals on how to choose cloud services - private, public or hybrid -
wisely and with a focus on data security in the cloud.
Howie sought to dispel the notion that the IT department or
other managers can claim that they don't need to worry about cloud security
because they don't use cloud services. Typically, individual employees
subscribe to cloud services on their own. He gave the example of a businessman
he met who was on the phone and couldn't send an email because the size of the
attached file was too large. The man said he would upload it to DropBox, a cloud-based file-sharing service,
instead.
"You use DropBox?" Howie asked the man. "'Well, not
officially,'" came the reply. "That's what you're finding in your organizations
today."
There's another reason to avoid consumer-oriented cloud
file-sharing or storing services such as DropBox, Google Drive or Microsoft
SkyDrive, he continued. They are free because they're advertising-supported and
they index the user data to glean information from it on what ads to
deliver.
"They are probably indexing your data, not because they want
to know what your data is at a human level," Howie explained. "But at the
machine level, they want to know what advertisements to send to you to increase
the click-through."
It may be harmless enough for consumers to have their data
indexed but an enterprise should not take that risk. There are paid
file-sharing services that are better designed for enterprise users and their
important security needs.
A related issue is how businesses can remain compliant with
government and industry regulations for the security and privacy of company
data in the cloud. Not only are there varying regulations on the state and
federal level in the United States, there are myriad regulations globally
and, increasingly, both companies and cloud service providers operate
globally. What regulations a company has to comply with depends on where the
cloud service provider's data centers are located as well as where the
company's data centers are located, Howie said.
Obama Seeks to Speed Broadband
Infrastructure Deployment
Excerpted
from Information Week Report by Patience Wait
President Obama signed an executive order Thursday directing
the creation of a federal working group to address broadband deployment access
issues for government lands, buildings, and rights-of-way.
The Broadband
Deployment on Federal Property working group will include representatives
from six cabinet-level agencies (the Departments of Defense, Interior,
Agriculture, Commerce, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs, US Postal Service,
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Council on Environmental Quality,
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and the National Security Staff.
The working group's task is to create a consistent,
streamlined approach to policy and permitting requirements for deployment of
broadband facilities on federally owned lands, buildings, rights-of-way, tribal
lands, and highways that receive federal assistance. The intent is to give
carriers a single approach to leasing federal assets for broadband deployment.
The government controls nearly 30% of the land in the United States, thousands
of miles of roads, and more than 10,000 buildings.
In conjunction with the release of the executive order, the
White House announced a new public-private partnership, US Ignite, among industry, cities, and
national research institutions, dedicated to accelerating development of a wide
range of ultra-fast broadband and software-defined network applications for
industries as diverse as advanced manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and
education.
With US Ignite, the White House announced a number of initiatives undertaken by participants, including:
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is expanding its
initial $40 million investment in the Global Environment for Networking
Innovations (GENI) project, investing a further $20 million "to transition
from building GENI to using it for Internet-scale experiments.
Six project grantees of the Commerce Department's National
Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) are joining the US
Ignite initiative.
The Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) will
serve as a test bed to accelerate development and deployment of
ultra-high-speed bandwidth applications. DREN is the networking part of the Defense Department's High Performance Computing
Modernization Program; as part of this initiative, it will connect research
sites at the US Military Academy, Naval Postgraduate School, Space and Naval
Warfare Systems Command, Naval Research Laboratory, Air Force Research
Laboratory, and Army Research Laboratory, and participate in an agreement
between the Maui High-Performance Computing Center and the University of
Hawaii.
Corporate partners
announced at the unveiling of US Ignite include Juniper
Networks, NEC, Cisco, Verizon, Comcast, HP, AT&T, Ciena,
and Big Switch Networks.
Comcast Defends its Subscribers against
Copyright Trolls
Excerpted
from WebProNews Report by Zach Walton
People have a lot of
bad things to say about ISPs, but we should give them credit when they do
something pro-consumer. Remember when Verizon
refused to comply with a subpoena that sought the identities behind IP
addresses? That was pretty awesome and pro-consumer. Another major ISP has
joined Verizon in protecting consumers' identities.
Comcast
has requested that the court quash the subpoenas being used in an Illinois
District Court. The subpoenas, like others before it, are demanding that
Comcast identify the people behind the IP addresses that have been found
downloading content over BitTorrent.
The reasoning behind the quash respect is sound which Comcast's lawyers lay out
in easy to understand terms.
They argue that the
subpoenas are "overbroad and exceed the boundaries of fair discovery." As for
the other argument, let's have Comcast speak for itself:
"Third, plaintiffs should not be
allowed to profit from unfair litigation tactics whereby they use the offices
of the Court as an inexpensive means to gain Doe defendants' personal
information and coerce 'settlements' from them. It is evident in these cases -
and the multitude of cases filed by plaintiffs and other pornographers
represented by their counsel - that plaintiffs have no interest in actually
litigating their claims against the Doe defendants, but simply seek to use the
Court and its subpoena powers to obtain sufficient information to shake down
the Doe defendants. The Federal Rules require the Court to deny discovery 'to
protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue
burden or expense.' This case requires such relief."
Interestingly
enough, AF Holdings accuses the defendants of participating in a BitTorrent
"swarm." The idea here is that everybody who downloaded a movie from AF
Holdings did so together with the intention of turning around and seeding it as
soon as they had finished downloading it. It seems that pornography studios
don't understand the Internet and how BitTorrent works, but Comcast apparently
does.
"The plaintiffs allege in their
complaints that the Doe defendants 'took concerted action' and 'were
collectively engaged in the conspiracy even if they were not engaged in the
swarm contemporaneously.' However, courts have found that 'much of the
BitTorrent protocol operates invisibly to the user after downloading a file,
subsequent uploading takes place automatically if the user fails to close the
program.' Simply alleging the use of BitTorrent technology "¦ does not comport
with the requirements under Rule 20(a) for permissive joinder."
If accepted by the
court, it would help shape the definition of what kind of BitTorrent activity
is actually considered infringement. A lot of people don't find the act of
downloading unauthorized content over BitTorrent actually to be infringement,
but the act of uploading the content to share is. The problem comes from the
fact that many BitTorrent clients automatically set the user to share the
content over BitTorrent upon finishing the download.
In short, this case
is absolutely fascinating. Unlike Verizon, which just refused the subpoena,
Comcast is making a great argument for the rights of their subscribers and
BitTorrent users everywhere. We'll keep watching the case to see what verdict
the judge returns. Either way, it's encouraging to see ISPs fighting for
consumer rights. Now if they could just get rid of data caps.
Please also see Comcast
Reply.
Coming Events of Interest
IEEE
32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing - June 18th-21st
in Taipa, Macao. ICDCS brings
together scientists and engineers in industry, academia, and government: Cloud
Computing Systems, Algorithms and Theory, Distributed OS and Middleware, Data
Management and Data Centers, Network/Web/P2P Protocols and Applications, Fault
Tolerance and Dependability, Wireless, Mobile, Sensor, and Ubiquitous Computing,
Security and Privacy.
Cloud
Management Summit - June 19th in Mountain View, CA. A forum for corporate
decision-makers to learn about how to manage today's public, private, and hybrid
clouds using the latest cloud solutions and strategies aimed at addressing
their application management, access control, performance management, helpdesk,
security, storage, and service management requirements on-premise and in the cloud.
2012 Creative Storage Conference - June 26th in Culver City. CA. In association with key industry sponsors, CS2012 is finalizing a series of
technology, application, and trend sessions that will feature distinguished
experts from the professional media and entertainment industries.
CLOUD
COMPUTING WEST 2012 - November 8th-9th in Santa Monica. CA.
CCW:2012 will zero in
on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of
high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact
of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating
and investing in cloud computing services providers.
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