Enterprise Cloud Computing

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Bart Copeland – ActiveState

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:30:00 EDT

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT?

Mind the Gap - Three Gaps to High Velocity Pipeline and How to Cross Them

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:28:00 EDT

When I used to go to London often and ride the Underground, the constant refrain seen was "Mind The Gap". Mind the Gap or you could suffer some unmentionable and clearly gruesome fate. As Online software service providers of all flavors try to create high velocity sales and marketing businesses, they would do well to mind these three gaps: The "It's Not Your Time" gap The "It's Not My Job" gap The "Window Shopping" gap 1) The "It's Not Your Time" gap 2) The "It's Not My Job" gap 3) The "Window Shopping" gap

You Say You Want a Revolution...

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:00:00 EDT

Remember the heady dot.com days circa 1999? We thought we were reinventing business, forming a New Economy, revolutionizing the essential nature of commerce. In our dreams! By late 2001 the bubble had burst, and what we thought was a new paradigm for business—the World Wide Web—turned out to be little more than a new marketing channel. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to disparage the power and importance of the Web. After all, the Web, and the Internet in general, have deeply affected so many aspects of business today. It’s hard to remember the time when you had to talk to a teller to use a bank or a stockbroker to trade stocks! But we were wrong that the Web was a revolution. It wasn’t a paradigm shift. Fundamentally, the rise of the Internet was more evolutionary than revolutionary.

IBM’s Patterns and Its Impact on IT Services Purchasing

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:14:44 EDT

Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the IT ecosystem in many ways, forcing related changes in business models. Other than customers (who are always “king” and make buying decisions), the IT ecosystem players being affected by cloud includes technology providers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs). One of the battles being fought right now by technology providers is to develop end-to-end cloud platform stacks attractive to ISVs. IBM announced additions to their recently launched PureSystems family at Impact 2012 with more than 125 ISVs supporting this family with patterns. Although the primary focus of this cloud platform stack is on ISVs, there is also a need for SIs to adapt to these changes, especially as it relates to custom software development and maintenance capabilities.

A Funny Thing Happened on Java’s Way to the Cloud

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

On the surface, everything seems fine. If you do a search, you’ll see lots of people offering support for cloud-centric application frameworks. But, when I speak with companies actually moving Java applications into the Cloud or trying to create new Cloud services based on Java, I get a different story. It’s not the application in many cases that’s in the way, it’s the JVM. An example that highlights these issues comes from one of our partners, Intalio. Intalio offers Cloud solutions based mostly on open source. They and their customers are frustrated by the fact that Java can’t take advantage of Cloud elasticity – the JVM strictly limits the amount of memory and cores an individual instance can use. To make matters worse, operators have to deploy multiple small instances (around 2-4 GBs of memory each) to keep garbage collection pauses short enough so users wouldn’t really notice the delay. Plus, managing it all is painful. Developers have to create distributed networks within individual machines, and the IT staff has to create and launch lots of new instances and tune carefully to avoid long response times delays. (Their CEO, Ismael Chang Ghalimi, describes the problem in detail in a paper called “Cloud Computing is Memory Bound – located here: http://www.intalio.com/cloud-computing-is-memory-bound.)

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Bernard Golden – HyperStratus

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?

IT Investments Have Big Payoffs

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:30:00 EDT

Fascinating new findings from a recent survey uncovers what distinguishes leaders from laggards among businesses, and identify which IT approaches and solutions are driving the most powerful business results these days.

The CIO’s Critical Shift: This Might Hurt

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:30:00 EDT

Talk of so-called “sea change developments” and “paradigm shifts” has long been rife among the IT media and the web’s wider technology commentary channels. Right now we’re all talking about cloud, mobile empowerment (let’s not forget the Bring Your Own Device tagline here) and virtualized computing resources as we re-align many of the mechanics that drive our collective IT resources. But does all this talk of “new compute models” leave us at risk of forgetting other large-scale departmental changes, which still have to be brought to bear by the CIO? I’m simply talking about security here. The CIO is now also being joined by a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), although in many cases this turns out to be one and the same person. The CIO’s security remit now must encompass absolutely all of the people, processes and technology that impact the day-to-day running of the business and this is no small matter.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Jill T. Singer – NRO

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:15:00 EDT

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now only four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?

Introducing the F5 Technical Certification Program

Mon, 14 May 2012 05:45:00 EDT

#F5TCP #interop You are now. Introducing the F5 Technical Certification Program.

Can you explain the role of the Cache-Control HTTP header? How about the operational flow of data during an SMTP authentication exchange? Are you well-versed in the anatomy of an SSL handshake and the implications of encrypting data as it flows across the network?

Can you explain the features and functionalities of protocols and technologies specific to the Transport layer?

If so, then you won’t need to study nearly as much as many of your compatriots when you take the test to become an F5 Certified™ professional.

Introducing the F5 Technical Certification Program (F5-TCP)

F5 Certified™ individuals represent a new breed of technologist - capable of manipulating the entire application stack from the traditional networking knowledge all the way to advanced application-layer understanding with a unique capability to integrate the two. Never before has any company created a program designed to bridge these worlds; a capability critical to the increasingly mobile and cloud-based solutions being implemented around the world today.

The need has always existed, but with the increasing focus on the abstraction of infrastructure through cloud computing and virtualization the need is greater today than ever for basic application delivery skills. Consider that at the heart of the elasticity promised by cloud computing is load balancing, and yet there is no general course or certification program through which a basic understanding of the technology can be achieved. There are no university courses in application delivery, no well-defined learning paths for new hires, no standard skills assessments. Vendors traditionally provide training but it is focused on product, not technology or general knowledge, leaving employees with highly specific skills that are not necessarily transferrable. This makes the transition to cloud more difficult as organizations struggle with integrating disparate application delivery technologies to ensure an operationally consistent environment without compromising on security or performance.

The F5-TCP focuses on both basic application delivery knowledge as well as a learning path through its application delivery products.

Starting with a core foundation in application delivery fundamentals, F5 Certified™ individuals will be able to focus on specific application delivery tracks through a well-defined learning path that leads to application delivery mastery.

Fundamentals being what they are – fundamental – the first step is to build a strong foundation in the technologies required to deploy and manage application delivery regardless of vendor or environment. Understanding core concepts such as the entire OSI model – including the impact of transport and application layer protocols and technologies on the network – is an invaluable skill today given the increasing focus on these layers over others when moving to highly virtualized and cloud computing environments.

As technologies continue to put pressure on IT to integrate more devices, more applications, and more environments, the application delivery tier becomes more critical to the ability of organizations not just to successfully integrate the technology, but to manage it, secure it, and deliver it in an operationally efficient way. Doing that requires skills; skills that IT organizations often lack. With no strong foundation in how to leverage such technology, it makes sense that organizations are simply not seeing the benefits of application delivery they could if they were able to fully take advantage of it.

Application delivery solutions are often underutilized and not well-understood in many IT organizations. According to research by Gartner, up to three-quarters of IT organizations that have deployed advanced application delivery controllers (ADCs) use them only for basic load balancing. When faced with performance or availability challenges, these organizations often overlook the already-deployed ADC, because it was purchased to solve basic server load balancing and is typically controlled by the network operations team.

-- Gartner: Three Phases to Improve Application Delivery Teams

F5 is excited to embark on this effort and provide not just a “BIG-IP” certification, but the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary for organizations to incorporate application delivery as a first class citizen in its data center architecture and fully realize the benefits of application delivery.

F5 Certification Resources

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End-to-End Cloud Offerings for Large Enterprises

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:00:00 EDT

With cloud adoption becoming a de-facto option for small and medium enterprises, large enterprises are relatively slower in their adoption of cloud. The main reason is that large enterprises have a very complex existing IT setup and no single offering from various cloud providers has yet to satisfy all their needs. However we find the recent announcements and offerings from IBM provide a perfect platform for large enterprises to on board to Cloud to make their businesses more agile. The below reference architecture provides an overview of how the large enterprises would like to position their cloud-enabled IT so that they get best of their traditional operations while merging with the benefits of cloud.

Legacy Modernization

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:45:00 EDT

IT exists to support the business - and in best-of-class IT departments, this truism is embedded deeply into the departmental culture. Yet in so many cases, this self-evident truth gets lost in the mayhem of building, maintaining and supporting the myriad of complicated and brittle legacy application systems that have been put together over the years to support the enterprise's business. Legacy Application Modernization is a transformative initiative that has the potential to not only change the way IT supports the business, but to change the very nature and culture of IT.

Media Company Employs the Latest in Collaborative Commerce

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:35:00 EDT

Mediafly, a startup company, delivers cloud-based applications for content management and distribution on mobile devices for Fortune 500 companies. Mediafly is the leader in the presentation platform market. What that means is that we’re the company that helps bridge the gap between large Fortune 1000 companies, their internal systems, and primarily mobile applications, but also things like Internet-connected televisions, and so forth. Large companies create lots of video. It could be live broadcast, sales presentations, training videos, and TV and movie industry content. When they're trying to distribute that content to make it available on all of these emerging devices, particularly at that large scale, they need a provider like Mediafly. Think of all the TV and movie productions that are going on the studios. Those companies have thousands of video files that they're housing inside of their four walls. They're trying to expose that content to all of their executives and staff, everybody from the makeup artist that needs to watch the last three dailies to the CEO and the president.

A Job for Man or Machine

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:15:00 EDT

A Chief Technology Officer for a Midwest banking holding company made a very interesting observation. In commenting about the needed increase in fraud fighting resources, he warned about the perils of overemphasizing technology while ignoring training staff in using manual fraud-detection processes. Most of what he says is spot on in terms of ensuring the proper prioritization, risk analysis and the blind reliance on technology to identify and neutralize threats and breaches. In fact, as an officer in a technology company, I happen to agree with him on almost everything he said. He also noted that to prevent fraud, financial institutions need to go beyond adopting the latest technologies and ensure they have trained staff to identify fraud, such as by reviewing reports or spotting unusual activity Now the key is how to cost effectively apply those resources, train those departments in the latest detection protocols and remediation, implement new layers of detection and correlation. Even for the largest corporation, this has the earmarks of an expensive (but obviously important) initiative. The answer can be found in the cloud as part of a security-as-service deployment.

Modernization of IT: Solving a Legacy of Business Problems & Applications

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:30:00 EDT

I talk to a lot of CIOs. I met with one recently who oversees the IT operation of a $6 Billion yearly entertainment-related company with about 7,000 employees. This top-notch exec was all about transforming a huge investment in existing IT infrastructure into a new dynamic, extensible and agile platform that would propel the business forward - not hold it back. This guy is busy figuring out how to keep a Boeing 777 up in the air while simultaneously re-fitting aircraft to make it best-in-class. That's what IT should be all about.

Cloud Management – Various Solutions and Standards

Thu, 10 May 2012 04:45:00 EDT

The growing use of Infrastructure as a Service to run custom applications, SaaS, and PaaS offerings is increasing the demand of management solutions to leverage the automation offered by IaaS. One of the biggest advantages of IaaS is the ability to automate tasks which were not possible before. E.g. a crashed server can be restored with an API call by launching a new instance.

Proper Security and Protection Measures Enable Rapid Cloud Adoption

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Cloud computing has clearly sparked the imagination of business leaders, who see it as a powerful new way to be innovative and gain first-mover advantages. It now falls to CIOs to not only rapidly adapt to cloud computing, but to find the ways to protect their employees and customers as they adopt cloud models – even as security threats grow. This is a serious -- but not insurmountable challenge. Cloud computing has clearly sparked the imagination of business leaders, who see it as a powerful new way to be innovative and gain first-mover advantages -- with or without traditional IT's consent.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: John Keagy – GoGrid

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now five weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?

Identity and Access Management in the Cloud

Wed, 09 May 2012 05:00:00 EDT

In today’s business world, data is the lifeblood of most organizations. As such, it has become a prime target for both external and internal threats. Data breaches made plenty of headlines in 2011 and don’t show any signs of slowing down. In fact, a recent report from Privacy Rights Clearinghouse found that there were 535 data breaches reported last year alone. Whether it is for a Fortune 500 business, a university or a midmarket company, the protection of sensitive information is not only important for daily business functions, but is now a security measure required by law. As organizations of all sizes – not just large enterprises – struggle to keep up with evolving security and compliance requirements, many are turning to identity and access management (IAM) solutions to meet their needs. Unlike traditional IT security technologies, which focus on perimeter and end-point threats, IAM solutions focus on identity lifecycles and access controls, as well as provisioning, authentication, certification and other identity-based processes. Previously seen as a luxury only available to the largest of organizations, cloud computing has increased the accessibility of IAM solutions for businesses of all sizes at a time when they are needed most. In addition, cloud computing provides the opportunity for security vendors to bring mature IAM technology to smaller businesses via a new deployment model – without starting from scratch and losing years of successful development.

How to Monetize the OpenStack Wave

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:00:00 EDT

After OpenStack was announced at OSCON in the summer of 2010, the degree of momentum behind this new open source platform has been nothing short of spectacular. Startups and enterprises alike have placed their strategic bets to monetize the OpenStack wave in various ways. As an ecosystem insider and one of the founding sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation, I wanted to offer my views on how various organizations are looking to skin this cat. I’d like to focus on three of the many efforts currently underway. These three, in particular, happen to be the most vocal about their position and represent three distinct strategy camps. They are Nebula with its OpenStack appliance; Piston with its PentOS cloud operating system; and Dell’s Crowbar, an OpenStack installer.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Bill Lowry – Terremark

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:00:00 EDT

Cloud Computing Is Meeting the “Enterprise” Needs of SMBs

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:30:00 EDT

I have been in technology marketing since my career began, and there is one word that I have come to loathe because of its misuse by marketing and business leaders in technology – enterprise, (or enterprise-class). I’m guilty of using it – it’s my job to ensure prospects know that we offer the best technologies available to handle complex workloads and applications. But what is the definition of enterprise, really? A quick Bing search produces three definitions – commercial business, business activities directed at profit, and a daring new project. A quick search of the Gartner IT Glossary tells me the definition of enterprise-class is “a term referring to the ability of a given tool or product to handle complex processes or services.”

Cloud Transition - Assess Then Fly into the Clouds

Tue, 08 May 2012 06:45:00 EDT

There is great excitement about the cloud; however, it is important to conduct a full assessment as part of the Cloud Transition. It is very important to decide which applications will be moving to the cloud based on factors such as alignment with business requirements, cost savings, level of effort, available resources, benefits of the new solution, risks etc to determine business and functional benefits. Architecture and security aspects need to be thoroughly assessed, and factors such as interoperability, reliability, portability, storage, data transfer, sensitivity of data have to be evaluated. The initial and projected cost implications for services have to be monitored regularly since services that are cost effective initially may end up being more expensive down the road as more users are brought on board. As part of the assessment of cloud vendors, technology and cost aspects need to be looked into carefully and expectations should be documented in the service level agreements.

Online Collaboration Improves Procurement

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:45:00 EDT

Cox Enterprises, through the Ariba Network, manages multiple ERP systems for an improved eProcurement strategy. We'll learn how Cox, through the Ariba Network, manages multiple ERP systems for an improved eProcurement strategy, and has moved toward more efficient indirect spend efforts to improve ongoing operations and drive future growth across more than 50,000 employees. We have six separate ERP systems spanning major subsidiaries, including Cox Communications, Manheim, Cox Media Group, and AutoTrader.com. Cox is a very interesting company in that our business units are very diverse and very unique. Across four divisions and our holding company we have those six ERP systems.

Deconstructing Agile

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:00:00 EDT

The business must specify its requirements in a fundamentally different way. Instead of thinking about what it wants the software to do, the business should specify how agile it expects the software to be. In other words, don’t ask for software that does A, B, C or whatever. Instead, tell your techies to build you something agile. We call this requirement the metarequirement of agility—a metarequirement because agility applies to other requirements: “build me something that responds to changing requirements” instead of “build me something that does A, B, and C.”

Looking for the Right Answers in the Clouds at Cloud Expo New York

Sat, 05 May 2012 08:30:00 EDT

The age of Big Data is here. Organizations are no longer challenged to find enough data to answer the pertinent questions required for success in today’s dynamic business environment. Rather, companies are struggling to keep pace with the enormous volumes of data invading their organizations – leaving some wondering what can we do to “connect the dots” from the data that is buried in our IT systems. Cloud Computing offers federal agencies, companies, and communities new solutions for consuming, storing, processing, and analyzing Big Data to find the right answers needed to accomplish the mission, gain competitive advantage, and collaborate in more meaningful ways. In their session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Jill Tummler Singer, CIO for the National Reconnaissance Office, and Jamie Dos Santos, President & CEO, Terremark Federal Group, will share perspectives on the Big Data challenge and how organizations can look in the clouds to discover the right answers. This session will feature collective results from a recent AFCEA International Cyber Committee white paper.

Infrastructure Was Then, Private Cloud Is Now and Beyond

Thu, 03 May 2012 05:00:00 EDT

A transition from a traditional infrastructure-focused deployment model into a cloud-friendly, cloud-ready, cloud-enabled and service-centric delivery vehicle in enterprise IT is imminent, if not already happening. IT is no longer about servers, networks, and storage; instead IT is about shortening go-to-market. This is not only a matter of survival for IT. This is a matter of survival of the business that IT supports. Seven years of research with 15,000 data points, as shown below, provides overwhelming evidence that there is a noticeable increase in efficiency with a significant reduction of TCO by moving IT from Basic intothe Rationalized stage in the IO (Infrastructure Optimization) model. And cloud, or more specifically private cloud computing, offers a roadmap to facilitate enterprise IT transforming from Basic or Standardized into Rationalized. A transition from a traditional infrastructure-focused deployment model into a cloud-ready, cloud-enabled, and service-centric delivery vehicle in enterprise IT is imminent, if not already happening.

MySQL in the Cloud

Wed, 02 May 2012 05:15:00 EDT

MySQL is probably the most popular open source database. While there is a wealth of discussion online for MySQL database encryption,doing it right in a cloud computing environment is tricky. The discussion here is quite long, and contains a lot of interesting details. So if you want a spoiler: it is possible to achieve true [...]

A Fistful of Fears: Our Top Five Security Issues

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:30:00 EDT

If you work in information technology and you passed through the city of London over the last week it would have been hard not to notice the InfoSec IT security conference being held at the Earl’s Court exhibition center. Logically, of course, certain themes and trends came out of this event, which (at a macroeconomic level at least) may provide some insight for chief information officers trying to analyse the state of their current security operation as they try to quantify the vulnerabilities that they may be harboring within their firm’s operational structure.

Are Your Cloud Computing Platforms Obsolete?

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:45:00 EDT

Every cloud computing platform that is being sold today will be obsolete prematurely unless they can retrofit them with a single-source timing device. If cloud computing is going to be as pervasive tomorrow as some sales executives have hyped them, the need for a more sophisticated platform has to be fulfilled today. It’s not enough to tweak some components or put some functions like I/O on the chip. That will definitely help performance, but we are not looking at just shaving off some latency when it comes to financial and other mission-critical applications. Clocking needs to be totally synchronous and that means getting it from one source. The importance of cloud computing is being “amped up” because manufacturers have to have some battle cry to boost sales of servers as well as next-generation chips. Would you buy this year’s car model if they only had eight-track tape systems in them? Half of you probably don’t even know what an eight-track tape is. The short answer is “No.” You would wait until they made the car with the proper instrumentation.

Case Study: Making Cloud ROI a Reality

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:45:00 EDT

IT managers at enterprises of all sizes are exploring cloud computing and virtualization as a way to address conflicting demands within their organizations. These mounting pressures include a lack of internal resources, mandates from the CFO to lower costs, and the struggle to complete key initiatives while also performing mundane server maintenance and application storage tasks. These same IT professionals are also being asked to build and implement battle-tested disaster recovery and business continuity plans that not only reduce data loss and downtime, but present a recovery time objective that prevents the organization from further interruption in the wake of an outage. You may have read some controversial articles in the early days of cloud computing stating that there is no such thing as ROI for cloud computing. These early cloud pundits believed that buying into cloud services is not an investment, but an avoidance in an investment – therefore, ROI cannot be measured.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Henry Fastert – SHI

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:45:00 EDT

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just seven weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...

Who’s Responsible for Protecting Data Stored in the Cloud?

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT

With cloud comes the notion of liberation. Cloud is the natural evolution of the data center. It’s easy to deploy, infinitely scalable, and highly redundant. It is the shiny new component inside the storage controller and is making it possible for an old dog to learn some very impressive new tricks. But with the cloud, comes responsibility. An article recently appeared over at BusinessWeek explaining how many businesses now operate under the assumption that once their data is sent offsite they need not be concerned with protecting it. In a perfect world, this is how it should work. One of the main selling points of outsourcing infrastructure is the idea that there is now one less thing for IT to worry about. However, before any business can trust a third party to protect their invaluable corporate IP, some due diligence must be conducted.

Making Sense of the Cloud for Growing Businesses

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:45:00 EDT

With all the hype around “the cloud,” it’s difficult not to be skeptical about its value. While cloud computing seems complex, it is possible to understand the building blocks that help make the cloud more tangible for businesses of all sizes. In fact, understanding the innovation the cloud delivers can profoundly impact critical parts of your business and may be the key in providing business growth and scalability. However, before diving into cloud adoption, it’s worth doing your homework. There are many terms in the cloud computing lexicon, including popular terms like IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service). As the owner of a growing business, you will likely have direct experience with SaaS – software applications most often hosted in the cloud. You’ll find that the SaaS market is considerably larger than the PaaS or IaaS markets, and SaaS adoption continues to grow. According to a recent Techaisle survey on SMB Business Application Cloud Computing, over 70 percent of respondents have already implemented cloud business applications in the past three years and plan to add an average of 2.9 cloud business applications to their current suite in 2012. In any case, let’s break down these terms as they relate to the cloud, removing needless complexities and using a language even technophobes can understand.

The Plain Truth About Hybrid Solutions

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:00:00 EDT

It’s time to rehabilitate hybrid – and no, that doesn’t mean that you have to check the Prius into a 12-step program. We’re talking about that big buzzword “hybrid” and what you can do today to turn that trend into a true business environment that runs as efficiently and with as little drama as a Prius. You see the word “hybrid” affixed to as many trends as you do “cloud” today. The over use of the term has about as much relevance and meaning to most of us as “best of breed”, “paradigm shifting”, and “synergy”. You see the word hybrid used to describe for systems integrators, infrastructure, databases, business applications, platforms – pretty much anywhere and everywhere you can say “online and premise together”, you can say “hybrid.”

Performance Cloud Computing: Yes You Can

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:15:00 EDT

The industry has long worried that cloud computing cannot deliver the performance required for critical enterprise applications. For example, the very notion of multiple compute instances or multiple applications sharing the same infrastructure has meant that service providers cannot guarantee service level agreements for response times. This has held many companies back from making the jump to the cloud. These performance bottlenecks are indicated in Figure 1. Multiple applications or virtual machines simply drive too much storage traffic to traditional disks, which cannot keep up with demands.

Cloud-Oriented Architecture and the Internet of Things

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:45:00 EDT

There are fundamental differences between data centers and the Internet of Things, which means that fundamental Cloud architecture principles must also transform to support this new reality. This transformation promises to be truly disruptive — a true paradigm shift as we figure out what it means to implement what we call Cloud-Oriented Architecture. Quick quiz for all your Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist of resources in data centers, running one way or another on racks full of physical servers. But there’s nothing in the definition of Cloud that specifies anything about the physical location of Cloud resources.

The Business Aspects of Cloud: Let's Get Started

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:38:53 EDT

The cloud discussions have been changing rapidly over the last months, focusing away from infrastructure to applications, services and industry requirements. I’ve spent the last several weeks addressing some of the business aspects of cloud and why/how companies move to the cloud. It’s time now to wrap this series up. The cloud discussions have been changing rapidly over the last months, focusing away from infrastructure to applications, services and industry requirements. Implementations in larger companies typically started with development & test activities within the IT department, while business teams used “shadow-IT” approaches to source services from external parties, potentially putting the enterprise at risk. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] The main reason is the perceived lack of responsiveness and agility of IT. As I pointed out, it is increasingly becoming clear that one size does not fit all, in cloud computing and that the CIO should become a “strategic service broker”, sourcing services from a series of cloud environments going from private to public clouds and from IaaS to SaaS services. To achieve a successful transition to cloud computing, the CIO needs to address three areas

Cloud Transactions: Timing as a Service (TaaS)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:00:00 EDT

Many organizations are starting to look at cloud computing as a universal solution, but there are many applications that cannot be considered unless the framework of cloud computing includes Timing as a Service (TaaS) as part of its fabric. Mission-critical applications require security measures including encryption, monitoring, and redundancy/resiliency, but that is not enough. If cloud computing is going to spread to more mission critical-type applications, it needs to get more exact and accurate when it comes to transaction-based applications. Trying to keep everything in a structured framework is going to require a more rigorous network infrastructure that includes timing down to milliseconds, if not nanoseconds. Financial transactions that can already be generated by “robotic traders” are being sent across networks at a very rapid rate. When you have thousands upon thousands of transactions being generated in a few seconds, you need to be able to sort them out if something happens and you want to replicate (or re-construct) the event.

CIO Question: What is the Right PaaS for Enterprises?

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:00:00 EDT

There are a number of the Cloud Application Platforms out there. And, that makes the life of CIO difficult in choosing the right PaaS for his enterprise. This post takes a logical approach to this challenge by examining the key enterprise needs and motivations.