10 Defining Points for Cloud Computing

What is Cloud Computing? 10 Defining Points

By Robin Bloor

This seems like an odd question to ask since you probably already have some concept of “the cloud.” However, given some of the conversations I have been having recently, I think there’s a good deal of cloudy thinking about cloud computing.

So here is the gist of what the cloud is (imho) summed up for you in a set of bullet points:

1. “Cloud Computing” is currently a marketing term. And that’s why I’m writing this; to divorce the use of Cloud Computing, the marketing term , from the use of Cloud Computing as an architectural idea . Marketing terms don’t have to conform to precise definition. They get used, then abused, then severely exploited and finally, as their bandwagon grinds to a halt, they get pitched onto the sorry stack of broken buzz words. That’s what happened to “eBusiness“, “Web Services“, “On Demand” and so on. Until the recession began in earnest Cloud Computing was a reasonably sane marketing term. That’s now changing because, in the minds of the IT audience, the cost of cloud computing is lower. That makes cloud the hype-word du jour.


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   cloud computing (Photo credit: kei51)

   
   
   
   

   Cloud Computing is NOT SaaS (Software As A Service). I’m making this point because some commentators have been equating these two ideas as if they were identical. SaaS is healthy terminology. SaaS is out-hosted software that you can access directly. Although you might not think of it as such, your electronic banking capability is SaaS – you just don’t pay for it directly. As such electronic banking is no different to Zoho or Google Apps. However, electronic banking is definitely not Cloud Computing, no matter how much you stretch the definition.

   
   


3. Cloud Computing Is Not About Emulating Google It looks suspiciously like the initial enthusiasm for cloud computing as a technology strategy was prompted by Google envy . Google was doing something unprecedented in building huge data centers to support its business. It was clearly a fact that Google’s operation was highly efficient and some CIOs mused about whether they could emulate Google. Actually there was no chance, because Google‘s business was defined by just two uncommon transactions: searching the web and placing adverts . Google designed a huge massively parallel operation using computer servers and switches they built themselves within an architecture that was optimized for precisely that workload. You can’t emulate that unless, like some social networking sites, you have a small variety but very large numbers of transactions. As you might expect, some social networking sites have emulated Google.


4. Cloud Computing Is About Technology Stacks Cloud computing is about technology stacks in the same way that the ISP business is about technology stacks. In general ISP deliver a consistent service to the myriads of web sites they host by employing a standard technology stack, most commonly, the LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. This means that management effort is minimal because everyone is running the same application (a web site) with the same technology (LAMP) and, where customers do have problems, they will normally be the same issues cropping up time and again.


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   Cloud computing comes to NERSC (Photo credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

   
   
   
   

   Cloud Computing Is About Economies of Scale The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon about Cloud Computing is that it is constructed for scale and that it is hosted on a set of resources that are distinct from the typical IT network. In other words within “the cloud” there is an architectural attempt to build for scale. Most cloud offerings are going to be based upon scalability. The truth is that if you plan to have a very large data center and you organize its use so that most of the workloads are very similar, or better, identical, then you will achieve significant economies of scale. You will then be able to offer the service at prices that undercut the customer’s costs of running the application in-house. The more customers you achieve the better the cost advantage.

   
   


6. Cloud Computing Is Not Outsourcing The typical corporate data center is not a cloud and will never become one. Its workloads are mixed the platforms they run on are mixed – the whole technology stack is mixed. That means you cannot transform the whole data center into a cloud operation. However, you can outsource it.


7. Are There Any Clouds Computing Standards? Not really, or perhaps better to say “not yet.” In general cloud computing infrastructure is built on servers that employ virtualization technology to deliver efficient resource utilization and typically, abide by open standards and, for the sake of economy, use open source software extensively. There is an organization formed by a group of universities, called the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), which is promoting open frameworks that will let clouds operated by different organizations work together seamlessly.


8. Is there Such A Thing As An Internal Cloud? Again, not really, or perhaps better said “not yet.” There is sense in organizations creating “domains” within their own networks that are built on cloud-type architectures, especially if they have applications that may need to scale over time. If cloud standards existed then such domains could be thought of as Internal Clouds. They would become staging areas for possibly moving internal applications into the cloud, or if the organization has its own software that it intends to offer as a service, then such a domain could become the platform for providing that service.


9. Is Cloud Computing Anything To Do With Web 2.0? No nothing at all. But you can make the connection if you want to. Many web sites that are said to be Web 2.0, primarily because they are social networking sites, have had to scale up dramatically when their user population shot into the millions. Because of that they have had to adopt highly scalable architectures (or die). Because they have such architectures they may be in a good position to offer some services to users in the manner of cloud computing.


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    English: Cloud Computing Image (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    
    
    
    

    Do Clouds Offer Guaranteed Service Levels? The answer to this is “yes” or at least it should be, and in the future it surely will be. We have to exclude free services, like Yahoo Mail and many of Google‘s services, which can be described as Cloud Computing from most perspectives, because a free service is never going to offer guarantees (even if it makes an excellent living from adverts.) But Cloud Computing will ultimately be defined, from the user’s perspective, by service levels and the nature of the service itself. If Cloud Computing Services are well defined in that way, then it becomes possible to compare such services with the cost of providing a similar capability from your own data center – as long as the Cloud Computing provider is transparent in providing details of the technology that it deploys.

    
    

Robin Bloor, Technology Analyst, Founder Bloor Research, Partner Hurwitz & Associates, Authors blog is at http://ift.tt/1d2cYBm

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Virtualization – What is the ‘true’ cloud journey?

The adoption of cloud computing is happening today, or so say a wide variety of analysts, vendors, and even journalists. The surveys show greatly increased interest in cloud computing concepts, and even increased usage of both public and private cloud models by developers of new application systems.

But does your IT organization really understand its cloud journey?

Friend, colleague, and cloud blogger Chris Hoff wrote a really insightful post today that digs into the reality–worldwide–of where most companies are with cloud adoption today…at least in terms of internal “private cloud” infrastructure. In it, he describes the difficult options that are on the table for such deployments:

There is, however, a recurring theme across geography, market segment, culture, and technology adoption appetites; everyone is seriously weighing their options regarding where, how and with whom to make their investments in terms of building cloud computing infrastructure (and often platform) as-a-service strategy. The two options, often discussed in parallel but ultimately bifurcated based upon explored use cases, come down simply to this:

1. Take any number of available open core or open-source software-driven cloud stacks, commodity hardware and essentially engineer your own Amazon, or


2. Use proprietary or closed source virtualization-nee-cloud software stacks, high-end “enterprise” or “carrier-class” converged compute/network/storage fabrics and ride the roadmap of the vendors

One option means you expect to commit to an intense amount of engineering and development from a software perspective. The other means you expect to focus on integration of other companies’ solutions. Depending upon geography, it’s very, very unclear to enterprises [and] service providers what is the most cost-effective and risk-balanced route when use cases, viability of solution providers, and the ultimate consumers of these use-cases are conflated.

Hoff is pointing out that there are no “quick and easy” solutions out there. Even if, say, a vendor solution is a “drop in” technology initially, the complexity and tradeoffs of a long-term dependency on the vendor adds greatly to the cost and complexity.

On the other hand, open-source cloud stacks enable cheaper acquisition and more ways to implement the features that best suit your company’s needs, but only at the cost of requiring additional development, engineering, and operations skills to get it working–and keep it working.

All of which leads to the likelihood that, as a whole, global IT will take some time to take private cloud “mainstream.” So that means cloud computing isn’t as disruptive as it was made out to be, right?

Wrong. Bernard Golden, CEO of Hyperstratus and a leading cloud blogger in his own right, pointed out today that it isn’t the CIO or CTO that will control the pace of cloud adoption, but software developers:

The implication for organizations…is that decisions made by developers create commitments for the organizations they are part of–commitments that the organization does not recognize at the time they are made by the developer and may, in fact, be decisions that, had the organization understood them at the time they were made by the developer, it would have eschewed them. The result is that two or three years down the road, these organizations “discover” technology decisions and applications that are based on choices made by developers without organizational review.

This may account for the curious lack of respect given Amazon on the part of IT organizations and vendors. O’Grady addresses this in a second post titled “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services.” In it, he primarily addresses the fact that most technology vendors evince little fear of Amazon, preferring to focus on private cloud computing environments. He attributes this, in part, to the vendors’ desire to keep traditional margins rather than descending into a pricing battle with Amazon.

Golden goes on to point out that, in his opinion, the reason many vendors aren’t seeing Amazon as direct competition in many deals is that they aren’t talking to the same people:

I might attribute it to a different factor: Vendors primarily seek to talk to senior management, those who control budgets that pay for the vendors’ products–and, as we’ve just noted, those managers often miss the reality of what developers are actually doing. Consequently, they won’t be telling vendors how much public cloud is being used, and the vendors will respond with the time-honored “we don’t really see them much in competitive situations” (I used to hear this a lot from proprietary software vendors about the open source alternatives to their products).

This, then, gets around to the point I made about the future of IT operations in my last post. If, indeed, cloud computing is an applications-driven operations model, and if application operations is managed separately from service or infrastructure operations, then application operations will almost certainly be developed/configured/whatever on an application-by-application basis.

If that is true, then the operations automation for applications will be:

1. Created as part of the software development process, therefore influenced much more by development decisions than by IT operations decisions, and


2. Will target specific deployment environments (clouds or cloud ecosystems), thereby predestining their ongoing operations requirements.

This is why I have said so many times on this blog that, though I believe that the short-medium term will see slow public cloud adoption, especially for critical workloads with legal compliance consequences, the long term will see an IT landscape in which hybrid IT rules, but public cloud will be a dominant deployment model (or acquisition model, in the case of software as a service).

The economics are just too compelling, and the technical issues just too solvable. Solving the legal issues remains to be seen, but there have been signs in the last year that both the courts and various legislative bodies are understanding the importance of protecting data in third-party environments. The corporate lawyers I’ve spoken to are reasonably sure that legal issues between cloud providers and their customers will be worked out in the next two to three years.

In the end, the journey to cloud computing won’t be a planned one. It will be, as disruptions often are, evolutionary and happen in often unexpected ways. The question is, can your IT culture handle that?

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Cloud Computing Is More Than A Technology

by: William smith

Cloud Computing is more than a technology. Cloud Computing is more than a platform and it is more than just an application hosted as a service. It is a combination of all the above plus provides immense data storage on the Internet.

In today’s competitive economic environment, as businesses are trying their best to balance and optimize their information technology or IT budgets, Cloud computing can be an effective strategy to reduce the information technology operations and management costs, and to free up critical resources and budget for discretionary innovative projects. Typically, a business organization has a eighty by twenty split between regular ongoing information technology or IT operations cost which includes hardware, software licensing costs, development, data center maintenance, etc. versus new investment for solving needs which are critical for a business to survive in these challenging times. Cloud computing technology can have a significant impact on this by reducing the footprint of information technology operations by taking out the upfront capital investments needed for hardware and software. It enables a new model viz. – use what is needed and pay for what is used model. This entails businesses to invest on innovative solutions that will help them address key customer challenges instead of worrying about cumbersome operational details.

Cloud Computing is a paradigm that is composed of several strata of services. These include services like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Storage as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a service (SaaS). Different Cloud computing services providers have developed various access models to these services. The access to these services is based on standard Internet Protocols like Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Representational State Transfer (REST), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and the infrastructure is based on widely used technologies including virtualization. Cloud computing is the maturation and coming together of several prior computing concepts like Grid Computing, application service provider (ASP), Server Hosting, Utility Computing, and Virtualization.

Cloud Computing Technology Provides Plenty of Benefits

Cloud Computing Technology provides plenty of benefits. Some of the main benefits are given below –

Reliability plus Scalability

You get extremely high uptime, that is, almost up to hundred percent. You are free to scale up or down resources.

Rolling Backup

Cloud computing service provider uses rolling backup technology to backup data.

Security and Support

SAS 70 Type II compliant data centers are used. Experts provide free 24/7 support service via chat, phone, email, etc.

Cost Savings

End users save much money on Information Technology or IT operations.

Any Application

Cloud Computing Technology allows hosting of Windows Server software, Peachtree accounting software, MS SQL Server, QuickBooks accounting software, MS Office Server, ACT! CRM(Customer relationship management), Lacerte Tax software, etc. Almost any application can be easily hosted in the cloud.

Anywhere and Anytime

Cloud hosting service provider allows end users to access cloud hosted software from where ever they are located. Multiple end users can instantly share same data file at the same time.

Visit: http://ift.tt/1c8I0wK

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The Evolution of Service Management

The Evolution of Business Service Management (BSM)

By Peter Goldin

Looking back, the emergence of business service management (BSM) seems inevitable. This new generation of tools helps IT organizations manage technology infrastructures within the context of the key services they provide for their customers. BSM tools are critical enablers for the increasingly popular process-focused IT Service Management (ITSM) approach.

What’s driving this evolution to BSM and its related IT management paradigms? Executive Consultant Troy DuMoulin of Pink Elephant, an ITIL events and consulting firm, explains, “The interest in ITIL, the evolution of legislation like SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002), and the interest in standards is symptomatic of something much more rudimentary. At the base of this growing focus on formalization and legislation is a growing awareness of exposure and dependency that the business has on IT. Before, IT was seen as an enabler, supportive but yet somehow separated from the business processes themselves. But now there is a realization that there is no true separation between the business process and the underlying IT services and systems.”

Information technology has become so vital to business today – so ubiquitous in every aspect – that most businesses literally cannot function without it anymore. Even simple manual tasks like filling a car with gas or cashing a check now require the support of an IT system.

This heightened reliance on IT has placed companies at a crossroads. They are compelled to address this new dependency by putting processes and technology in place to ensure IT does its job serving the business effectively. So the move to BSM can be seen as a natural reaction to the new way IT interacts with and enables business.

“BSM is a way for a company to agree on what the business expectations are, and manage the IT performance to those agreed upon expectations,” clarifies Brian Childers, a consultant who also serves on the Board of Directors for itSMF USA, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting best practices in IT services management. “Once we understand the expectations, we can build the processes to suit the expectations, and manage against them.”

Vendors are responding rapidly to these new service management imperatives. Leading software providers – like HP, BMC, Mercury and Managed Objects – are already introducing new BSM-versions of their popular tools to help revolutionize the way IT managers gauge technology performance and leverage that knowledge to meet business needs. And new kinds of automated, self-learning software from companies like Netuitive, are making it easier than ever for managers to cut across their technology silos and tie together their existing management tools.

“Over the years – especially during the frenetic IT build-out of the late 1990s – companies cobbled together a mishmash of systems within their IT organizations,” adds Tony Gilbert, vice president at Netuitive. “The result now is a heterogeneous set of components in the IT environment, and individual departmental silos for managing each one. The right set of BSM tools makes it possible to tie together all of these pieces of technology across an enterprise and to monitor IT from the perspective of the service it delivers.”

BSM tools help IT groups see technology in terms of how it impacts their business services, and zero-in on the cause of a particular performance issue that is affecting that service — a capability companies do not have when they manage IT solely through technology silos. The new BSM tools can also enable a company to prioritize resources based on the relative importance of multiple business services. For example, a brokerage firm could manage online trading or online banking services holistically instead of piecemeal within silos: the server group, the database group, the application group.

More Than Just Technology

But completely changing a management approach is not easy. “For the last 20 years our industry has been focused on managing technology. Management of IT has been by domains, such as mainframes, networks and databases. But those domains don’t truly live in isolation.” Pink Elephant’s DuMoulin continues, “A basic premise is that there is a business requirement for IT to understand how any given IT component relates to another and how these devices support or potentially disable a business process. When you understand IT from this perspective you see that you cannot manage by technology or device. You need to understand the relationship between those devices, and how they relate to IT services, and ultimately how IT services are consumed by business.”

The people factor remains an issue, too. For many organizations, BSM often requires a corporate culture change. IT personnel must learn that they don’t just manage boxes and applications, but actually provide services that the business consumes in order to survive and thrive. Most experts agree that the tools are out there, and are necessary, but they go hand in hand with changing processes and changing the way companies perceive the value of IT.

“Some people believe that it doesn’t matter what technology you use as long as you have the right processes in place,” comments Ken Wendle, the ITSM Solution Lead at HP. “But I have always said that IT service management is a combination of people and process, enabled by the right technology, all working in synergy with each other. It is about the intelligent blending of technology to enable and enforce the right processes, which then will allow an organization to execute around business priorities.”

“I have seen companies that put the right processes in place, and trained the right people, but then created process silos,” HP’s Wendle also notes. “But ITSM is about cutting across the technology silos, not just creating another set of process silos on top of them. ITSM is about taking a holistic approach.”

The BSM Evolution Continues

Cloud computing icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Where is BSM going from here? “One of the missing ingredients today is the enrollment of the business community,” itSMF’s Childers believes. “They need to understand what BSM is and why they would want to support it. I think the better job everyone does with bringing the business side onboard, the faster BSM will progress.”

“I don’t think companies have gained all the benefits of technology that they could,” HP’s Wendle agrees. “The business people need to understand and appreciate what IT can do to help the business side of the organization.”

Clearly there is work to be done, but the adoption of ITSM and the BSM tools that support it continues to gain momentum as more companies realize this is a prerequisite for success in a new world where business and IT have become one.

“The prediction is that over the next five years, ITSM will be as impactful as ERP systems were, or maybe more,” itSMF’s Childers concludes. “I don’t think ITSM is going away, because it makes too much sense.” And innovative BSM vendors will continue to develop new tools to help.

Reprinted from BSM Digest

The BSM Digest newsletter delivers timely original articles about the latest trends in business service management, IT Service Management and ITIL. Plus, we scour the technology industry’s leading publications and alert you to the best articles you don’t want to miss. http://ift.tt/1eUGbUi

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