Recently, I took part in a live Twitter chat hosted by the Cloud Commons blog (thanks again for the invite!) that was focused on Rogue IT. After hearing from, and engaging with, some major thought leaders in the space, I decided to write a blog summarizing my thoughts on the topic.

What does “Rogue IT” mean anyway?

I think that there are rogue IT users and there are rogue IT projects. There’s the individual user scheduling meetings with an “unauthorized” iPad. There’s also a sales department, without the knowledge of corporate IT, developing an iPhone app to process orders for your yet-to-be-developed product. Let us focus on the latter – rogue IT projects. Without a doubt, rogue IT projects have been, and will continue to be, an issue for corporate IT departments. A quick web search will return articles on “rogue IT” dating back around 10 years. However, as technology decreases in cost and increases in functionality, the issue of rouge IT projects seems to be moving up on the list of concerns.

What does rogue IT have to do with cloud computing?

Cloud Computing opens up a market for IT Services. With Cloud Computing, organizations have the ability to source IT services to the provider that can deliver the service most efficiently. Sounds a lot like specialization and division of labor, doesn’t it? (We’ll stay away from The Wealth of Nations, for now.) Suffice to say that Rogue IT may be an indication that corporate IT departments need to compete with outside providers of IT services. Stated plainly, the rise of Cloud Computing is encouraging firms to enter the market for IT services. Customers, even inside a large organization, have choices (other than corporate IT) on how to acquire the IT services that they need. Maybe corporate IT is not able to deliver a new IT service in time for that new sales campaign. Or, corporate IT simply refuses to develop a new system requested by a customer. That customer, in control of their own budget, may turn to an alternative service offering “from the cloud.”

What are the advantages of rogue IT? Do they outweigh the risks?

Rogue IT is a trend that will continue as the very nature of work changes (e.g. long history of trends to a service-based economy means more and more knowledge workers). Rogue IT can lead to some benefits… BYOD or “bring your own device” for example. BYOD can drive down end-user support costs and improve efficiency. BYOD will someday also mean “bring your own DESK” and allow you to choose to work when and where it is most convienent for you to do so (as long as you’re impacting the bottom line, of course). Another major benefit is increased pace of innovation. As usual, major benefits are difficult to measure. Take the example of the Lockheed Martin “Skunkworks” that produced some breakthroughs in stealth military technology –would the organization have produced such things if they had been encumbered by corporate policies and standards?

Should CIOs embrace rogue IT or should it be resisted?

CIOs should embrace this as the new reality of IT becoming a partner with the business, not simply aligning to it. Further, CIOs can gain some visibility into what is going on with regard to “rogue IT” devices and systems. With some visibility, the corporate IT departments can develop meaningful offerings and meet the demands of their customers.

Corporate IT departments should also bring some education as to what is acceptable and what is not acceptable: iPad at work- ok, but protect it with a password. Using Google Docs to store your company’s financial records…there might be a better place for that.

Two approaches for corporate IT:

- “Embrace and extend:” Allow rogue IT, learn from the experiences of users, adopt the best systems/devices/technologies, and put them under development

• IT department gets to work with their customers and develop new technologies

- “Judge and Jury:” Have IT develop and enforce technology standards

• IT is more/less an administrative group, always the bad guy, uses justification by keeping the company and its information safe (rightly so)

CIOs should also consider when rogue IT is being used. Outside services, quick development, and sidestepping of corporate IT policies may be beneficial for projects in conceptual or development phases. You can find the transcript from the Cloud Commons twitter chat here: http://bit.ly/JNovHT

Office 2010 includes a lot of interactive and collaborative technology that ties into other products such as SharePoint, Lync and InfoPath, but the reality is not everyone has fully invested in those other products so one may think, what’s the point of going to Office 2010 because we’re not going to even use those other products at this point. Well the good news is Office can do more than just play with those collaboration products; in fact it actually has a lot of subtle, useful tools that make the everyday work experience just a little bit easier on you.

Email is a very important messaging tool that that we know and love, in fact we probably interact through email more than our phones, so Microsoft has provided some practical tools to make our daily use of email a little simpler. One is the Out of Office message. Like Marty McFly, Office 2010 can also see into the future. Once you add a contact name into the “To” Box, Outlook will let you know that your contact is out of the Office so as you’re about to type your message you can decide to abort the email all together or format your message differently knowing that the person you’re about to send it to may not immediately read their email. Doc Brown would be proud. Office also has Mail Tips, where it lets you know that you’re about to Reply to All, which is nice to know just in case you’re about to send a very regrettable email to everyone in your company. HR would be proud. It also has a Forgotten Attachment detector. If you’re sending out an email that reads please see attachment, Office recognizes that you’ve written the word “attachment” in the body of the email so it will let you know to actually attach the file if you have forgotten to do so, because as you know it’s always rewarding when the person you wrote the email to asks “what attachment?” Doh! Homer Simpson would be proud. Lastly, when someone sends you a meeting request, Outlook shows you what other meetings are sandwiched between your meeting, that way you can see how much of a crazy day you’re going to have or how much time you have to recoup from you lunch food coma. Yikes, I have a ½ hour to suck down a 5 Hour Energy! Dyn-o-mite!!! Jimmie Walker would be proud.

If you’re still running an older version of Office, one of the great things about Office 2010 is that it allows you to work anywhere. It’s incorporated a lot of functionality into mobility products such as the Windows Phone and iOS devices. If you’re stuck in a cab in NYC and have to make a few edits to a presentation, Office 2010 allows you to view and edit PowerPoint presentations and Word documents on the fly right on your phone as Microsoft has made an investment in the fidelity of the product to make the application look exactly the same on the phone as it is on a PC. However, it’s much smaller especially if you’re using the Derek Zoolander ridiculously good looking tiny phone. In addition if you don’t have a collaboration tool like Lync or WebEx, Microsoft has built in presentation capabilities right into Office 2010 which allow you to broadcast PowerPoint presentations on your PC or phone right on the web through a shared URL.

Office 2010 also added hundreds of more commands, which at first is a bit overwhelming, but they did it in such a way that it’s organized into a variety of tabs on a ribbon. For instance if you click on a picture it brings you right to a tab where you can make any edits to that picture on that tab without having to jump around all over the document.

Lastly if you purchase Office 2010 with Software Assurance you’ll receive a whole bunch of other benefits, the first of which is Office Home Use Program which lets employees download a copy of Office for their personal PC for $9.95. The cool thing is the employee has a full functioning copy of Office that they can use at home for work or let their kids do their science projects on. Ok, so maybe it’s not that cool, but from a manageability standpoint when an employee downloads Office the employee would sign a separate EULA from the one provided to the company under their Volume License Program. With this agreement the employee would be required to remove the Office from their PC if they were to leave the company, keeping the company off the hook in trying to retrieve the Home User license. In fact, if someone does leave, the employer can redistribute that Home Use license to another employee. Also, with Office 15 coming down the pike, Software Assurance would provide new versions rights to have access to Office 15, when it’s finally released, allowing the end user to enjoy the new features of Office (which may include touch capabilities).

If you’re on an older version of Office and are looking to upgrade, now is a great time to do so. With the purchase of Office, as well as other products, Microsoft is offering their Big Easy promotion which provides subsidy dollars for implementation of future solutions and products including software and services. Basically, depending on the quantity and type of software you purchase, Microsoft will give you money back in the form of a check that you can use for future purchases!

I wanted to talk about the shift I have seen in technology that we use in business every day. This transformation has been just as large and disruptive as virtualization. 10 years ago, the end user hardware and software was set and had very little diversity or customization. It was Win/Tel (Windows running on Intel processors) all the way with Microsoft Office. There was very little or no working from home, and you had to be in the office or have a VPN to the office to do your work.

Fast forward to today and the end user client and software environment has a lot more options. The other architects and I have daily conversations about thin clients, zero clients, iPads, iPhones, Android phones, VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures) so workers can work from anywhere. I am also seeing many more Apple Macintosh’s in business environments. Exchange is moving into the cloud as in storage, social networks and many companies we work with consider Instant Massaging as a key business application.

You can blame Apple and the usability of the iPad and iPhone, Samsung and other Android tablet and phone manufacturers or the continued advances in technology, but you cannot deny that providing applications and data to end users is not just Windows, Office and a desktop anymore.

I had an interesting personal experience with this recently. I have been a Windows user for most of my life. I do have an iPad and have been using that more and more. I needed a new personal laptop and after much soul searching and justifying the additional cost, I purchased a MacBook Pro. It took me years to talk myself into paying more money for essentially the same hardware. Well, I am very happy that I did. I find the Mac has almost all of the applications that I use, and I have VMware Fusion for any Windows applications that are not supported. I really enjoy using the Mac more and find it much more usable than the Windows laptop I use for work. Gestures and the awesome usability of the mousepad (trackpad) make this my personal choice of hardware going forward.

The bottom line is that today’s IT department has many more choices in how to deliver applications and data to their end users. This can be a management nightmare, if not planned correctly, but does offer end users many more options to stay connected and do the work they need to anyplace, anytime, and on (almost) any device.

When you start to look at what it means to automate and orchestrate a process such as the one mentioned above, you will start to see what I mean by “what you think you’re doing is less than half of what you’re really doing.” Hmm, that may be more confusing than explanatory so let me reset by first explaining the generalized process for turning a series of commodity IT activities into a workflow and by turn, an orchestration and then I think you’ll better see what I mean. We’ll use the example from above as the basis for the illustration.

The first and foremost thing you need to do before you create any workflow (and orchestration) is that you have to pick a reasonably encapsulated process to model and transform (this is where you will find the complexity that you don’t know about…more on that in a bit). What I mean by “reasonably encapsulated” is that there are literally thousands of processes, dependent and independent, going on in your environment right now and based on how you describe them, a single process could be either A) a very large collection of very short process steps, or, Z) a very small collection of very large process steps (and all letters in between). A reasonably encapsulated process is somewhere on the A side of the spectrum but not so far over that there is little to no recognizable business benefit resulting from it.

So, once you’ve picked the process that you want to model (in the world of automation, modeling is what you do before you get to do anything useful ) you then need to analyze all of the processes steps required to get you from “not done” to “done”…and this is where you will find the complexity you didn’t know existed. From our example above I can dive into the physical process steps (hundreds, by the way) that you’re well aware of, but you already know those so it makes no sense to. Instead, I’ll highlight some areas of the process that you might not have thought about.

Aside from the SOPs, the run books and build plans you have for the various IT assets you employ in your environment, there is probably twice that much “required” information that resides in places not easily reached by a systematic search of your various repositories. Those information sources and locations are called “people,” and they likely hold over half of the required information for building out the assets you use, in our example, the composite application. Automating the process steps that are manifested in those locations only is problematic (to say the least), if not for the fact that we haven’t quite solved the direct computer-to-brain interface, but for the fact that it is difficult to get an answer to a question we don’t yet know how to ask.

Well, I should amend that to say “we don’t yet know how to ask efficiently” because we do ask similar questions all the time, but in most cases without context, so the people being asked seldom can answer, at least not completely. If you ask someone how they do their job, or even a small portion of their job, you will likely get a blank stare for a while before they start in how they arrive at 8:45 AM and get a cup of coffee before they start looking at email…well you get the picture. Without context, people rarely can give an answer because they have far too many variables to sort through (what they think you’re asking, what they want you to be asking, why you are asking, who you are, what that blonde in accounting is doing Friday…) before they can even start answering. Now if you give someone a listing or scenario in which they can relate (when do you commission this type of composite application, based on this list of system activities and tools?) they can absolutely tell you what they do and don’t do from the list.

So context is key to efficiently gaining the right amount of information that is related to the subject chain of activities that you are endeavoring to model- but what happens when (and this actually applies to most cases) there is no ready context in which to frame the question? Well, it is then called observation, either self or external, where all process steps are documented and compiled. Obviously this is labor intensive and time inefficient, but unfortunately it is the reality because probably less than 50% of systems are documented or have recorded procedures for how they are defined, created, managed and operated…instead relying on institutional knowledge and processes passed from person to person.

The process steps in your people’s heads, the ones that you don’t know about—the ones that you can’t get from a system search of your repositories—are the ones that will take most of the time documenting, which is my point, (“what you think you’re doing is less than half of what you’re really doing”) and where a lot of your automation and orchestration efforts will be focused, at least initially.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t automate and orchestrate your environment—you absolutely should—just that you need to be aware that this is the reality and you need to plan for it and not get discouraged on your journey to the cloud.

By Rick Blaisdell; CTO ConnectEDU

Cloud computing has definitely revolutionised the IT industry and transformed the way in which IT Services are delivered. But finding the best way for an organization to perform common management tasks using remote services on the Internet is not that easy.

Cloud management incorporates the task of providing, managing, and monitoring applications into cloud infrastructures that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location or of the system that delivers the services. Monitoring cloud computing applications and activity into requires cloud management tools to ensure that resources are meeting SLA’s, working optimally and also not effecting systems and users that are leveraging these services.

With appropriate cloud management solutions, private users are now able to manage multiple operating systems on the same dedicated server or move the virtual servers to a shared server all from in the same cloud management solution.  Some cloud companies offer tools to manage this entire process, some will provide this solution using a combination of tools and managed services.

The three core components of cloud environment, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and finally Software as a Service (SaaS), now offer great solutions to manage cloud computing, but the management tools need to be flexible and scalable just as the cloud computing strategy of an organization should be. With the new paradigm of computing, cloud management has to:

• continue to make cloud easier to use;
• provide security policies for the cloud environment;
• allow safe cloud operations and ease migrations;
• provide for financial controls and tracking;
• audit and reporting for compliance.

Numerous tasks and tools are necessary for cloud management. A successful cloud management strategy includes performance monitoring in terms of response times, latency, uptime and so on, security and compliance auditing and management, initiating, supervising and management of disaster recovery.

So, why is it so important to implement a cloud management strategy into an organization? By having a cloud management strategy that fits into the cloud computing resources that a company uses, it offers a faster delivery of IT services to businesses, it reduces capital and operating costs, it charges backs automatically for resource usage and reporting and it allows IT departments to monitor their service level requirements.

This post originally appeared on http://www.rickscloud.com/cloud-management/

With the dynamic today moving towards private and public cloud offerings, the virtual appliance marketplace will most certainly continue to grow and mature.  There are many reasons why this makes a lot of sense.

Take a look at the time it takes to implement a physical network appliance.  Let’s use an application delivery controller – or load-balancer if you prefer that term.  How long does it take to implement a physical box into an existing environment?  Between ordering the unit(s) which usually come in pairs, shipping, and installing, it takes some time.  The cables need to be run, the box racked and stacked and then physically powered on and provisioned.  We have been doing this for years and this used to be standard operating procedure. Now that works well and good, kinda, in your own data center.  What about a public cloud offering?  Sorry, you don’t own that infrastructure. How about downloading a virtual appliance, spinning up a VM and you are off to the races. Again, this happens after provisioning the unit, but there is a lot less moving parts going that route.  Cloud or not – either way it still makes sense.  There will be less infrastructure requirements: power, rack space, cabling etc.

There are some other tangible benefits as well.  From a refresh perspective it just makes sense to upgrade a virtual appliance with a newer image – or adding memory –rather than a hardware-based forklift upgrade every five years (with potentially more downtime required).  The ability to shrink or grow a virtual appliance is one of the things that set it apart.  We don’t have to repurchase anything – other than license keys and annual service contracts.  Regrettably, those won’t go away.  But coupled all together with the flexibility to move your virtual appliances along with your data from one environment to another is key.  We will see more and more network-centric appliances become virtualized.  There will most assuredly always be some physical boxes that the network folks can get their hands on, but that will be for access purposes only.

The companies/manufacturers/network-engineers who don’t embrace this trend could quickly find themselves behind the eight ball. Analog phones anyone?