Lean IT Manager's Cloud Computing Blog

Truth in (round) numbers?

2012-02-15T01:43:00.000-08:00

Statistics matter, not only in business, but increasingly also in our social life – well, at least in our social media life. Some of the statistics I noticed this week were round numbers, like 1000. With 1000 representing both the number now showing under “followers” in Twitter and the revenue number for research (that’s excluding events, consulting and other items) we grew to in 2011.

And on my blog I saw – a bit to my surprise - it has been of full 10 weeks since my last post! That’s however more a case of bloggers block than writers block, as I did (co-)author the round number of 10 research notes since joining this summer. To catch up, I am including below a short overview of the topics these research notes covered (Gartner clients only) and that I likely will explore further in the future - both in research and using (social) media.

So what topics did these 10 research notes address? First to mention are the Predicts 2012. I participated in two this year, one called Predicts 2012: Cloud Computing Is Becoming a Reality in which we revisited an earlier prediction on cloud lock-in and explored the idea of a Maslov type hierarchy of needs for cloud computing customers. In this needs hierarchy fear of lock-in will be gaining ground as more basic needs like security are better understood.

In the second Predicts 2012: CSPs Need to Redefine Their Business Scope we focused on the expected penetration of Cloud Service Brokering among leading Communication (and increasingly Cloud) Service Providers or CSPs. Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) was also the topic of an Emerging Services Analysis note. As discussed during the 2011 symposium keynotes brokerage of individual solutions into more whole, aggregated and integrated solutions is increasingly becoming a necessity in the world full of cloud specialists typically offering one thing at enormous scale and lowest possible price points.

But the emerging cloud computing discipline also has distinct touch points with IT markets and disciplines that have been around for many years, like outsourcing (particularly in Europe) and with the IT operations management (ITOM) discipline. With regard to the first I contributed to work from our colleagues in the outsourcing & IT services team on a Market Map and Compass, aiming to give some guidance on when to choose which approach. Meanwhile in the ITOM area a note was published called Cloud Management Platforms: A Step toward ‘ERP for IT’. I did not participate in this one personally, but given my earlier writings like "Lean, and the art of Cloud Computing Management”, you will understand I welcome this approach whole-heartedly.

A foundational element and quantitative bearing point for all these types of research notes are the industry Forecasts and Forecast Analysis notes, such as the one for Enterprise Network Services (which includes hosting, colocation and cloud IaaS services) that our team publishes in a quarterly cadence. In these we expanded the forecast horizon to 2016, which somehow feels a lot less round that the previous horizon of 2015.

A less broadly known but very interesting part of our research are the Marketing Essentials notes aimed at technology and service providers. I worked on ”Four Strategic Options for CSPs to Explore Cloud Computing Opportunities which came out shortly after this Competitive Landscape on the approaches of two European CSPs (Telecom Italia and Orange Business Services) and the earlier mentioned Emerging Technology Analysis regarding the use of self-service portals and APIs in cloud computing. APIs are becoming an increasingly important part of cloud computing and my latest research on Market Trends explores further how dynamic allocation of network capacity through use of an API (enabled by emerging software defined networking standards such as Openflow) could become the third foundational element of infrastructure as a service (next to compute and storage as a service). In this note we explore how enterprises may want to command a business class of networking services - similar to how enterprises (in the good old days) commanded a business class of airline services – but all using the same underlying infrastructure as consumer offerings.

So what’s next?
First of all lots of the day to day analyst activities I described in my (talking of round numbers) cloud in a hundred days post and more recently by my colleague Lydia Leong in a post called Five reasons you should work here. First upcoming item on the publication calendar in an overview of the research agenda our team will be writing against in 2012 and of course the annual 2012 cool vendor reports for which the nominations now are all in.

With regard to the momentum of cloud computing, I guess it is fair to say that even when one might believe we had seen the top of the hype(cycle), the amount of buzz and excitement around cloud computing continues to grow. In some cases resembling the mad rush of the days of Open Systems (where boards with no particular insight or interest in technology would a mandate a move to "open systems" (what ever that meant), sometimes even despite what business cases and common sense would suggest). And if we wanted, we could fill every week here by attending briefings from provider- and vendor-organizations on their new cloud computing plans and offerings.

But as with any new technology the proof of the pudding lies not in cooking it (or even in writing about it), it lies in eating it. And that is the next step. Moving from specific use cases (such as test-dev, customer facing web applications and high performance computing) to the generic - deploying, more and more parts of enterprise’s vast application portfolio’s using cloud based datacenter services. It’s this crossing of the chasm that has consistently proven to be the most difficult step for both vendors and technologies to take. It’s the numbers (round or not) that will eventually be the judge of how successful the transition will be.
PS. Almost all of the above notes were written in cooperation with other Gartner analysts, for a who's who see the detailed listing of lead- and co-authors by document here.

The rise of IT-industrialization

2011-11-23T02:57:00.001-08:00

A few days ago I attended the analyst summit of one of Europe’s large service providers and the theme of industrialization rang through very clearly in many of the presentation and interview sessions. Those of you who followed my earlier writings know that applying the lessons of modern manufacturing to today’s IT, is a topic near to my heart. Back in 2004, long before joining Gartner, I wrote an article on IT-dustrialization in CFO magazine , followed by many blogs, later bundled in “Lean and the art of cloud computing management”. At Gartner IT services industrialization is covered in my area under the topic of IUS (Infrastructure Utility Services) and I am currently working with two of my European colleagues - who have been covering IUS for several years - on a market map and compass for this IT industry area.

But, as mentioned earlier publishing in many cases precedes (best) practices, so it was refreshing to see how the ideas of industrialization were very much present during the mentioned analyst day. It would go too far (also given our blog policy) to list the whole story here, but let’s look at some of the more interesting bits and sound bites.

In a very open welcome talk, the CEO acknowledged that maintaining quality is one of the hardest things when moving to a more industrialized production method. To me this sounded a lot like the problems that the Japanese car industry faced when first importing into Europe. The cost of their cars was significantly lower, but they came with a quality level to match. Now we all know that in those years Dr. W. Edwards Deming made his first visits to Japan, introducing statistical analysis and simple tools to apply quality control at all stages, and the rest is history, with Japanese quality for many years matching or even exceeding global quality (Later the Deming circle formed an important foundation of other best practice movements in both manufacturing and IT).

The several ten thousand strong production department of this provider went through a similar transition. All staff was immersed in (on-line, multi-media and in person) training programs and processes were defined and orchestrated to an extent comparable with the ballet-like orchestration you see in modern factories. Comparing itself with internal and external benchmarks was made a way of life and statistical measurement tools were applied widely. Inspiration for much of this came from conversations the head of production of this provider had with his customers: large manufacturing organizations employing several hundred thousands of factory workers with a high focus on product and process quality. (Note: Don’t mistake the term factory worker we use here for the traditional blue collar versus white collar division of labor. Today’s factory workers are often higher educated, better trained and in many cases even better paid than most clerical white collar jobs, while the production activities they are responsible for are more automated and supported by more robot technology than most regular office - or IT - work).

But in IT, even more than in manufacturing, changes are a major enemy of quality. And with the type industrialized scale we are talking about here that means that thousands or even tens of thousands of change requests are to be applied each night or weekend. In manufacturing it is nowadays best practice that any factory worker can stop the production line when he/she feels quality is somehow at risk. But - as availability is one of our primary definitions of quality - stopping the line, a.k.a an outage, is exactly what we don’t want to do in IT . So in this case a best practice from the airline industry was applied. Any change has to be checked by 4 eyes before being implemented into production. In other words, it has to be reviewed by at least two people, call it the pilot and the co-pilot. An intermediate step that at first may seem expensive - just like most people in the eighties felt it was crazy to have any worker be able to stop a multi-million dollar assembly line - but that in the end reduces overall cost. Also because doing things right the first time is - over time - always cheaper than incurring rework, penalties and other cost of non-quality.

But industrialization goes further, also for the customer who is at the receiving end of these industrialized services. In this case the CIO of one of the global customers of this provider gave his insigtfull perspectives on the changes the industry is going through. Again a couple of soundbites.

This CIO is driving his organization toward obtaining “anything as a service”, which eventually – as he put it - enables CIO’s to separate the I from the T (allows focus on the Information, not the Technology). For providers this means moving from delivering traditional system integration projects, to standardized products that are delivered as a service. This change does not only impact how it is delivered, but also how it is procured. Again a car analogy. When this CIO was to order a new car, he did not go shopping around; he did not even test drive his final choice. As he had a history of good experiences with this manufacturer, a rough idea of the type of model he wanted (eg. 4 door sedan, no MPV, no SUV), and a number of minimum requirements (think of automatic, diesel, navigation), he basically picked the car unseen, as he knew it would be “good enough” for his requirements. I would classify this as a mature buyer in a mature market. Where the immature buyer will shop around, go on test drives in many makes and models (including in two door models he is not even allowed to order as a company car) and from manufacturers he may have never heard of, the mature buyer knows what he wants and rather spends his valuable time on stuff that really matters (in business terms: on activities that differentiate the company).

At this stage the market has not many mature buyers yet (even for cars, I know because I just selected mine and that took me more than a couple of calls). But mature buying also requires a mature market. In the car industry, buyers know that most of the major brands now deliver high quality and reliability. While the brands that did not reach that trusted status yet, offer warranty periods that even Charles Deming could only have dreamed off. It is this kind of trusted quality level the industry will need to reach.
As for cost, also there the ambitions and expectations are high. As Adam Smith showed in his wealth of nations, a traditional craftsman might manufacture one pin a day. A pin factory, however, created 48,000 pins a day using ten men. In the light of what Taylorism and scientific management did in manufacturing, the voiced ambition of reducing IT cost by 90% seems a lot more feasible. Especially when realizing that in some of today’s on-line "factories" (i.e. consumer web shops) the cost of an IT item already might be 1/10 of the TCO based cost that IT departments charge in their internal catalogs of IT services (and when procuring things as a service there is no "ownership", so also no Total Cost of "Ownership", although there may be other governance related cost).

I’ll finish off with a last (car) anecdote from this CIO: When Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler originally estimated the size of the overall addressable car market, they came to about 1 million cars (which is about as accurate as the max of 5 computers that Thomas Watson once arrived at). But more interesting than the overall number is the way they arrived at it. As there were no available statistics on cars, they estimated the number of households that would be wealthy enough to afford a chauffeur. We now know that overwhelming majority of cars are bought by users who drive these cars themselves. When extending this to IT, the idea would be that future CIO’s would be like today’s chauffeurs, the people that drive IT in a very small set of special cases, while most of IT would be “bought and driven“ by users. An interesting idea, let’s hope IT-industrialization can drive the required maturing of the supply side fast enough to be ready for this scenario.

Any comments/questions send me a mail at gregor.petri at gartner.com.

The art of listening

2011-11-13T14:07:00.001-08:00

One of the first tips I got when entering the workforce was "You have two ears and only one mouth for a reason!", meaning that in conversations with customers you should spend twice as much time listening as you do talking. Point was to avoid becoming like a radio with only one button: "Send".

Over the years I learned that above also applies to "new media" such as email, blogging, tweeting and podcasting. You need to use the receive button at least twice as much as the send button. Although less obvious, I am trying to maintain this ratio also as an analyst. Maybe not in every single conversation - our type of analyst inquiries are not like psycho-analysts calls where the analyst just keeps asking the patient repeatedly "and how do you feel about this?" - but overall it still makes sense to allocate substantially more time to input (also from colleagues, peers and even competitors) than to output.

With modern management techniques increasingly focused on managing a workforce that is increasingly spread out and that maintains work hours outside the traditional nine to five, it may – across many industries - feel increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain this balance of input versus output (as only the latter seems to gets measured and formally acknowledged nowadays).

Luckily there is modern technology - like podcasts and RSS feed readers - to help streamline at least parts of the input process. Funny thing is that some of this technology is not that new at all. My first encounter with Gartner's "podcast avant la lettre" was with the "Talking Technology" series that back then came on “compact cassettes” (for young readers that may never have seen a cassette - not even in your "my first Sony" - there is now an iPhone app that emulates the experience). This "Talking Technologies" series still exists (feed here, subscription required), in fact our High Tech and Technology Providers team just participated in the November edition with a segment on the "4G, the Next frontier for Cellular Networks" special report that describes why 4G matters and what impact it will have on both providers and consumer (Personally I just hope we will use 4G at least as much to receive as to broadcast).

Just like the classic "Talking Technologies" cassette tapes and the subsequent CDs, these podcasts require a subscription. Fairly recently we added to this a series of almost daily Gartner webinars, which are open to all interested parties after a short registration process. You can register for these webinars here, but to make it even more convenient you can also subscribe to a feed with the upcoming webinars or to a feed with all replays. This Tuesday (November 15th) I will be doing my first contribution to this series. In this webinar, called "The Crowded Cloud", I will talk about how many different industry players, including Communication Service Providers, are trying to become the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) of choice for their enterprise customers. Would love to welcome you there.

As you gathered by now the above is part of the 1/3th of my activities focused on output/sending, but I look forward to balancing that out soon with more personal and more two way communications. Meanwhile please feel free to comment below.

Cloud in one hundred days (and nights)

2011-11-11T23:14:00.001-08:00

This week the Gartner Symposium visited an unexpectedly sunny Barcelona. This year’s theme for the Gartner Symposium is "Re-imagine IT" and how the forces of Cloud, Social, Information (incl. big data) and Mobile are forming a nexus (Websters: a connected group or series) of change, see the bottom of this post for a link to the on-line replays. While here I ran into a former colleague who reminded me that this is also around day 100 in my new role as analyst. And although I am all too aware that being an analysts is not even remotely like running a country, this seems as good a point in time as any to have short look back and forward.
Apart from the usual getting acquainted with some new and some familiar (not to say classic) systems, here are some of the things that kept me busy:

A core activity is off course writing research, in October an Emerging Technology Analysis on How Self-Service Portals for Cloud Infrastructure Services Impact the Customer Experience published, followed by a European focused Competitive Landscape on Two CSP Approaches to Cloud Computing in November.
Still in the process of peer reviews, fact reviews, editing etc. are a co-authored piece on Cloud Service Brokerage and a Marketing Essentials document describing four strategic options for Cloud Service Providers. Upcoming are also the annual Gartner Predicts for 2012, for which I got to submit a new SPA (Strategic Planning Assumption) and had a look back at an earlier one.
But analysts also get out on occasion, for example to host a forum during the press day of a cloud datacenter opening at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport (some coverage here). Or to participate in a cloud brainstorm with the lead architects and national CTO’s of a large European communication services provider. And on the end user side: to facilitate a global cloud strategy workshop for a leading European life sciences organization and to moderate a European vendor day for an international freedom and security alliance.
In addition there are the inquiries. I stopped counting at some point, but spoke with numerous banks, governments, manufacturers and many service providers in all shapes and forms (from gaming agencies to health care providers) and from all parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe and the America’s about their cloud computing strategies. Also met in person with several members of our EXP program and had briefings with and/or visited several cloud and communication service providers (CSPs).
These cloud service providers included traditional (and not so traditional) hardware providers, software companies, hosters, co-locators and a surprisingly large number of cloud providers form other continents that are in the process of setting up European facilities in Amsterdam. Also managed to squeeze in a visit to the European edition of VMworld and spoke with their executives about the (European) market.
Given the fast growing number of cloud providers in Europe we also set up a continuous survey (see last month’s blog), so if you are providing (or planning to provide) cloud services in Europe it makes sense to have a look, also if you’re interested in the process of setting up a vendor briefing around your offering.
On the internal research front started to participate in the communities covering IaaS, PaaS, IUS (Infrastructure Utility Service) and ITOM (IT Operations Management incl. private cloud). Other internal activities included onboarding training, getting a phone, ordering a car and last week I was asked to become the second or backup agenda manager in our team (Our agenda management is not about scheduling or calendars, but about setting and managing the agenda storyline of key trends and key issues that we write to).
Looking forward: I am hosting a customer roundtable at symposium about “How private or public should your ideal infrastructure cloud be?” and next Tuesday (15 Nov) I am presenting a Gartner Tech Tuesday webinar called “The Crowded Cloud – Opportunities for CSPs” (open for viewing after registering here). Going forward I plan to find more time for blogging again and for writing more in depth research on the topics covered in this blog.

Meanwhile you may want watch highlights from this year’s Symposium, like in other years these are open for general viewing (after a short free registration process) at www.gartnereventsondemand.com. In addition to the Gartner keynotes, the special guest keynote interviews and other highlights, you can also watch sessions from the symposium sponsors there, some even adapted their session –like Google – to the keynote from earlier on the day.
Apart from the earlier mentioned nexus, my personal favorite sound bites from the opening keynote were: Spending on cloud currently is already far in the tens of Billions but still only a small percentage (around 3%) of total enterprise IT spend and growing much more rapidly than traditional spend. And: Cloud will do for IT what supply chain models did for manufacturing. Both topics I hope to touch upon further in upcoming research, talks, presentations and blogs.

Using a cloud service to … collect information on European cloud infrastructure services

2011-11-02T03:02:00.000-07:00

The public cloud infrastructure as a service market is developing quickly, also in Europe. Over the past months we saw the number of international IaaS providers setting up shop in Europe increase, while also several European based providers launched new or upgraded offerings.

To keep a finger on the pulse of developments we started, as part of the European Cloud IaaS coverage at Gartner, surveying pan-European providers of Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service . We are now extending the invite to participate in that survey more widely (like we recently did for the CIO survey).

Especially in Europe we see cloud IaaS services being offered as an extension to existing services, this survey focuses therefore on how IaaS services fit with the overall service portfolios of providers, so it also includes short questions on adjacent offerings in areas such as PaaS, SaaS, Managed Desktops & VDI, DC Outsourcing, Infrastructure Utility Services, Managed Hosting, Co-location and IT Professional & Brokerage Services.

If you are providing IaaS services in at least two European regions, then please take some time to fill out this survey. The data received will be used to gauge the overall state of the pan-European Public Cloud IaaS landscape, not to describe individual providers (for these we use other information such as the regular vendor briefing process, see here how to apply for such briefings).

You can take the survey from the Gartner Blog Network (GBN) page here

If you have any questions please send a short email to gregor.petri at gartner.com

Of these 10 most hated jobs, how many did you have?

2011-09-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week Yahoo Finance ran an article on the 10 most hated jobs (based on a survey asking hundreds of thousands of employees at a major career site).

What amazed me most - apart from the large number of IT jobs, including the top one, making the list – was that I personally was employed in no less than five of these . Now you may think: “What a miserable career that must have been!”, but to be honest, it never felt like that. Sure I can relate to some of dissatisfiers that people listed, such as a lack of direction from upper management (actually described for one of these jobs - guess which one - as “employers are unable to communicate coherently, and lack an understanding of the technology”). But overall I had good fun doing most of my five.

In fact, some of my other jobs – although fun at the time - would have been more logical to make the list. As a student I was a part-time restaurant worker (even though my parents insisted the only job I was doing part-time was studying) and when that restaurant burned down I spend 3 months rebuilding it as a construction worker (hard hat and all). Both of which did not make the list.

Now this survey is not about IT and does not even mention cloud computing, so why discuss it here?
The reason is that with cloud computing lots of job roles will be changing and there is an opportunity for all of us to think about which aspects of our current roles we like best (and which we hate most). So we have these clear in our mind while venturing into this new world.

On changes at the macro and organizational level –beyond cloud - Mark McDonald just published a series around "Thinking Small" (It is time for IT to ‘THINK small’, Thinking Small — Creating value rather than controlling costs , Thinking Small — Thinking value) and a piece called Re-Imagine IT, Lead from the Front (a preview on the CIO experience at Orlando Symposium).

But also at the micro level we can do our share in re-imagining our job roles. Cloud computing - with its “as a service” delivery mechanism – may add some degrees of freedom to what can be imagined. Not that it will eliminate some of the less loved aspects of our jobs by having for example: EaaS for doing our Expenses as a Service, RaaS for doing our weekly Reporting as a Service and MaaS for attending mandatory Meetings as a Service (although the idea sounds pretty cool). But cloud may enable us - also as individuals -to focus on what we are best at and on where we add the most value (which often seems to equate to having the most fun – or at least to getting the most recognition).

Scale (and particularly large scale) is certainly an important aspect of cloud computing, but let’s hope for (and work hard on) keeping our jobs at a human scale. Just like the way we apply our laptops and tablets is not impacted by having 1 million or 1 trillion transistors inside, the scale of the cloud should not impact how closely we work with people. In fact, the efficiencies of scale that cloud computing brings, may allow us to be even more granular and differentiated (a.k.a. customer focused) at the local level.

Personally I recently did my evaluation and took the opportunity to make a switch (and yes, am having fun!). Meanwhile I am observing my kids’ early (part-time) exploits into working live. First conclusion they reached is that restaurant work definitely beats a paper route (better hours) and restocking super-market shelves (more degrees of freedom). I am still working on getting them enthusiastic for any jobs involving IT (or clouds, for that matter). Not sure this top 10 will help.

Travelling at the speed of cloud in Europe

2011-08-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

First post from my new base blogs.gartner.com. When looking at public cloud infrastructure as a service it is fair to say that, with some notable exceptions, most off the larger scale activities, initiatives and even the majority of excitement and buzz around this phenomena so far originated outside of Europe. Understandable, as both the largest and most visible users of public IaaS – think of organizations such as Facebook, Twitter and Netflix – and the most well known providers of Iaas started their cloud activities on the other site of the Atlantic. Even when looking at government activities it is the US government that seems to be most enthusiastic, both in intend and action, about cloud computing.

Over the last year there are however some encouraging signs that public cloud IaaS is also gaining interest in Europe, both among users, providers, government and the press. Users are asking more questions and starting pilots and projects; Local providers are bringing their first or even second generation offerings to market; Governments are investigating opportunities and the EU even stated it wants Europe to be not only “Cloud-Friendly” but “Cloud-Active”. And in typical European tradition we see market players joining forces in new European associations or adding new chapters to their (many) existing vehicles of national and international collaboration.

A telling sign of cloud IaaS becoming more mainstream in Europe was the press picking up on the recent power outage in Dublin, headlining with how it impacted the European services of cloud IaaS providers. Now this power outage – for which the jury is still out on whether it was caused by lightning or something else – did off course not only impact cloud providers. Also several more traditional datacenters and datacenters services struggled, but the fact the press picked the cloud angle as headlining topic was telling.

So it’s clear there is a lot going on around public cloud IaaS in Europe: places to see, things to do and stuff to write about. And that is exactly what I plan to do from here. After the summer vacation I have started as a Research Director at Gartner covering this area. My colleague Lydia Leong just published a short piece detailing the Gartner teams, people and roles covering public cloud IaaS on her blog. At Gartner all IT-related analysts’ blog posts are first published on the Gartner Blog Network (GBN) at blogs.gartner.com before posting to existing or personal blog pages. If you’re interested in what we write and not write about on these blogs have a look at the Gartner Blog Network Q&A. Although tempted I will not use this post to do a further introduction of myself – with all of today’s social media my history should be an open book anyhow – plus I now have a new profile page here on gartner.com. In a next post I will cover some of the topics we are currently looking at in Europe and ways to brief us on your activities in those areas if you are a provider.

I do want to end with a disclaimer. Although “European cloud” has a nice ring to it, reality is that the idea of a European Cloud is just as “virtual” a concept as European citizen, European market and European tax. If you speak to someone from Europe and you ask where they are from, they will say Germany or Italy or France or the UK. Very few will say “I am from Europe” (unless they expect you to have absolutely no idea where their home country is located). Same for the European market. Although we have free traffic of (most) goods and services, companies have to fight for each individual market and European market share is a construct of adding up shares in individual country markets. Even a European Tax we have (so far) managed to avoid. And despite many consumers using global solutions like Twitter and Facebook all the time, I don’t expect the European cloud IaaS market to be extremely uniform for the foreseeable future. Not just because some regulations still prevent this, but also because local cultures, habits and even things like labor relations, are vastly different across different parts of Europe. This makes Europe such an interesting place to be, also when looking at this area of cloud computing.

Did the global summer of cloud start in NYC?

2011-06-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

Having just returned a scorching hot New York (host of CloudExpo East 2011) to a definitely cooler Europe, it makes sense to see whether these differences in temperature also apply to the cloud market.

This 8^th Expo was the third cloud expo I was invited to speak at and it definitely was the biggest so far. If CloudExpo West in November signaled the entry of the large mainstream vendors like Oracle, Dell and Microsoft - not to mention several CA divisions - as major sponsors, then this edition was signified by the larger turn out of end user organizations and even some coverage on mainstream news channel such as CNN. A quick audience poll on the first day revealed that about 90% of the audience is in the orientation phase, getting ready to do some serious spending (you could almost hear the vendors sigh of relieve as it is starting to look their investments will indeed pay off).

Although many of the sessions were vendors explaining their approaches and offerings, there were some notable exceptions featuring real implementations, like the case study session where hamburgers (in fact plastic burger replica’s holding gift certificates) were passed out to the audience. The “how to get from here to there session by Andi Mann, where he showed two alternative paths to the cloud (an evolutionary and a revolutionary one) was also well received. In fact his subsequent book signing session generated a queue even longer than the one at the lunch buffet.

Looking at the event from a European angle it was refreshing to see several European solutions featured in the expo. I saw a next generation NAS solution from Belgium – addressing MSP’s interested in offering an S3 equivalent without requiring the traditional high NAS upfront investments; a solution from France to automatically build the innard’s of VM’s based on specific OS and middleware requirements. And a PaaS solution - originally from Holland - built in the KISS (Keep it Stupidly Simple) tradition of the great 4GLs, but with the scalability and usability that the cloud can bring to application development.

A special mention goes to the Holland Pavilion–located directly opposite the CA stand - featuring no less than 8 additional Dutch companies and start-up’s on their way to make it big. Now this is not the first time the Dutch picked New York as a good spot to start the move into America (remember New Amsterdam?), but it is refreshing to see a government investing to stimulate economic activities around cloud computing (They did not yet spend the US$ 20B the U.S. government is vowing to put into cloud computing this year, but it’s a start). The other interesting angle of the mission was to position Amsterdam (in this case old Amsterdam) as digital gateway to Europe. With broadband in almost every home and international bandwidth that matches the proverbial throughput and transit capacity of the Rotterdam harbor this seems a logical proposition.

In my session on Day two I covered several aspects of vendor Lock-In and more importantly, possible approaches to prevent it. We discussed standards, of which most are still too early to tell or too close to call, although the open datacenter alliance - as if on cue - published their first use case proposals on the same day. I also explored the benefits of a software based fabric approach for portability across (hybrid) clouds and revisited the earlier discussed 3D cloud strategy model.

Overall the event showed that cloud is becoming red hot, almost as hot as the pavement outside the Javits convention center (a condition many an attendee sought refuge from at one of the rooftop reception's thrown by the various sponsors). With all this momentum we are likely to see a next edition with even more cloud use cases and success stories, also from Europe. This could be done by every provider session including a real-live implementation story or a separate track dedicated to sharing the experiences of cloud (end-) users. Maybe a bit like our recent cloud leaders initiative, which features online stories from cloud luminaries such as PGI and DonorsChoose and cloud accelerators like LayeredTech, ScaleMatrix and DNS Europe (now also available as free Cloud Leaders iPad app).

Don’t let the cloud creep up on you! (also not at Cloud Expo NYC next week)

2011-06-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

In IT we like to use fancy words like architecture, governance and strategy, but is our approach to IT innovations indeed as structured and planned as these terms imply or is IT in many cases just like real life: IT is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans? And if yes, does that also apply to cloud computing?

When I recently published my “to cloud or to compute” column, fellow columnist and IT service management expert Alee Roos submitted the following “confession”(at ITSM portal):

“… I'll make an embarrassing confession. I had not been much interested in the cloud-thing but finally went to listen to a presentation on cloud and cloud security. It was only then I realized that I had already put most of my business in the cloud without thinking much about it. The point was that I had bought services like web-site, Outlook Exchange, remote backups and a eSurveys, not cloud. I bought them because they solved some immediate business need at a very reasonable price.”

But Alee is not alone; I believe many organizations are in the same predicament and not only for SaaS solutions. When speaking to the European CTO of one of the largest IaaS providers (now part of a large Telco) he explained how many of their customers tend to move to the cloud. At some point a customer may have a need for temporary test or development capacity. Because it is a one-off need and not as strategic as production workloads, they “give it a try”. Often that first try is successful and they are surprised it was that easy. So a few weeks later – when a new need arises - they take the same route again. Often without a lot of due diligence, because by now this is an already used solution from an already accepted vendor. And before they know it they have several critical and/or production systems running in a cloud.

Now this is not the first time this is happening in IT. Many of us were taken by surprise by departmental servers (mini's), then we didn't notice PCs become important and costly (remember one of the first TCO surveys, the one that rocked our world and the one that caused us to run around trying to “implement” ITIL so we could make them as reliable, controlled and efficient as our mainframes had always been?). Next we managed to underestimate that at some point everyone - not just a few exceptions in higher management - needed mobile phones. And just recently some companies discovered that they had spreadsheets running core business logic that had become so large and so complex that to continue running them, they had to buy dedicated servers (yes these Excel-only servers now exist). I can’t imagine that any IT professional would plan for these things to work out like this. And finally how about the “structured and strategic way” we are introducing tablets into the organization? Yes, as mentioned, IT is what happens while you're busy making other plans. And now we risk letting the cloud creep up on us.

With SaaS most people have started to realize this, in fact our former CIO, David Hansen , now general manager of CA Technologies Enterprise Solutions and Cloud Management Business, explained to fellow CIOs at Evanta’s annual CIO Executive Summit how he – to get a feeling for what was being used sorted through the many authentication requests from inside the company to outside services. It was amazing to hear what employees were using, even back then, when cloud was not yet a household name and in a time when everything that was not approved by default was verboten (remember the days you had to leave the office to access Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc.?).

And now as an industry, are we at risk for similar experiences with IaaS, too? Guess it's a case of l’histoire se répète (but a Dutch proverb involving a Donkey also comes to mind).

Of course you could ask: how bad is it if this happens? If users are happy, prices are reasonable and service is good. Why should we care? Well –beside the obvious one: risk management – avoiding vendor lock-in seems to be a pretty good reason. Just be sure it doesn’t creep up on you while you’re busy making other big plans.

By the way, I will be speaking more about this topic in my session at Cloud Expo on Tuesday afternoon at the Javits Center in New York: "Cloud Users of the World, Unite!, How to Remedy Cloud Lock-in.”

To cloud or to compute, that’s the question

2011-05-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

The ultimate dream of any marketer is to have its brand become a verb. “Let me quickly Xerox that”, “I Fedexed it to you yesterday”, “I just Googled it”. In cloud computing I do not see that happening any time soon. At least I haven’t heard anyone say they Amazoned their intranet or forced their custom apps yet. But it is also unlikely we will be calling it cloud computing forever.

Cloud computing is not the first new kind of computing. Previously we saw “interactive computing” - indicating that it was no longer processed in an overnight batch – and “client/server computing” –indicating it ran with a graphical user interface and not on a boring green screen terminal. But pretty soon the new way became the norm and we resorted back to simply calling it “computing”.

For cloud computing there are basically two options, we will either call it computing again – meaning it is perceived as a slightly improved version of the same old, slow and expensive service they used to get from the EDP or IT department. Or users may start to use a new name: “Since we cloud our email, the cost has gone down considerably”, “Our new CIO agreed with the CEO to cloud as much as possible, and the results have been amazing”.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating to try and repeat the oldest trick in the IT book of putting a new name or label on old ideas. Like when we started calling everything e-something and we renamed our companies to Something.DOT.com. Some of that is already going on around as cloud washing (companies renaming their existing offerings to be perceived as cloud solutions, even if they have little to do with cloud).

Now it may take some time to get used to clouding as a verb - as I am sure it took some time to get used to texting as a verb. And what does not help is that - till now - the only things people clouded were issues.

For people that grew up in IT this idea of calling it cloud may sound silly. Why on earth would we use a new name for something that basically is computingas we invented it (or at least as we intended it). But it won’t be the IT people deciding what to call it; it will be the next generation of users. The same generation that – at least in Holland – massively adopted the verb computering. “What did you do last night?” “Oh not much, got pizza, watched a movie and computered a bit”. It’s the generation that came up with verbs like texting, computering and gaming. All not very results oriented activities, but that’s not the point.

The point is that if it feels like traditional computing – where you depended on an IT department to get service and decided what you were allowed to do - they will likely simply call it computing again. If it feels completely different, with more freedom, more possibilities and more speed and agility, it deserves to become a verb.

PS Anticipating the popularity of “to cloud” a Dutch vocabulary site is already showing the full conjugation here.

In cloud standards, it's all about survival of the fittest

2011-05-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Kuppinger Cole European Identity Conference 2011 (EIC), which was held in Munich earlier this month, truly represented a ‘Who's Who' of cloud initiatives and standards. Representatives from many influential, established and aspiring standards and industry bodies were on hand to showcase progress of the security initiatives currently in the works.

The number of initiatives is overwhelming. For years the joke was that any time two Dutch meet, they are likely to start an association or co-operative initiative, but apparently that is also true for security and cloud experts. I won't bore you with all the clever acronyms (it's a true alphabet soup), but I do want to highlight the more interesting overall findings.

In one of the first forum sessions - called "In Cloud We Trust" - Dr. Laurent Liscia of OASIS gave an interesting perspective on these competing standards. He compared the process of establishing an accepted standard to a Petri dish (no relation). Multiple cultures in a nutritious environment all trying to do a land grab. A process that is not orchestrated, it's ‘eat or be eaten' and it is hard to predict the outcome because the process takes time. No amount of pressure or additional heat can accelerate it and watching a Petri Dish real-time is about as useful and as interesting as watching grass grow. Meaning, it's better to wait for history to run its course.

Having said that, there one initiative from this forum - which had participants from ENISA, The World Economic Forum, TRUSTe and CA Technologies - that I do want to highlight, even though the implementation is still in an incubation phase.

Earlier this year the World Economic Forum IT partnership - in collaboration with Accenture and with input from a steering group including representation from CA Technologies - published "Advancing cloud computing: what to do now?" with eight recommended action areas.

The reason I mention this particular initiative is because of the enormous influence this organization has on governments. As associations all over the world realize that legislation and government stimulus may determine the success of their regional cloud industry - an industry that is likely to be the next economic engine of prosperity - they are rapidly publishing recommendations on what they feel their local governments should do to facilitate the success of cloud computing. So as not to be drowned out in the aforementioned alphabet soup of initiatives, it makes sense to anchor such local recommendations against the global guidance of the World Economic Forum.

The recommendations are not earth shattering, but if governments and the cloud ecosystem participants could streamline their efforts around these eight, it would further these efforts in a useful and pragmatic way. For more info read the (very readable) full report, but in a nutshell the recommendations are:

Explore and facilitate the realization of the benefits of cloud
Advance understanding and management of cloud related risks
Promote service transparency
Clarify and enhance accountability across all relevant parties
Ensure data portability
Facilitate interoperability
Accelerate adaptation and harmonization of regulatory frameworks
Provide sufficient network connectivity to cloud services

P.S. During the event I participated as a forum member in "Cloud Standardization: From Open Systems to Closed Clouds?," and "Identity and Access in the Cloud." I will be speaking more about the topic of lock-in at the upcoming International Cloud Expo in New York (June 6-9), and I will cover cloud computing and risk during the Middle East Financial Technology Conference (MEFTEC) in Abu Dhabi (May 30-31).

April 21, the day the cloud was out!

2011-04-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

Some blogs percolate for a while, waiting for a good day to be put to paper. For this one - about the cost of reliable cloud - that day was last Thursday, the day a network mishap caused an outage at Amazon Web Services taking down more than 100 customers, many of which cloud providers themselves, in its aftermath, while at the same time a similar mishap at Sony PlayStation´s network stopped about 70 million gamers from connecting.

A lot has been written about the outage, so I won't repeat that here (if you want to catch up suggest you read: TechCrunch for the PlayStation story, GigaOM for an overview of the Amazon issue, eWeek for some interesting analysis and the DotCloud blog for a very readable explanation of day to day use of a public cloud service like Amazon).
Instead, let's focus on the big picture of the cost of reliable cloud, comparing it - again - with the move from mainframe to distributed computing. History tends to repeat itself, especially in IT where generations of technology tend to be heavily siloed, and staffed with different generations of people who often do not even sit at the same table in the canteen.

Somewhere during the 1980s, IT pros started to realize they could get the same processing power for significantly less money, when selecting distributed servers - till that time used mainly for scientific work - instead of traditional mainframes. Soon after, companies began porting existing applications to the new platforms, focusing initially on applications that were more compute than I/O or data intensive (sounds familiar?). And indeed, initially the new departmental platform, not requiring all the resource intensive water cooling, air-conditioning or a heightened floor did seem a lot more cost effective. But, it didn't take long after initial proofs-of-concept to find that for some applications we needed more processors or to set up clusters, or uninterruptable power supplies and other redundant features. On the storage front, we started to use the same - not so cheap - storage solutions as we did on the mainframe. And shortly thereafter, the distributed boxes started to look and cost about the same as the systems they were replacing. Let's not forget that at the same time, smart mainframe developers - pushed by the competition from distributed systems - found ways to abandon water cooling, leverage off the shelf standard components like NICs and RISC processors and even re-examined their licensing cost for specific (Linux) workloads.

What does this all have to do with cloud computing? Likewise, we see that running a certain "compute intensive" workload can be done much faster and cheaper in the new environment. But when replacing these one-off batch jobs with services that have higher availability and reliability needs, the picture changes. We need to have redundant copies and failover machines in the data center, and in many cases a backup data center in another part of the country, preferably located on an alternate power grid and connected to multiple network backbone providers. All of a sudden it sounds a lot like the typical set-up a bank would have - and likely with a similar cost profile. So far cloud seems to offer cost benefits, but will this cost advantage still exist if we need to replicate our whole cloud setup at a second vendor - worst case scenario, doubling the cost. Now cloud has many other advantages beyond cost (elasticity, scalability, ubiquitous access, pay per use, etc.), so many specific use cases are still ideally suited for the cloud, but if a certain application has no need for these, then it may be worth (re-)considering the business case for a move to the cloud.

Regarding redundancy, the cloud business case actually has two opposing vectors. On one hand, there is the fact that as a user you have less control (you can't fly there and ‘kick' the server) leads to requiring a secondary backup installation. On the other hand, the cloud - with its pay-as- you-go model - offers much more efficient ways to arrange for a backup configuration for running your applications, than finding your own second location and filling it with shiny new kit.

At the same time you have to take into account the likelihood of the cloud having capacity available at the moment you need it. If your own data center fails, I am sure you could find another cloud provider with some capacity. But in this case, where one of the largest (cloud) data centers in North America had issues, all customers, in principle, could be looking to move their workloads elsewhere, it is not certain that enough excess capacity would be available at alternate providers.

In this specific case there seemed to have been technical issues inside Amazon and Sony's data centers that caused a series of events impacting the services running within, but what if there had been a major physical problem, such as a large fire or accident? With more mission critical applications moving to the cloud, companies need to make contingency planning a top priority.

As a result of last week's incidents, enterprises should take stock to assess what services are truly vital to their customers and/or to their own continuity. Organizations (and the world) seem to be more resilient than you might expect. In the Netherlands we saw Telcos ceasing mobile service in a large part of the country for periods of up to half a day, with ISPs unable to offer Internet services for as long as a week in certain regions. And yet, these companies did not go under. Each industry, government and organization will have to assess its own priorities and success metrics/criteria and standards. As I mentioned in a past blog post, aiming to continue your on-demand video services after a mayor flood, hurricane or nuclear disaster may be over-shooting what is necessary under those circumstances - survival will be the only concern in a case like that.

Looking at the reactions in the market so far, the responses of the vendors impacted by the Amazon mishap seem to be a lot more benign that the reactions of impacted PlayStation gamers. Maybe because these vendors feel they have a good thing going and the last thing they won't to do is kill it by too much honesty. What is refreshing is that not too many vendors crawled out of the woodwork saying "private cloud, private cloud, private cloud" -- not even my colleagues who recently published a book on the topic. Good! Nobody loves "I told you so" types and there's no point in kicking your opponent when he is down. But the case for private cloud did get a bit better, or is it just me thinking that?

5 Simple Rules for Creating a Cloud Strategy

2011-04-21T00:34:00.000-07:00

Over the last 18 months, the media, technologists, analysts, CIOs and CEOs have all been talking about the cloud. Now, most organizations are embarking on some form of cloud computing, but as always, technology is the relatively easy part. For those of you wanting to keep your feet firmly on the ground, and looking to set your direction and strategy, here are some simple guidelines to help you along the way.

1. Start your cloud strategy (and any cloud project) with an exit strategy

Now this may seem like contradictory advice, but there is a great risk of vendor lock-in with cloud computing than there is with traditional on premise software, and I'm sure that you will be aware of the downside of vendor monopolies such as high cost, low responsiveness and inflexible vendor business practices, which result in vendor lock-in and prohibitive switching costs.
A second important reason to avoid vendor lock-in to any cloud computing services is that unlike today, where software is purchased and then used to deliver services to customers, in the cloud era organizations are directly dependent on external providers to deliver those services. The impact of a breakdown or contract termination of as a service delivery is much more immediate to the business, it is therefore imperative to have a plan B.
Ideally you will architect your cloud services and contracts in such a way, that you can move to an alternative (Plan B) within a reasonable timeframe. A definition of reasonable depends on the type of business and may vary be between six months and six seconds. Standards, although currently just emerging, will play a crucial role and I recommend that you consider any implementations that are not based on such standards as temporary. Meanwhile the automation capabilities of vendor neutral management tools can help enable such exit strategies in a cost effective manner.

2. Design IT as a supply chain
Although deceivably simple, this analogy will help to change both the way the IT organization thinks and acts and, how other departments perceive IT. Supply chain thinking allows you to both buy and build; it allows you to make all your decisions in the context of what your company needs in order to deliver services to its customers. It allows you to look at what your IT department owns in-house but also all the services you sourced externally too. A good rule of thumb in setting your IT supply chain strategy is the lean mantra: Only do what adds value to your customers and remove any steps/activities/processes that don't add value or aren't legally required.
A supply chain approach means dynamically balancing resources (both internal and external) against rapidly changing goals and constraints towards an optimal end result. This is a very different game from traditional IT where IT operations avoided changing anything that was not broken to "keep the lights on" in the most reliable and stable manner possible. Just as in a car factory the product mix changes constantly, new products are introduced while others are phased out, the supply chain will enable IT to switch services on and off as and when required.

3. Use a portfolio approach for deciding WHAT to move to the cloud

A good cloud strategy is as much about WHAT to do as about HOW to do it. A portfolio approach helps you identify which services could be moved to the cloud and deliver cost savings and agility to the business, versus the more business critical services which - at this time - are less desirable to move to the cloud.
A portfolio approach needs to begin with the strategic goals of your organization in mind. These goals may vary from becoming customer focused to launching products in emerging markets or; reducing cost within the business.
Once the strategic goals are identified, these need to be matched to business or market constraints for example legislation, resources, geography or finance. The final step would be to map the goals and constraints to existing IT services and your cloud based opportunities.
From this exercise you will produce a roadmap of what you need to do; how you allocate human, financial and technical resources to deliver the most critical services and, monitor progress against your plan.
IT portfolio planning is not a one-off exercise and not something that can implemented overnight. It will constantly evolve as the business evolves and as IT gains maturity and experience in consuming and deploying cloud services. It is a good starting point to determine your "low hanging cloud fruit" which could add considerable value in terms of benefits or cost savings quickly and, those services which are too business critical to be put into the cloud.

4) Make service costing a core competency
If cloud computing it going to achieve one of the goals it is heralded for, then it needs to remove unnecessary cost - not just move CAPex to OPex.
Regardless of whether a service is completely rendered in house, composed from various sourced components or procured completely as a service, it is essential to understand the exact cost characteristics and the impact on the overall cost of doing business.
IT needs to be able to determine the cost of each service delivered rather than just the cost of individual IT functions. For example, services may include payment processing, issuing tickets, sending invoices, creating an order, facilitating video conference calls and delivering online training courses.
In electronics manufacturing the heads of production are not interested in how much the company spends in total on plastic versus aluminum or copper, but they want to know whether they can offer their new product at a competitive price compared to their competitors. In the same way, IT needs to prepare itself for such discussions, can they deliver services at an optimal cost, and if not, can they suggest a viable alternative?
Cost reduction is not the only reason or benefit when adopting cloud computing, increased accountability and agility and reliability are a few other areas which cloud computing can really impact positively. So whilst increasing transparency in the cost of IT services will give you insight into areas to optimize from a cost perspective, you may need to balance this view with potentially needing to increase investment in the short term for greater business agility.

5. Treat security as a service
Security or to be precise "fear of a lack of security" is consistently cited as the biggest barrier to cloud computing. However, a recent study conducted by Management Insight and sponsored by CA Technologies showed that 80 percent of mid-sized and large enterprise organizations have implemented at least one cloud service, with nearly half saying they have implemented more than six cloud services. This adoption is happening even though 68 percent of respondents cite security as a barrier to cloud adoption. These survey results indicate that for now cost and speed of deployment are leading reasons for cloud adoption and are strong enough to offset the perceived risks associated with deploying cloud services. This may be a sufficient for now, but as increasingly sensitive data and applications are selected to migrate to the cloud, organizations will quickly reach an impasse.
The security challenge with the "supply chain" model is an organization's ability to dynamically control access of a variety of users across a changing portfolio of applications running internally and externally from multiple suppliers.
The cloud computing model demands a rethink about how security is approached- making it an enabler instead of an inhibitor. The challenge is, not denying access to everyone, but letting the right people access the data they need to have access to (and no more than that) and to actively control the usage to prevent any out-of-the-ordinary activities.

Now having shared some advice and suggested first steps to start planning, I'd like to add one last thought.
The appropriate speed for deploying cloud computing depends on the culture and current state of your organization and realistically you aren't going to be in the cloud tomorrow. The US Federal government issued a directive called "Cloud First." This is basically a type of "Comply or Explain policy" which states that cloud options should be evaluated first (comply) unless there are significant reasons not to do so (in which case departments should explain). Pushing the accelerator that hard might not be everyone's cup of tea, but whatever you do: don't rush in, but also make sure you do not get left behind!

More on fabric computing in the cloud

2011-03-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

In my last post I covered the concept of fabric computing and why it matters in the world of cloud computing. With a "fabric" approach towards creating a cloud application, we include the virtual compute, storage and network components inside a fully software-based model of the service. This is distinctly different from a more traditional approach, where the various resources are added and configured one by one.

In response to a comment, I also suggested that this new approach could be compared to a modern espresso machine. Such a machine delivers a complete service (coffee!) - in an integrated fashion. No need to worry about the temperature of the water, grinding the beans, any other steps or equipment required to make it happen.

In a cloud computing context, the fabric is integrated "out of the box," like the espresso machine. It doesn't require provisioning, managing, integrating and monitoring lots of VMs and appliances individually. Most cloud solutions approach building a cloud by automating these individual steps - typically through scripting -- but this approach has distinct drawbacks. I included a short demo of the fabric approach below, but to understand these drawbacks we will use another analogy:

The parable of the spreadsheet and the calculator

Imagine you are an accountant and you can choose between using a spreadsheet (a fabric) or an automated (scripted) calculator. Both a calculator and a spreadsheet have similar base functions (add, subtract, multiply, square root). On a calculator, you start with a value and you perform functions against that. If you perform the same functions every month you could put these in a script, so you can play them back automatically next time. You could even edit that script to do it slightly different. This may makes things easier, but it is not a spreadsheet. With a spreadsheet you can have several versions next to each other (you can do a "Save as"), a change in one area immediately updates the other areas (it is integrated, there is no need to rerun a script), you can send a spreadsheet to other users or to your accountant.

Have a look at the demo below to see how that applies also to a fabric cloud application (including "save as", creating multiple versions, send it to someone else to run). But first ask yourself: when did you last see an accountant with a calculator? In fact automated calculators never really took off. Spreadsheets (fabrics) are simply the better way.

Seeing is believing: the epiphany of a demo
When I personally saw my first demo of this concept in action, it reminded me of two earlier occasions where a demo later reshaped IT as I knew it. The first was after I installed Windows 1.0 (all 12 floppies). Sure back then it was still monochrome, there were no applications and the performance was not great, but it did make me think: "Boy, if they ever get this to work, it will really change how we use desktop computers."

The second "epiphany" was my first experience with X86 virtualization. After having confiscated the biggest machine in the office with the most memory, and after quite some tinkering I saw an actual X86 machine boot inside a window (of course this was not an actual machine - it was a virtual one). After it booted, it could not do much, and running two of them brought the whole machine to a grinding halt. Yet, it did make me think: "Wow, if this ever scales, it can completely change how we handle our machines." And (admittedly somewhat to my surprise), about a decade later around 2009, X86 virtualization did actually start to scale and it developed into the billion dollar industry that is changing the way we manage our servers.

Just like Windows profoundly changed the way we use desktops and virtualization is changing the way we manage servers, this new software-based, virtual fabric approach, in my view will change the way we manage data centers. Now I was certainly not the first person to realize this. Nicholas Carr already acknowledged the power of this approach in his book "The Big Switch." In an interview with eCommerce Times, he subsequently said:

"In 3Tera's AppLogic, you can see the broad potential of virtualization to reshape how corporate IT systems are built and managed..."

How is that so? Well, my marketing colleagues here created quite an entertaining video , but the original - now vintage - 5-minute demo that shows how to define an application as an integrated fabric is also still out there (and shows the potential much better than my above ramblings).
CA 3Tera AppLogic software essentially enables you to do three things:

1) First, you set it up on commodity x86 servers, creating a single fabric for the storage, network and compute capabilities on those servers.
2) Then, using an integrated modeling tool, you take your application or service - including all its components, such as data, networking, load balancing, security etc.-- and create a 100% software based model (using a Visio-like drawing tool - check out this InformationWeek demo from Cloud Connect to see this in action).
3) Next, you can deploy a model of the fabric, with the software allocating resources based on the model, and providing automated scaling, metering and fail over capabilities.
You can also move the service or application to another data center very simply, even to one in another country or at another provider. Or, you can copy it and provide the same service to another department or customer (nearly instantly).

For a long time, CA 3Tera AppLogic software was kind of an industry insider secret. Several analysts and writers - like Nicholas Carr - were aware of it, discussed it and listed it in their publications. But today there are many case studies and real life success stories of both small and large implementations out there. This may be a good time for you to have a closer look; if only as an interesting implementation of these new fabric computing trends and principles in action.

Is fabric computing the future of cloud?

2011-03-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

The term fabric computing is gaining rapid popularity, but currently mostly within the hardware community. In fact, according to a recent report, over 50% of attendees at the recent Datacenter Summit had implemented, or are in the process of implementing, fabric computing. Time to take a look at what fabric computing means for software and for (cloud) computing as a whole.

Depending on which dictionary you choose, you can find anywhere between two and seven meanings for "fabric." Etymology-wise, it comes from the French fabrique and the Latin fabricare, and the Dutch Fabriek actually means factory. But in an IT context, fabric has little to do with our often used manufacturing or supply chain analogies; instead it actually relates much closer to fabric in its meaning of cloth, a material produced (fabricated) by weaving fibers.

If we check our handy Wikipedia for fabric computing, we get:

Fabric computing or unified computing involves the creation of a computing fabric consisting of interconnected nodes that look like a 'weave' or a 'fabric' when viewed collectively from a distance.[1]

Usually this refers to a consolidated high-performance computing system consisting of loosely coupled storage, networking and parallel processingfunctions linked by high bandwidth interconnects ...

In the context of data centers it means a move from having distinct boxes for handling storage, network and processing towards a fabric where these functions are much more intertwined or even integrated. Most people started to note the move to fabric or unified computing when Cisco started to include servers inside their switches, which they did partly in response to HP including more and more switches in their server deals. Cisco's UCS (Unified Computing System), and its bigger sibling, VCE, are the first hardware examples of this trend (although inside the box you can still distinguish the original components).

One reason to move to such a fabric design is that by moving data, network and compute closer together (integrating them) you can improve performance. Juniper's recent QFabric architecture announcement is another similar example. But, the idea of closer integration of data, processing, and communication is actually much older. In some respects, we may even conclude IT is coming full circle with this trend.

Let me explain.

Many years ago I spoke to Professor Scheer, founder of IDS Scheer and a pioneer in the field of Business Process Management (BPM). (Disclosure: years later IDS Scheer became part of my former employer: Software AG.) He spoke about how - in the old days of IT - data and logic were seen as one. Literally! If - while walking with your stack of punch cards to the computer room (back then it was a computer the size of a room, not a room with a computer in it) - you dropped your stack of punch cards, both data and logic would be in one pile on the floor. You would spend the rest of your afternoon sorting them again. There was just one stack: first the processing/algorithm logic, and then the data. Scheer's point was that just like we figured out after a while that data did not belong there and we moved it to its own place (typically a relational database), we should now separate the process flow instructions from the algorithms and move these to a workflow process engine (preferably of course his BPM engine). All valid and true - at that time.

But not long after, Object Oriented programming became the norm, and we started to move data back with the logic that understood how to handle that data, and treat them as objects. This of course created a new issue of having these objects perform in an even more remotely acceptable way, as we used relational databases to store or persist the data inside these objects. You could compare this to disassembling your car every night into its original pieces in order to put it in your garage. Over the years the industry figured out how to do this better,in part by creating new databases which design-wise looked remarkably similar to the (hierarchical) databases we used back in the day of punch cards.

And now , under the new shiny name of fabric computing we are moving all these processes back in the same physical box.

But this is not the whole story -- there is another revolution happening. As an industry we are moving from using dedicated hardware for specialized tasks to generic hardware with specialized software instead. For example, you might use a software virtualization layer to simply emulate a certain piece of specific hardware.

Or, look at a firewall: traditionally it was a piece of dedicated hardware built to do one thing (keeping non-allowed traffic out). Today, most firewalls are software-based. We use a generic processor to take care of that task. And we're seeing this trend unfold with more equipment in the data center. Even switches, load balancers and network-attached storage are becoming software-based (virtual appliance seems to be the preferred marketing buzzword for this trend).

Using software is more efficient than having loads of dedicated hardware, and we can't ignore the fact that software, because of its completely different economic and management characteristics, has numerous inherent advantages over hardware. For example, you can copy, change, delete and distribute software, all remotely, without having to leave your seat, and even do automatically. You'd need some pretty advanced robots to do that with hardware (if it could be done today).

So how do these two trends relate to cloud computing?
By combining the idea of moving stuff that needs to work together closer together (the idea of fabric) and the idea of doing that by using software instead of hardware (which gives us the economics and manageability of software) we can create higher performance, lower cost and easier to manage clouds.

Virtualization has been on a similar path. First we virtualized servers, then storage and networking, but all remained in their separate silos. Now we are virtualizing all of it in the same "fabric." This means that managing the entire stack gets simpler, with one tool to define it, make it work and monitor it. And that's something that should make any IT pro smile.

In my next post, I'll share my thoughts on why I think this approach has the power to change IT as we know it, based on some of my own epiphanies.

An IT Supply-Chain model, once more with feeling

2011-03-09T05:10:00.000-08:00

The idea of cloud computing making IT management more similar to supply chain management has been mentioned before; it’s time to take a closer look.

This post originally appeared as at ITSMportal.com

Let’s start by looking at the supply chain in its simplest imaginable form, even simpler than the supply chain at a manufacturing company. Think of a transport company – like a Federal Express, DHL or TNT – that transports packages from location A to location B. There are processes, people and resources needed to get the package from A to B within the supply chain.

The reality today is that many of these distribution companies do not actually come to your door themselves – at least not in every region or town; they use subcontractors and local partners at various points. It would be far too expensive for the delivery firm to have their own trucks and employ their own drivers in every remote country, city and village around the world. (Bear with me, we will get to cloud computing in a minute). This way, they can still offer you end to-end-service and keep you up to day of minute by minute parcel movements around the globe. They provide customers with tracking numbers - or “meta“-information (01001011). They know exactly which trucks are where, and with which packages; as a result they can “outsource” almost every logistical process (the outside arrows in our animated diagram).

figure 1: animated IT supply chain

But IT does not transport packages from A to B (at least I hope that is not what you do all day!). IT meets the demands of the business by providing a steady supply of services. IT does not have trucks or warehouses, but departments such as development, operations and support that work within their supply chain. What an IT supply chain essentially does, is take IT resources - like applications, infrastructure and people - and use these to create and deliver services.

Some IT shops have decided not to react to demand, but to actively help the users - work with the business – figure out what they should want or need (shown by the arrow marked “innovation” in the diagram). A more recent trend is the introduction of DevOps, a way to closely connect and integrate the demand side with the supply side. This is often done in conjunction with the introduction of agile development processes.

Users typically care about speed, cost and reliability, not about whether IT used its own trucks or someone else’s. Speed - like in many supply chains - is one of the main criteria. Responding faster to customer or user demands reduces cycle time and time-to-market and makes organizations more agile and more competitive. The use of cloud computing in all its incarnations, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), can play an important role in further increasing this speed.

With IaaS, the IT department can significantly speed up the procurement, installation and provisioning of required hardware. Because of its OPEX model, no capital expenditure requests need to be raised, no boxes with hardware need to be unpacked, no servers need to be installed. Just as in the above distribution example, the organization can rapidly respond to heavily fluctuating demand, extreme growth or demand for new services by using external capacity if and when needed.

With SaaS the route from determining demand to getting a service up and running is even shorter, because the whole thing is already a service the minute we start looking at it. There is no buying, installing, or configuring of the software. It all runs already at the provider’s website. If you are implementing a solution for ten thousand users across hundreds of departments, the time you save by not having to install a CD is not that significant. Large SaaS implementations go live much quicker than traditional on premises implementations, in many cases for psychological or even emotional reasons.Once the solution is already running, users are much more willing to start using it on the spot. Many SaaS providers reinforce this further by specifically designing their software to enable simple “quick starts.”

In those cases where there is no readymade solution available, PaaS (Platform as a Service) can deliver significant time savings. As soon as the developer has defined the solution, it can be used in production. The PaaS provider – through its PaaS platform – takes care of all the next steps such as provisioning the servers, loading the databases, granting the users access etc. Comparing PaaS with IaaS, the big difference s that with PaaS, the provider continues to manage the infrastructure, including tuning, scaling, securing, and so forth.IT operations does not have to worry about allocating capacity, about moving it from test to production or about all the other things operations normally takes care off. And because the PaaS provider has already done this many, many times, it can be done immediately and automatically.

Sound too good to be true?
Well,actually it might be, because - although the above can be faster – it also can mean IT loses control and can no longer assure the other two aspects that users care about: reliability and cost. So, how can these concerns be addressed? In the same way as in the distribution example: by making sure that at all times, IT has all the information (010011001) about “where everything is,” or better, “where everything is running.”

This management system –call it a “cloud connected management suite” if you like – needs to not only give insight about where things are running and how well they are running, but also allow you to orchestrate the process, move workloads from one provider to another, and help you decide whether to take SaaS or PaaS applications back in house (or move them to a more trusted provider). Ideally it will allow you to dynamically optimize your environment based on the criteria –such as speed, cost reliability – and constraints – such as compliance, capacity, contracts - that are applicable at that moment in time to your specific business.

Clearly this dynamic approach is a long way from the more traditional “If it ain’t broke, don’t change it,” but IT will have to get used to this. Or - even better - embrace this new way of doing things, just like planners at industrial companies did. Today’s global manufacturing would not be as efficient and such a driver for the world’s prosperity if they had not started to optimize their global processes a long time ago.
There are, however, a number of prerequisites to be able to implement such a supply chain approach in IT. First, we need to achieve fluidity or movability of IT. IT needs to be able to take fairly sizable IT chunks and move them somewhere else with relative ease. On the infrastructure side, virtualization is a major enabler of this. Virtualization containerizes and decouples from the underlying hardware, thus acting as a dire needed “lubricant”. But to enable true movability, more is needed.

figure 1: animated IT supply-chain (repeat)

Many of today’s applications are as intertwined as the proverbial plate of spaghetti. This makes the average datacenter a house of cards, where removing one thing may cause everything else to come crashing down. On the functional side, the use of Service Oriented Architectures can help, but we will also need to apply this thinking on the operational side.A virtual machine model is in many cases too low level for managing the movement of complete services; management needs to take place at a higher level of abstraction, ideally based on a model of the service.
The second hurdle is security. I don’t mean that the security at the external providers may be insufficient for the needs of our organization. In fact, the security measures implemented at external providers are often much more advanced and reliable than those inside most enterprises (fear for lack of security is consistently listed as top concern by organizations before they use cloud computing, but it rapidly moves down the list of concerns once organizations have hands-on experience with cloud computing). The real security inhibitor for the dynamic IT supply chain is that most organizations are not yet able to dynamically grant or block access to a constantly-changing set of users, across a fast moving and changing portfolio of applications running at a varying array of providers. This requires us to rethink how security is approached, where it is seen more as along the lines of “Security as a Service”, an enabler instead of an inhibitor.

The third consideration is that any optimization will have to work across the whole supply chain, meaning across all of the different departments and silos that the average large IT organization consists of. For example, it has to look at the total cost of a service, including running, supporting, fixing, upgrading, assuring, and securing it. Likewise, it also has to optimize the speed and the reliability - or at least give visibility into these - across the whole chain.

To prevent sub-optimization (the arch enemy of real optimization) one needs to understand and connect to many of the existing information and systems in these departments. Systems in diverse areas such as helpdesk, project management, security, performance, costing, demand management, data management, etc. IT supply-chain optimization is in its infancy and many start-ups are gearing up to offer some form of cloud management, but it will be clear that offering optimization requires quite a broad and integrated view of IT.

The end result of adopting a Supply Chain approach is that IT becomes more an orchestrator of a supply chain - a broker of services - than a traditional supplier of services. Demand and Supply are two sides of the same coin which occur (almost recursively) throughout the chain. Once we close the loop, the supply chain becomes a cycle that constantly improves and becomes more efficient and agile in delivering on the promises the organization makes to its customers, just like an industrial supply chain but also very much in the spirit of Deming and the original ideas around Service Management.

Vivek Kundra’s decision framework for cloud migration

2011-03-02T08:55:00.000-08:00

A framework applicable beyond government and geographies

The decision framework for cloud migration that US Federal CIO Vivek Kundra recently published as part of his Federal cloud computing strategy, offers advice applicable to all organizations.

In my last blog, a cloud of two speeds, I mentioned Vivek Kundra’s very readable cloud strategy and the industry stimulus effect this approach can have on the emerging cloud industry. By presenting his strategy not simply as a way to cut costs and reduce budgets, but as a way to get more value from existing IT investments, he enlisted IT as an ally to his plans, instead of a potential opponent. Section two of the strategy is a pragmatic 3 step approach and checklist for migrating services to the cloud which can also be valuable for organizations outside the government and outside North America.

The following is a short summary of this “Decision framework for cloud migration”.

The full Federal cloud computing strategy (43 pages and available for download at www.cio.gov) includes a description of the possible benefits of cloud computing, several cases, metrics and management recommendations. A short review of the document was given by Roger Strukhoff at sys-con

Decision Framework for Cloud Migration

The following presents a strategic perspective for thinking about and planning cloud migration.

Select

· Identify which IT services to move and when

· Identify sources of value for cloud migrations: efficiency, agility, innovation

· Determine cloud readiness: security, market availability, government readiness, and technology lifecycle

Provision

· Aggregate demand where possible

· Ensure interoperability and integration with IT portfolio

· Contract effectively

· Realize value by repurposing or decommissioning legacy assets

Manage

· Shift IT mindset from assets to services

· Build new skill sets as required

· Actively monitor SLAs to ensure compliance and continuous improvement

· Re-evaluate vendor and service models periodically to maximize benefits and minimize risks

A set of principles and considerations for each of these three major migration steps is presented below.

1. Selecting services to move to the cloud

Two dimensions can help plan cloud migrations: Value and Readiness.

The Value dimension captures cloud benefits in three areas: efficiency, agility, and innovation.

The Readiness dimension captures the ability for the IT service to move to the cloud in the near-term. Security, service and market characteristics, organisation readiness, and lifecycle stage are key considerations.

Services with relatively high value and readiness are strong candidates to move to the cloud first.

Identify sources of value

Efficiency: Efficiency gains come in many forms. Services that have relatively high per-user costs, have low utilization rates, are expensive to maintain and upgrade, or are fragmented should receive a higher priority.

Agility: Prioritize existing services with long lead times to upgrade or increase / decrease capacity, and services urgently needing to compress delivery timelines. Deprioritize services that are not sensitive to demand fluctuations, are easy to upgrade or unlikely to need upgrades.

Innovation: Compare your current services to external offerings and review current customer satisfaction scores, usage trends, and functionality to prioritize innovation targets.

Determine cloud readiness

In addition to potential value, decisions need to take into account potential risks by carefully considering the readiness of potential providers against needs such as security requirements, service and marketplace characteristics, application readiness, organisation readiness, and stage in the technology lifecycle.

Both for value and risk, organizations need to weigh these against their individual needs and profiles.

Security Requirements include: regulatory compliance; Data characteristics; Privacy and confidentiality; Data Integrity; Data controls and access policies; Governance to ensure providers are sufficiently transparent, have adequate security and management controls, and provide the information necessary

Service characteristics include interoperability, availability, performance, performance measurement approaches, reliability, scalability, portability, vendor reliability, and architectural compatibility. Storing information in the cloud requires technical mechanism to achieve compliance, has to support relevant safeguards and retrieval functions, also in the context of a provider termination. Continuity of Operations can be a driving requirement.

Market Characteristics: What is the cloud market competitive landscape and maturity, is it not dominated by a small number of players, is there a demonstrated capability to move services from one provider to another and are technical standards - which reduce the risk of vendor lock-in - available.

Network infrastructure, application and data readiness: Can the network infrastructure support the demand for higher bandwidth and is there sufficient redundancy for mission critical applications. Are existing legacy application and data suitable to either migrate (i.e., rehost) or be replaced by a cloud service. Prioritize applications with clearly understood and documented interfaces and business rules over less documented legacy applications with a high risk of “breakage”.

Organisation readiness: is the area targeted to migrate services to the cloud pragmatically ready: are capable and reliable managers with the ability to negotiate appropriate SLAs, relevant technical experience, and supportive change management cultures in place?

Technology lifecycle: where are the technology services (and the underlying computing assets) in their lifecycle. Prioritize services nearing a refresh.

2. Provisioning cloud services effectively

Rethink processes as provisioning services rather than contracting assets. State contracts in terms of quality of service fulfillment not traditional asset measures such as number of servers or network bandwidth. Think through opportunities to :

Aggregate demand: Pool purchasing power by aggregating demand before migrating to the cloud.

Integrate services: Ensure provided IT services are effectively integrated into the wider application portfolio. Evaluate architectural compatibility and maintain interoperable as services evolve within the portfolio. Adjust business processes, such as support procedures, where needed.

Contract effectively: Contract for success by minimizing the risk of vendor lock-in, ensure portability and encourage competition among providers. Include explicit service level agreements (SLAs) with metrics for security (including third party assessments), continuity of operations, and service quality for individual needs.

Realize value: take steps during migration to ensure the expected value. Shut down or repurpose legacy applications, servers and data centers. Retrain and re-deployed staff to higher-value activities.

3. Managing services rather than assets

Shift mindset: re-orient the focus of all parties involved to think of services rather than assets. Move towards output metrics (e.g., SLAs) rather than input metrics (e.g., number of servers).

Actively monitor: actively track SLAs and hold vendors accountable, stay ahead of emerging security threats and incorporate business user feedback into evaluation processes. And track usage rates to ensure charges do not exceed funded amounts “Instrument” key points on the network to measure performance of cloud service providers so service managers can better judge where performance bottlenecks arise.

Re-evaluate periodically the choice of service and vendor. Ensure portability, hold competitive bids and increase scope as markets mature (e.g., from IaaS to PaaS and SaaS). Maintain awareness of changes in the technology landscape, in particular new cloud technologies, commercial innovation, and new cloud vendors.

The above is a summary of the “Decision framework for cloud migration” section from Vivek Kundra’s Federal Cloud Computing strategy http://www.cio.gov/documents/Federal-Cloud-Computing-Strategy.pdf provided at www.cio.gov.

Disclaimer: This summary uses abridgements and paraphrasing to summarize a larger and more detailed publication. The reader is urged to consult the original before reaching any conclusions or applying any of the recommendations. All rights remain with the original authors.

A Cloud of two speeds: Europe vs. America

2011-02-22T08:02:00.000-08:00

Cloud computing is gaining rapid acceptance, but not everywhere. Governments across Europe – in what many call “the old countries” - are still remarkably conservative or even reluctant to embrace cloud computing.

This week President Obama organized a dinner with the CEO’s of 12 high-tech and cloud companies to stimulate job creation in North America, meanwhile - over in Europe - the Dutch Minister of the Interior replied to questions of parliament about the use of cloud computing by governments.The fact that this particular minister had to be invited three times by Dutch Employers Association to switch from his pre-war model cast iron bike to a more modern bicycle with gears and suspension, says something about the tone of this debate.

A hilarious misunderstanding was that the official government delegation kept referring to cloud computing as a new invention, while the representatives of the industry (including Google and a large international accounting firm) tried to explain that cloud computing was an established practice with many real life use cases and success stories, both inside and outside government organizations.

Remarkably the US and this European government announced almost at the same time a plan to radically reduce the number of government data centers: by about 60 in the Netherlands, and by about 800 in the U.S. The underlying idea in the U.S. is to make greater use of "data centers as a service" a.k.a. cloud computing. On the other hand, the Dutch plan so far sounds more like a traditional consolidation approach with the objective of creating more efficiency by increasing the scale of use (an approach that has so far not proven to be very successful; in fact, we see globally that the bigger the scale of the projects, the more spectacular the reports in the public press about the outcomes).

In the meantime, the CIO of the U.S. Federal government, Vivik Kundra, published a very readable cloud strategy – at only 43 pages this is a must read for anyone involved in setting IT strategy (a shorter analysis can be found at sys-con). Kundra presented his strategy not as a way to save on IT costs, but as a way to get more value from existing IT investments. In many places, but certainly in the public sector, "protection of budgets" has become a primary survival strategy. By positioning cloud computing not as a way to cut cost but as a way to increase value he makes IT (and of the whole civil apparatus) an ally to his plans, instead of a potential opponent.

The technology industry likely was already on his side, because the government’s ‘promised’ cloud spending in cloud services is likely to amount to about $20 billion per year, or 25% of the total budget. This annual amount is approximately equal to the total government investment required to put a man on the Moon. In my view, the U.S. government’s cloud program is also a way to create and safeguard jobs for the coming decade – in a sense, an industry stimulus program.

Due to European free trade rules and regulations, creating stimulus packages for national industries in Europe is at best complicated, and in many cases even illegal. Within the European Union, Neelie Kroes - the former free trade commissioner - has taken on the role of Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. In a recent lecture, she indicated her ambition is to make Europe not only "Cloud-Friendly" but "Cloud-Active" (a kind of "all-in" strategy?). The plan is built around three core areas: 1) a legal framework, 2) technical and commercial fundamentals) and 3) the market. There are now more than 100 actions on her European Digital Agenda, of which more than 20 specifically addressing the European “Digital Single Market”, an online equivalent of the European single market for goods and services.

However, a fundamental problem for cloud computing in Europe is that the European Union was based on enabling free traffic of persons, goods and services, and NOT free traffic of DATA. This puts European providers of cloud services immediately at a disadvantage. American, but also Chinese, companies have a huge domestic market, which they can serve from one geographic location. Europe has, in theory, a similar large domestic market for cloud services, but the various European languages, cultures and laws make this market a lot less uniform than the American market. Some argue that this diversity has made European suppliers (or European divisions of global providers) better at providing a differentiated approach, instead of the more traditional "one size fits all" solutions. But in a fast growing new market like cloud computing, all this diversity does makes achieving the required scale more difficult.

And in addition to issues with European privacy laws as described in this NY Times article,
there are a variety of local and national laws preventing local suppliers from serving the European (government) market from one location, even if this location lies within the European Union. For example, the German Government requires that all data of local government agencies is kept within Germany. From a historical perspective this may be understandable, but it prevents the European government sector from becoming a launching force for “One European Cloud Market.”

Maybe it's time for a European cloud of two speeds? Just like we saw smaller groups of countries signing the Schengen treaty (which enabled traveling between selected European countries without checkpoints) or for the introduction of the Euro single currency, a small leading group of countries could opt for accelerated introduction of uniform cloud legislation.

Comments: Please leave them below or send a message to @ gregor petri on Twitter

PS for some links to the European local language sites we used automatic web translation facilities from Microsoft and Google. Thought that with #IBMwatson defeating the human trace at Jeopardy the time might be right for this. Let me know whether you felt these were useful or not.

Is your cloud strategy 3D-ready?

2011-01-25T09:08:00.000-08:00

While the TV and consumer industry is getting ready for its next wave of innovation called 3D, the IT industry has been going through a similar three dimensional transformation. Let’s have a closer look at this 3D journey of IT and how a good cloud strategy should support all three dimensions. And don’t worry; you won’t need to wear funny 3D glasses to read this blog.

This post was originally published as a column on ITSMportal

Cloud computing is not the first innovation to hit IT – although the amount of hype and blogs seem to indicate otherwise - ever since the first computer got carried into the building all the way to the latest generation of tablets, the way we use IT, the things we use IT for and IT itself has been changing profoundly. We can classify these changes along three dimensions: Extending IT’s reach to new users and into new functional areas, Abstracting problems so they can be managed at new conceptual levels and Sourcing solutions from specialists where it makes sense.

Dimension 1 - Extend your reach

Traditionally the computers and applications that IT managed were used exclusively by employees. For example general ledger and inventory systems were accessed by the bookkeeping and manufacturing departments. This exclusivity has long gone. Applications have extended their reach and are now directly used by customers, by employees of partners and subcontractors and in some cases our applications reach out directly to suppliers or even suppliers of suppliers. This extension of reach has made IT a lot more time critical. Any failure can directly impact the customers’ experience.

In some cases the line between what is the business and what is the supporting application is even blurring completely. For many people banking is their home banking application, the service the travel agent provides is an application to book tickets and hotels and Telco’s run software to connect people. More and more the digital process is the becoming the business process itself.

Extending the reach of applications also has a severe impact on who should be given access to our systems and applications. From a ‘simple’ list of employees with their roles and responsibilities we are moving to a situation where the list of potential users is endless. Security is becoming less about keeping people out and more about enabling the right people to do the right things with decisions about who and what are allowed taking place at increasingly granular levels of detail and subtlety.

The inherent network orientation of cloud computing provide a natural fit for enabling “extend your reach”, but “extend your reach” goes beyond having more and different people accessing ITs’ applications. It is also about extending into completely new application areas. Recent examples are convergence of traditional data processing based IT with voice and video and ventures into “big data”, where analysis of volumes of information - traditionally to large or too diverse to sensibly process - leads to new insights and advanced levels of optimization. These applications go far beyond the “traditional business IT” applications that essentially were limited to capturing and processing administrative facts about business processes, with processing that seldom became more complex than adding and subtracting and the occasional multiplication. Cloud computing can help IT extend into these new, more complex, areas.

Dimension 2 - Abstraction - IT moving up in the food chain

When IT first started, companies could not buy computers, they had to build their own. Later on computers could be bought but they did not come with any applications or even an operating system. Customers were expected to build these themselves, first in assembler, later in higher level languages, while nowadays many complete standard software applications are readily available. The point is that IT for years has been moving to higher levels of abstraction to enable them to move from extremely detailed technical work to higher level tasks.

Abstraction is basically the mechanism that makes modern IT possible. If we would still be required to manually manage every transistor on a modern chip, every register in a CPU or every disk in a content management system, IT would never get around to actually helping the business.

Abstraction occurs in programming, hardware and management. In programming we went from assembler via 3GLs and 4GLs to modern Object Oriented languages, where abstraction basically is the core concept. In storage we went from addressing blocks and spindles to disks to NAS or even content management systems. Similarly virtualization allows us to abstract from the underlying (detailed) physical implementation to a more standardized high level representation. And also in IT management we abstracted from managing individual components such as network, storage and processing to managing at higher conceptual levels such as services (ideally using some kind of service model).

Automation providing Abstraction

Abstractions have been around forever (in fact any spoken language can be seen as an abstraction describing underlying realities) but in IT they are often implemented through automation. We enable users to abstract to the higher level by “automating” all the tasks they traditionally had to execute at the lower level. Traditional programming was all about memory management, higher level languages take care of this automatically. Traditional data-processing was about running hundreds of sequential jobs across many sets of data in the right sequence, workload automation suites automated this away. SOA (Service Oriented Architectures) offer services that perform complex tasks “as a service” automatically. These automated services free the developer from having to manage or even understand the internal workings of the service he uses.

Automation is the engine that enables the user to manage processes at a higher, conceptual level. Having the right conceptual model is essential to success. Conceptual models come in many shapes and forms. A file system is such a conceptual model, so is a database. Programs, applications and services are another example of conceptual models covering different levels. A good conceptual model is close to the reality the user wants to manage and allows him to specify in the appropriate level of detail what the solution needs to do. Appropriate is the key word here. Assembler language does not provide a good model to implement General Ledger or CRM systems, but could be appropriate to define operating systems or microcode.

Appropriate cloud abstraction models

Traditionally conceptual models for new technologies closely resemble the old reality; remember how the first cars closely resembled carriages, but without the horses. The driver seat would be really high because he traditionally needed to be able to see over the horses ass. And even though the automobile had no horse anymore; the seat was still high up. Cloud computing is also still in search of the appropriate conceptual models to be managed through. Traditional datacenter management was about provisioning and starting and stopping servers and configuring networks. When using a private cloud to run applications a conceptual model around servers may be too detailed, a more appropriate model would be based on services not underlying machines.

In a similar fashion the industry will have to find conceptual models to manage the use of SaaS and PaaS cloud offerings. Initially people will try and manage these in the same was as we managed in house applications and development platforms, but over time we may move to higher more appropriate levels of abstraction. An interesting development here is the Service Measurement Index (created by the SMI consortium in cooperation with Carnegie Mellon University and hosted at cloudcommons.com) that aims to abstract the provided application services into a number of core characteristics that enable management at a higher abstraction level.

Dimension 3: Source - Divide and Conquer

The third dimension that IT has transformed itself along over the years is the sourcing dimension. As IT organizations moved on, they started to subcontract, outsource, offshore, procure as a service more and more tasks they traditionally did in-house.

To some extend abstraction and sourcing are related, they both result in the organizations not having to perform certain task themselves. But the two dimensions also tend to reinforce each other. The external providers perform their specialization at such scale that they are best equipped to automate their services up to a next level of abstraction. Many organizations that outsourced their service desk operations found that the provider rapidly moved from a Chinese army approach - where they processed millions of tickets manually - to offering automated remediation and self-service to make the support process more efficient. In-house teams simply did not have the time, skills or scale to set this up.

Sourcing also means letting go of control, no longer being able to step in and fix things yourself in case things go wrong. As a result any sourcing strategy should include an exit and a fail-over strategy. One CEO became acutely aware of these sourcing risks when he read about several companies ceasing service to Wikileaks. He asked his IT department how dependent they were on the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) vendor they sourced their capacity from. His IT department - always game for a good challenge - took up the gauntlet and 48 hours of non-stop programming, gallons of diet coke and tens of pizza boxes (containing cheese and salami, not CPU’s) later they had created the ability to automatically move their complete operations to another IaaS provider. Given the criticality of today’s IT from a business and personal perspective, every organization should consider such a divide and conquer strategy. By dividing the workload across multiple vendors or storing a shadow backup copy of critical data at an alternative vendor they can arrange instant failover and prevent themselves from being locked in.

Of course cloud computing has a distinct sourcing angle. In fact so much that many people see cloud computing basically as just another form of outsourcing. But the attractiveness of cloud computing is that it can further IT along all three dimensions. Extending ITs reach to new users and into new functional areas, abstracting problems so they can be managed at new conceptual levels and sourcing solutions from specialists where it makes send.

Such a 3D Cloud strategy enables you to Extend, Abstract and Source Your IT, something us acronym crazy IT folks maybe should call EASY IT.

Audits and Certificates Won't Erase Cloud Security Concerns

2011-01-19T11:50:00.000-08:00

In every cloud survey, security consistently comes out as an inhibitor to cloud adoption. Even though this has been the case for several years, many feel that it is a temporary barrier which will be resolved once cloud offerings get more secure, mature, certified, and thus accepted. But is this indeed the case or do we need another approach to overcome this barrier?

During a recent cloud event, two speakers from a large accounting and EDP auditing firm took the stage to discuss the risks of cloud computing. While one speaker dissected the risks for both consumers and providers of cloud services, the second speaker discussed the various certifications and audit schemes that are available in each area. They acknowledged that with the currently available certifications, not all risks were covered, but their envisioned remedy was even more comprehensive certifications and audits. Now, this may come as no surprise given the speakers' backgrounds, but more "paperwork" simply won't address what IT pros are really worried about. Let me try and explain my thinking, including how the recent WikiLeaks events influenced this.

Security is often cited as a concern with regard to cloud adoption. My view is that the apprehensions are more the fear of losing control (not being able to restore service when needed), not primarily the fear of losing data. Fear of losing data can be addressed by cloud providers through implementing security solutions as described in various posts on the CA security management blog, but fear of losing control cannot.
The big difference between traditional IT and cloud computing is that cloud computing is delivered "as a service." With traditional IT we bought a computer and some software. In case it did not work we could fix it ourselves (sometimes a firm kick would suffice). No matter what happened (good or bad), we were the master of our own destiny. And even with traditional outsourcing, we often told the outsourcer "what to do," and in many cases "how to do it." If push came to shove and the outsourcer really screwed up, we could -- at least in theory -- still say "Move over, let me do it myself."

When something is delivered as a service, there is no equipment to kick and we no longer can say "Move over, I'll do it myself." We likely won't even be allowed to enter the room where the equipment is located or get access to the underlying code and data. If your biggest customer (or your boss, or the boss of your boss) is on the phone screaming at you, that is not a position many people want to find themselves in. And believe me, showing all the certificates and audit reports that your vendor accumulated and shared with you, will not quiet them down, even assuming that the vendor at that moment is doing its best to fix the problem. But what if the vendor has made a conscious decision to discontinue rendering the service - as seems to be the case with WikiLeaks?
Now you may feel your organization would never do something that would warrant or even cause such behavior by your vendor. But what if a judge ordered your vendor to discontinue the service? Something that can happen and has happened, sometimes because of really small legal technicalities or unintended incidents like a server sending spam or an employee collecting illegal content on a company server. Google and other mail providers have been ordered to cease mail services to both consumers and business, and have complied. Sure you can go to court and appeal, but will that be quick enough?
For each "as a service" service we will need to evaluate what is reasonable risk and what to do to remedy the unreasonable risks. What is reasonable will very much depend on the type of industry. In the following examples we look at scenarios of the service not working (outage), and the data being stolen. Some incidents the business may hardly notice, others can be severely inconvenient, but others could jeopardize overall business continuity (not being able to invoice or missing a deadline on a project with severe penalty clauses).

Email: If email is down but phones, instant messaging, text messaging and maybe the occasional fax are still available, then a few days outage may be reasonable (for some companies). Provided we get all of our email back at the end of the outage, regardless of whether we moved to a new provider or the old one finally got it fixed or switched us on again. With regard to theft: nobody likes their personal conversations discussed in public (see again the WikiLeaks example) so measures like encryption, digital signing, using SSL and working with reputable (OK, let's call them certified) vendors are in order.
CRM: This system tells us what our sales team has been up to. Before we implemented CRM (fairly recent in many cases) we had limited insight into sales activities, so it seems reasonable that a week of outage is fine (again, depends on your industry). With regard to theft, these are often records about people, so legal and privacy requirements apply, not to mention that you may not want this data to show up at your direct competitor.
Invoicing, order intake, reservation management: Very much depends on the industry, but for some industries a single hour of outage at the wrong moment can already mean bankruptcy. In this case, you probably want to have a hot swappable system, preferably at two different "as service" vendors.
Project management: Depends; if you are a system integrator with penalty clauses or an innovator rushing towards a product launch, it may be critical.
Bookkeeping: Depends (before end of month closing?).

I could go on and on, but I'm sure you get the point. For each service that you would consider moving into the cloud, you have to determine the importance, criticality and impact of disruptions (I am sure you do this all the time for all your services ;-)). This exercise may actually save you lots of money. Most services are not under-provisioned but over-provisioned. In case of doubt, IT tends to move services to the more secure, more reliable, more failover equipped platform. A famous example is the company that was running its internal employee entertainment Tour de France betting system on a hot swappable dual everything nonstop system.
Next, for each service you must determine what a reasonable recovery period is, and how to implement it. It could be simple source code escrow (with the right to keep using the code) and a failover contract with a nearby infrastructure provider. Or it may require having a fully up-to-date system image ready to provision within an hour. For other scenarios, you may be running two instances of your service or application, in parallel at two separate service providers on different grids, different networks and in different jurisdictions. And for some you may not bother. It's like insurance: most people insure their house against fire (as they could not overcome the financial impact if it burned down) but many do not insure their phones or cars against theft of damage (as they can afford to buy a new one if needed without going bankrupt, even though it may be "severely inconvenient"). There is also a case of being too cautious. I remember at my first employer, the bookkeeping department of the local plant would travel separately to the annual company outing (two by train and two by car), even though we had 12 factories located within a hundred miles, each with four bookkeepers. I am sure we would have closed the books somehow in case of a travel mishap.

Hopefully most of the services currently running in the cloud (CRM comes to mind) fall into the "severely inconvenient" category. If they are business critical, you hope the companies have a plan B that allows them to move these jobs quickly to another cloud if the need arises. To be able to do so easily, we will need two things: Standards that enable more portability than we have today, and automation tools that allow us to do this "semi-auto-magically." Our accountant friends may claim you also need certifications on both the primary and the backup vendors, but I am sure these will remain in the desk drawer when push comes to shove.A final thought on assuring your services in the cloud. On the insurance front we see that many people do not insure their house against natural events such as earthquakes, first because it is often not possible or affordable, but also because -- as my father used to say -- "if heaven drops down, we will all be wearing a blue hat." Imagine if a video on-demand provider is the only one still running after an earthquake, how much good would it do them? In other words, it is all about being pragmatic.

P.S. During my economics study, at some point you had to decide whether to major in accounting or in IT. Guess what the more pragmatically inclined folks chose? ;-)

Cloud Predictions Beyond 2011 - 2: The need for a cloud abstraction model

2010-12-28T03:20:00.000-08:00

If the cloud is to fulfill on its promise we need to start thinking of it as a cloud, not as an aggregation of its components (such as VMs etc.)

As mentioned in a previous post I‘ll use some of my upcoming posts to highlight some cloud computing "megatrends" that I believe are happening - or need to happen – beyond 2011. One of these would be the creation of an “abstraction model” that can be used to think about (and eventually manage) the cloud. A nice setup to this was done by Jen-Pierre Garbani of Forrester, who in a recent post at Computerworld UK talks about the need to Consider the Cloud as a solution not a problem.

In this is he uses the example of the T-ford -which was originally designed to use the exact same axle with as roman horse carriages, until someone come up with the idea of paving the roads - to argue that customers should not “design cloud use around the current organization, but redesign the IT organization around the use of cloud .. The fundamental question of the next five years is not the cloud per se but the proliferation of services made possible by the reduced cost of technologies”.

I could not agree more, it is about the goal not about the means. But people keep thinking in terms of what they already know. It was Henry Ford who ones said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Likewise people think of clouds and especially of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in terms of virtual machines. It is time to move beyond that and think of what the machines are used for (applications/services) and start managing them at that level.

Just like we do not manage computers by focusing on the chips or the transistors inside, we should not manage clouds by focusing on the VM’s inside. We need a model that abstracts from this, just like Object Orientated models abstract programmers from having to know how underlying functions are implemented we need a cloud model that abstracts IT departments from having to know on which VM specific functions are running and from having to worry about moving them.

In that context Phil Wainwright also wrote an interesting post: This global super computer the cloud, a post that originated 10 years ago. First, it is amazing that the original article is still on-line after 10 years – imagine what it would take to do that in a pre-cloud era. Second, the idea of thinking of the cloud as a giant entity makes sense but I disagree with him when he quotes Paul Buchheit’s statement on the cloud OS: “One way of understanding this new architecture is to view the entire Internet as a single computer. This computer is a massively distributed system with billions of processors, billions of displays, exabytes of storage, and it’s spread across the entire planet” That is the equivalent of thinking of your laptop as a massive collection of chips and transistors, or of a program you developed as a massive collection of assembler put, gets and goto statements.

To use a new platform we need to think of it as just that, as a platform, not what it is made off. If you try to explain how electrons flow through semiconductors to explain how computers work, nobody (well almost nobody) will understand. That is why we need abstractions.

Abstractions often come in the form of models, like the client/server model or (talking about abstraction) the object oriented model or even the SQL model (abstracts from what goes on inside the database). Unfortunately the current cloud does not have such a model yet – at least not one we all agree on. That is why everyone is trying so hard to slap old models onto it and see whether they stick. For example for IaaS (infrastructure as a Service) most are trying to use models of (virtual) machines that are somehow interconnected, which makes everything overly complex and cumbersome.

What we need is a model that describes the new platform, without falling into the trap of describing the underlying components (describing a laptop by listing transistors). The model most likely will be service oriented and should be implementation agnostic (REST or SOAP, Amazon or P2P, iOS or Android, Flash or HTML5). Let’s have a look what was written 10 years ago that we could use for this, my bet would be on some of the Object Oriented models out there.

PS Feel free to follow me on Twitter @GregorPetri and read this blog at blog.gregorpetri.com

Cloud Predictions Beyond 2011 - Part 1: Consumer Services Rule

2010-12-22T14:04:00.000-08:00

In the past weeks we launched directly from the season of cloud events into what SysCon calls the Annual Predictions Bonanza. Gartner released its predictions on December 1 leading with "critical
infrastructure will be disrupted by online sabotage." At CIO magazine Bernard Golden gave two
interesting points of view, one for vendors and one for users, and even CA Technologies offered insights into the changes we expect in 2011, including how "security will shift from being perceived
as a cloud inhibitor to becoming a cloud enabler."

So, what happens after 2011? In a few upcoming blogs I will highlight some "megatrends" that I believe are happening - or need to happen - in the decade about to start. (Now, you may argue that the decade started a year ago, but starting to count at zero is very "old school IT" and "old school IT" is definitely not what we are going to see going forward.)
BIG IT becomes Consumer IT
Traditionally "BIG IT" represented the IT operations of large banks, governments and Fortune 1000 companies. These organizations were typically the first to implement new technologies, ranging from the first mainframes to powerful UNIX clusters and later rack-based systems. Many technology companies used the 80/20 rule -- that the top 20% of companies were responsible for 80% of
the overall Global IT spend -- to guide their strategy. Today the total data processing at the
average stock exchange still dwarfs the number of transactions a phenomenon like Twitter handles, but online entertainment is rapidly catching up.

This really hit home while visiting a large hosted European data center a few weeks ago. There were some corners where you could still find enterprise servers zooming away, but the really big server farms and all the reserved open spots were dedicated to consumer-related services such as online gaming, mobile internet and messaging, and on-demand television. The rise of of these consumer services will cause unprecedented demands for cloud storage, cloud networking and cloud processing in 2011, but the average enterprise IT manager won't particularly notice. In fact, many traditional IT chiefs may still feel they are "BIG IT". If you're interested in an analyst covering these new consumer areas then you may enjoy Om Malik's GigaOM site.

You could say that this trend of data centers becoming more and more consumer-centric is the top- down part of IT consumerization. The bottom-up part is employees bringing their consumer technology (iPhones, iPads, etc.) and expecting to use them while doing their job. The long term impact of this top-down trend will be that traditional BIG IT technology vendors will start to focus their R&D more on new, fast growing markets. Vendors with a running start in this new reality will be consumer electronics companies (like Apple) and technology vendors that grew up - or grew big - with the internet. As a result Enterprise IT will become a secondary market, a market where data center inventions and investments that were originally made for the consumer and entertainment market can be redeployed. Something to take into consideration when picking your strategic technologies and vendors for the next decade.

Now consumer IT won't take over Enterprise IT completely during 2011, but the days that we made fun of hardware vendors that made more money on consumer printers and ink than on enterprise data centers are definitely behind us.

P.S. -- OK just one prediction for 2011. In one of my earlier blogs I wrote about the four P's of Innovation - Problem, Ponder, Publish and Pilot. For Enterprise IT, 2010 was clearly the year of publications (just look at the number of blogs with cloud predictions). That would make 2011 the year of piloting. Check back for my next blog on what I expect the production period will look like.

Virtual Strategy - Virtually Right

2010-12-19T03:49:00.000-08:00

With a private cloud strategy and dynamic data center you can quickly respond to rapid business fluctuations. But how do you get there?

This post was originaly published as thanksgiving weekend special at virtual-strategy.com.
In the article I discussed some approaches for building a dynamic data center that not only addresses complexity and reduces cost, but also accelerates business response time, to ensure that organization realizes the true promise of cloud computing, business agility and customer responsiveness.

Cloud computing presents an appealing model for offering and managing IT services through shared and often virtualized infrastructure. It’s great for new business start-ups who don’t want the risk of a large on-premise technology investment, or organizations who can’t easily predict what the future demand will be for their services. But for most of us with existing infrastructure and resources, the picture is very different. We want to capitalize on the benefits of the cloud ― on demand, low risk, affordable computing ― but we’ve spent years investing in rooms stacked high with hardware and software to run our daily mission critical jobs and services.

So how do organizations in this situation make the shift from straight-forward server consolidation to a dynamic, self-service virtualized data center? How do they reach the peak of standardized IT service delivery and agility that is in step with the needs of the business? Many virtualization deployments stall as organizations stop to deal with challenges like added complexity, staffing requirements, SLA management, or departmental politics. This “VM stall” tends to coincide with different stages in the virtualization maturity lifecycle, such as the transition from tier 2/3 server consolidation to mission-critical tier 1 applications, and from basic provisioning automation to a private/hybrid cloud approach.

The virtualization maturity lifecycle
The simple answer is to take it step-by-step, learning as you go, building maturity at every step. This will earn you the skills, knowledge, and experience needed to progress from an entry-level virtualization project to a mature dynamic data center and private cloud strategy.

It’s called the virtualization maturity lifecycle, and it builds in four steps. Just like pilots start their training on small planes (going full cycle from take-off to landing) before they move onto large commercial jets, it is advisable for organizations to implement these virtualization maturity steps iteratively. For example, start a full maturity cycle on test and development servers before moving to mission critical servers and applications.
Start easy, by consolidating servers, to increase utilization and reduce your current carbon footprint. To ensure deep insight and continuity in support of the migration from physical to virtual, you might want to leverage image backup and physical-to-virtual restore tools that allow you to move your physical IBM, Dell and HP images directly to ready to run VM images for VMware, Sun, Citrix and Microsoft.

The next step involves optimizing the infrastructure. Apart from maintaining consistency, efficiency, and compliance across the virtual resources (which is proving fast to be even more complex in virtual than in physical environments), we analyze, monitor, (re-)distribute and tune our applications and services.
While optimizing, we also discover and document the rules we will automate in the next phase. Rules about which applications best fit together, what areas are suitable for self service and which type of services are most important. As you can imagine the answers to this last question will be very different for a nuclear plant (safety first) compared to an online video rental service (customers first), which it is why it is such an important step. If you skip this stage and go straight into automation, you’ll likely end up in the same situation that you’re in today, just automated.

A successful cloud strategy is all about agility and flexibility, and the next step in the virtualization maturity lifecycle helps take care of automation and the orchestration of your (now) virtual services. You can empower users to help themselves ― industrialize processes ― without calling IT for every service request. Automation has many advantages here. It is the catalyst to standardize your virtual infrastructure, integrate and orchestrate processes across IT silos, and accelerate the provisioning of virtual cloud services. Once the industrialized provisioning process is live, automation technologies can then also be used to monitor demand volumes, utilization levels and application response times and to assist root-cause analytics to help isolate and remediate virtual environment issues.

The final stage is the centerpiece of a cloud strategy, a position which allows you to manage the definition, demand, and deployment of IT services: the dynamic data center. Your now agile infrastructure, delivered from a secure, highly available data center, enables you to quickly respond to rapid business fluctuations. To reach a dynamic data center, you need to automate the entire process of service delivery from request to fulfilment. This includes centralized service requests, automating the approval process so that department heads can quickly approve or reject requests, a standard and repeatable provisioning process, and standard configurations.

This goes much further than the traditional dream of a “lights out” data center, which basically was a static conveyor belt-like factory where all labor was automated away. The dynamic data center is like a modern car factory, where robots perform almost all tasks, but in ever changing sequences and configurations, guided by supply-chain-lead orchestration.

The new normal
As we all know, technology changes fast. This advancement in technology is creating a “new normal” where relationships with customers are increasingly in a digital form and technology is no longer an enabler or accelerator of the business― it has become the business.

This is a theme picked up by Peter Hinssen, one of Europe's thought leaders on the impact of technology on our society. He evangelizes this new normal, arguing that in a digital world there will be new rules that define what is acceptable for IT, including zero tolerance for digital failure, an era of “good enough” functionality (60% functionality in six weeks rather than 90% in six months), and the need to move your architectures―including your new cloud architecture―from “built to last” to “designed to change”.
The lifecycle approach described earlier may be just what you need to help align your IT organization to what Hinssen calls the new normal. First you determine where opportunities exist for consolidation and rationalization across your physical and virtual environments ― assessing what you have in your data center environment and establish a baseline for making decisions that take you to the next stage. Next, to achieve agility, you have to automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of virtualized resources, including essential elements, such as identities, and other management policies such as access rights.

The next step in delivering an on-time, risk-free (zero failure) cloud computing strategy is service assurance. You need to manage IT service quality and delivery based on business impact and priority — top-to-bottom and end-to-end. That includes, for example, delivering a superior online end-user experience with low-overhead application performance management, and end-to-end visibility into traffic flows and device performance. The new normal also needs to be secure. IT security management technologies must be applied against current regulations and end-user needs, which enable the virtual layer to be more secure.
All these factors combined ultimately lead to agile IT service delivery. With agility, you can build and optimize scalable, reliable resources and entire applications quickly. By embarking on the virtualization maturity roadmap, you can move closer to a dynamic data center and successful cloud strategy.

Any shortcuts?
This evolutionary approach may sound very procedural (and safe). You may also be thinking, is this the only way? What if I need it now? Is there no revolutionary approach to help me get straight to a private cloud much more quickly? Just like developing countries, which have skipped the wired POTS phone system and moved directly to a 100% wireless infrastructure, a revolutionary approach does exist. The secret lies in the fact that – in addition to the application itself - the infrastructure required to deploy an application can be virtualized – load balancers, firewalls, NAS gateways, monitoring tools, etc. This entire entity – the application and the required infrastructure it needs to be successfully deployed – can then be managed as a single object. Want to deploy a copy of the application? Simply load the object and all of the associated virtual appliances are automatically loaded, networked, secured and made ready. This is called an application-centric cloud.

With traditional virtualization, the servers are the parts that are virtualized, but afterward, these virtual servers, networks, routers, load balancers and more, still need to be managed and configured to work with the other parts of the data center, a task as complex and daunting as it was before. This is infrastructure-centric cloud. With full application-centric clouds, the whole business service (with all its involved components) is virtualized becoming a virtual service (instead of a bunch of virtual servers) which reduces the complexity of managing these services significantly.

As a result, application-centric clouds can now model, configure, deploy and manage complex, composite applications as if they were a single object. This enables operators to use a visual model of an application and the required infrastructure, and to store that model in the integrated repository. Users or customers can then pull that model out of the repository, reuse it and deploy it to any data center around the world with the click of a button. Interestingly, users deploy these services to a private cloud, or to an MSP, depending on who happens to offer the best conditions at that moment. Sound too futuristic? Far from it. Several innovative service providers, like DNS Europe, Radix Technologies, and ScaleUp, are already doing exactly this on a daily basis.

For many enterprises, governments and service provider organizations, the mission for IT today is no longer just about keeping the infrastructure running. It’s about the critical need to quickly create new services and revenue streams and improve the competitive position of their organization.
Some parts of your organization may not have time to evolve into a private cloud. For them, taking the revolutionary (or green field) approach may be best, while for other existing revenue streams, an evolutionary approach, ensuring investment protection, may be best. In the end, customers will be able to choose the approach that best fits the task at hand, finding the right mix of both evolutionary and revolutionary to meet their individual needs.

Reshaping IT Management – by cutting it into two halves?

2010-12-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

The McKinsey quarterly just published an interesting and very readable piece on “reshaping IT for turbulent times”. In the article they analyze what seems to be a dichotomy for today’s IT management: How to balance running an efficient IT factory with being a responsive customer focused provider.

In the article (which is freely accessibly after registering) Roberts, Sarrazin and Sikes describe two models, an efficient factory approach and a more enabling, innovation oriented approach. However, their suggested approach of applying two models, splitting the organization effectively into two separate parts -- a mainstream factory and a boutique -- seems less than optimal. This split very much resembles the traditional split of IT into development and operations, something that is also turning out to be less than optimal and too slow for today’s markets. Hence the emerging of a new IT discipline called DevOps.

It is understandable they use two models as traditionally efficiency and innovation require different approaches. There is an old analogy that makes this very clear. Think of the organization as a sponge. If you want more efficiency, you centralize (squeeze the sponge and any excess water pours out); however, if you want innovation and new ideas, you need to let go of the sponge, creating room to suck up water - new ideas. Squeezing and letting go at the same moment seems impossible.

Addressing both efficient production and customer responsiveness at the same time seemed an insolvable issue in traditional manufacturing, as well. Until management innovations - such as just-in-time (JIT) supply chain optimization - gave management the tools needed to address this. The main difference between the new supply chain and the traditional manufacturing-oriented approach was that the goal shifted from efficient production to effective end-customer delivery. This leads to vastly different decisions when put into an optimization model. The IT equivalent of this JIT innovation is cloud computing.

Splitting the IT organization into a back-office grinder shop and front-office boutique will turn out to be a temporary solution at best. Not just because a dual-model approach - almost by definition - prevents any optimization across the two, but also because experience shows that in cases like these, the low cost grinding part will soon move to a low-cost provider (for example, manufacturing moving to China), after which pretty soon the innovation part is likely to follow (again look at what is starting to happen in China). Traditionally the best innovation labs are near factories, except maybe for fundamental research (which most commercial have lost interest in or can no longer afford).

It took the manufacturing industry several decades (and fierce competitive pressure from pioneers such as Japan) to make the transition to be both efficient and responsive at the same time. IT can learn from these experiences. The competitive pressure required to make such a transition has already arrived. Cloud computing enables users to bypass IT completely and source solutions directly from outside service providers, a practice sometimes referred to as “Rogue IT.” In my post "On empowered users, rogue and shadow IT, stealth clouds and the future corporate IT" I wrote on the valid need for IT to be closer to the business again, which in my view can be achieved without cutting it in two.

By taking an integrated approach - based on aforementioned IT supply chain thinking, with a large emphasis on sourcing – IT organizations will be able to both have their cake and eat it too.

The private cloud debate is building up steam, but is it worth having?

2010-11-28T04:06:00.000-08:00

Slowly but steadily the debate in the blogosphere about private clouds is increasing. Now it is always good to see some debate, but is this a debate worth having? Will the cloud long term not be about other things than who owns a machine?

Under provocative titles like “Private cloud discredited, part 1” and “Do We Really Need Private Clouds?” the private cloud debate is building up steam. The first blog is actually called “part 1” because the author is sure there will be a part two, given the raging emotions and all the opinions being aired.

The second one is part of a very readable guest series by IT analyst avant la lettre Robin Bloor at Cloud Commons. Cloud Commons is a cloud consumer rating service community site, like consumersearch.com and epinions.com but for cloud products and services, that CA Technologies helped initiate.

Now it is always good to see debate, and I vividly remember when we all got exited some years ago about Open Systems (with Open roughly being defined as anything running on Unix versus anything that was not running on Unix- including mainframes, AS/400's, HP3000's, etc. etc.). To be honest , that debate was maybe as productive as a debate about private versus public clouds may turn out to be. In my view the most important thing that the cloud can bring is namely that cloud (finally) decouples the application from the underlying infrastructure. As a result it matters a lot less where it runs (private or public). In a comment on Robin’s “Do We Really Need Private Clouds?” blog Jonathan Davis, CTO of DNS Europe, introduces a good example of that principle. Using a cloud platform (Applogic* in this case) his company makes it possible that applications can be deployed transparently and instantly over grids of compute capacity (re. discussion of grids, see Robin’s earlier post in the mentioned series) regardless of whether these clouds are private (hosted or internal), public or a combination (hybrid).

Where to start
The remaining Private versus Public question then is: where to start. Do you start with less sensitive applications on a public cloud and then expand what you learned to core apps onto maybe a private cloud, or v.v. do you start with a more sensitive app on a private cloud and expand to public when you feel that is proven and secure enough for that application.

Surprisingly (at least to me) there was some very clear guidance given in the cloud scenario session at last month’s annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo**. Basically a kind of “comply or explain” approach was suggested there. It basically suggested: first explore whether a job can be done with a public cloud (“comply”), and only if there are valid and severe reasons to not go public (“explain”) than consider private. I’m paraphrasing so check with your analyst for exact wording and/or check out the free videos recordings of this year’s symposium at gartnersymposiumondemand.com . Unfortunately the break-out sessions on cloud are not available for free there, but it does offer all plenary keynotes, all industry CEO interviews (Bennioff, Chambers, Ballmer, Dell) and … a recording of my session ;-).

During the symposium, Gartner also indicated that security concerns should be more seen as valid but temporary challenges to be addressed and overcome, rather than as a reason (or excuse) to discard public clouds. At last weeks Datacenter Summit one of Gartner’s lead analysts on cloud, Thomas Bittman, gave a slightly more nuanced view. Understandable as this wa sthe week of Thankgiving and the folks in the room were predominantly the guys running today’s private datacenters (Thanksgiving --> Turkeys :-) ). He highlighted some scenario’s where private clouds makes perfect sense (eg. stable, predictable loads). In his worthwhile and balanced session he also noted that the current emphasis on Infrastructure as a Service (where the Private versus Public debate mainly plays today) over Platform and Software as a Services comes from the fact that IaaS can run today’s existing applications and does not have to wait for a next generation of apps, as developing such new applications simply takes time.

A new generation of cloud applications
In my view this new generation applications will be very different from the applications we run today, which makes it even more important that these new generations of applications will no longer be tight to underlying infrastructures. New generations come with new applications, mainframes introduced OLTP, Mini’s or distributed systems (both open and proprietary) introduced departmental systems and later packaged applications like MRP and ERP and internet web systems introduced the age of e-commerce, where we started buying books and gadgets online and doing our banking on-line (remember when everything was called e-something). So “re-hosting" our existing apps to (either private or public) clouds is only a very small part of the long term cloud story. Not that next year, as I will address in my upcoming #IT2011 predictions, won’t be a very lucrative year for many vendors - including the one I work for - helping organizations move their existing applications to (hosted or internal) private clouds. Not to mention that 2011 is likely to be the year of the IaaS KillerApp TestDev-clouds, that make test/dev machines (a whopping 70% of the average IT organization’s machine park) available in a much more flexible, economical and ecological way. My college Marv Waschke wrote about this last week as a perfect way to gain experience with private and public cloud scenario’s

But the big long term story in my view is that cloud will be ideal for a generation of new applications. Applications that allow organizations to collaborate with other organizations – so not the now much talked about in-company twitter and facebook clones that enable people to waste as much time at the office as they do at home. Through these new collaboration applications, organizations can take business processes that were traditionally done in house and source them as “as a service”. These processes can vary from bill collecting, invoicing, physical distribution, repair handling and HR to full manufacturing or product design. Having companies be able to specialize and offer these services to many organizations will enable them to achieve massive economies of scale. Note that many of these services which will be largely or completely information/software based. An example: Imagine the efficiencies of one company handling repairs for several large mobile phone manufacturers versus each company having to arrange their repairs themselves. Most phone manufacturers sell through the same resellers, use the same repair centers, source form the same Chinese factories, etc. etc. Hooking these up ones to a central platform used by multiple players can give an enormous platform effect. An early European player in the area is eBuilder.com (who BTW also run a cloud academy, but specific about these business aspects which they call “Cloud Processes for the Value Network”. At their site their head of product marketing also shares a handy list of 10 essential elements to create and run such a next generation cloud service). These types of new generation cloud applications will render efficiencies far beyond any pure IT savings or efficiencies imaginable (see also my earlier entry re. Gitex)

Now you may say that companies have started this move towards specialization and outsourcing of processes already some years ago. And you’re right, but so far they did so often despite of support in IT applications. Thanks to the cloud, IT can now become the big promoter, enabler and catalyst for this. In fact, I came across the scenario of "repair handling as a service" over a decade ago, while introducing XML for a previous employer. But back then the idea of bringing crucial functions outside the firewall and outside the realm of internal IT was just a bit too revolutionary. The fast growing acceptance of cloud computing as a model (often even more on the business side than on the IT side) is rapidly changing this. And to be honest, public cloud may clearly have an advantage over private cloud for such public services, as it is already located outside single companies proverbial firewalls.

PS many links in this one, if you read only one, make it Robin Bloor’s series at Cloud Commons, his havemacwillblog was one of the first IT blogs and this new series shows that experience does count.

*Disclosure: The cloud platform Applogic is a platform by 3Tera, now part of CA Technologies, my employer. DNS Europe spoke at the invitation of CA about their experiences with Applogic at VM World in Kopenhagen.
**CA Technologies is a premier sponsor of Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo and Datacenter Summit.