Clouded Issues

When CloudedIssues.com moves home

2012-10-11T13:59:00.003+01:00

First of all, ‘Hi’ & ‘Sorry’. Hi, because I haven’t posted to this blog in a while now, & sorry because of the aforementioned.

A brief update is in order;

I’ve stepped away from LootJunkie (for a variety of reasons), & now curate some new self-created podcasts (Origin:Z RetCon & ‘L90URP’) with a good friend of mine, which also use Tumblr. Tumblr is something I’ve been happily using for my own personal blog (IANBERGIN.COM) for some time now.
Following a love/hate relationship with the Blogspot tool for some time now, I’ve been mulling over moving the Clouded Issues blog to a new home. The ability to manage so many ‘blogs’ from a single point on a platform I love for its non-standard approach meant Tumblr was going to win, & it has.

CloudedIssues.com will now full time live on Tumblr. For historical reasons, I will be leaving the old Blogspot.com site active - but without a domain pointing to it (as alot of historical links reference there). I’ve also managed to copy my posts from that across to this (for completeness & to make sure people have a single reference point).

CloudedIssues.com will continue to contain OpEd/Articles/Blogs from me as & when I see appropriate (I think trying to ensure a regular stream of fresh articles while great, is at this point aspirational - but just wholly impossible - there’s not always something to write about for the purpose of this blog). With that, CloudedIssues.com will also now curate interesting articles with some of my own thoughts around the Cloud Computing space.

If you're reading this & got here via some historical links on some social network or via the Googleverse, you can check out http://cloudedissues.tumblr.com or http://www.cloudedissues.com

- Ian

Episode 23: Cloud will never oust the desktop as Mayor

2012-08-13T17:20:00.001+01:00

Yup. You did just read that on a Cloud professional's blog. And I meant every word of it. And it's true too. The cloud will never replace the 'desktop machine' (or 'localised IT infrastructural assets' for those who want to be pedantic & play along at home!). And before you say it, your friendly neighborhood cloud sales person isn't right. Your friendly neighborhood cloud sales person wants to sell you services, & all the spoils that come their way for making their targets. And they've just read that opening salvo & gotten annoyed by it. Very annoyed.

The cloud is very good at a great deal many things. Sure, it can simplify lots of complicated purchasing into 'consume-on-demand' ICT in nice neat easy-to-use services. Sure it means you're not making CAPEX spends in such an indefinite set of economic & trading circumstances that otherwise kills your ability to be flexible to the market. And sure, it means you can offload some expensive aspects of your requirements to being someone else's problem as a managed service. And they're all very laudable selling points.

But, and this is the biggie - Cloud has become something used BY the desktop. That's right. Cloud is an augmentation to the desktop. Access to cloud services still requires a machine with an OS, with storage to install accessibility software of some sort (browsers, VPN clients, dedicated applications etc.). Even on your mobile devices, you're still dependant on them carrying the traditional 'desktop-architecture' to access your cloud for management or productivity.

And no, desktops in the Cloud isn't the answer. In fact, it's damn near a non-runner. Purely aspirational in-fact. And Why? Much as there are those who are loathe to admit it, Microsoft owns the market when it comes to productivity computing. They also don't allow their Windows desktop licensing to go near ANY form of multi-tenancy solutions for hosted desktops. Sure there's OnLive, but that is a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a giant 'how-in-the-hell' blanket.

Given the cloud as a whole is multi-tenancy, unless Redmond reverses its stance on Windows Desktop licensing, this will never happen save for those few businesses who implement on-site virtualisation, which will be for reasons other than cost-effectiveness, but only at the 500 seats or more space.

And no, it's not realistic to expect or suppose there'll be a shift by everyone to using a Google Chromebook, or even to ClamCase's laptop dock. It's just not going to happen. Nor is it realistic to expect that everyone is going to shift to tablet computing eschewing notebooks or desktop machines. There's too much of our daily computing lives in the world that simply will not transfer to mobile. That is clearly visible in markets such as MMO gaming with 9.1m players of World of Warcraft, or the 1m players of Star Wars: The Old Republic, or high end games such as EVE online. If anything, mobile computing devices are simply companion devices. Yup, I just said that too - you didn't misread.

Tablet machines are great for low-interaction computing needs from wherever you find comfortable - be it on a giant bean bag, at your favorite coffee shop, or your favorite park on that bench in front of the lake with the ducks, or even lazing on your couch. Smart phones are in the exact same boat. But I can tell you that you are not going to knock out your end-of-year accounts on those devices. Sure, there are some who will say "But Ian, I do." And if you're one of those, good for you. But you're in an extreme minority that isn't growing, nor will it.

And the most important fact is that people fear change. People will not willingly give up the security of their disks in lieu of those in the Cloud. Cloud writers/gurus/warriors/evangelists/bloggers/watchers often live in a world which is purely aspirational, not filled with FUD (which is often perpetuated by cloudwashers & marketeers), & where their ideals exist peaceably. It's a mind share that right now in the current climate just cannot be overcome by slick-salesmanship, good marketing or even divine intervention. And historically, it's an easy to prove case also.

The cloud while nothing revolutionary, does have many chops that can help your business. It can become a very good friend to your business. But, the cloud will forever be just a drinking buddy to your 'desktop'. They'll be best friends. They'll get drunk together, sometimes sing some great tunes while getting along famously, other times they'll fight like a pair of rummies & not talk to each other. But, they will become closer & share even more with each other. And, we will all look on like concerned friends, continuing to wonder how it will all end. And the cloud should accept that. So should you. And your friendly neighborhood cloud sales person.

Blog Awards Ireland Nomination

2012-08-13T15:01:00.002+01:00

Yup, that's right. Clouded Issues has been nominated for another award. This time in the category of 'Best Technology Blog' with Blog Awards Ireland . It's nice to see the blog involved in these kind of things. Would it be nice to win? Sure, but it's nice to get it out there to people outside its core readership too.

Yet again, it is the only Cloud Computing blog nominated in its category - much like the Eircom Spiders last year. Fingers crossed - but either way, it'll be a cracking event & a cracking night (this time without the black-tie requirement 8-) )

Episode 22: When the rain from the cloud is just your tears

2012-08-07T10:59:00.000+01:00

The tale of Mat Honan's remotely wiped Apple products has now been committed to the lore of the Internet. But this tale as with any comes with a proviso that has long been the anchor of the 'superhero' story; "With great power comes great responsibility." Our reliance on technology as the super-hero in our modern life has set us up for spectacular falls, akin to any great fallen-hero story-arch.

We have great power in our hands with our smart phones, mobile devices, cloud-enabled hand-held & remote technologies, & yet we wield these powers with little to no real responsibility. Mat Honan originally supposed that his accounts were brute force attacked (something he later retracted), but days later we learn they weren't. He was the victim of social engineering; the attackers rang Apple support, managed to pass through their security protocols due to "Apple's centralised single user account approach."

Blaming Apple is easy, but the fact is we are seeing further centralisation of our online lives with more & more of our accounts & services being linked together via our Twitter, OpenID or Facebook accounts. Each node we link in this way just increases our vulnerability. With security compromises of user databases on the rise, our entire 'digital life' faces compromise from any one of the countless services we interlink.

But that's not even the bigger risk. Publicising information about ourselves in such a carefree manner on social networking sites gives 'hackers' (calling them this when we make it this easy for them denegrates those who are 'real' hackers) less work to do when searching for information to use against us in a social engineering scam, when they wish to target someone.

The real threats as a result of our digitalisation is not our own personal Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Tumblr accounts - the real risk is our employers, & our businesses. As we increase the drive towards BYOD, our personal & business accounts become increasingly intermingled, something Honan discovered when his employer Gizmodo experienced as part of his account compromise, where tweets from Gizmodo were sent by the hacker.

Very few security breaches today are carried out by brute force. Most are the net results of social engineering, or end user stupidity - the breaches of Irish Department of Foreign Affairs systems by people linked to Anonymous earlier this year showed that stupidity really was the over-arching issue, with passwords such as 'Password1', which demonstrated two failures;

A failure culturally within the Department of Foreign Affairs ICT to educate users about the security of ICT systems, & to ensure a clear understanding of the requirement to always operate a 'strong password' policy
A failure of the users themselves to understand that given the sensitivity of information they handle from where they work, that security should always be to the forefront of their thoughts when working within ICT systems

Security breaches are often where 'hacker' opportunism meets 'end user complacency'. I have always maintained that the biggest threat to any business is not external, but at every level inside a business, even more so at executive level. Social Networking as powerful a tool as it is for good to be used by us, can just as easily be turned against us at a moments notice.

To protect you from yourself, there are a few simple steps I would recommend & suggest:

every time you "link" a social media account to another account or app, ask yourself "Am I really happy with this connection being made permanently? What's this company's history on security like?"
If you authorise an app to link to one of your social networking accounts, regularily review that connection - if you don't find yourself using it often, revoke access until it is absolutely needed again - don't leave authorisations blindly open
Who can view your social networking streams? How much information do the reveal about you? Perhaps the only people who should see your streams are those you know, & not the great wide world.
Are your personal passwords themed with your work password choices? If they are, address it immediately.
Do you save passwords in your browsers, or directly in applications? If so, remove them. Then change your passwords.
Is your password comprised of a word with numbers, even with capitals? If so, this is hacker101 from a dictionary list. Even words where letters are replaced with numbers are straight from hacker101; i.e. 'l33t' should ring a bell with most.
Do you use the same password for multiple services? If so, this is a rookie mistake, & often how many online gamers accounts get compromised. Using the same password or variants of over & over is just putting you one step at a time closer to getting burned. Badly.
Ask yourself can anything I reveal or have revealed on my social networking sites help lead someone to one or more of my passwords? If your answer is 'yes' or 'I'm not sure', you've a problem you need to address.

When CloudedIssues.com is overdue an update

2012-07-25T15:30:00.003+01:00

Firstly, I'm going to apologise for my lack of activity on the blog - this has been down to my involvement with the LootJunkie.com project, which has taken a large amount of my time, along with one or two other projects that are currently in development that I really can't speak about until they're a little further along (it kills me to not be able to speak about them - but that's just how it goes). I've a few blog posts for Clouded Issues near completion that I hope to publish up before months end (scouts honor!), & I hope I can return to at the very least one post per month going forward.

Secondly, for those who don't know - I'll be giving a speech at the forthcoming Cloud Summit 2012 event on September 12th in Croke Park Dublin called "When Cloud Meets Copyright" - which will discuss the issues facing the Cloud Computing sector & its customers amidst the ongoing copyright war.

I'd finally like to thank everyone who's been so supportive of the blog, & my other projects -- it means alot!

- Ian

Episode 21: Your legacy in the cloud & your rights (or lack of them)

2012-03-30T22:24:00.000+01:00

As we shift more of our lives onto the Internet, & thus into the Cloud, we commit our lives either unconsciously for some or fully in the knowledge for others to big data, big business & profits for big business. It has long been sci-fi lore that humans would interface with computer systems uploading their vast knowledge & consciousness to cyberspace to 'live forever'.

But we don't. We die. And when we pass on, there's an estate that is disposed of either via a will with an executor etc, or via the granting of a letter of administration. But, our worldly possessions now are not just limited to the contents of our homes, bank accounts etc., we're all actually the rights holders to our information, our likenesses, & our works we publish on the Internet (unless you sign them away like FaceBook's terms & conditions).

For a long time in the 20th century, loved ones left behind photographs, slides, books, journals, diaries, mementos from trips, postcards. In the 21st century we're looking at Flickr albums, FaceBook wall entries, Twitter accounts, FourSquare pins, GMails, & countless other digital footprints from our lives. Even our own hard-drives of photos, movies, & music. The legacy of our lives can now be measured in ones & zeros. And with many of these future legacies, a problem arises; access to them to retrieve & pass on.

To use one of my own examples, when my maternal Grandfather passed in the mid 80's, he left an absolute treasure trove of things; photographs, negatives & slides from his countless travels around the world, some of his books with his notes written in them, some of his naval belongings - many of which today, I treasure greatly.

Zip forward about 25 years, & I look at my own little collection. Up until around 2000, I've a fine collection of photographs & negatives, along with trinkets & some writings from countries, cities & towns I've been from around the world. However, after that I'm seeing lots of digital photographs, my musings/writings are exclusively digital. I've e-mail accounts I've held going back to as far as 1995. I've a fantastic collection of gaming moments across a number of MMO games I've played (and some I continue to play today), along with many other exclusively digital assets.

As I go on in years, these will no doubt increase substantially. And when I inevitably pop my clogs, I will have to ensure I've a list of password details written down somewhere to allow my loved ones retrieve everything. But, what happens if something happened before I had time to plan for this eventuality? Should I already be creating a password safe of sorts? Convention on security would tell you creating one of these is absolutely insane, yet on the flip side, how else would loved ones retrieve everything else? It's not as if they can ask the service providers to hand over the data, as the contracts of use are between me personally & the providers, it's not like financial assets after death that form part of an estate.

Which brings on the more interesting question; while our personal data is recognised in data protection acts as our own, should our personal data now in turn form part of our estate legally? Should there be provisions for this in data protection legislation?

In the UK for example, 'property' when dealing with a dead person's estate is defined as follows:

"'Property' includes houses, real estate generally, shares, antiques, jewellery, works of art, and intangible property such as patents and copyrights."

and according to UK law, access to that property happens as follows:

"If the deceased held property in their sole name, and they left a valid will dealing with the property, the property will usually pass in accordance with the will. If the deceased left no valid will, or a will that did not deal with the property, it is dealt with under the law of intestacy.

If the deceased held property with another person or persons, the deceased's executor or administrator needs to find out how the property was owned. Where the property is a house, there should be written documentary evidence of the type of ownership."

In Ireland, under Ireland's own 1965 Succession Act, property is defined as "includes all property both real and personal", & none of the references seem to make direction to copyrights and or patents. part of the problem globally seems to be the lack of establishment by courts how some one's online services relate to transfer to estates upon their passing. This is not a new issue. It is an issue that has been questioned for a number of years, & a really good example to read is Thomas Scrampton's piece in 2009.

One of the leading writers/speakers on this area is Lillian Edwards, who is currently Professor of e-Governance at Strathclyde University. In mid 2010, she gave a talk at Wolfson College about 'Death & the Web', which raised many interesting statistics. More recently it has again come up for discussion, with Laurence Eastham writing about it for SCL, which was prompted by a press release by UK law firm, Rothera Dawson Solicitors.

And yet, in Ireland as a country pushing forwards as a central player in Digital Europe, apart from us having our cyber security act buried on some civil servants desk now for over a year in the life of this Government, & unimplemented from the last residents of the Government offices, there is no discussion about us moving this important area of legislation, or legislative discussion forward.

It is all well & good to push the agenda of Ireland as a centre of cloud excellence & influence, but if our legislation around data in the cloud continues to be woefully inadequate due to ill informed politicians, civil servants with their own agenda of 'not rocking the boat' & businesses who in general have a poor level of awareness of data protection & their legal requirements/compliance, & a no-one in the legal sector even spotting this is a ball that needs picking up & running with, we are heading for a massive storm amongst our clouds.

As the cloud finds itself becoming part of the discussion on rightsholders & their legal reachs via SOPA/PIPA/ACTA etc - why are we not asking for the rights to our own creations/works/digital assets to remain with us? Surely as the discussion about privacy is front & centre to the Cloud & digital media/social networks, our rights to our own content must become part of that fabric of discussion, & part of the discussion as 'rightsholders' in our own sense.

Episode 20: The dirty business of cleaning the Cloud with SOPA

2012-01-31T15:03:00.000+00:00

SOPA has become the pariah term for the Internet in recent weeks. In the US, mass lobbying from internet users made it more undesirable than a fart in a spacesuit, & that is saying something. However, the day after the January 18th protests, MegaUpload was taken down by the FBI, citing fraud, money laundering, racketeering, & its founders arrested in New Zealand, pending extradition to the US to face those charges.

Over a week later, the FBI is seeking to confiscate all MegaUpload data that was held on US based servers, whether legitimate or not, & the owners of legitimate data have little to no indication if or even when they will have their property returned to them.

In Ireland, a statutory instrument is being sought for implementation by the music industry there under threat of legal action against the state following the unsuccessful suit by EMI Ireland against Internet Service Provider, UPC, where the judgement laid down that instructions to block sites, and or force disconnections of offending users could not be achieved due to a gap in legislation.

That 'gap' in legislation was due to be plugged last week, were it not for a steam-train of lobbying by Irish Internet users in the 'Stop SOPA Ireland' campaign, which raised the alarm to industry, & internet users alike. It also prompted the Irish Internet Service Providers Association to issue a strongly worded letter against the proposed statutory instrument. ALTO, who represent a group of telecoms companies, also set forward their view opposing the change in law in its current form.

The issue with the secondary legislation due to be passed was the vagueness of how it could/would be used, leaving interpretation wide open to the judiciary, no clear indication of how costs of such challenges would be met (or by who), along with even going so far as having such vagueness to possibly effect the likes of Google, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn & others who operate in Ireland, as no clear-cut guarantees could be given to them not coming under threat from it.

All of which led to over 77,000 signatures on a petition against the legislation in its current form, hundreds of thousands of emails to politicians, calls, on street demonstrations & for the first time, having secondary legislation becoming subject to an open debate in parliament chambers.

The intense increase with which such 'seizure' legislation is being sought worldwide completely undermines the viability of Cloud Computing, as the legislation being sought is often extremely on-sided, does not seek to ensure that access to legitimate information is protected while also allowing the wheels of law to engage against infringing data.

Those seeking the legislation (the movie, music & entertainment industries) claim it is needed to protect their business, while caring nothing for the businesses that will be caught in the crossfire, many of whom will be small to medium enterprises, which will not have resources to extricate themselves from the legal salvos on both sides, while their business suffers.

What is worse is the fact that Governments who are trying to stem the bleed of small business failures are doing nothing to recognise this, or recognise the impact on innocent parties. Even the organisations who represent small business seem to turn a blind eye to this, & don't seem to care how they could in fact one morning as a result of some action being taken wake up to find a membership out of business simply because they failed to be informed, step in to seek consultation, & drive for that.

There is a very real threat out there to the Internet & cloud computing. It is not piracy. It is not copyright infringement. It is over-zealous politicians eager to not offend rights-holders who seek legislation that is potentially incredibly damaging to the growth of our now globalised information & knowledge society.

No-one is disputing that copyright infringement is wrong. No-one is disputing that piracy does hurt businesses in some way. However, the ideology of American-esque 'shock-and-awe' to solve this problem is unhelpful, self destructive & damaging, & the Cloud will suffer, as will the industries around it, those who depend on it to try keep businesses afloat so they can move forward.

The destruction of the Cloud at the hands of ill-thought, ill-considered, under-debated & consulted anti-piracy measures that are enacted with iron fists will cost more jobs globally than the issue of piracy itself.

Today in Ireland, as we debate the issue of how such legislation needs to be approached, thought & consulted, a country seen as leaders in the Cloud will find its fate determined by a Minister of State under pressure to save face, save costs from a legal action & keep Ireland out of the spotlight. Unfortunately, his actions to date have ensured there is one on Irish Government buildings today, & the outcome from the chamber debate.

Episode 19: If Prof. Trelawney did 2012 cloud predictions, it would be these.

2011-12-31T20:44:00.001+00:00

2012 is mere hours away. A new business quarter looms, & Irish cloud companies will be gearing up for the traditional January assault on the market. With the last twelve months behind us, & a new year to look forward to, 2012 is the year that will make or break the cloud in Ireland. As such, I've taken a look ahead at what I believe the next 12 months will hold for the cloud computing market.

1. The continued rise & rise of the enterprise app market
With thriving markets for Apple's iOS devices, Android, Google Apps, SalesForce Force.com, & Amazon's App Store already mainstays, 2012 will be the year where AppStores will take off in the enterprise space, providing Cloud services to replace traditionally more expensive pieces of software. This will come from the growing PAAS space, where developers will build out on these platforms. If Google Apps is anything to go by, there will be a big push in this space for enterprise from the big five.

2. PAAS growth
With AppStores taking off, PAAS players will be rubbing their hands gleefully. Long gone are the days of issues over OpenSource VS Microsoft. The real power play is going to be in who provides the better incentives for developers financially. Sure, Google's Android market has more Apps than Apple's, but Apple makes a better payout to developers, & more often. It is also widely acknowledged for having better earning potential for developers. People in the PAAS area turning to the enterprise App market will be aware that having a great App is not enough, enticing people to use your market & make it worth their while will be the key.

3. More mobile & tablet computing
We're starting to see the death of even netbooks with Dell winding their offerings down, & the real focus is on the mobile & tablet computing side of things. With these access points being so focal in the consumer market, it is only natural that adoption in the enterprise area will follow, which will go hand-in-hand with an explosion in the enterprise app market in 2012. The frantic increase in the lawsuits over IP in the tablet/mobile computing space right now across the globe should tell you everything. For the big players, we're at the forefront of the latest technology warfront. Control of the battlefield is essential to how platforms, app stores, developers & the future of the technologies in the enterprise space is at stake.

4. Less Private Cloud discussions
As far as I'm concerned, the debate over private cloud is well & truly over. Private cloud doesn't exist. Call it what it is; virtualised consolidation of private environments. This contentious area of the cloud has been debated ad-infinitim, & has been murked by vendors who were silling these kind of solutions against what are accepted cloud solutions as a means to show a value against what are often cheaper competitive solutions. Private cloud in 2012 will become part of the 'do you remember when' types of discussions, as opposed to constructive parts of discussions about where the cloud goes from 2012.

5. More consumer cloud solutions
Between Google & Amazon's music lockers, iTunes, iCloud, & Microsoft recently announcing they were seeking to bring on more cloud services for their mobile OS users, & Nintendo sneaking an App store under the radar, things are moving at a freight train pace for consumers. Digital Television is finally coming into the fore across Europe, so expect an explosion of cloud-based consumer services for the consumer, including TV-related ones, especially following the US court ruling that TV/movie content uploaded into cloud lockers by consumers is not a violation of copyright law. With Apple rumoured to be releasing a range of televisions in their own unimitable style this year, & With SOPA coming under increasing pressure publically, consumer cloud will continue to be the canary down the mine for Cloud services, which will eventually cross over into the Enterprise.

Episode 18: Did 2011 have a silver lining for the cloud in ireland?

2011-12-31T20:36:00.000+00:00

2011 for the cloud in Ireland was a turning point. At the start of the year, there were but maybe two handfuls of cloud computing service providers in Ireland, & twelve months on, the choice has ballooned, with numerous IAAS & SAAS providers in the market place, pushing forward the commoditisation of the cloud away from preserve specialty services they have been in recent years.

One of the biggest complaints & criticisms levelled at Irish cloud service providers by their customers, even by those in the market space as potential adopters is the inability by those same providers to actually make the services easy to access, in the same way Apple makes its technology intuitive & accessible. They want it easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. They don’t care how it works, or why it works and rightfully so. They don’t need to. It should ‘just work’ right out of the well packaged & marketed box as promised. It’s not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that is in the forefront of the Irish cloud space.

To an extent, 12 months on this is still the case, but as the Cloud pervades further in the consumer space, the innovations from this will drive into the enterprise solutions to address this. This is atypical of how the technology life cycle works. First, things become the preserve of a few innovators at the vanguard with early adopters. Then, the tech is adopted, moulded & shaped to find it's way into the biggest market where real cost-return scales can be achieved, to then eventually become more refined, powerful & resilient at the enterprise level.

Earlier this year, Microsoft & the IDA announced Ireland could become a global centre of excellence for the cloud. And this showed, with Irish Cloud companies taking in investment from VC funds, foreign cloud companies setting up shop here, like EngineYard, Marketo, & Tethras, to name but a few (although this had more to do with a low unchanged Corporate Tax rate than Ireland's output from the cloud to date), the big players like EMC, IBM, HP & Dell furthered their investment in their cloud services from Ireland.

Cork Institute of Technology announced in May that it had under consultation with cloud system heavyweights EMC, VMWare, Cisco, GreenPlum, RSA, & SpringSource, developed a two year programme to allow people to attain an actual qualification specialising in the field of cloud computing, as opposed to say a grouping of certificates from various companies; i.e. Cisco accreditation, VMWare VSP etc. This was heralded as proof of Ireland's ability to reshape & own its identity as a knowledge economy.

2011 was also the year where people realised the true impact of what happens when cloud can & does go wrong. None more so than the outages at Amazon, & the countless security breaches throughout the year. These incidents made news headlines, & had people jittery, reacting over the top, & discussions about how fragile the cloud was were made like they were children's fairytales. This could not have been farther from the truth, but the fallout in the media was plain to see, & not limited to specialist media.

Security, reliability, resiliency & data protection were all constant reoccurring themes. While Ireland was being positioned by its new Government as a Cloud Computing/Digital Gaming/Life Sciences & Clean Tech place to do business.

Ireland itself was not engaging in areas such as helping to tighten up on areas of digital security, following up on EC court rulings about ISP content blocking, or its own Government moving towards cloud adoption the same way some of its European & global counterparts were.

All of this happened against a backdrop of increasing economic depression at home & globally. Ireland asked & got its change of leadership earlier this year, and that leadership by year end despite sound bites, media ramblings, event appearances has still failed to reach out to those in the Irish Cloud market, even despite the announced €5m centre of cloud excellence announced by that same Government.

2012 will require the indigenous cloud computing sector in Ireland to shout to have its voice heard above the noise of foreign multinationals whose first interest is in tax savings they can make here rather than fostering Irish industry to serve itself at home & abroad.

Episode 17: When the cloud goes bust & you're up a river without paddles

2011-12-29T23:34:00.000+00:00

2011 has not been a kind year for Irish business. Five small businesses failed every day this year. 2011 has also seen a huge increase in the number of cloud service companies open for business in Ireland across SAAS/IAAS/PAAS areas. A burning question for many about taking their trip into the cloud is; what happens if my provider goes bust? How do I get my data back?

Browsing through vast majority of the terms & conditions belonging to many cloud services providers operating in the Irish market, there are absolutely no provisions in there about what happens to your data, or how you can access your data in the event your provider of choice goes bust.

When companies are touting for your business to move what are key systems from inside your business into theirs, & there are no provisos for what becomes of access to your data in the event they go into receivership, or go out of business when your business depends on that data, there is a much bigger issue at play.

An oft-quoted comic book theme is that 'with great power comes great responsibility'. This is true, & an even more crucial truth for the Cloud, & something the cloud industry must do to win faith from would-be converts. It is not good enough to say 'but we won't be going bust'. Provide your customers with explicit details of how in the event of the company going out of business what happens to their access, & more importantly than their data. In this current period of time, un-necessary costs to wrangle access to your property as a small business is unhelpful, & undermines any pro-cloud arguments.

Small businesses more than anyone else today cannot afford risk. If you offer a cloud service, you better provide a better form of risk than the data in or on their premises. The 'savings' argument is no longer enough. In a world where assurity carries a greater premium, this must be a tenet for the cloud service provider.

Sure, big cloud companies servicing big business will make sure that in the fine lines of the contracts there's provisions for these kind of what-if's. But, this really has got to also become part & parcel of offerings to small businesses by default, not something they should be paying a premium for, afterall - you are being charged with holding onto their data; which in today's world is the real asset in any business, not the bricks & mortar.

If you are currently being courted by a cloud services company, ask them what their provisions are for access & retrieval of your data from them in the event they go bust, & if these provisions are in the contract or agreement for your services from them. If they're not, I would suggest walking away. Someone's word is no substitute for your business being dead in the water because you can't access your data when you need it.

One thing that we have learned in 2011 is that data capture, analysis & actions arising from those activities is absolutely paramount. Take supermarkets. The data being collected on each shopper is shaping your shopping experience; what special offers get put where, aisle layout, how to drive people through the store to essentials to encourage people to buy more than was intended. We are long past the 'if you build it they will come' routine, & businesses today need access to their data on demand; no delays, no hiccups, no impediments.

So, as you shop around for your cloud service needs, ask your friendly cloud sales rep about contingencies for access & retrieval of your data if they should for any reason 'go bust', & more improtantly, how quickly your data can be exported back to you.

Episode 16: Knock knock. Who's there?

2011-11-16T23:26:00.000+00:00

Security in the cloud. This is the re-occurring theme when the technology conversation turns to cloud computing. Usually that's followed by "Where's my data?" or "Who can get access to my data?" or "Do I have complete control of my own data?" Security in the last twelve months has become the real deal breaker, & issues experienced by a high profile name in the technology world like Sony really made alot of people who have been on the fence about whether to take some of their business critical systems into the Cloud.

Recently, the Ponenmon institute conducted a study that revealed that 67% of the IT professionals questioned admitted that their respective organisations were vulnerable to hackers due to lax firewall security. Scarier was that 42% of those surveyed said that were they breached or attacked, they'd have no way of knowing what was compromised. And it got worse with over half saying they were of the opinion that their staff had no knowledge about the potential risks of open firewall ports.

The full insights of that study would appear shocking to those outside the Cloud Computing industry, but to those in it, it's not, but it also isn't the full story. The study neglects the real root of the issue; good security governance from the desktop upwards in any infrastructure. The truth is, there seems to be a general lack of knowledge about security & the implications of security issues from the receptionist to the CEO, with no-one seemingly taking full responsibility for it. No-one drawing a line in the sand about where the buck truly stops.

People leaving their screens unlocked, downloading software, or opening e-mail attachments without care, providing the opportunity for those out there to re-enact a digital version of the siege of Troy. There's even less of a responsibility taken by those who code websites, or are designers-for-hire. Many don't seem to understand the platforms they are building for, or understand how the applications they design & build for clients work in the cloud.

The issue really comes down to one single fundamental questions; would any of us leave our wallet down for anyone to peruse at will or take? The answer is no, we wouldn't. Data in any business IS the wallet of the company. It has to be given the same reverence, respect & care. Sure, the questions about where your data is, or who has access to it are valid, but the real question any organisation must ask is simple & stark; do WE ourselves treat our data the way we expect our service providers to treat it?

As sure as you could establish a cloud solution with a cloud service provider, then pen test that to within an inch of its life, the more important pen tests need to be done within your own organisation. One of the continually growing areas of access compromise is people taking advantage of social engineering; the process of obtaining information and or access through deceit.

People are still taking calls from people claiming to be from well known technology companies to run pieces of software on their machines, only to later find themselves compromised, exploited and or defrauded. People are still clicking on links in e-mails telling them to log on & confirm passwords. Ask any online gamer how often they've heard of someone getting compromised.

The simple truth of this is, no matter how good the hardware platform is, how good the process is from the service provider, & how good you think your staff is, the real threat to the security of your business comes from within. Your service provider is only as good as your own instructions, your own knowledge & understanding, & your own ideals, & those ideals being kept rigidly.

A degree of suspiciousness, caution & paranoia is not only healthy, but acceptable as well as needed in today's Digital Age. The level of concern about security in the cloud is really to do with business' own insecurity over its own processes, data handling ideals than what the service provider's level of security offers. If you can sleep well at night knowing your wallet is safe, shouldn’t your data in your business be able to feel the same?

Episode 15: The one where Ireland leaves the front door unlocked

2011-11-14T13:21:00.004+00:00

Ireland is at an incredible juncture in its history. Our national debt is of gargantuan proportions, we're in a harsh period of austerity, & the real economy is on the verge of complete collapse with barely any growth, & things are looking to only get worse for the citizens. Our exports however are the only thing that's saving our bacon. Richard Bruton, the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation stated last month in the Dail that "Ireland is well placed to exploit opportunities in new sectors such as Cloud Computing & Digital Gaming, Life Sciences & Clean-tech". He went further to state that "Ireland’s services sector continues to grow & in 2010 accounted for 45.3 per cent of total exports."

One of the growing areas of concern in the tech sector continues to be security. Major gaming hubs from Sony, Nintendo, Enix, Sega Pass, Nintendo & Steam have in recent months come under attack to be compromised, as have Nokia, The Sun, CitiBank to name but a few. When you look through the major gaming names previously mentioned, you realise that these guys are in the top tier of that sector, & with their millions, they got their security totally wrong.

If we're going to engage digital gaming as a means to increase our exports alongside cloud computing, we must place an incredible amount of attention on us having a strategy for cyber security in Ireland. In the area of cloud computing, as each market around the world begins the embrace, the first question is always around security, & it continues to be a question even in further developed cloud computing markets.

Ireland is one of the more mature markets for cloud. The sales penetration levels wouldn't tell you that, but it is much further along over four years later from when Ireland's first indigenous cloud computing provider entered the market. Back then, security was a huge issue, & there was alot of scaremongering about the security of the cloud versus traditional managed or collocated I.T. infrastructure services. So, with the market being more mature & over a hundred cloud computing services providers in Ireland, the tech exports market being so crucial to our economy you'd assume Ireland had a cyber security strategy already in place.

You'd be wrong. According to a question posed by Clare Daly last week to Pat Rabbitte, our Minister for Telecommunications, Energy & National Resources, that framework document doesn't yet even exist. His department are only in the process of developing it for publishing some time in 2012. We're hedging our survival as a country on I.T. services, & the digital economy & we have absolutely no framework as a country on the single biggest threat & concern to that sector?

Coincidentally, my collegue over at CloudBook, Thu Pham, wrote a great article about the concerns of security in the Cloud for SMB's (or, SME's to us in Ireland). While this article does discuss things from a US market standpoint, we're trying to attract US cloud market players to Ireland. So this does provide some viewpoint into what kind of market expectations these players have to work in back home.

Yes, you could revert to type & cast that off as a typically Irish response to a problem, & that it is the same slip-shod approach that was taken to our banking sector; "we'll worry about those problems after the fact." But that's not acceptable. It can't be. If we're spending huge resources on trying to attract direct foreign investment from technology based services companies, positioning Ireland to take advantage of cloud & digital gaming opportunities, this legislation must be of absolute priority.

Four years ago under the previous government, the question was asked about the Irish Governments shift to cloud computing, & the then-Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan stated that only one department had engaged in looking at a virtualisation or cloud computing strategy so far, & that was his own department. It may be of interest to know that Cloud Computing has been part of Dail discussion 37 times since this present administration has come to power. In seven months, that is approximately five times a month without an exclusion on parliamentary breaks. Thirty seven discussions, with no sign or mention of a government strategy for Cloud Computing to address the costs & inefficiencies of the Government I.T. infrastructure.

There has also been no real approach made to the Cloud Computing industry in Ireland by Government. Discussions behind closed doors with the big five about direct foreign investment don't count. They're not the real players. Had the Government made approaches to companies like Hibernia-Evros, Network Recovery (who recently achieved ISO certification on their cloud), SunGard AS Ireland, DigiWeb, DediServe, DEG-Telecity-Redbus (recent merger of Telecity Redbus & DEG), Eircom, or the any of the other players, any of these players would have made alot of PR hay from the opportunity without any hesitation.

There needs to a proper industry working group, which would help understand the size of the Irish Cloud Computing market, its potential value to the Irish economy from service exports, & its potential for growth, market penetration & adoption throughout the business chain. This group needs to work with the department of trade, the department for public finance & expenditure, as well as the department of communications to help it understand what is needed from a national cyber strategy.

Ireland asked & got its change of leadership earlier this year, it is now time that changed leadership acted like leaders, instead of dithering like a deer in the headlights, reach out to those in the Irish Cloud market, reach out to those in the Digital arts markets (gaming/entertainment etc.), form some proper advisory working groups, & get on with helping to make the push behind a group of industries that form the tech sector that helps support our exports to allow us to fix our real economy, or are they going to continue to bet the farm on those who will move at a moments notice for tax & cost sakes premiums?

Episode 14: Happyslapped by a Cloud Marketeer

2011-10-25T20:20:00.000+01:00

Cloud brokers & consultants like to talk alot about 'demistifying the cloud'. There's alot of whitepapers, case studies & cloud blogs on 'what is the cloud'. Marketing people almost soil themselves in delight at the prospects of how much money they can make from some of the cloud sales campaigns they design, complete with resplendent back slapping over well-earned cocktails on a Friday evening after work.

The I.T. industry is getting drunk & high of its own spin & the slap-happy tags of 'As A Service' onto things. But recently, I do believe this merriment has gotten to the stage of 'wasted'. That point of drunkeness where even the smallest task is nigh on impossible. I'm talking about the recent love affair with 'Bring Your Own Data' being slapped on as a marketing tag. Which usually comes now with a side order of 'all you can eat data'. Now sure, 'all you can eat data' is nothing new. Anyone who's worked in telecoms has had this phrase bandied about in meetings, internal memos etc..

But, this was never a phrase much seen in marketing. It would usually appear under 'unlimited data' with an asterisk pointing to small print telling you fair usage limits applied. The actual phrase 'all you can eat data' in the cloud is being used, & being used as its considered 'disruptive' & to make it stand out from the traditional straight-edged I.T./telecoms marketing speak of 'unlimited data'.

Okay, so disruptive marketing in the current I.T. services market is nothing new. But slapping 'Bring Your Own Data' on as a marketing piece frankly just shows both how desperately stupid marketing people are about the cloud, & also how incredibly badly those in the Cloud space have been about educating their customers, & also why the cloud space is so small right now. And this really shows in our nearest trading partner, the UK.

A new survey reveals that the current cloud computing services market for UK SMBs is worth £660m. According to the region-by-region reports done by the British Government that were published in October 2010, the total number of small to medium businesses in the UK is somewhere close to the order of 4.7 million. If you were to just take a pure average on that, the survey shows SME/SMB spend on cloud in the UK is currently valued at approx. £150 per year per small company. That's barely even the cost of a few Google premium mail accounts.

Stupidity such as 'Bring Your Own Data' is not marketing people being smart, or driving business into Cloud companies. In fact, the entire prospect of what the cloud offers, whether it is PAAS/SAAS/IAAS was always based on 'Bring Your Own Data'. It is in fact a fundamental of it. Calling it BYOD is stating the bloody obvious, & fooling no-one.

For example, in an IAAS scenario, you're asking people to bring their own data to your cloud facilities, otherwise they'd be bringing their own hardware & data & it would be classed as colocation. In the scenario of SAAS services, of course they're bringing their own data - whether they are a start-up, OR an established company. The same even goes for PAAS; you're bringing your own data to plug into a platform to generate systems in the cloud.

The marketeers in the Cloud have become too drunk off their own illusions of success that they can slap 'As A Service' on things, found a new cow to milk that upon inspection, even at possibly the biggest cross section of the potential market for Cloud, even just within the UK as an example they've made a cloud market worth roughly the same as the shared hosting market four years ago (i.e. pre recession/global market meltdown).

Success? I think not. Cloud marketeers need to get their heads out of the clouds, back onto a footing of reality, & actually engage with the prospective customers. The excuse of 'people won't pay' doesn't wash. They will. People look for cheap services because there's nothing to make them see beyond the value of the cheap services. And it's really a message that is crucial right now as the world still recovers; LOOK AFTER YOUR CUSTOMERS.

Slick marketing & corny chat-up lines like 'Bring Your Own Data' are like the prawn cocktail; dated, & no-one's really buying them. Return to basics, & bring your customers along with you, & give them the value they will pay for, & get rid of silly marketeers who are damaging the growth potential of the Cloud. You'll save yourself money too in the process that you can spend properly on your customers.

Clouded Issues gets shortlisted for the 2011 Eircom Spiders 'Big Mouth' category award

2011-10-25T11:46:00.000+01:00

Wow, that title is a mouthful - but yes, I am extremely proud to announce that 'Clouded Issues' has been shortlisted for the Big Mouth award at the 2011 Eircom Spiders, & is flying the flag for the Cloud in Ireland at the awards being the only Cloud blog shortlisted. I'd really like to take the time to thank everyone who has been involved in my journey in the cloud who has in effect made the nomination possible, & the people who went out of their way to have me nominated in the first place. I am grateful beyond any words I could ever possibly express for that kind of support.

Episode 13: Where all for one leaves you on your own.

2011-10-17T21:50:00.000+01:00

Consolidation in the Irish datacentre & hosting industry is something that those in it have spoken & written about over the last number of years. In the last number of years in the Irish market, we've seen the likes of Novarra bought by DigiWeb, Register365 bought by Namesco, Hosting365 by SunGard, Aventure by DediServe, & recently, one of the biggest buyouts of DEG by Telecity Redbus.

As is natural in times like this, the merging/buyout of companies competiting by each other is a natural course of evolution in the market. Less competition tends to make alot of people nervous, especially in trying financial times. But then there's others who view these buy-outs as important for securing services held by customers by them not waking up one morning to find their service provider is closed, in administration & their business as a result is in limbo. In the end, in either circumstance, the customer actually loses.

Yes, you read that right. The customer loses. Forget the fact competition evaporates into a consolidated & captive market, the real loss is diversity of solution & redundancy. In Ireland, the managed services industry has been extremely poor at promoting redundancy in solutions. It was common when customers suggested to one of their providers they were seeking an additional back-up, or co-existing solution in another provider's centre to provide some level of redundancy that a provider would put the customer wish first, & a sense of betrayal felt.

For a long time in the Irish market, the customer was not the focus of the business, & that was obvious from the number of failed companies, companies whose customers left in their droves to other providers, & the fact that in the last few years even with so many of the small companies being bought out by bigger companies, the big boys have been totally incapable of dominating the market, & that smaller players have entered & been so successful.

Apart from the frequent criticisms of extremely poor customer care being levelled at some of the big players; horrendous contractual terms, complete inflexibility in the solutions to serve the customer in the way they want & need, horror stories of entire systems not working, & support that just never gives answers, with no real support. Sure, some of these complaints existed before consolidations happened, but afterwards, many have spoken to me of worsening service levels.

But the single biggest complaint many have had is the complete inability due to the sheer myriad of cloud solution platforms used by different service providers meaning people cannot obtain true redundancy. Performance of high-read software systems on many of the virtualisation platforms used has proven hugely problematic for many who have 'been around the houses' in the cloud in Ireland. Moving away from a cloud provider leaving contractual disputes aside proves the most problematic when trying to extract your data to move, or diversify with another provider due to vendor platform lock-in.

Cloud right now in Ireland should be a total no brainer. Traditional services shouldn't stand a chance on the cost argument, or the resilience argument. Cloud providers should be 100% customer focused. The customer is absolutely king right now, but they're not. Ireland yet again continues to prove that customer service in our country is given absolutely little consideration as a factor, along with the customer coming first.

I remember many years ago going into a store to buy a brand new electric guitar, & sure I wasn't parting with two grand for one, it was around 800 to 900 euros for the one I wanted. The first store I went into, I was going to pay the asking price of the model I wanted, & I asked about a case of some kind for it to be thrown in for free (just a simple soft case - they maybe retail for 20 to 25 euros) since it was a mid-range model. I got told in the store that if I bought a Rolls Royce would I expect a garage to be thrown in too?

And sure, you migt read that & think, you can't expect something for nothing. The four other Irish stores that carried the model I wanted gave me the same run-around. At first I thought to myself, maybe I shouldn't expect a garage to be thrown in. Then I said to myself,I'm sure there's someone out there who will. So after a short online search, I found & rang a store in Glasgow, Scotland who not only had the guitar, but were willing to throw in a hard case for free, & ship it for much less than the guitar on its own in a cardboard box here in Ireland. Just to be clear - this wasn't a scale/purchasing power issue. The store was much smaller than the ones we have here in Ireland.

The day after it was delivered, I got a call asking me if I was happy with everything, & was there anything further they could do for me. All this for a guitar I in the end picked up for 670 euros, hard case included. The end result? I have never bought a single guitar here in Ireland after that. In fact, the company I bought from in Glasgow, I've since bought two other guitars from.

Earlier in the year, I went into a very well known store that has pretty much taken over as a guitar megastore in Dublin for another guitar. I was almost laughed out of the store over a discount on a guitar I know they have a huge markup on. The end result, I bought it in from the same store in the UK at a saving of over 300 euros. Again, I received my call the next day thanking me for another purchase & asking me if everything was okay, & even had some on-the-phone support given to me regarding a set-up issue I had with a feature on it.

Consolidation is fine, as long as the efforts on customer service, customer satisfaction & meeting the needs of the customer get concentrated. In Ireland, it's a lesson we still need to learn. Shop around, demand more & don't accept the same-old same-old. It's hard to earn money as a business today. When you go spend, always remember, a fool & his money are easily parted. You cannot afford to be fooled more than once in the Cloud in these times, so keep your feet on the ground while your head is in the clouds.

Episode 12: Carbon in the Cloud & the taxing questions for Ireland

2011-08-10T00:27:00.000+01:00

Ireland has set many of milestones so far with respect to the Cloud. We've our first dedicated cloud computing third level course, our Government has talked about a Cloud Strategy & the importance of Cloud Computing to Ireland, we had Irish businesses bought over by large international companies because of their head start in the Cloud, we've had venture capital companies invest into Cloud computing businesses. Now Ireland's Cloud contributions face something that has been coming for some time, carbon taxes tangibly harming its growth potential.

Ireland however, will not be alone. It's biggest & nearest trading partner also seems set to introduce a carbon tax in its budget later this year. While Ireland has already had an carbon tax in place since our Novermber 2010 budget, it looks set to increase under pressure from our EU/IMF deal, which has already been outlined in a Department of Finance published paper.

In 2007, it was estimated that the I.T. industry as a whole contributed about 2% of the carbon emissions in the world according to a Gartner report. That put it on par with the Aviation industry, which is constantly under-fire from the Green movement on its eco-record. Gartner said the solution was fewer servers, better management of resource consumption, increased virtualisation, & better capacity planning.

In 2007, when Cloud was slowly taking off here in Ireland, that sounded great. It made for compelling sales patter. It made for a great eco-friendly story to sell the cloud with, when the idea of carbon taxes was being introduced. It was a great time to sell the concept of the 'Green Cloud'.

The Green Cloud has been a concept that has existed as long as the idea of Cloud has. Greenpeace however in 2010 showed an example of the real problems that Cloud Computing faces in terms of its environmental impact. It also highlighted that if Cloud Computing is now going to be the driver of the I.T. industry, it must also influence how the energy that is to power it is sourced. Michael Dell in an interview with Forbes Magazine said that "I.T. is the engine of an efficient economy, it can also drive a greener one."

As the demand for Cloud Computing increases, multiple cloud providers have opened for business in Ireland in the last twelve months. Wirtualisation companies have taken off, & gathered in the market. With these will come an increased demand for data centre space. This increasing data centre space requirement will see an increase requirement for the provision of power for the infrastructure, as well as cooling systems, power supply fail safes such as generators (usually diesel) & battery systems. All of these are an eco-warrior's bane. Again, the Greenpeace report looked at the greenhouse gasses development from increase data centre creation, & it wasn't a pretty picture being painted.

It also showed that companies in the U.S. like Google led the way when it came to energy sourced from renewable sources, but Yahoo! was the clear stand-out with nearly one third of its energy used coming from renewable sources.

But how does this affect Ireland? These companies (Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Google, IBM, HP, Intel etc), have invested significantly in the country, provided thousands upon thousands of jobs, & Ireland still is heavily dependent on 'Brown Power' (oil/coal/fossil fuels etc). We still have issues in making better use of freely available resources to us to exploit so we can shift our dependency away from fossil fuels, thereby reducing our energy imports, which would in turn allow us to reverse the role, & become a significant energy exporter.

Each day, almost twenty times our energy needs is washed against our shores & still Ireland procrastinates in the area of renewable energy. Yes, we have a number of wind energy projects. We've one of the highest growth rates for this in the world, but no-where near what could be achieved. This comes down to horrendous planning laws, & poorer administration of our planning system in general. In some instances, wind farms don't get built by their developers unless there is a confirmation of guaranteed connection to the national grid, & the entire development project remains contingent on the fact there is absolutely no guarantee of connection to the grid, which seems foolish.

With Cloud Computing increasing in Ireland as we move forward in being a hub for these services to Europe & the world, our greenhouse gasses & carbon emissions will increase. These increases will become subject to these increased carbon taxes.Costs of these services will increase, hamper their ability to be competitive while other nations have greener power sources, & benefit in the market along with lower unit costs of service delivery. This may leave Ireland missing its place on the Cloud gravy train.

If we are to pursue our national agenda & interests in Cloud Computing, Ireland as a whole must make our energy strategy towards shifting to more renewable energy sources in Ireland an integral component of that framework. Commercially, it would be ideal to have a paradigm shift towards more of the 'free-air-cooling' datacentres like Microsoft's own here in Ireland, or others adopting FaceBook's own recently made-public datacentre & servers model.

The issue of datacentre green credentials & its service platforms 'being green' to grow with this rapidly expanding market is really a small part of an even larger global Cloud issue that Ireland will have to confront head on with its notoriously expensive costs to do business. Lower costs for Cloud services for suppliers & end users is a must to be competitive in what is a global service arena given the nature of the Cloud. The green side of it however is not an issue for tomorrow. It's an issue that should have been resolved earlier this morning. We're now in the afternoon without a comprehensive plan or answers, or idea of a solution with the clock still ticking.

Episode 11: No, the answer is not 'Cloud'.

2011-08-01T23:36:00.000+01:00

In the last week I've had some really interesting conversations about Cloud Computing with some acquaintences of mine. While a good portion focussed on the technical aspects such as the 'true' public cloud, what is perceived as public cloud, & the reality of public cloud actually really being private clouds, there was an aspect of the conversation that kept coming back up; market perception, marketing & of course, those all important sales numbers.

When I think of my own experience in selling cloud solutions to various people whether they were guys starting up a web-based business or cloud-services business, or media companies, or even large multinational businesses who were brave enough to jump into the Cloud, alot of the time the USP was the fact it was 'Cloud' & all that goes with that; scalability, utility resourcing/billing, resiliency etc etc.. That was all fine & good when it was solutions that were going head to head against traditional infrastructure-based solutions.

But, right now we're right at the cusp with a Cloud revolution already underway. The stories of 'I went Cloud, & my business went stratospheric also' while few & far between, do exist. But, we're now at the stage where 'Cloud' is no longer really acceptable as a USP. Nor is the ideal of 'Something-As-A-Service'. Something provided as a 'Cloud' must be a solution that gives a better quality of life as an end result.

A good example of how quality of life is almost of absolute paramount importance is 'Office365'. In Ireland, Microsoft are pushing this like crazy with radio advertisements etc., of how you too can have your office in the Cloud (I realise this is something I covered in a blog in June, but I'll not labour on this point too much). Microsoft Office is the most widely used piece of Officeware right across the Globe whether it's home users, business users or students. In short, it's been a stalwart product for the Redmondians. It does exactly what you need at every level of user from basic to power user alike.

Now, the argument for Office365 is compelling; no longer worry about keeping your office software up-to-date, access your office software & documents anywhere & so on. They tell you front & centre with the marketing it's office in the cloud. Now that's all very well, but how does the quality of life of moving from say a desktop office license to Office365 work for a basic, low end user of Office? The quality of life is practically non-existent if they move to Office365 from a desktop license of Office.

In trying to be clever, Redmond totally missed the point of why Google Docs is successful, & that the Googleplexians have absolutely nothing to fear, & why they are more likely to convert people from desktop versions of Microsoft Office to Google Docs. Microsoft made their product ridiculously difficult to use, totally unintuitive, & giving users as a result a total disimprovement in their quality of life. The pricing model is difficult to get to grips with & small businesses are going to be 'living on a prayer' when it comes to support (online forum support will not make Bob from SmallBusiness Ltd 'feel the love').

It just looks more like Balmer signed off on a project for the sake of it being a Microsoft contribution to the growing Cloud market in a desperate attempt to try keep up with more agile, inspired & user savvy solution providers out there. In essence, cloud for clouds-sake. If big guys like Microsoft are getting this so blatently wrong, then the odds are very rich that smaller companies with an eye on some of the change off the lower end of that big USD$150bn market valuation too are heading for a rude awakening.

I think the example of Microsoft Office365 as 'businesses embracing the cloud' is a really poor example. The numbers of businesses placing their e-mail with Google's G-mail, or people using SalesForce, or the business adoption rates for Apple's iPad & ultimately their use of iTunes' Cloud services are far more telling, but they're not 'sexy stories' that sell magazines, or business news section, or Cloud monthly periodicles online or in paperform.

The truth here really is Cloud in its integration & deployment should be almost anonymous or go un-noticed. That is the absolute true point to & of cloud computing; scaleable, easy deployment without any impact on the end user or them noticing. I mean, yes there are the self-agrandising press-releases of 'Hey, we went cloud, we're awesome & now our customers are awesome too!'. That's par for the course, & shouldn't be mistaken for an indicator for success, or an indication for the existence of a Cloud solution making people's lives better.

For some people Cloud is part of a solution, or not even a solution at all, as the problem with Cloud is that at a certain point in your scaling, the cost becomes absolutely prohibitive, & the technological ability to scale becomes a joint issue of technological & fiscal prohibition. Cloud adoption must be about more than a solution for now to a business, it must be about how it will serve the business now, next week, next month, next year & even in the next five years.

Moving platforms is expensive, costly, is fraught with many things that can hurt your business. If you're trying to shave costs right now, ask yourself what are the costs to get off the platform you're moving to, & what are the lock-ins to your growth using it. Saving cents that ultimately costs you dollars or euros later is not good economy. Do not be bullied into going cloud because the 'sales guy says so'. Sometimes the sales guy just wants to 'A.B.C.' (Always Be Closing), & knows the longer term revenue from you on their platform is more important to him than to your business. Solutions must be the square peg for the square hole, not a sphere that happens to also fit that hole.

Episode 10: Band On The Run?

2011-07-04T09:47:00.001+01:00

People think Cloud is big business now. We're not even at the projected years yet like 2014 where some have estimated it will be worth as much as USD$150bn. There is a growing perception out there amongst executives in business that 'Cloud' is nothing more than a really nice way of saying 'outsourcing' & question its value based off that, which is really the wrong way to view it. But leaving that aside, the other side of the table are the Cloud service providers.

So far in the Cloudiverse, we've:

SAAS - Software As A Service
PAAS - Platform As A Service
IAAS - Infrastructure As A Service
CAAS - Cloud As A Service (granted this is my own term - but still!)

Last week upon my weary travels through the countless number of articles/blogs/opinions/reports I read every day a new term came creeping like a truck hurtling down a mountainside into my view;

Desktop As A Service, or DAAS.

That's right, 'DAAS'. In the late 90's there was a running joke amongst I.T. workers about TLA's (Three Letter Acronymns) & even some went as far as XTLA's (Extended Three Letter Acronymns, which was another humourous way of saying four letter acronymns). In my early days as a support engineer we would try find as many funny TLA's or XTLA's as we could for things during mind-numbing tasks as a way of lightening the mood. A collegue of mine one day introduced me to the term 'PEBKAC error' (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair). Even to this day it brings a wry smile to my face.

But it does over a decade later have me asking, are we getting to the stage again where in order to 'sound' convincing we're confusing the end user with loads of fancy abbreviated terminology? It is bad enough that currently there are so many people out there who from a lay person's stand-point can see how some of these 'Cloud services' can help their businesses. Whether that's to save money, or divesting themselves of capital investment, or just making access to certain systems more global or location neutral. There is a growing problem where despite the fact Cloud companies are sprouting up at the rate Dot Com businsses used to, the market is not being brought along for the ride with it.

There is a sales technique called 'the band wagon effect' where in a bid to try & have your lead buy in to what you're trying to sell them you tell them that their competitor is using your product/service & already benefitting, so they should to. It is a technique done in the hope of assuading fears about how something may be relevant & useful to your business/vertical, while also inserting another fear; the competition having an edge over you as a business.

I get the feeling in amongst this explosion of cloud that people are really trying to be extreme with the 'first to market' ethos & creating as many new 'As A Service' models as possible in a bid to hitch their own wagons to the Cloud band wagon. While no-one can ever deny the fact it's easier than ever to establish a solutions based business to leverage off the Internet, & tag your solution as a 'Cloud' service, there's a temptation for the I.T. industry to 'pig out' on what alot must feel is an 'all you can eat buffet' in the Cloud.

They say unless you learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. The last time there was a feeding frenzy like this it was called the 'Dot Com Bubble', & that burst. Hard. It also took alot of investors with it & alot of VC companies took a real kicking, especially over companies like 'Boo.com'. Yes, you shouold make hay while the sun shines, but considering the global econmy is still recovering, & here in Ireland we are really struggling, the last thing we need is another over-inflated bubble bursting, which may send any recovery or early signs of it straight into a grave.

As someone whose been involved in the Cloud for some time now, it has been very good to me in terms of employment, work, & opportunity. Not to mention the education it has given as well as enthusiasm again for the I.T. service industry. While we all as Cloud warriors, defenders, enthusiasts, developers, founders, evangelists, champions, consultants etc. want to share this with the world, make some bucks too (because this is what it is ultimately about), we must ensure that as chiefs in our tribes bring the tribes along with us, otherwise we're going to be standing there all on our own looking at a very expensive totem pole that everyone else stopped caring about, & sees no relevance in, with a very hefty tab awaiting us, wondering why people 'don't understand' or 'don't get it'.

Episode 9: It's a bird, It's a plane, no it's my office .... in the sky?

2011-06-29T17:23:00.000+01:00

Last week I was at a presentation given by Paul McEvoy from Baker Security (better known as Go Oodles) where it was discussed how the Cloud for business can best be started with by moving the easier officeware into the Cloud. With Go Oodles being Google's premier partner here in Ireland, that for them means helping to get you into Google's GMail system, perhaps even Google Docs, & in the future, for start-up businesses, or even established ones. They will soo be offering Google's Chromebooks, whcih I understand can be leased on a monthly basis.

For a long time, I have been a proponent of businesses keeping I.T. costs low by using alot of Cloud based systems, or internally deploying desktops using older machines with some flavour of Ubuntu, even REALLY old machines usign Kubuntu where the employee in question would only ever be using web-based systems, or simple desktop work such as spreadsheets, or creating the usual familiar documents in the usual suspect formats. I've never been fond of the idea of businesses who are trying to keep costs low splashing out money on brand new desktop hardware, expensive operating systems, or officeware licenses.

I'm even less enthused about the idea of still relying heavily on local storage. So it's pretty clear where my love for the Cloud comes from. In saying that, when Microsoft first broached the idea about creating Office documents online or the user desktop being online, personally - I was unconvinced truth being told. Despite the fact I was involved in Cloud computing at the time, I thought it was another one of those Microsoft-jumping-on-the-bandwagon ideas, much like Zune, which was eaten alive by Apple's iPod in the market.

Even in 2006, Bill Gates knew the value of working online, making sure that he could even work on the move with his tablet PC. In Ireland, we've had a few really attrocious winter seasons due to poor infrastructure management & planning from our authorities, & alot of working days were lost. I myself living amongst the countryside fell victim, but working days were not lost. I was able to work remotely. Even my office phones I had easy access to thanks to some smart VOIP systems.

Even that aside, alot of people around the world don;t work in a central office, & rely on centrally hosted systems to work, or cloud-based systems to work so geographic location doesn't matter. Google themselves said during the ash-cloud travel restrictions in Europe in 2010, they were able to have employees stuck in countries just turn up in Google offices, & log into their own systems from terminals there.

Right now we're in the middle of a recession, & it is said that times like these are the best to start a business as costs are really low. So right now, the idea of a completely cloud-based office makes absolute sense. It's also why companies like Dublin Mail Drop are doing so well in the current climate offering virtual offices to people. Companies can even open up 'international' offices remotely using companies like them. Have a central post-box address, localised contact number, & have sales guys or service guys on the road with laptops/tablets/Chromebooks with 3G access to office systems.

This really does champion the best use of the cloud, & really show a great way forward for alot of start-up businesses, & an even better way fo existing businesses looking at their own overheads etc.. Do you REALLY need an office? Do you REALLY need internal systems? Would it be better to have your small company of people work from home, & if a meeting room is required, take advantage of virtual office services, who often offer meeting room use for hourly costs.

Suddenly when you step back, think about that, the costs to be saved & the absolute control, maintenance, the complete freedom & agility this idea gives to a start-up company who is trying to make it past the first year, so it can hopefully also pass year two & onto the hopefully profitable year three.

If you are a business who right now is wondering how to take advantage of the cloud & are wonering where you can even start, e-mail is your best place to start. After that, looking at things like your accounts packages, or payroll using things like Sage or Big Red Book. Even your CRM software, making use of things like SugarCRM or SalesForce will also move you away from expensive desktop licensing, the need for nightly back-ups of hard-disks for data from these, or versioning issues.

I know of one company who once a week still go around & manually back up a different version of the CRM from each person's dekstop machine & then go through a manual integration process, for a redistribution on a Monday morning. That's just insane when you think about it.

Another example in mind is a business who have a single server in their office for all their data, which has persistent problems & there are online alternatives for their requirements, but won't use them as they & I quote here "won't in any way, shape, or form let our data outside the front door." The server in question also has a single hard drive inside. A manual tape back-up is done every one or two weeks on it. If this company is unable to access that server for an hour, all hell breaks loose & they can & have lost customers due to systems outages.

Strip away alot of the hype, the B.S., the marketing & look at the logic to the Cloud. If businesses in start-up mode are in heavy risk during the first three years, why would you not leverage off systems designed to mitigate risks in multiple areas to give your baby a better chance of survival? If your business is currently at risk, why would you not take all & any precautions to minimise against failure?

The difference right now between staying alive & dying as a business while the economy rights itself, & our politicians tinker with very fine balances is absolutely on a knife edge. Maximising the opportunity while reducing the risks where possible is absolutely crucial. Using things like Google's GMail, or GoogleDocs, or Office365, or Azure, SalesForce, SugarCRM online, SageOne Online, or Big Red Cloud may just save your business not only money, but heartache.

The Cloud allows you to focus on the core of your business, & if you have I.T. staff have them helping to grow & secure your business instead of being fire-stokers. You don't pay I.T. staff to keep the wheels greased, you pay them to help drive your business through better enablement, & management OF that enablement. They are not janitors, & even those who manage I.T. sections of non-I.T. businesses need to understand that & become more pro-active in showing their value to their companies so the full benefits can in turn be passed on to the end customer, who will value any 'wins' they can get amidst their own troubles.

Episode 8: A guy walks into a bar & orders a beer with his Cloud

2011-06-28T18:21:00.001+01:00

I recently had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Go-Oodles at one of the Google offices in Dublin, where I was also introduced to the Chromebook, which is due to hit our shores in July through the guys at Go Oodles. The Chromebook is Google's chosen fighter to enter the ring against Apple's leviathan iPad, which has decimated the competition in the tablet market after initially being scorned by some upon its introduction, & sold like crazy, where you can't even get one in a PC World outlet unless you're there on a Tuesday morning when they get their fresh deliveries of them!

Some have asked why Google are even going down this road considering the spectacular problems facing their Android platform. The issues facing Android are in fact absolutely no fault of Google's, but the poor exposition of Android by handset makers, carriers & what those aforementioned pair have done with their own respective implementations of Android, & also that there's less choice in the way of Apps as a result, as application developers make more money per App from iOS apps than Android ones.

Even in my own experience with my own Android tablet, saw me unable to load a great deal many applications from the official Android Market, because the applications were meant for Android Phones, not tablets. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've actually never used a full unmolested version of Android from Google. Yet I know when I pick up an iOS device; I can have any flavour I want, as long as it's Apple.

But, I'll digress at this point about that as this is not a blog about tablet computing, or Android VS iOS, but how tablet computing is in fact going to lead the march into the cloud, lemming style. While the enterprise is slowly moving into the Cloud, the consumer market is there, front & centre, & the push is persistent, kept simple & enabled by peple like Google, Microsoft, Apple, & Amazon.

Each of these players is involved with some consumer hardware that pushes people with ease into the Cloud & the use of cloud services. I pick up an iPad now, I no longer need a computer to activate it, & I can get straight into the iTunes Cloud to consume as much or as little as I like, & then shove what I want back up into iCloud.

I open up a Chromebook, find a wifi connection, I can work in Google Docs, check my Gmail, & listen to my music up in Amazon's Sound Drive, even watch videos out of YouTube. I can lose my Chromebook, or it break, I can contact Google, or a designated Google partner, & I'm right back there, no data lost, no more 'ah crap, I forgot to back X or Y up!'

Budweiser recently introduced an iPhone app that will track then temperature near where I am & give me cut-price beer in a local bar, or a free drink should it reach a certain temperature. The Cloud is bringing me cheap, or free beer. WOW! If you stood up at a Cloud Computing conference, or talk & made the statement of 'Cloud can even bring free beer to the masses' you would not only be laughed at, but questioned as to whether you yourself perhaps had too much beer.

Within every 'Cloud' company right now there is a drive to push adoption & sales like crazy. Executives are demanding numbers. Sales guys are hitting the market hard & aggressively. In some cases, the numbers are coming up short. Routes to market are being reviewed, messages being tweaked, even the offerings are getting changed, or re-imagined for re-marketing.

The successes in enterprise cloud right now are coming hard & fast in areas of software as a service, like e-mail, officeware or CRM's. These are the real fast quick wins for business consumer and service provider. Large complex migrations are never going to shorten down into exec-friendly boardroom pleasing sales cycles.

People are looking at companies like Google, SalesForce, Marketo, Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Apple & wondering why their Cloud offerings are not beating the paths to revenue like these guys are. These guys defined cloud. They were not only born from it, but pretty much defined it respectively. They fulfill the basic needs immediately, don't require much action in terms of market persuasion for people to beat a path to their door, & allow easy, non-fussy consumption of their services.

When you think of them you don't think 'Cloud service'. You don't find yourself asking 'okay, how does their cloud work'. 'How do I benefit from them?' You don't even find yourself really having to do much thinking at all to be on their cloud. And yet each of these guys despite being very active in the enterprise market, is exponentially more active in the average joe's life.

Countless droves of your every-man or every-woman has a G-mail or Hotmail account. Hundreds of millions of us have Apple iPods, or iPhones, or iPads (indications are a huge number have one or more of these devices or even all three!). Alot of us have bought products via Amazon's store, & alot of use SalesForce at our work. And as for Google, a billion unique visits per month across their services says it all.

Amazon are even in the process of introducing their own low-cost tablet computer, which some seem to think will deliberately be sold at or below cost so they can storm into the market & east into Apple's share, & grab those who are still unconvinced by Apple's pricing. This tablet is also believed to also tie neatly into Amazon's AppStore, Cloud Drive & own online store with ease. Further making the push into cloud via consumer devices.

Episode 7: Hello cloud, I'm a business - who are you?

2011-06-16T22:01:00.003+01:00

Over sixty percent of Irish businesses cited the cost savings as an imperative for cloud adoption in Ireland according to a very recent survey commissioned for Cloud Arena by Seefin Data Management. Now while that may be pretty much par for the course & pretty much part of the standard message of Cloud Computing, others findings from this survey for most Irish cloud companies are of greater concern.

"The biggest challenge is that we need to learn more about Cloud & how it works"

"Inertia & a fear we need to be technically expert"

"Limited knowledge of cloud systems"

These were some of the comments that came back as part of the survey, accompanied by the statistic that over 20% of respondents said that overall understanding of the Cloud within their companies was low & they felt there was a need to educate their staff about the effectiveness of the Cloud. Cloud right now is THE buzzword in I.T., & Irish companies appear to be grasping it quite well when it comes to calling their products 'Cloud', but many of them seem to be very poor at actually using it to present better levels of infrastructural & I.S. cost economics to their business.

The comments about education are in some-ways almost a catch-22. For alot of these companies, if you were to suggest to them that to better educate their staff on the benefits/effectiveness that some form of training needed to be invested in, red flags would appear & a look of panic would befall the CFO in the business. There is also the flip side that in some of these companies that they continue to used aged technology because 'it's what they know', & no matter how great a new piece of tech might be for the business, there may be that I.T. manager who will find a way to shoot it down because it means he/she has to re-train, re-learn new things.

There is a perception that people who work in I.T. always want to learn the newest technologies, always keen to be dynamic, motivated to get to 'play' with new things. This is not always the case. People who work at the cutting edge will always remain there. People who work with older technology, from my own experience have generally tended to stay there, age with the tech they oversee & go through the motions to pick up the paycheck.

Another issue with the cloud is the absolute muddy-ness of the term itself. For companies who are trying to understand how they can harness the cost savings Cloud purports, tell them there's IAAS, PAAS & SAAS & their heads auto-explode instantly. This also is in line with the comments from the Cloud Arena survey of "Inertia & a fear we need to be technically expert".

The muddy-ness doesn;t end there. There's companies who are engaging in re branding services as 'Cloud' for a cash-in, who won't be challenged on it by their industry peers. The entire idea of Cloud following the spectacular collapse of the global economy has helped increase the buy & sell opportunities for cloud off the back of 'cloud saves you money' will not be placed in jeopardy by any kind of internal squabbles in the industry over whose products/services are/are not Cloud, or the industry self-examining. There are some minor indications of this where you'll often see some IAAS providers use statements like 'we are true cloud', but won't then follow-up by saying what is 'not cloud'.

How is any of this supposed to help get those who want to actually help their businesses engage in some obvious wins for their business in terms of costs, redundancy gains, & provider diversity to secure their business futures? It doesn't. All it does is prolong the sales cycles for cloud service providers, leave the issues facing buyers completely unaddressed & ultimately see the industry around the Cloud self-sabotage the opportunities. If you want passengers on your ship, you need to give them clear reasons to come aboard & stay - the idea of 'saves you money' or 'a great deal' is not enough anymore. There has to be an absolutely crystal clear value proposition that is plain as day, as money & credit even more so, is hard to come by these days. Pennies are being watched like they are large denomination notes.

Clarity & transparency about the cloud in the way the bottom part of the cloud food chain needs it to be to give full end-to-end adaptation, & growth I fear will be procrastinated upon the same way migration to IPV6 has been done. I remember discussing about migration & implementation of IPV6 over 6 years ago with some acquaintances of mine who were senior network engineers, & in recent conversations with them, they said they still hadn't moved into IPV6 because there was an argument about cost & the benefits still going on despite the imminent day zero scenario approaching.

Right now, as much as Cloud is the meal ticket for the technology industry, & those who leverage off it heavily to in turn provide services/businesses using it, even the lack of interoperability between various cloud systems/services/products is something that the industry itself won't address because there is too much at stake. It is pretty much an unspoken state of 'hold-fire' that in the near future will come to a crunch-time the same way IPV4 has. All this does is continue to leave the Cloud as an aspiration that people who want it will never reach, much like the white fluffy counterparts in the sky.

Episode 6: The one where the cloud went to school

2011-06-07T07:38:00.000+01:00

The I.T. industry in Ireland has a near-100% employment rate right now, yet there are so many jobs are out there being advertised that have few takers. A growing area in the jobs market is the search for cloud-savvy employees.

Recruitment agencies are scouring LinkedIn for people with 'cloud' experience. Anyone with 'cloud' in their details is getting contacted several times a week for opportunities from various recruiters up and down the country, and if you're lucky, one or two from further afield. My LinkedIn inbox for the last month has been brimming with contacts from various recruiters wanting to talk to me about cloud opportunities, because I am listed as someone who has worked in the sector.

One thing that struck me was that many of these recruiters didn'tt seem to even understand the concept of cloud themselves, or that there are sectors within the cloud such as IaaS, SaaS and PaaS. The perception placed in the media about cloud also doesn't make any real distinction. I recently had the pleasure of being invited to a chamber of commerce B2B meeting, and despite cloud being a relevant buzzword and hyped as the saviour of our woes, many came to me afterwards and admitted that they still didn't know what the cloud was. In many encounters with people interested in the cloud, the same sentiment was often expressed; 'what exactly is the cloud?'

Enter Cork Institute of Technology (CIT). It was announced on Tuesday that CIT had, under consultation with cloud system heavyweights EMC, VMWare, Cisco, GreenPlum, RSA, and SpringSource, developed a two year programme (which I am assuming is a national certificate course based on length and it being CIT) to allow people to attain an actual qualification specialising in the field of cloud computing, as opposed to say a grouping of certificates from various companies; i.e. Cisco accreditation, VMWare VSP etc.

Recruiters up and down the country, along with people seeking to see if they can join the cloud-train professionally, will have welcomed this announcement, just like the political bandwagon-jumpers who instantly latched themselves onto it.

Some people viewed this pairing of the IT industry and third level education as a first step towards Ireland building our much touted 'knowledge economy'. But like many things in Ireland within our education system, we're late adopters. A school in Mayo recently announced the option of children using iPads instead of books. This has been done since the iPad turned up in the U.S. in some school districts there.

To give an example closer to home-fields, heavy industry involvement in education has been done for several years successfully in Sweden, home to the ultimate award in educational fields; the Nobel prize. Academia is taken very seriously there, and for years its academic leanings have been treated like a business sector; being innovative, very closely tied to business to deliver the kinds of graduates businesses really need, and all courses are constructed and operated with rigorous quality control.

Sweden also heavily subsidises it's third level education programme to the point where even foreign students can go and study almost for free, so they offer the best courses at all levels to ensure they have the best people educated in the best way to better serve Swedish industry needs regardless of industry.
For too long in Ireland the IT courses have served the IT industry poorly.
Our education system must come to meet with the people investing in our country if they are to stay in our country. It cannot be left to these large multinationals to train people in skills they should already have while trying to grow their businesses – it's just not viable, especially given the speed IT moves at.

The flip side of this is Irish IT businesses are generally extremely poor at up-skilling, providing training and bringing people along in their education through their professional career. Yes, some request you keep your Cisco certification up-to-date, or your MSCE in-date, but in general they're not pro-active about training staff or doing in-house uptraining. Large U.S. Multinationals in general are almost obsessive about this, and understand the value of training their people, keeping their education in their field refreshed, and actively investing in their staff's educational needs.

Once upon a time, biotechnology was hailed as the next big thing and the hype failed to deliver in Ireland from a few years ago when it was billed as 'the next big thing to generate thousands of jobs' that ultimately never materialised. Is this course welcome? Yes it is. Is it overdue? Very much so. The real test will be what it delivers, what the uptake is, and whether it actually delivers value to businesses outside its progenitors.

Episode 5: Cloudy with a chance for goofballs & legal headaches.

2011-05-04T11:06:00.002+01:00

Cloud. Security. Two words consumers of the cloud want together, side by side. Hand in hand. In the early days of the cloud, it was the easiest card to pull to deter people from moving to the cloud. To some degree, it's less of an issue with the normalisation of 'cloud' (or is that rebranding of existing systems as cloud, another debate for another day) into every-day Internet services such as Google GMail, Apple iTunes, SalesForce, MSN Hotmail, & the countless other software-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service interactions we consume online.

And yet, a study released last week by the Ponemon Institute in conjunction with CA Technologies shows that in Europe 35% of I.T. professionals strongly agreed or agreed that I.T. leaders in their organisations are concerned about the security of cloud computing resources that is provided to their customers. That is utterly incredible. Not to mention utterly irresponsible. In the U.S. this figure was even lower at 23%. (To see a breakdown on the sampling, click here).

Even on the face of this set of statistics alone, in Europe a little over a third of people tasked with setting the I.T. agenda in businesses that deploy cloud services care about the security of use to be extended to their own customers. Some people when presented with this would be horrified & retreat further from ever going near the cloud.

What is scarier again is that in Europe, approx. 46% of cloud service providers think that security is important when it comes to their operations & how they handle data, & the study went further to then suppose that security is not part of the reason people use their cloud services.

So, almost half the cloud providers in Europe have a complete disregard for the security of your personal data & assume because as a customer you don't state it up front, & the biggest reason to move to the cloud for people is to reduce cost, it's something they should disregard. Now, there's a train of thought (and legally bound via the Data Protection Act) here that says that as the owner of a business, you are ultimately responsible for the security of your customer information; i.e. credit cards, customer details etc.. This goes for the customer using Cloud services to enable their business, & also the cloud service provider.

Want the truly scary statistics? In a combined result of U.S. & European cloud providers just 37% responded they were either confident or very confident they could identify & authenticate users before granting access to services/data/systems, while 81% of that same sample said they were also confident or very confident they provided access to highly qualified I.T. security personnel.

81% said they can provide access to highly qualified I.T. personnel, yet those same people are only 37% confident in an absolute fundamental of security, leaving I.T. aside - access control; making sure the right people are able to access a resource & keeping the wrong people out. That is not only mind-blowing, but nothing short of disgraceful. Whatever about maintaining up-time, or performance, controlling access to the data of god knows how many people's personal information should at all times be paramount to absolutely everything else. There should be NOTHING more important than rigid controls on that aspect. Losing people's personal data through poor access control is the equivalent to leaving your house unlocked or unsecured.

I could go into further shocking details or summaries from the report, but I've linked it earlier in the article, & will close instead on the real crux of what I'm trying to get at here with these revelations.

You start an Internet business. It's great because you can keep costs down unlike a traditional bricks & mortar business. You can get up & running fast, & buy 'expertise' to do so relatively cheap & from around the world. And that's great, but there's one absolutely fundamental question you should always ask yourself;

"If this was a business on the high street, what considerations would I be giving to security, insurance & risk?"

The recent breaches with Sony should bear enough testament to how much furore, unwanted media attention & pending legal action in the U.S. & Europe they have brought down upon themselves over the breaches of approx. 77 million PSN users. Sony is also being investigated in Ireland by the Data Protection Commissioner over the incidents that affected Irish PSN users. Lets us not forgot the incidents in Ireland in recent times, two high-profile ones being the Irish Blood Transfusion Services, & Bord Gais .

Data protection breaches are bad for business, & will earn you as a business a very uncomfortable conversation with the Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland, who in recent years following high profile incidents has taken a shine to dispensing costly fines to businesses. A good blog post by ICS IT Law was written a little over a year ago on this topic, which provides a compelling further exploration on this topic. If as a business you are unsure about data protection, or the levels of data protection exercised by your cloud service provider, please read the information at this link from the Irish Data Protection Commisioner.

Episode 4: The Day The Cloud Crashed & People Lost Their Minds

2011-04-22T13:24:00.000+01:00

February 20th 2011 will be a date that cloud commentators, cloud zealots & the opportunists in the cloud will make sure is not forgotten. Amazon AWS had a colossal outage. This article from the BBC exemplifies the kind of coverage that went along with the event. Needless to say, alot of people directly affected as customers of AWS were miffed, as were users of those services hosted there in the affected area. And no, SkyNet did not begin its take-over starting with AWS for those who were concerned.

First off, one thing really needs clarifying about this event, as the reaction in social media circles, especially amongst twitterati was grossly out of of proportion. The reality of this is that a SINGLE region in Amazon's network was down. The rest of their services in the USA were fine, as were their European & their Asian services. The fact that the affected region services so many companies made the issue seem far greater than it was. Amazon AWS customers who engaged in deploying their cloud strategy across multiple regions in Amazon's EC2 system were completely unaffected.

The fact it went on for over ten hours yes is a concern. And rightfully so. But, did it violate Amazon AWS's 99.95% SLA which allows for '4 hours per year of downtime'? Nope. Not even in the slightest, even with their 10 hours of being unavailable to people who were screaming over lack of access to key services. But, screaming doesn't get around SLA's you agree to for services you take, or use. Always check the warranty.

And this is the real thing to remember; the fine print of your SLA's or terms & conditions of service are the last word in any comeback you have. Cloud Providers trying to win business from AWS to their own services around the world, especially in Ireland cried foul. What they neglected to tell those same Irish companies they were trying to win business from as a result of the outage was that their own SLA's & guarantees are in fact absolutely no better than Amazon's ones. In fact, some of them have in their terms & conditions that you have absolutely no comeback whatsoever in the event of an outage, & there are no guarantees on up-time at all, even at centre power/connectivity level, which some at least provide.

The companies who promote their uptime & their 'solid SLAs' if you dig into them are actually nothing more than guarantees against power & network connectivity to an actual hosting center itself, & unless both those fail for more than four hours in a year, you could lose access to your VPS or cloud for days on end due to a hardware, or virtualisation or internal networking issue & they would still not have violated their SLA with you.

Beware of service providers who are eager to bash the performance of their competitors openly. They'll mouth off quite happily about others lack of 'service', while at the same time not being so mouthy about what happens when (not a case of 'if' with technology, but 'when') their services fail on you. And believe me they will. If multi-billion dollar global companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple & others have outages, your local provider who is less equipped staff-wise, financially & technically to be as able to deal with outages as efficiently as those corporations who have vast resources in all areas. It is also important to remember a very old adage when it comes to this, empty vessels make the most noise.

So, you're a company looking to engage a cloud strategy because you can see the benefits, but are scared by what happened with Amazon AWS from what you read on blogs & Twitter. You don't know what to do next. Firstly, the most important thing to do is ignore Twitter & the blogs decrying AWS. These are but a noisy few out of millions. Many of them are vested interests & vested interests should be ignored like the plague.

A good cloud service provider will be upfront with you when you engage them. They should be knowledgable enough to work with you in understanding your requirements, explain what risks there are to what you want to achieve, & provide advice on how to mitigate against the risks to what you want to do. Sure they're there to sell you services & gain your custom, but a good consultant will tell you that they are & should only be part of a solution to you. That as good as the company they represent may be, risk should always be spread.

Every company involved in risk management as a business will tell you that the absolute fundamental to risk management is spreading that risk around in a controlled manner to shore up your mitigation. Mitigating risk is not cheap. So don't fall for companies promising you to be the 'cheapest solution for your business' - they're not. They are if anything given their pricing, a small part of a solution to you. You also need to ensure that you have a communications plan in place in the event of any outages, as well as documented & tested internal procedures on how your teams & staff need to act, & what events need to be triggered if any to mitigate the circumstances or ease them as much as possible.

But this issue goes outside your cloud provider. It comes down to your choice in developer also. Your developer if they are worth their salt should have an application that allows for spread, that allows for redundancy. They should also be advising you to spread your system across at least two providers or two centers at the very least if your single provider can actually do this. Your cloud provider really should even do this. Single cloud services are single points of failure.

And the issue of disaster recovery or planning doesn't even stop at the developer or the service provider. You, as the business owner/operator leading your organisation are the absolute linchpin of it all. Fundamentally, being a good leader means being a good planner. As a leader of yours, it is incumbent upon you to plan, & plan well & properly.

'The Cloud' is not a solution to redundancy, or disaster recovery. It is a tool to help mitigate some aspects of risk at best in a cost effective manner for its part. It should never be the case of "Oh, it's in the cloud, no need to worry or care. It's taken care of already by my cloud provider." Just because it's easy to set up a business in the internet space, doesn't mean normal conventions for business disaster recovery, or 'battle-stations' planning doesn't apply. The fundamentals of good business planning apply to the Internet as much as the high-street. Most of the time, it's just cheaper. Shortcuts on these areas are just that, except to one day being caught proverbially with your pants around your ankles.

Remember; a blip in the operation of your business from an outage won't kill your business, but how you manage that blip, communicate & work towards the point of restoration will determine whether your business will recover when it happens. Another couple of adages worth closing this blogpost with is 'plan for the worst, hope for the best', 'expect the unexpected' & 'if you want peace, prepare for war'.

Episode 3: The one where the the story of the cloud in Ireland was told

2011-04-19T15:20:00.003+01:00

In the last four years, clouds in Ireland have represented three distinct things to the Irish people; our freakish & severe weather pattern changes wreaking havoc & causing hundreds of millions of euros in insurance claims, the dark clouds of national economic & personal depression from our financial issues, which have since placed Ireland at the centre of the world’s gaze, & the third kind being the latest buzzword in I.T., ‘Cloud Computing’, which coincidentally was heavily influenced by those aforementioned fiscal issues. Business costs being driven down were becoming part of the fight-for-survival, & traditional I.T services models or owning hardware was no longer part of the business plans for some companies, for who cloud was a solution turning traditional capital costs (CAPEX) into more economic, budgeted operational spend (OPEX).

The economic factors by their very existence and effect on Irish businesses has proven influential in the story of the cloud in Ireland, and its growth to Ireland becoming a ‘Global Cloud Computing Centre of Excellence’ according a report commissioned by Microsoft & the IDA (the Industrial Development Agency - who are responsible for the attraction and development of foreign investment in Ireland). [ link to report http://www.idaireland.com/news-media/publications/library-publications/external-publications/Cloud%20Computing.pdf ] A view that also conforms with the recently produced programme for Government [ link to Programme for Government 2011 http://www.finegael.ie/upload/ProgrammeforGovernmentFinal.pdf ] from the recently elected National Unity Government of Fine Gael [link http://www.finegael.ie ] & the Irish Labour party [link: http://www.labour.ie ]

To firstly put some perspective on where the cloud in Ireland currently stands say against the USA, a recent comparison of cloud adoption rates between Ireland and the USA suggested that the IAAS aspect of cloud services (infrastructure as a service - for those not ‘down’ with the cool tech kids) is getting a far better adaptation rate in the USA than in Ireland, while SAAS (software as a service - think SalesForce, Apple iTunes’ Appstore etc.) had a better adoption rate in Ireland than IAAS. IAAS in Ireland still has some levels of mistrust, and as a result the cloud in Ireland to date has never really been driven by big business demands, or the major global players in the same way it has in the USA.

Cloud’s adoption in Ireland has traditionally been led by the development community, who when working on new web-based projects for small Irish start-ups had seen them place those projects live in the cloud, as shared hosting had proved itself unreliable despite being cheap, and that dedicated servers had become expensive, but again seen as unreliable in against ‘the cloud’.

The Irish development community, through its early use of Amazon’s web services, demanded cloud services in Ireland. The Irish hosting companies, who were either running out of space, available power and/or access to land to build data-centers (as the cost of land in Ireland went out of control - [ link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble ] ), or even those who saw the potential for small scale virtual private servers, began slowly answering the call.

The charge with providing cloud services in Ireland has been blazed by Irish hosting companies, and has since spawned a new breed of cloud-centric service providers who provide ‘cloud-only’ services, supplying best-in-class cloud services without the noose of aged legacy infrastructures and services to support. One such company is Dublin based Digital Mines, the brain-child of Ed Byrne. Byrne was part of the senior management team who early last year sold Hosting365, once one of the mainstays of the Irish shared hosting scene, to U.S disaster recovery company SunGard.

Digital Mines (www.DigitalMines.com), founded in 2010, recently shot into the news after closing €750,000 in first round funding via Enterprise Ireland and Delta Partners [ link: http://blog.digitalmines.com/2011/03/digital-mines-receives-e750000-investment/ ], a venture capital fund. Considering the difficulty Irish businesses in general have continued to express over the last three years since the global economy imploded, i.e. obtaining loans, funding, credit etc., this kind of investment not only shows the strength of the cloud for economic hope in Ireland, but that experienced Irish cloud professionals are leading the way, getting their message heard and more importantly, playing their part in the cloud fulfilling its potential and economic role in the Irish and European markets.

Digital Mines, as an example, set out on the path of innovating beyond the traditional euro-spend-sink of buying hardware, building a data-center and the whole traditional go-crazy capital investment infrastructure spend by instead leveraging off existing world-class leading infrastructure from Amazon’s AWS [ link: http://aws.amazon.com ]. Amazon’s lead in this area is best put in perspective by the fact each day they add the equivalent compute power & services to power Amazon.com in the year 2000, which then was a USD$2.8 billion business. It is hard to imagine there is anyone else globally implementing that much infrastructure for cloud on a daily basis, let alone in the Irish market.

Digital Mines’ team with overfour years experience of building out cloud services, combined with a similarily experienced cloud sales team, no legacy infrastructure or service issues, or capital investments, Digital Mines set about creating a best-in-class, business friendly management console that plugs into AWS, which operates from multiple, diverse cloud centres in Ireland, which are the centrepiece for Amazon’s European cloud strategy. Again, a demonstration of Ireland’s importance role in the European cloud story to date and for the future.

The recent Microsoft and IDA study in Ireland, which was conducted by Goodbody Economic Consultants, while highlighting and acknowledging the importance of the cloud for Ireland, failed to highlight the opportunities and the levels of innovation it has already spawned. It also failed to demonstrate the issues the market in Ireland faces to meet the potential it envisions and aspires to, which are concerns that could apply to the potential for the European market growth for cloud.

Many cloud companies in Ireland (and across the world) have learned along the way that the awareness of cloud computing among both business and technical users is quite high, but that they come at it from different perspectives. Most interesting is that while awareness of the cloud is high, the actual understanding of how to apply it within a business is not. As a result, most businesses have not taken advantage of cloud services to date. Obviously this is a huge opportunity with awareness and appetite being very high, but expertise and understanding lacking.

For example, IAAS cloud providers in the Irish market have in recent years tended to take a very hands-off, business unfriendly ‘we-provide-infrastructure-only-with-service-level-agreements’ approach. This has proven to be one of those barriers to adoption of cloud in Ireland, and indeed an example of bad experiences some early cloud adopters faced, which has in fact turned some of them off the cloud, and back into traditional frameworks such as colocation (where a company buys server hardware and places them in a third party data-centre for power, security, cooling and connectivity), dedicated servers (IAAS), or shared hosting (a no-frills, no guarantees, inexpensive, generally insecure form of web hosting). Cloud, where it was supposed to be a solution, suddenly became a problem for some of these users.

One of the biggest complaints (and indeed criticisms) levelled at Irish cloud service providers by their customers, and even by those in the market space as potential adopters is the inability by those same providers to actually make the services easy to access, in the same way Apple makes its technology intuitive and accessible; they want it easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. They don’t care how it works, or why it works and rightfully so. They don’t need to. It should ‘just work’ right out of the well packaged and marketed box as promised. It’s not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that is in the forefront of the Irish cloud space.

Too often a start-up (usually the most common adopter in Ireland of cloud services) approaches a cloud service provider for a solution, only to be told the solution they want is a problem, as opposed to the provider having the solution to the prospect’s problems. Often the prospective cloud customer must rejig their needs to fit into the provider’s expensive monthly template.

I personally experienced from a particular hyper-visor supplier’s seminar last year a presentation about the benefits of this cloud platform solution to the service provider in maximising return and revenue, with very little if no emphasis on the benefits for the end user, who it ultimately must serve and be attractive to want to acquire services on. The perception presented was that ‘it was cloud and it will sell itself and to make hay while the sun shines’.

And yet in spite of these kind of issues, the cloud in Ireland has had a large number of successes, which those in the industry know exist, but won’t discuss, or are afraid to share. As a result, success stories in the cloud in Ireland to date have been given minimum coverage, despite the current hype.

If the cloud in Ireland is to grow in line with that hype, genuine use cases and indeed, more cloud-based businesses must be encouraged to come on stream, innovate and ultimately be a leading part of the ‘smart economy’ Ireland’s politicians have waxed so lyrically about during countless media interview sound-bytes.

While the Goodbody Economic Consultants report rightly indicated the level of hype for cloud in Ireland, and the many job possibilities, it really failed to highlight what the opportunities were, or indeed explain the Cloud in any detail to help drive the point home and to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, which has driven the cloud in Ireland to date.

Yes, it has garnered further awareness and excitement, as well as help ignite sparks of hope for jobs in the smart economy, but the example of Ireland’s fervor for ‘hype and excitement’ in property in the early part of this decade did it no favours. The fervor for this must have follow through. It must be purposeful, and not turn into the same level of emptiness that the property boom did in Ireland. Cloud in Ireland, or anywhere else must be about working smarter to gain better results as we face into an uncertain set of economic circumstances that our previous ideas about IT enabling business had alluded to.

The cloud and it’s strategy in Ireland now needs the Irish Government, arm in arm with its global commercial links and partners to work together to ensure that it nurtures this space adequately and appropriately. That it actively encourages the lead Ireland’s native cloud industry has taken thus far, and supports the jobs it has, can and will create in the future. It is with this impetus that it can contribute to the economic recovery in Ireland, and across Europe, with an excitement and energy that we all need; one that is found in abundance within those same cloud companies daily.