I am now working at a great company, Datapipe, as VP of Cloud Strategy.   Datapipe has a great team, a great story, and great customers in many different industries that trust Datapipe’s managed services to be there for them 24×7.  I was a happy customer of Datapipe’s for a very long time – before cloud was an industry keyword, Datapipe was my “cloud” when I needed to stand up infrastructure quickly and reliably.

At Datapipe, I’ll be working on the overall cloud product and services strategy, and also working closely with customers on taking advantage of all the options available today to innovate and optimize with enterprise cloud computing.    I am also excited to continue evaluating cloud tooling and platform vendors in the interest of providing value to customers.

I’ll also be posting on the Datapipe official blog and reposting here.  I have much to say, and I want to devote some more time to techcloud.com to continue the conversation about Ruby on Rails, cloud computing, and web  & mobile development.

Thanks

Ed

• This bye honey. Secretary of State feeling call me back bye.
• Yeah, Hi Ed, This is coat and I’m calling from to use. I’ll try to get on the phone to discuss with you. Talk to development services, which would provide for fit, you must on this. I would like to discuss with you when deed in about our company expert. If you could give me a call me ###-###-#### Have a great day. Bye bye.
• Hey Ed, The, P here. Gimme a call. I wanna sell your duties today. Bye.

Case in point, Mike Vizard from IT Business Edge writes that the “Patriot Act May Hamper Cloud Adoption“:

But when it comes to actual corporate data, Massaro is betting that no matter what the economics are, corporate legal departments are going to direct their corporate officers to steer clear of any service that eliminates their ability to keep potential damaging information out of the hands of Federal prosecutors without so much as the nicety of being told what the government might actually be looking for.

The author also assumes that these sorts of National Security Letters are equivalent to someone sneaking in your backdoor, taking a sip of your milk from your kitchen, and not even leaving a thank you note.  However, the NSL’s have been explicity prevented from maintain a gag order, so all a service provider needs to do is notify you of the letter in question and you have the same effective protection as you would if your data was under your mattress.

This would be concerning if it made a difference if your data was on the cloud or not.  What company is going to be able to keep their data from the Federal government under subpoana or other legal device?  I’m not a lawyer, but if I played one on TV I’d take a look at this gem from AIG:

“More love notes from Elias,” Cassano wrote to his subordinates as he forwarded another set of Habayeb questions. “Please go through the same drill of drafting answers . . .”

The Cassano-Habayeb correspondence, along with thousands of other e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, as well as supporting interviews, reveal a company wracked by more division, doubt and turmoil than anyone on the outside realized during those tense months in 2007, a full year before the federal government undertook one of the largest corporate bailouts in U.S. history to prevent AIG’s collapse.

Whoa. I’m reading AIG’s emails. But, I’m pretty sure they weren’t “on the cloud.” How on earth did the Washington Post get these emails if they weren’t on the cloud??

Major cloud utility providers need to continue to publish transparent policies that address specific concerns like this.   However, the reality is that there are a dozen ways for the government, reporters, employees, hackers, and other malicious or benign agents to peruse and expose your data.   The cloud doesn’t guarantee security, but the alternatives also do not.  And as much as I love a good lawyer, they sadly can’t prevent de facto data leakage either.   Only diligence, a sound security policy, and the right mix of vendors, services, and products, can give you the peace of mind that you are doing everything you can to protect your company information.

James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart)
12/2/09 7:21 PM
RT @llangit: RT @mhindsbo: #Azure supports .NET languages, such as C# + VB + Java, PHP, Python and now also Ruby http://tinyurl.com/yfs7cn6

James Urquhart from eWeek reports that Azure is now supporting Ruby on Rails.

This is exciting – you now have a major platform cloud player validating the Ruby platform.

It also shows that Microsoft is starting to behave like a “split company” – the Windows and Server business clearly not holding the web services businesses hostage.    Previous Microsoft endeavors have always had vertical integrity as a goal – Browser, OS, Office, Server, Web.  They are changing.

I’m going to start experimenting with this stuff and report back what I find.

“move idisposable.net to techcloud.com”

The problem was, I’ve been terribly busy building out the cloud products and services practice at LTech.  My two sons are getting bigger.  It’s been hard to blog.  Twitter amused me for a while, but I’ve lost interest in it for day-to-day use.  I wanted to start blogging again and bought this great domain name, techcloud.com, but life happens and got in the way.

Well, the long Thanksgiving weekend, full of turkey, stuffing, and cranberries, has afforded me some time to get the blog into shape.  I have changed the theme around, moved it to a new URL, and set up a bunch of draft posts to write about over the next few weeks.  My goal is to have at least a post a week, but I will probably fall short of that.  In any case, the more feedback I get from people out there on the ‘tubes the more I’ll post.

Anyway, thanks for listening and welcome to the new, improved, TechCloud.

From InformationWeek:

Google partner LTech has already build an application called SharePoint Move for Google Apps using the API to help liberate data, as Google might put it, from SharePoint.

Sharepoint Move is based on the Google Sites APIs.  These types of APIs are what makes the cloud viable.  The best cloud computing platforms have open, easy-to-understand, standards based interfaces for developers, customers, and partners to build upon.

The idea behind Sharepoint move is to help organizations smoothly transition their users to Google Apps.  Many companies have invested a significant amount of time and training on systems like Sharepoint.   Tools that help to ease that transition have value in the cloud product ecosystem today.  We’ll be marketing more tools like this for the Google Apps platform (and other platforms) in the coming months.

From GigaOm (emphasis mine):

“I spoke with founding member Paul Kurtz, partner at Good Harbor Consulting, to get some details on the news — and I was a little surprised by what he had to say. While questions still remain in areas like data retrieval and identity management, Kurtz believes cloud computing is already secure enough to be used by large enterprises for mission-critical tasks. In fact, he thinks there are many security advantages to cloud computing. These include rapid software updates and upgrades, and, depending on the provider, multifactor authentication. It’s the outsourcing of IT operations to a third party that makes execs “swallow hard,” but he notes that even large banks already have run SAS 70 audits and assured themselves they can get what they need from the cloud.”

Good Harbor is led by none other than Richard Clarke. Richard Clarke was the White House Advisor on terrorism, among other prominent security postions.  You know who else ran a little operation called CTU that dealt with this sort of thing?

Or maybe more like Chloe since it sounds like he knows his way around a firewall: he was the Special Advisor to the President for Cyber Security.

And if Chloe says the Cloud is ready, who are we to argue?

From the Vocabulary of Cloud Computing:

The dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand.

A Google search reveals some of the history of the term.  It was coined by Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Services, and then developed by the community to capture the essence of the techniques required to bridge public clouds and private networks.

I think you’ll see more about “cloudbursting” as the enterprise starts to adopt the Cloud.   Web servers, development and test servers, and non-mission critical databases are being connected now.

The connective tissue to cloudburst in a secure fashion, like CohesiveFT‘s VPNcubed, will play an important role in enabling IT administrators to burst outside of their tradtional on-premise or managed service datacenters.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I lived through the dotcom bust – I was a fresh faced developer just starting to get my stride.   I was in the office with too many Aeron chairs in a hip loft with lots of iMac’s and cable lighting.  After the parties ended, when the bottom fell out, there was not much left to do but look around and say “What happened?”  We all moved on, some of us started companies, some went to work for the Web 2.0 giants, some went to the Fortune 500.   For anyone who experienced those wacky days, especially in New York City, the movie August is a trip down memory lane.

Set in the waning days of the dotcom era pre-9/11, August captures glimpses of the reality and promise of that time.  The writer uses some awkward terms (“Click-and mortar”) and the acting and story aren’t particulary interesting.  But the essence of the day is there  – the office set is spot on, as is the CNBC-like interview in the opening scene.  Theres talk of Bezos, option lockups, and Gulfstreams.

Beyond the nostalgia, some of the writing touched a nerve with me as I thought about all of the good ideas (and bad ones) that didn’t quite have the chance to make it because of costs, bandwidth, and lack of existing services.  August was like that glowing orange copy of WIRED Magazine from 1999 that sat on my desk too long – reminding me of how both exciting and futile those days were.   How could we build the next great medium when we had to build for downlevel browsers and 56k dialup?  What can you do when ideas take millions of dollars of hardware and software just to get going?   With the emergence of the Cloud -  the hope and hype of the dotcom days may actually be realized.

The Cloud is pure “e”

The Cloud is freedom. It is unfiltered, immediate, and cheap innovation power.  It’s not just content delivery, storage, CPUs, or memory.   It is boundless rendering farms. It’s supercomputer simulation and modeling for the masses.  It’s world-class software, platforms, and infrastructure to build whatever you want without having to worry about what it might cost you if it doesn’t work out.  Thomas Edison would have been a fan.

In academia, imagine what this access will mean to the next generation of students and professors?  The same kids who are putting up EC2 clusters for C.S. class are going to be in the next doctoral programs at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.  They’ll be working for cloud services and product firms building the next generation of Internet technology.   The physical sciences and social sciences will also benefit from the ability to conduct limitless experiments at extremely low costs.

The government it using it on sites like Whitehouse.gov; and in probably other places that aren’t so public.

For those of us in the private sector we are presented with a unique opportunity to offer new products and services that would be unimaginable just a few years ago because of both costs and technical capabilties.

The economy is accelerating the adoption cycle

The slowing economy is forcing companies to take a look at the Cloud.  It was going to take many more years for the adoption of industrial strength software, platform, and infrastructure in a decent economy.   Without pressure to cut costs, there was little incentive for IT managers to take risk.

But the time has come.  Saving money is more important than sacred cows like email and infrastructure.   I’ve been in a dozen meetings in the past 45 days with CIO’s, CEO’s, and other decision makers at large firms.  They all feel it coming.  The smart money is going to the Cloud – in one form or another.  Who wants to be the CIO or direct report who recommends spending more money on traditional IT without evaluating the cloud?  How many  IT careers are in the making because of shrewd decisions and well executed plans that result in millions of dollars in cost savings?

What Fortune 500 CIO would have said this in 2007?

“Let’s put all of our corporate email and sales and customer data on some network that is located somewhere we don’t know, on hardware we’ve never seen.  We’ll pay them a modest yearly fee, only for the employees actually using it, and we don’t have to spend too much more worrying about it after we make the switch.  By the way, it only takes a few days or weeks to setup, even for tens of thousands of users.  And it works from a $250 netbook, a Blackberry, or a laptop that we never have to install software on.”

Not one.  They couldn’t.  This stuff didn’t exist the way it does now.

But they are saying it now – maybe in not those exact words, but with their wallets. They are saying it at small and large companies alike. The CFO is in charge now and she wants to lower costs and increase productivity.

The enterprise is adopting the Cloud. With software like Google Apps and Salesforce, platforms like AppEnine and Force.com, and infrastructure from Amazon.  There are dozens more promising products and services coming online everyday.

This isn’t going to be easy, but neither is golf or surfing.  There is a community of people working hard to find opportunities and develop this industry despite the slow overall economy.   As a bonus, much of the innovation is happening here in the United States, for as old industries die we need to create new ones for our children and future generations.  The pure “e” of the Cloud will be the catalyst for the next IT revolution.

PS -  Thanks to my friend Eric from Klotnet for lending me the August DVD.