Next Generation IT by Ian McDonald

Cloud computing and location of data

2012-01-23T10:17:00.001Z

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer so this is not legal advice, and these views do not represent my employer's views either.

One of the big elephants in the room with cloud computing is the location of data. People are naturally worried about whether their data is accessible by others or not. Some providers will tell you the location of the data, some will not. There are also the issues of the Patriot Act and safe harbour when interaction with technology providers across the Atlantic.

The Patriot Act requires a US based corporation to hand over data to the government and they do not have to disclose it to the end customer either if they are service provider. As far as I can understand you are not protected any further even if the data is in the EU or another region. The defining requirement is whether they are a US based company.

One thing that is mentioned often is safe harbour. Basically what safe harbour means is that the US based provider will adhere to the same standards as the EU requires. This is because US data protection is basically non-existent. The safe harbour provisions does NOT mean your data will reside in the EU, it just means that it will be protected to the same standard as the EU.

Of course none of this matters if you work for a global corporation headquartered in the USA anyway as then you are required to hand data over to the government if requested under the Patriot Act as I read it. The difference is, whether you know whether the government is accessing your data. The government could request your data from you, but may not need to if they go to your cloud supplier who is also a US based corporation.

It is common sense that if you have sensitive data that you encrypt it, whether you store it in the cloud or on premises. This is especially important for data such as customer or employee data that would cause damage - either real financial loss or damage to reputation.

I believe that there will be a rise in cloud encryption services e.g. GPG type plugins for Gmail. Already Amazon has a service for S3 called Server-Side Encryption. With this service you give your private keys to Amazon to seamlessly encrypt/decrypt data on the fly. However what this means is that Amazon could give your encrypted data to the US government without your knowledge even the Patriot Act. As such in my mind the only reason that anybody would use this would be for low value data and I would not consider an encryption service for email where the vendor controls the private keys.

One aspect that people do often overlook is not so much government regulations, but their own rules. What do your customer policies say, and what do your own staff policies say. For example your HR policy may say that all personnel data will be stored in UK, or your customer terms and conditions might say that all data will be stored in the EU. Many cloud services might not be based in the EU and there are very, very few in the UK. There can also be obscure regulations specific to your industry e.g. in a previous role the code master had to be in the UK as cryptographic code was considered a weapon and needed an export license.

It should be noted that complying with privacy regulations by storing data in the EU does not mean that it cannot be taken under the Patriot Act. In these cases it is assumed that the US Government is the evil one, but I have no less reason to suspect that the UK or any other government is any less nefarious.

My conclusion is that it is safe to store data in the cloud if a company adheres to safe harbour, and is probably better than most companies own data protection. If however you are worried about your data falling into government hands then you need to look into it very carefully. The only really safe way to protect your data from governments is to encrypt your data in the cloud with your own encryption keys.

Useful reference articles:
ZDNet Article: How the USA Patriot Act can be used to access EU data
Wikipedia article on the Patriot Act
Wikipedia article on safe harbor
Ars Technica article on Patriot Act and cloud providers

Future of mobile apps

2011-09-12T13:14:00.002+01:00

Interesting article about HTML5 being the future of apps on mobile. Having worked in the smartphone industry I totally agree. Just like not many apps are used on the PC / Mac anymore but mostly web browser I believe the same thing will happen on tablet / smartphone.

The key obstacle to PC moving to web was the horsepower and fast links. If you think about the smartphone and mobile networks you could consider them to be like the PC and dialup internet 5 years ago. Given Moores law and 4G networks the mobile will go the same way I believe.

The other key part is offline storage in HTML5 so that applications can retain data/state. Already the financial times have switched to HTML5 based app so that they can avoid the 'Apple Tax'

Slides from Cloud Computing World Forum

2011-06-21T20:14:00.000+01:00

My slides from Cloud Computing World Forum today are up at http://www.next-genit.co.uk/events-1

It was a good event and some pretty good speakers in general and lots of interesting and smart people around. If you're in London it's still on tomorrow.

Slides from today's presentation

2011-06-07T21:58:00.000+01:00

My slides "Evolution of cloud computing" from today are up at http://www.next-genit.co.uk/events-1

It was a great little summit over in Newport, Wales - thanks to the organisers.

Why the Google Chromebook will succeed

2011-05-14T16:24:00.000+01:00

I'm excited about the Google Chromebook and I believe it will do very well. Not 80% market share well, but perhaps around 20% and Apple seems to do very well with a similar market share.

Why do I think this is a game changer? Isn't a notebook that only works on the Internet doomed?

I don't think so for a few reasons. Firstly it will work offline. Google Docs will be working offline soon. The operating system (ChromeOS) will also store files locally. This includes things like Google Music and I'm sure others such as Spotify/DropBox will add support once it becomes popular.

Secondly it will work seamlessly with Google Mail/Google Apps. More and more organisations and individuals are going down this path and remember all those people with Android phones (now #1 smartphone) also have a Google account. So now you'll have a notebook with optional 3G that you can use for email, docs etc even offline. I often use my Android phone instead of my iPad or Mac or PC already when travelling as it just works so much nicer. I'm also at a point where with the combination of DropBox and Google Apps/Mail I can easily switch machines when I want and I'm sure more people will head down this route in the future.

For both companies and individuals these combinations of things will drive down the cost. For businesses these are machines that don't need to be managed very much at all, and for individuals the notebook will keep working without being touched.

Citrix and VMWare are also supporting virtual desktops on Google Chromebook so this will work very well for businesses that haven't yet converted everything to the browser (which is the best strategy).

And of course there is the 8 second boot so you can play Angry Birds quickly.

As a postscript ff you want to come to work for a cool media company that uses this sort of technology then have a look here.

Motorola Atrix and Motorola Xoom thughts

2011-03-23T13:32:00.001Z

I had a quick play today with the Motorola Xoom (iPad competitor) and Motorola Atrix (smartphone that doubles up as a netbook).

I must say that I was impressed with both of them, although the Xoom was the more impressive of the two. The Xoom seems a credible competitor to the iPad and the Honeycomb version of Android looks very polished and works on tablets well. The speed of it seemed faster than the original iPad and around the same as the iPad 2. All the software on it that I used seemed quite nice. I did like the ability to customise the home screens more than on the Apple.

Of course the key to the success for many people will be what apps come out for it. I personally believe in 5 years that apps for cellphones will be irrelevant, just like they are on a PC today as mobile platforms and web browsers become more powerful. That still leaves a few years in between though. The other key to success will be whether the battery lasts like the iPad and I couldn't test this.

The Motrola Atrix is a device that also docks to your TV and a netbook type thing. The TV side seems to just work but was quite surprised to find that it was only 480p. The king in the multimedia/goog video area still seems to be the Nokia N8. (I could write a whole post on Android vs Symbian and may yet do so..). As an Android phone it just seems like any other Android phone to be honest.

The netbook side of thing only makes sense to me if you don't have a separate device already so probably appeals to the developing world, except it will be far too expensive.

To see comprehensive reviews look at the Ars Technica review of the Xoom here and the Atrix here.

Amazon move deeply into PaaS

2011-01-19T10:33:00.000Z

Amazon have announced today Elastic Beanstalk.

I have been wondering how long until Amazon do PaaS in depth and now they have. As a techie, I like their approach too. You can either leave it just as a service that runs your applications e.g. Java or you can tune each individual component.

Amazon are continuing to go up the stack and this is probably enough to convince more people to use them now.

Rackspace showing real thought leadership

2011-01-12T20:14:00.001Z

I continue to be impressed by the direction that Rackspace is taking at the moment in regards to the cloud.

Today they announced that they are working with Akamai on distributing content through the cloud as reported through The Register here. On paper this seems to jump past the AWS from Amazon and their CloudFront service. CloudFront doesn't push anywhere near as deep into the network as what Akamai do. Of course I'm not going to write off Amazon though as they are innovating very quickly also.

The other big (huge??) thing that they are behind is OpenStack. I believe that the project has the ability to really tidy up in cloud management, and as a bonus it is open source. If it's good enough for NASA then perhaps it is good enough for others also. They worked with Rackspace to get OpenStack started because of dissatisfaction with open core model on another product (I could start a whole rant on open core here and how some people are using some real deception at the moment but I don't like writing negative blog posts...).

See this article here from The Register which talks about Ubuntu going with OpenStack very recently. I have been nudging a few people at Canonical to take this direction for a number of months, and glad to see it coming to fruition although I probably can't claim much credit for this!

Of course the big two parties missing from OpenStack are VMWare and Amazon who probably have the majority of private and public cloud deployments today. They probably have the most to lose from this as well.... Interestingly enough Microsoft IS backing OpenStack.

So RackSpace allows you to shift from traditional colo, to VM hosting, to true cloud services. Can you see why they have been so successful recently? You don't need to keep changing vendors as you start advancing your strategy.

One could also comment on the Scoble effect as a side note as Dennis Howlett did recently. And then there are other products that they've picked up along the way like CloudKick and JungleDisk which fill some nice niches.

The only area I'm not sure about though is their cloud email strategy and their SaaS strategy as a whole. I think Microsoft with Office 365 (formerly BPOS) or Google Apps has a big head start here. Having said that the market is still young, and at US$2 per user per month for their email service that is great value for money.

You could also argue that they are covering off all of the cloud bases and probably the only company that is showing such foresight at present in my mind is actually Microsoft as I talk about a little here.

For historical note I first flagged up Rackspace and OpenStack back in July last year here and here. The only thing that I am kicking myself is that I didn't buy shares at the time when I wrote this. Look at this graph and see what the shares have done since then....

Microsoft server application virtualisation

2010-12-31T16:44:00.000Z

I see Microsoft has released a test version of Server App-V which enables individual server roles to be run on top of a virtual machine - particularly Microsoft Azure.

This confirms in my mind that Microsoft has one of the strongest cloud visions of all the Tier 1 vendors. They provide all layers of the stack - IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. This particular move makes a lot of sense to me as you're taking away the need to manage the operating system so much and instead manage the application. The more abstraction you get, means less cost to maintain.

(As a primer for those who don't know much about App-V it started as a technology to publish virtual desktop applications. To me this makes more sense than a fully think desktop as you already have the grunt on the desktop and you can push out individual apps and that way you can run new technology e.g. Windows 7 but still run your XP dependent apps if needed).

Thanks to Mary-Jo Foley for the heads-up. I also have some overview of Microsoft (and other vendors) on my cloud page.

Privacy and social network aggregation

2010-11-11T10:30:00.000Z

In the last couple of days I tried out a new service from a subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar company that made me want to stomp on it and crush it. Harsh words I know but the way this service abused privacy was just astounding.

This device enabled you to touch another persons device and then it would share your contact details, including relevant social networks. All sounds fine and just a modern version of a business card surely?

The problem was two fold - the first problem was that you could not decide on a person by person basis what contact details you want to share. I can't think of many people that I would want to share all my phone numbers, email (work and personal), LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook details with - I would always want to give a subset of my data with to each person. What's also scary is that this company is in the location based scenario.... So is there future roadmap that you share all your details and where you are?

And it gets worse. The way it links to the social networks is not by you supplying a profile link. Each service it wants to install an application that can extract all your data and post to it as well. Are you kidding me? I'm not letting an aggregating service do whatever it likes with my online presence.

So when you see these sort of websites don't just click yes, yes, yes all the way through and supply your login details to everything you own online.. And also think about what would happen if that aggregating service got hacked...

Amazon does SSL termination

2010-10-18T21:41:00.000+01:00

Amazon has had a viable cloud strategy with AWS for quite a while now as I have discussed on my website.

They have now introduced SSL termination which is a big help when it comes to e-commerce/secure websites.

What is SSL termination and why is it important? Well with Amazon you've been able to distribute traffic to a number of your servers automatically using their ELB (Elastic Load Balancer). You can even use auto scaling to add extra servers automatically if you want!

The problem is that until now this has not worked for decrypting HTTPS traffic (SSL termination). This generally has made things quite hard and you've had to work around by directing to a single node, have multiple certificates or complex configuration.

Now the ELB does the HTTPS encryption/decryption and can then direct the traffic to any node as it does with unencrypted traffic. If you want to know all the gory details have a look at the AWS blog here.

As a side note - if you want to learn more about starting the Amazon journey then go have a look at Symbian's architect's blog here.

Is 3Par worth $2 billion?

2010-08-29T16:29:00.000+01:00

After seeing all the news around 3Par I started to wonder whether they are really worth $2 billion considering I had never heard of them before.

The primary benefits I can see of 3Par are:

simplification of storage management
thin provisioning

From a pure financial point of view the deal doesn't make sense - their sales were just under $200 million in the last year and I am quite confident that you could build a similar set of products for less than $2 billion.

Conspicuous by it's absence in the bidding are IBM, HDS, Oracle, and EMC. They have either decided it is too expensive or already have something similar under development.

The other thing to consider is that we have two heavyweights in HP and Dell doing the bidding. It is interesting in itself that they aren't being considered for acquisition by a smaller player. I believe that the reason for this is that a smaller company would realise you can build a competitor for much less. Many large companies have forgotten the art of innovation and it is much simpler to buy companies with the product you need.

The unknown value of 3Par might be in it's patent portfolio - since no-one else seems to be doing thin provisioning in the way that they do it might be reasonable to guess they have patented it. In my mind software/pure idea patents shouldn't exist and the idea of thin provisioning is an obvious idea. This hasn't stopped VMWare taking out patents on thin provisioning of memory though, and pursuing it.

So in my mind I wouldn't pay $2 billion for 3Par but a big company would quite willingly do so since they can't quickly innovate themselves and are scared of IP issues. What I would have done though if I led HP or Dell is to pay $100 million for a non-exclusive perpetual license of their IP, and put the rest of the money into integrating it into my products and then selling them.

Nice update on Azure

2010-08-12T14:55:00.000+01:00

Mary-Jo Foley from ZDNet has posted a nice update on where Microsoft Azure is at. Wander over here to have a look and see page 2 in particular for a nice system architecture drawing.

Microsoft begins adding single-sign on support to its Azure cloud

2010-08-06T17:24:00.000+01:00

Interesting article here about Microsoft adding SSO support to Azure cloud including things such as Google and OpenID.

They are showing pretty serious intent with all of this. Great to see!

Featured in Outsource magazine

2010-08-02T17:12:00.000+01:00

I just got interviewed by Outsource magazine today and the interview is up here.

At the moment I'm even up on the front page of their website!

OpenStack

2010-07-19T21:08:00.000+01:00

Great to see the launch of OpenStack being announced. This is a great idea for everything in the cloud stack to be open sourced, including management tools, provisioning etc. This does really fulfil the things Open Cloud Manifesto is asking for.

This is being backed up by many leading companies which is great to see. To find out more go have a look at their website or see Glyn Moody's article which has many good links.

Microsoft increases the pace of their cloud offerings

2010-07-12T22:46:00.000+01:00

Microsoft have realised for a while that they cannot be left behind by the cloud and have put a lot of efforts into areas such as Azure. Today they went further with the announcing of Aurora and further updates on other projects.

Steve Ballmer came out and said that partners shouldn't find this and enable their customers to move to the cloud. He is absolutely right here as Google Apps becomes increasingly viable to many firms.

Aurora is a version of Microsoft Small Business Server which allows services such as Exchange and Sharepoint to be run in the cloud. This makes a lot of sense as running a mail server or Sharepoint server is a lot of work and causes the most problems. Essentially Aurora will just be an Active Directory logon server with local storage which appears to be backed up in the cloud, and this provides authentication onto Microsoft hosted servers. I believe that in 5 years about 30-40% of organisations run their mail in the cloud and in 10 years it will be about 90%. Mail has become a commodity and there really is no need for most organisations to do it themselves any more.

Next on the list of items today was a second beta of InTune. InTune basically provides a management server for the PCs in your SME organisation. Again this is a pain point for this size organisation so it is a brilliant idea. Not so brilliant is that it only supports Windows 7, but hopefully this is a temporary limitation.

Microsoft have also announced other vendors such as HP, Dell, Fujitsu hosting Azure servers and the ability for firms to create their own private clouds (but not Azure). Personally I think there is more strength in Microsoft doing it themselves but this gives them quick reach and enables partners to build clouds such as for the government or tied to geographies that Microsoft may not otherwise cover.

To reflect all of this I have also updated my State of the Cloud page at Next Gen IT website.

It's good to see that Microsoft haven't lost focus with the cloud and my personal opinion is that they have timed it about right to make a run.

State of the cloud

2010-07-04T12:31:00.001+01:00

I've just finished putting together an article on the state of the cloud. You can go over and read it here.

Supporting the Open Cloud Manifesto

2010-07-01T17:10:00.000+01:00

Over on the Symbian Blog you can see a new post by me about Symbian supporting the Open Cloud Manifesto.

Openness is going to be an increasing issue as more people move to the cloud. Just as closed virtualisation formats hurts enterprises with a mixture of formats, so does closed clouds.

One thing that is interesting is who has, and who hasn't supported the manifesto. It is a real shame not to see Amazon, Google or Microsoft in the list. It is encouraging to see Rackspace there though as they are proving to be a strong player in the cloud also. IBM, HP, VMWare are on the list - but they don't have much cloud market share yet (VMWare does have mind share though). My take on this is that the big players who have not yet locked in market share are wanting to be open so they can stay in the game, and the ones that do have market share (with exception of Rackspace) are just not interested.

Welcome to Next Generation IT blog

2010-06-28T20:48:00.000+01:00

Welcome to our new blog for Next Generation IT.

The aim of this blog is to post relevant news and thoughts about what is happening with the next generation of IT, including cloud computing, open source and developing technologies from industry leaders such as Microsoft also.

You can also go over to our site at www.next-genit.co.uk