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This Week in Cloud, October 19, 2012: Cloud puts high demands on networks, Cloud infographic, Cloud standards interview. And more...

Derek Stevens — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:01:00 GMT

CloudViews Unplugged!

Watch the October episode of CloudViews Unplugged - a monthly video chat analyzing the top cloud news stories.

Cloud News

Cloud services are putting new demands on enterprise networks, a recent survey by Juniper Networks and Forrester Research revealed, according to this AllThingsD article. Of the 150 senior IT executives surveyed, 58% said that they had to upgrade their networking hardware to meet the new demands brought on by cloud services.
A new infographic by CA Technologies reveals that 80% of companies believe that cloud computing drives innovation, but over half of those companies don't have plans to implement the technology yet, according to this Mashable article.
Citrix announced that its open-source CloudStack platform gained key support from CA Technologies and Cisco this week, according to this GigaOM blog. Citrix's commercial CloudStack implementation, CloudPlatform, will now connect into Cisco's Nexus switches, Unified Computing System (UCS) and Open Network Environment (ONE) and CA Technologies' Cloud Automation Suite and Nimsoft Monitor.
A recent survey by Tecala of 136 CIOs and IT managers reveals that 62% of Australian organizations are planning to increase their spending on cloud computing in the next year, according to this ZDNet article. Close to 80% of those respondents said they'd use cloud to replace physical servers.
The cloud may be heading to cooler climates, according to this Data Center Knowledge article. By strategically choosing the location of cloud data centers, cloud providers may be able to drastically reduce or eliminate their cooling costs and cut down on overall power consumption.

Featured Content

IDC Report: Cloud Systems Management 2011 Vendor Shares: Market Moves Beyond
A new report from IDC examines the growth of the worldwide cloud systems management software market and ranks the current vendors, including CA Technologies, VMware, BMC, HP, and IBM based on their 2011 cloud systems management software revenue. You can read the full report on CA.com.

Feature article

Cutting through the cloud clutter By Katherine Demacopoulos, CA Technologies

It feels like there is never enough time to keep up with the changes that cloud computing is bringing to the IT market. What's the latest data on projected market growth and enterprise adoption of cloud services? Which cloud deployment models are proving most popular with enterprises and why? What's the latest news from the vendor community and what's the real impact behind the hype? What are some of the unexpected and interesting applications of cloud computing across healthcare, financial services and other industries? What's been going on lately with cloud standards and regulations and why does it matter?
These are the types of questions that Andi Mann and George Watt answer in CA Technologies new monthly video chat series, CloudViews Unplugged. We know you don't have a lot of extra time to spare, so we keep every episode short and only cover the stories that matter most. Read the full article.

Cloud Views

Are cloud standards important? In this special edition of CloudViews Unplugged, Marvin Waschke, author of Cloud Standards: Agreements That Hold Cloud Together, is interviewed by Andi Mann and George Watt of CA Technologies. In the video, Waschke discusses why cloud standards are important and how they can help foster innovation. Join Marvin, Andi, and George for a @CloudCommons #CloudViews cloud standards tweetchat on Tuesday, October 30^th at 2 PM ET.
Is the clock ticking for OpenStack? Forrester analyst James Staten says that organizations that are members of the OpenStack cloud computing project need to see a return on their investment soon or they may lose interest, according to this PC Advisor article.
Should educational institutions adopt cloud computing? In this Huffington Post blog, Naibo Yu describes how his startup is promoting the use of cloud computing in Chinese classrooms. Allowing students to access lessons and materials at any time from their PC or tablet is an obvious benefit, but Yu also cites the ability to access user analysis and data as a crucial step in ensuring the students are receiving the best education.
What are the top 5 benefits of cloud computing? In this Wired blog, Edwin Schouten outlines the 5 key benefits that cloud provides for companies including business agility, new business models, less operational issues, better use of resources, and less capital expense.

MSP Corner

Is the cloud leading to more opportunities for MSPs? In this Channel Partners blog, Angela Trillhaase describes how the cloud and mobile are opening up more opportunities for MSPs when it comes to midsized companies.
Will IT ever regain control of all employees' devices again? In this MSPMentor blog, Jessica Davis takes a look at the rise and future of bring your own device (BYOD).

Upcoming Cloud Events

Gartner Symposium & ITxpo 2012: October 21-25, Orlando, FL
Cloud Computing World Forum Asia: November 12-14, Singapore
AWS re:Invent: November 27-29, Las Vegas, NV
Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit: November 27-29, Las Vegas, NV

The #1 Best Practice For Cloud-Based Innovation

Adam Famularo — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Here's one thing everyone in IT can agree on: nobody agrees on best practices for cloud-based innovation. There's an ongoing debate about how to use the cloud, and what role it should play in the enterprise to foster innovation. That shouldn't be surprising, since we're still debating how to define the cloud itself, despite the fact that the term has been in use, technically, since at least the early 90s, and probably longer.

Part of this is due to the fact that the cloud is still evolving, and rapidly so. Vendors, analysts, consultants, and IT leaders alike continue to coin new buzzwords to describe some nuanced view or technical model for the cloud ("hyper-hybrid cloud," anyone?). And vendors specifically are slapping the "aaS" moniker on more offerings every day, to the extent that I expect to soon see Acronyms as a Service.

In all seriousness, this is characteristic of an IT technology that, conceptually, remains in flux. Flux leads to confusion. Confusion leads to a lack of generally accepted best practices. And that's why IT is, in large part, still debating how best to catalyze cloud computing for delivering innovative capabilities and business benefits to their organizations.

We at CA Technologies talk to a lot of global companies and IT leaders every day. This keeps us in a pretty good feedback loop with forward-thinking enterprises using fast-moving technologies, such as the cloud. There's one emerging best practice for cloud that, in our travels, we're seeing IT leader after IT leader embrace: Use the cloud to launch a new product or service, rather than build out a new internal infrastructure.

The reason: The cloud gives them better flexibility to deal with the unknowns involved in new product launches. It turns out this insight isn't merely anecdotal. "Exploring the Unknown" emerged as one of the key differentiators of more innovative companies in CA's Innovation Imperative research, a global study conducted by market researchers at IDC and commissioned by CA Technologies.

Organizations with a formal process for innovation were more than twice as likely to put a significant emphasis on exploring the unknown than less innovative companies (48% vs. 23%). This makes perfect sense. When you bring a new product or service to market, you don't really know what the business requirements are going to be, or whether the new product or service will succeed technically or in the marketplace.

You think you know. Your organization is convinced it knows. Resources are marshaled, research conducted, development engaged, launch plans put in place. But you really don't know, and won't know until after the product or service hits the streets. History is filled with companies that thought they had the answer-the winning product, service, or solution-only to learn that few innovations survive their first encounter with the customer.

And yet IT has long built entire infrastructures to support some new business idea before that first customer encounter. In earlier eras, we didn't really have a choice. But why do that today? Put it in the cloud, where you can more easily, and certainly faster and more cost-effectively, expand or contract depending on your needs. Most important, piloting in the cloud reduces the organization's "innovation risk."

The product or initiative might flop. If you built your own in-house infrastructure, you own all the (now unnecessary) hardware, software, and support staff. If you piloted in the cloud, you can just archive the code and shut the system down. Your only costs are time and development resources. And if the failed initiative was a platform play-say, choosing a cloud-based CRM system-you just pull the plug and you're done. It's the classic CapEx vs. OpEx argument applied to business innovation.

Success might be even worse than failure. The effort might succeed beyond your wildest projections. Your in-house infrastructure would likely buckle, even break under the demand. And the lag-time required to deploy additional resources hampers your staff, gives competitors time to catch up, and could cause you to miss the crucial window of opportunity with customers. With a new launch, you often have but one chance to delight or disappoint people. Pilot in the cloud, and it's is easy to scale up to meet unexpected spikes in demand. Likewise, it's easy to scale back if anticipated demand isn't there.

At the end of the day, the cloud's inherent ability to help organizations deal with the unknown mitigates risk. Indeed, it's one of the reasons why the cloud was found to be one of the major "innovation-enabling technologies" in the Innovation Imperative study. Innovative organizations were 30 percent more likely to list cloud computing as an innovation enabler than less innovative companies.

This might mean using this-or-that "aaS" to meet certain new business requirements. It might mean setting up your own private cloud, which can serve as the organization's skunk works. It might mean using a third-party's secure private cloud. It might mean using a hybrid cloud (or even a hyper-hybrid cloud!), where some of the resources are provided by your organization, and others provided by vendor partners.

The debate about cloud best practices will rage on for some time. But one thing is clear: IT leaders are recognizing the cloud is a smart, safe place to launch their next new product or service.

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Are All Apps Created Equal for the Cloud?

Denise Dubie — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:23:00 GMT

GigaSpaces exec explains how to put a middleman between your apps and the cloud.

Think you don't have the appropriate applications to make a significant move to the cloud? Think again.

It's been widely reported that cloud computing isn't a fit for all types of applications, or at the very least, that many companies do not feel comfortable moving mission-critical applications and the data they hold to the cloud. Typically uses for the cloud range from file storage to backup to hosting and e-mail, but mission-critical, transactional applications - such as those used by financial services companies - aren't often the ideal use-case presented by cloud providers.

That is, until GigaSpaces partnered with CA Technologies to deliver the GigaSpaces XAP AppLogic appliance, which Amnon Raviv, Head of the Executive Sales team covering Business Development and Strategic Alliances for GigaSpaces, says provides the elasticity needed for cloud environments to any application.

"The appliance is particularly relevant for customers in financial services, telco, e-commerce, specifically for mission-critical applications. [These apps] require extreme levels of performance, low latency and high availability, for example, applications in the financial services space, like reconciliation applications, fraud detection, risk analysis, risk portfolio analysis," says Raviv in a CA Technologies Cloud Luminary video. "In telco, OMS type applications on the management systems; the same as in e-commerce and retail, so highly transactional, complex applications."

The appliance and the technology it hosts acts as a middleman between the application and the environment in which it will reside, whether it be a private data center, a private cloud, a public cloud or a combination of them all. It makes sense that GigaSpaces, a middleware provider since 2000, would be poised and ready to apply its technology to cloud computing when it emerged and gained popularity later in the decade.

"Our middleware lent itself very well to cloud environments, highly virtualization, highly distributed environments," Raviv says. "Because of our ability to decouple, to abstract the application from the underlying topology of that environment, it is a lot easier for enterprises to move their application from one cloud environment to another. ... Otherwise you would have to rewrite the application and adapt, make it run well on Cloud A and then makes all these changes for its to run on Cloud B and then on Cloud C. It's pretty complex and expensive to do."

What applications do you send to the cloud? What hesitation do you have about using cloud with other applications? Please leave a comment here, let me know your thoughts via Twitter @DDubie or e-mail me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.

Watch a short video about GigaSpaces here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M-gmHFCh2s

This Week in Cloud, August 30, 2012: Gartner's Big Data Hype Cycle, Essential cloud skills, America's cloud confusion. And more...

Derek Stevens — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Cloud News

Andrew R. Jassy, the head of Amazon Web Services, believes that Amazon's cloud services can be as big, if not bigger, than its retail business, according to this New York Times article. The article reported that Amazon currently has over 600 AWS related job openings posted on their website.
A recent IDC study predicts that the Indian cloud computing market will grow 70% this year to reach $909 million, according to this The Hindu Business Line article. From 2013-2016, IDC predicts that the Indian cloud market will grow 50% per year.
American consumers still don't understand cloud computing, according to a recent Citrix survey. Only 16% of the 1,000 people surveyed correctly identified the definition of "the cloud," according to this ZDNet article.
VMware announced the vCloud Suite at the VMworld conference in San Franscico this week, according to this InformationWeek article. vCloud Suite is a combination of vCloud Director and VMware's virtualization products.

Featured Content

Gartner Report: Hype Cycle for Big Data, 2012

Big data is one of the most hyped terms in the market today. The first Big Data Hype Cycle helps enterprises develop strategies to address the growing business need for insight from datasets of increasing volume, velocity and variety. You can read the full report compliment of Cloud Commons on Smart Enterprise.

Feature article

No Joke: You Should Model Your Cloud Plans after the Feds

By Denise Dubie, CA Technologies

U.S. government cuts costs, speeds services and better satisfies customers.

We're all familiar with the myriad jokes about slow-moving government agencies with antiquated processes and outdated systems, but this isn't your parent's federal government. Vivek Kundra, CIO of the U.S. government, laid out in the Cloud First initiative a series of steps government agencies should take when creating new services or provisioning technologies that enterprise companies would be wise to follow. "It used to be that in the 1960s, the best technology was in the government, then there's a huge shift in the ‘80s where that moved to the enterprise, so some of the greatest technology was in the enterprise," Kundra says. Read the full article.

Cloud Views

Is Big Data overhyped? Join us on Thursday, August 30^th at 3 PM ET for a #CloudViews tweet chat on Big Data. You can preview the questions on Smart Enterprise.
What are the 8 essential skills that enterprises need for cloud computing? In this Forbes.com blog, Joe McKendrick proposes the following: business and financial skills, technical skills, enterprise architecture and business needs analysis, project management skills, contract and vendor negotiations, security and compliance, data integration and analysis skills, and mobile app development and management.
Can companies drive the cloud? In this Smart Enterprise blog, Trevor Williamson compares his experience as a young car enthusiast to today's businesses that are interested in the cloud in order to examine the difference between being cloud capable and cloud functional.
What happens when your cloud provider shuts off the lights for good? In this TheHostingNews blog, Tavis J. Hampton describes how customers can protect their data if their cloud provider goes under.

MSP Corner

Despite a difficult market, many MSPs are continuing to innovate, grow, and increase profits. In this MSPmentor blog, Joe Panettieri reveals the MSPs that made the latest Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing U.S. companies.
How should MSPs deal with the challenges of BYOD and cloud computing? In this MSPnews blog, Laura Stotler discusses the importance of security services as virtualization, BYOD, and cloud computing continue to grow in popularity.

Upcoming Cloud Events

Cloud Connect: September 10-13, Chicago, IL
Dreamforce '12: September 18-21, San Francisco, CA
Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit: September 18-20, New York, NY
OracleWorld: September 30 - October 4, San Francisco, CA

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Cloud Providers Must Commit to Innovation

Denise Dubie — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:38:00 GMT

CIOs and IT leaders across the board have been handed a challenge this year: to transform traditional IT organizations focused on maintaining operations into agile, incubators for innovation.

The evolution from focusing on ‘keeping the lights on' to enabling more innovative approaches for solving new and existing problems won't be easy, but IT leaders are not alone. According to industry watchers, the push toward innovation will also fall into the laps of cloud providers that will need an innovative edge to compete for IT budget dollars. While IT works to become the center of innovation within their organization - perhaps choosing cloud as part of a broader strategy - cloud providers should be demonstrating how they intend to stay ahead of competitors and customer demands with innovative approaches to delivering the best technology, says Sean Hackett, research director covering cloud computing at 451 Research, in a recent CA Technologies Cloud Luminaries video.

"The most compelling attributes for companies to look at when choosing a cloud platform is the company's commitment to innovation. We're still a ways away from a fully integrated, hybrid cloud platform so the commitment to innovation and the commitment to adding the right functionality and the right tool sets that will enable this fully-blown, multi-sourced environment to happen and the best execution-workload environment to happen is still a ways away," Hackett says. "So it's incumbent on users to link up with a company that they feel has a vested interest in the platform and will continue to innovate."

Despite what it may seem like considering its current popularity, Hackett says it is still a young market for cloud computing and while companies today commit to a cloud provider, the cloud provider must in turn commit to innovation. And while internal IT shops are striving to enable innovation, offloading some work to cloud providers could provide respite from day-to-day activities consuming too many valuable resources that would be better spent on innovative new projects. According to Hackett, the drivers for cloud adoption among customers and clients he encounters aren't always cost-related.

"Cost reduction is becoming less and less of an issue, although affordability is still an important factor in driving cloud adoption," Hackett says. "But I think it's the flexibility, the adaptability, the ability to meet the demands of the business, the ability to scale up or to scale down is becoming increasingly - at least we see in our interactions with enterprise customers - seems to be becoming more and more weighted in terms of importance."

Cloud providers must commit to this level of innovation to keep customers happy while they demonstrate their own level of commitment to innovation within their organizations. The demand on cloud providers make sense when you consider the demand on IT and the business it supports. The question is, "How can cloud vendors prove their commitment to innovation?"

Do you consider a commitment to innovation a critical factor when choosing a cloud vendor? Why should innovation become a standard requirement for cloud providers? Please leave a comment here, let me know via Twitter @DDubie or e-mail me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.