WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, Oct 28, 2011

Pushed by rapidly evolving technology and changing user demands, the tectonic plates of the IT industry have shifted during the year. Across hardware, software and services, established players have had to rethink their strategies, finding a business-as-usual approach no longer works. Topping the list of seismic shifts was cloud computing. Having wafted quietly on the outskirts for the past few years, the cloud billowed into the mainstream this year. Substantial investments by IT vendors and service providers took what was an innovative but non-compelling concept and turned it into a critical business platform.










Read More about the seismic shift ahead as data goes sky-high.


Demystifying the Cloud

The way people and companies, big and small, define the cloud at the moment is also quite vague. “A common user may be interested in SaaS (Software as a Service) whereas a developer would love to play around with PaaS (Platform as a Service),” says Singh. On the other hand, some solution providers are only talking about IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) when talking about the cloud. The quintessential example is a company that outsources its IT needs, doing away with the hassle of servers, storage space and networking in its own premises. They turn to cloud solutions companies who give them flexible, customized plans or bill them according to usage.

What Is Cloud Computing?

Everyone is talking about cloud computing. Forrester projects that the total market for cloud computing will be $241 billion by 2020. But what does cloud computing mean, exactly? Cloud computing means computing can be used as a service rather than a product. This has become possible because it's now cost-effective for companies to build huge data centers where computing and software can be provided remotely at massive scale and rented out, like a utility service.

Getting cloud security right from the start

Steve Durbin, vice president sales and marketing for the Information Security Forum thought the issues around cloud security would have been nailed down by now, "but I couldn't have been more wrong," he told iTWire. The ease of getting started with cloud services is a nightmare from a security perspective, he suggested. People on the business side of an organization can simply sign up and put the usually modest charges on their credit cards, bypassing (though probably not maliciously) the normal security procedures.

Is the cloud living up to CIO expectations?

Is the cloud living up to CIO & CTO expectations? There has been a lot of speculation about what top computing experts think of the cloud and its advantages. Knowing how CIOs and CTOs view the cloud can help us shape our cloud offerings in a way that works well for them. This data also gives us a direct line-of-sight into the point of view of IT leaders on the cloud market and where it is going.”

We hope these short sum-ups on cloud computing will help you to take a more knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming weeks.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

Santanu Das
Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, Oct 21, 2011

The idea that cloud services will make a big difference to businesses has been a recurrent theme of technology discussions for the past 10 years or so. Certainly, businesses have indicated that they are ready to adopt cloud computing. A study in the first half of 2011, which polled IT and business decision-makers across the private and public sectors, found that almost half already use cloud services. The private sector leads the way, with those employing more than 20 people ahead of smaller businesses in adoption (52% v 38%) – even though the latter could gain more because of the lower capital spending Cloud Computing requires. The driver for adoption is overwhelmingly cited as flexibility, with only 16% citing cost savings, though that figure rockets up to 69% among those already using cloud services.



Read more to find out why Cloud Computing is a bright light for business.

Clouds vs. Outsourcing: The Next Battleground

Established vendors entering cloud computing are often already outsourcing partners to the firms that are now frequently looking for an infrastructure service provider. But that doesn't mean they have an inside track on the business. They do not. Established vendors are going to face stiff competition for outsourcing business from the new infrastructure providers: Amazon, Rackspace, and others, according to a report by Pricewaterhouse Coopers. "Service providers in the IT outsourcing space have, after all, profited handsomely by taking on their customers' highly complex, one-off collections of IT assets and finding ways to manage them more efficiently than their customers are able to," states the Pricewaterhouse report.

SMB Nation: Where Did All the Cloud Supporters Go?

Held Sept. 30 to Oct. 2 in Las Vegas, SMB Nation caters to the thousands of mostly smaller IT providers who serve companies with a few to a few dozen employees. While last year's show was packed with sessions about building a cloud service practice, this year's agenda leaned more heavily toward technical content about conventional, on-premises infrastructure solutions. That change stemmed from a poll of potential conference-goers indicating tepid interest in cloud-related topics, according to Harry Brelsford, founder and chairman of SMB Nation Inc., the Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based company that hosts SMB Nation.

Computing: On cloud nine?

Will cloud computing, the latest buzzword on everyone’s lips in the IT business, provide the answer that Indian IT majors, faced with the prospect of volatile if not declining revenues, are looking for? Or will it go down in history as another overhyped idea that was destined to remain just that? Despite its potential, cloud computing has not yet taken off in a big way. Why? According to a research paper from Deutsche Bank, quoting from a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers into the German cloud computing market, the reasons have to do with data protection and compliance (60%), standardisation of internal processes (53%) and arranging individual service-level agreements (49%). So, if cloud computing is to deliver on its promise, service offerings will have to satisfy individual and legal standards with regard to data privacy.

Clarifying Cloud Service for Your Business

The term "cloud computing" has been used to describe a wide variety of services and frameworks recently, which has caused confusion among many in the industry. In one definition of the cloud Google provides a cloud service such as Gmail or Google Docs that you might use but do not need to maintain. Another cloud definition is a lower-level service such as Amazon’s EC2. This service provides server and storage instances that you can then manipulate to run your own applications and services. Essentially, they build and maintain the servers and storage, and you are responsible for installing and maintaining the applications that run on those instances. In this particular case, the servers and storage are not physical, but rather virtual instances that are largely independent of the hardware.

We hope these short sum-ups on cloud computing will help you to take a more knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming weeks.

Don't forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

Santanu Das
Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, Oct 14, 2011

Companies using the latest cloud computing solutions have been urged to ensure they have a good relationship with the manufacturer that is providing them. Seth Robinson, one of the authors of the CompTIA second annual Trends in Cloud Computing report, explained that a service level agreement (SLA) is a key factor in any deal to purchase and use a particular product. "With the cloud, (companies are) trusting a significant portion of their IT to another provider and then you would have something like security goes down or even some downtime," Mr. Robinson stated.




Read More to see why Cloud Computing users are advised to focus on relationship with providers.

Cloud Computing Now Makes It Easier (and Cheaper) to Innovate: Study

A recent survey of 1,035 business and IT executives, along with 35 vendors, conducted by the London School of Economics and Accenture, has unearthed this new emerging role for cloud computing — as a platform for business innovation. Many people these days still see cloud within its information technology context, as a cheaper alternative for existing systems. But this may only be the first and most obvious benefit. The study’s authors, Leslie Willcocks, Dr. Will Venters and Dr. Edgar Whitley — all of the London School of Economics and Political Science — identified three stages cloud computing moves into as it’s adopted by organizations:

1. Technology and operational changes 
2. Business changes 
3. New ways of designing corporations themselves 

How to Choose a Cloud Computing Vendor for your Start-up

Selecting the right cloud is just as hard as predicting the weather correctly. Small and medium sized businesses need to finish their part of homework before plunging into an agreement with any cloud-computing firm. Check out some of the few points that can guide you in selecting the right vendor.

Securing the Cloud

Some people describe securing the cloud as a datacenter challenge, sometimes as a software issue, and sometimes as a data or device access issue. In reality, securing the cloud depends on working out where and how to apply those measures specific to your end user. Indeed security services are continuing to develop, enabling a cloud delivery model and allowing us to have security increasingly delivered in cloud services. This will be applied to both the cloud infrastructures and to services in their own right. In essence the cloud model is evolving as one of the core models for delivering services.

7 Stubborn Myths about Cloud Computing

Some common cloud myths that are holding back Cloud adoption are:

Myth 1) Building a cloud can take months
Myth 2) You need new hardware to deploy a cloud
Myth 3) There aren't many applications available for the cloud
Myth 4) Developers need to learn new languages to deploy services in the cloud
Myth 5) It's complex to move from public to private clouds (and vice versa)
Myth 6) The cloud isn't secure
Myth 7) It is hard to support a cloud environment

We hope these short sum-ups on cloud computing will help you to take a more knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming weeks.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

Santanu Das
Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, Oct 07, 2011

We're probably less than half a percent into the full realization of public cloud, yet there already are more cloud computing providers in the market than users can count. So how are you supposed to settle on the right cloud services provider when the multitude of types and choices is dizzying? Enterprises that want to contract for cloud services might be frustrated to find it takes months just to compare what's out there in any thorough way. What's even more frustrating is that, after all that work, many new cloud providers will have been added to the list while others may have changed their financial and service terms, been acquired by a larger vendor, or gone out of business altogether.




Read More to find out why you should choose one cloud computing provider over another.

Small units to get cloud computing, says govt.

The government would collaborate with service providers to provide latest technology and software to micro-enterprises at cheaper rates. "Small entrepreneurs are unable to afford expensive software packages... Keeping in mind, our ministry proposes to launch in collaboration with service providers, cloud computing for the sector," Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Minister Virbhadra Singh said. He said the ministry would combine with software providers; the move would help small units access world class computing packages at lower rates.

With great cloud comes great responsibility

There’s a good reason why everyone is talking about cloud computing. With infrastructure-as-a-service, for example, whatever computing power and storage capacity you might need is immediately available on tap. Combine this with virtualization technology and organizations gain unprecedented flexibility to deploy virtual servers whenever and wherever they are needed. Organizations should never just assume their data is safe when they expose it to a publicly available service. When you get a private line from a telco, is it really ‘private’? The fact is that it uses shared infrastructure and it is up to you to secure it. The same is true when you put data in the cloud. It is still your responsibility to secure it.

Cloud computing disappoints early adopters: Survey

Few organizations have moved to cloud computing - the delivery of computing as a service from remote centers - and of those that have, many are disappointed with the results, a survey published on Tuesday found. Fewer than one in five organizations questioned have outsourced the hosting of their applications to cloud computing providers, with two-thirds in early discussions, in trials or not considering a move, said computer security firm Symantec. Concerns about security and a lack of expertise among IT staff are the main factors holding companies back, according to the survey of 5,300 organisations carried out by Symantec.

Cloud computing needs blue sky thinking too

Several years after IT gurus first spoke about cloud computing, it is still something of an ethereal concept. But as the availability and affordability of African bandwidth increases, corporations are beginning to see how the cloud can help them expand their physical presence without equally heavy investments in IT infrastructure.

We hope these short sum-ups on cloud computing will help you to take a more knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming weeks.

Don’t forget to add your comments and suggestions. I will have more around the cloud a week later.

Santanu Das
Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks


NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.