WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, June 29, 2012

People are the No. 1 reason why private clouds fail. The traditional IT staff is a tactically driven, deeply technical group of hardware and software problem solvers who aren't familiar with strategic IT thinking and don't have time for it. They aren't accustomed to aligning IT processes with business drivers. They're more comfortable with explaining why something can't be done than finding a way to make it happen. And they will be the downfall of your private cloud deployment.

Read More to find out how people are the biggest threats to your private cloud deployment




Cloud computing: Five reasons why it matters

Computer users will start storing at least one-third of their content on cloud services by 2016, research firm Gartner has said. Only 7 per cent content was stored in the cloud in 2011, the company said in a report, adding that this number was likely to grow to 36 per cent by 2016.

Here are the first fact from the Gartner report:

“Gartner predicts that worldwide consumer digital storage needs will grow from 329 exabytes in 2011 to 4.1 zettabytes in 2016. This includes digital content stored in PCs, smartphones, tablets, hard-disk drives (HDDs), network attached storage (NAS) and cloud repositories. (1 exabyte is 10^18 bytes; 1 zettabyte is 10^21 bytes.)”

Cloud computing 'lifts small firms' firepower'

Centimetre by centimetre, the playing field on which big business competes with small businesses is being bulldozed flat by the steady advance of cloud computing, according to Wellington "Cyber Gold" award winner GreenButton. The company has ironed out another kink by providing computer processing power on tap to financial services firms that want to use risk-management software sold by United States firm Numerix, which has 400 clients in 25 countries.

How to leverage public cloud to your maximum advantage

For organizations of various sizes, the benefits of moving workloads to a public cloud are fairly obvious and widely understood. However, the complexity increases as organizations go down the path of evaluating public cloud options – multiple public cloud providers with data centres in specific geographies, multiple pricing models, varied supported technologies, and not to mention the multiple hosting providers masquerading as public cloud providers.

Cloud Computing: Is It The Wave Of The Future Or Just A Passing Fad?

For those of you that remember the dotcom craze, it seemed like everyone could get rich overnight. Then the bubble burst, and it all crashed in on itself. To some degree cloud computing is in a very similar situation, right now. Some of the biggest names on the Internet are now deploying some form of cloud computing. Amazon, HP, Intel, IBM, Google, Facebook and Twitter are a few that lead the pack, and there are numerous smaller services popping up too. Does that mean the whole thing is going to crash? Everything has its ups and downs. Cloud computing is still in its infancy with new technologies being made available almost every day that can be used with it. As with any business, however, there are going to be some that stick around and some that will not.

We hope these short sum-ups on Cloud Computing are helping you to take a knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming week.

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, June 22, 2012

The delivery of software is not the only thing being impacted by the rise of Cloud Computing. Moving to the Cloud is also disrupting the traditional software pricing model with the potential to dramatically change customer behavior and impact market dynamics. In the future, CC leadership will be as much about getting the pricing model right as it will be about technical excellence.

The ubiquitous cloud:



With CC, software applications are delivered as a subscription-based service over the Web much like a utility delivers power over a grid. This scheme allows a user to purchase only what they need, when they need it, for as long as they need it. Not surprisingly, customers are embracing this powerful value proposition. Forrester Research estimates that over 33% of companies now get some of their software delivered as a service. The market for Cloud-based services is growing over 20% per year.

Read More





Standardized Cloud APIs Aren't Possible

Rackspace President Lew Moorman drew a line in the sand for cloud standards: On one side, he put those companies and commenters that think cloning Amazon's APIs is the way forward. On the other side are those that think standards need to be open and developed independently of any particular vendor. I'm definitely in the latter camp, so I'm keeping good company, but the real question is: What, exactly, needs to be standardized?

Cloud computing has helped SMEs remain resilient during economic downturn

Cloud computing solutions are enabling small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Europe to the work more efficiently in these lean economic times. That’s the view of Daniel Saks, co-founder and co-CEO of AppDirect. In a recent blog for the Guardian newspaper, he said that while the crisis in the Eurozone has certainly made things difficult for companies to operate many are showing resilience as a direct result of using cloud-based services. He also pointed to research from Microsoft which shows that, despite many firms scaling back their spending, an 18 per cent increase on cloud computing spending is projected for the year ahead.

Africa: Cloud Computing’s Secret Weapon

Cloud computing’s best opportunity for unparalleled progress and worldwide relevance lies in how deeply and effectively it penetrates the African information technology community. Point blank. Why is this so? Simply because the massive continent remains in the dark ages of technology of all sorts, a condition which has fostered as many difficulties in thwarting this lack of progress as it has defined Africa as a potential gold mine for the cloud computing set. Reconnaissance of Africa’s technologically stunted growth provides vital context. As the African Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania concludes, “Africa seems to be the ‘lost continent’ of the information technologies. The second largest continent is the least computerized, and its more than two score countries have an average telephone density that is an order of magnitude smaller than that of the European Community.”

Cloud Failures Cost More Than $70 Million Since 2007, Researchers Estimate

A total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 well-known cloud services since 2007 had an economic impact of more than US$71.7 million dollars, said the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) on Monday. The average unavailability of cloud services is 7.5 hours per year, amounting to an availability rate of 99.9 percent, according to the group's preliminary results. "It is extremely far from the expected reliability of mission critical system (99.999%). As a comparison, the service average unavailability for electricity in a modern capital is less than 15 minutes per year," the researchers noted in their paper.


We hope these short sum-ups on Cloud Computing are helping you to take a knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming week.

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, June 15, 2012

Marx referred specifically to Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat in 1851, which came nearly 52 years after his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, seized power in France in similar fashion. He might as well have been commenting on cloud computing, though. The reaction of many in IT to cloud computing is eerily similar to initial responses by similarly placed people in regard to open-source software. One can view this latest set of reactions as a farcical repeat after the initial open-source struggle-and one can predict a repeat of the outcome, as cloud computing is undoubtedly going to emerge successful, just as open source did.

Source: http://www.cio.in

Check out the 5 Ways Cloud Computing is Like Open Source

How to embrace the shift to the cloud

Cloud computing is coming and businesses need to be ready. The transition to public or private clouds is gaining pace as companies realize the potential for transforming business capabilities and driving new innovative services. In fact, while cloud services are still in a nascent stage, IDC estimates that the market was already USD16 billion worldwide in 2009 and is expected to reach USD55 billion by 2014. To put this in context, cloud-related IT spending was only 4 percent of the total IT market in 2009, but is expected to increase to 12 percent of the total IT market by 2014.

Counting the cost of cloud computing

Among the benefits of cloud computing are lower infrastructure costs, reduced time to market and greater flexibility, with no need for enterprises to buy, install and maintain IT infrastructure and software. It can allow companies to become more agile and entrepreneurial, while the cloud computing vendor can deliver economies of scale by amortising its costs over all its customers. And we all also know that cloud is catching on in a big way. According to Microsoft, 70 per cent of businesses say they have already moved to the cloud or plan to do so.

Cloud computing comes to risk analysis

Regulatory pressures and business requirements demand that both buy-side and sell-side firms generate faster, more frequent and accurate pricing and risk analysis. At the same time, most firms need to assess trading and risk management decisions from a consistent, enterprise-wide, cross-asset perspective. But calculating such complex risk and pricing typically requires an enormous amount of computing power; resources that many firms, particularly hedge funds, asset managers and insurance companies do not have.

How to plan your cloud migration

Many enterprises are struggling both with deciding which applications should be moved to the cloud and which combination of vendors to use. In the fourth article in the Open Cloud Visionaries series, we interviewed Sadagopan (Sada) Singam, Global Vice President, Cloud Computing, at HCL Technologies Ltd., a pre-eminent technology services company in India. Singam offers battle tested advice for CIOs and CTOs who are trying to map out a coherent cloud migration strategy.

We hope these short sum-ups on Cloud Computing are helping you to take a knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming week.

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, June 08, 2012

When people think of Cloud Computing, the service that most readily comes to mind is Infrastructure. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) refers to the infrastructure, storage and network services that are available from most cloud vendors. IaaS is a completely separate offering and market from the other services provided by cloud vendors such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or any of the many other XaaS offerings and is often confused with datacenter outsourcing or a hosting solution. And though vendors appear to offer very similar offerings, all cloud vendors are not created equally.



So, with so many vendors out there from Amazon to Virtacore Systems, how will you know which is the best for you? Click here to know more

How cloud computing is revolutionizing tablet apps

Although today the words “tablet computer” instantly conjure images of the ubiquitous iPad, the tablet itself goes back much, much farther than that; the first patent for an electronic tablet used for handwriting was granted in 1888. Fast forward to 2002, when tablets running a modified version of Windows XP debuted — and immediately flopped. Early tablets never really quite caught on. They were heavy, there were issues getting desktop software to run smoothly on the hardware, and, perhaps most importantly, there were very few applications available. When Apple overhauled the concept by releasing the iPad, it had already had an App Store up and running for almost two years. Easily downloadable applications to run games, handle productivity tasks, display maps and more had already been built, tested, released, adopted, reviewed and talked about.

Could Cloud Computing Help Restore Our Trust in Banks?

Could cloud computing help restore our trust in the banking system? That’s a tall order, since the responsiveness and stability of our financial system rests on many factors, from adroit management practices to proper and measured fiscal and monetary policies. But some financial technology experts say technology — particularly cloud computing — can help repair some of the damage wrought in recent years and advance the banking sector into a new realm.

Cloud's Big Caveat: Runaway Costs

Cloud computing is a relatively new tool for IT--Amazon really launched the modern infrastructure as a service concept with its beta service in 2006. The management tools and IT practices used to control it show that inexperience. Also at many companies, cloud infrastructure is in a small-scale pilot that doesn't justify much spending on management tools, so the tool is a spreadsheet of what employees have said they plan to use. The technical term for such a system is "deploy and pray."

The cloud will cost you, but you’ll be happy to pay

Today, conventional wisdom suggests that cloud computing will bring increased efficiency to computing markets, which will then decrease costs. Cloud computing will allow organizations to cut IT spending and help relieve pressure on IT budgets. It’s a nice vision, but that’s not going to happen.The good news is that you’re not going to mind that your cloud computing budget will be higher than what you’re paying now for IT, because you’ll be able to do more. And here’s why.

We hope these short sum-ups on Cloud Computing are helping you to take a knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming week.

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, June 01, 2012

An industry report by software provider Sage claiming cloud computing is an "enigma" to business has been met with ridicule but also as a market opportunity by analysts and commercial rivals. The 2012 Sage Business Index reported over half of companies surveyed in Australia had never heard of the term "cloud". Barriers to adoption included limited perceived benefits, uncertainty as to how to implement cloud technology and a belief that their business "isn't the sort that could make use of the cloud".

Carter Lusher, chief analyst with Ovum and research fellow, said he found the survey results "puzzling" and appeared to be an attempt to fight technological transition.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Read more to understand the lurking question what is this thing called cloud?

Cloud Computing: do you have a clue?
Big systems vendors are spreading misconceptions about the cloud because it helps them sell more kit. This week’s BTL guest posting by an IBM IT architect, Cloud Computing: Is it right for you?, was an interesting insight into what the big systems vendors are telling their customers about cloud. But it was so full of misconceptions and misdirection it abjectly failed in its stated mission of sensibly guiding enterprise decision makers. Sadly, this is typical of the ill-informed conventional wisdom you’ll hear from the likes of IBM, HP, Oracle and most parts of Microsoft, Accenture, Deloitte and the rest when discussing cloud computing. To help redress the balance, here’s a quick rundown of some of the most egregious fallacies in the posting.

Cloud Computing Market to be Worth $37.9bn in 2012
Visiongain’s analysis indicates that the cloud computing market will reach a value of $37.9bn in 2012. With ever increasing proliferation of cloud services adoption by enterprises and end-users in recent years, the demand for cloud computing is at an all time high and is set to continue in demand and popularity over the next five years.

Are Cloud Reliability, Security Still ‘Open Issues’?
In a new report, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) notes 23 “open issues” regarding the cloud computing, including computing performance, cloud reliability, economic goals, compliance and information security. FierceGovernmentIT reports that issues highlighted in NIST Special Publication 800-146 (PDF) “are traditional distributed computing topics that have remained open for decades” but have become more relevant since the emergence of cloud computing. “Other issues appear to be unique to cloud computing,” says the document. On Offline access and synchronization/reliability: “For the cloud, reliability is broadly a function of the reliability of four individual components: (1) the hardware and software facilities offered by providers, (2) the provider’s personnel, (3) connectivity to the subscribed services and (4) the consumer’s personnel.”

The Politics of Cloud Computing
There are many issues taken for granted by companies when they move to the cloud. Aside from various technical issues, businesses fail to recognize that they’ll have to take into consideration the cultural environment of their own company. A very common problem that all businesses will encounter is the internal politics within the organization, which will tends to slow down cloud computing adoption.

We hope these short sum-ups on Cloud Computing are helping you to take a knowledgeable approach towards moving to the cloud. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on in the forthcoming week.


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.