Recently, BlueLock’s Brandon Jeffress and I visited Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana to take a look at how cloud computing is being used, or could be used, in the classroom environment. Jeffress, alum of Anderson, arranged for us to meet with Professor Charles Koontz, head of the Information Technology department there. After a tour of the facilities, we sat down with Professor Koontz to discuss the role of virtualization in modern college IT training.


You can’t open a news feed today without reading something about cloud computing, virtualization, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), so Brandon and I were surprised to learn that these topics are all but absent from the modern college IT major’s curriculum. Professor Koontz explained that colleges follow the guidelines of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) which sets standards for the curriculum of IT majors in order to ensure that graduates possess the appropriate body of knowledge upon entering the working world. Cloud computing, it seems, has simply exploded onto the business scene so quickly that education has not been able to keep up. Curriculum changes take time, and so it is left up to the proactive student to engage with these expanding fields through their own research and internships. 

Brandon and I weren’t satisfied with that. Even for the most proactive students, internships and independent exploration cannot compare to the engagement one gets with a project under the direction of a professor. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to introduce students to virtualization through a short classroom tutorial, allowing them to interact with the topics they were reading about in the news through actual hands-on experience? 

      
Professor Koontz suggested that the IT major’s senior capstone class might be a great place to start. He invited Brandon to come and teach a day’s class on Cloud Computing, the advantages of cloud hosting, and his role at BlueLock this fall. Brandon agreed that even an introductory level class might really help to give the students some clarity around the whirlwind of topics referred to as “cloud,” including: Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). 

Additionally, Brandon suggested that the advantages of cloud computing could work in the students advantage when it comes to getting hands-on experience in managing environments. Before virtualization, it would have been impossible for an individual student to practice managing their own multiple-server environment. Even just three servers would have cost thousands of dollars in years past. But now, with virtualization, it takes just a few minutes to spin up three new VMs. If a college were to leverage virtualization in its classroom, students could manage their own multi-server environment in the cloud with ease. The student could control everything from creation of the VMs to their retirement, giving them great experience in one of the hottest fields in IT.

Professor Koontz believes such a program would be a great addition to a student’s education and would be willing to experiment with such a program at Anderson. He also recommended we investigate other local universities, including Indiana University, IUPUI, Ball State, Purdue University, and The University of Indianapolis. Together these schools could work to build a standard curriculum and pool their resources to implement this short tutorial series which might give Indiana’s recent graduates a leg up as they step out of the classroom and into a very “cloudy” business world.

Last week I attended Softletter's SaaS University in Washington, D.C.  It was a great event aimed at helping SaaS companies learn how to better market, sell and deliver their cloud computing solutions using the Software-as-a-Service model.  BlueLock was asked to deliver a session on the infrastructure choices that SaaS companies face when deciding how to host their application. 

The numbers from the 2010 Softletter SaaS Survey revealed that SaaS companies have many infrastructure choices to make, from highly virtualized (Cloud) server farms to highly managed service systems and many variants in between. My session analyzed the choices available to SaaS providers and and gave some realistic numbers, checklists, and scenarios that hopefully helped them make the best choice for their operations and peace of mind.  Infrastructure As A Service offerings can be a great benefits to SaaS companies in that they can help them move opex expenses to capex expenses, lower their overall costs, align their expenses with revenues, improve their speed-to-market and provide a competitive advantage.

Here's a link to the PPT and the presentation on SlideShare.

Ping Li from Accel Partners wrote a very interesting article this week about how some of the companies that his firm have funded are leveraging cloud computing.  He made a couple of points that I find particularly interesting: 

The first is that VC companies are making it a “pre-condition” of funding that the funded company leverage the cloud vs. buying traditional infrastructure. 

Even more interesting and more powerful is his second point: that most of these companies didn’t need that encouragement – there is no way their company could exist if they didn’t launch in the cloud – it just wouldn’t be possible to build the scale, complexity or cost without using a cloud infrastructure provider. 

His article got me thinking about all the other companies in the “universe” and the book by Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch.  In the book, Nick tells the story of Henry Burden and “Burden’s Wheel”.  Burden realized in the late 1800’s that he could locate his manufacturing company next to a river, build a huge water wheel to generate electricity and then automate many of the manufacturing processes, thereby lowering his cost, increasing production and crushing the competition.  Mr. Burden, no doubt, needed a very specialized group of people to build and maintain this elaborate “power system”, however, by the early 1900s, commercial power was introduced that turned his internal power generating systems into an enormous cost that other manufacturers did not have to bear.  Sound familiar?

Many others have done a better job than I could in this post about the difference between power and data - that really isn’t the point.  The point is that there are companies today that have launched very successfully without any internal IT systems – which means no IT capital costs, no/minimal IT labor costs and maintenance costs that larger companies today bear with their own internal IT systems.  There are other differences, of course, namely, that large established companies have huge legacy systems that may not necessarily be appropriate for the cloud, however, they do have very large costs supporting other systems that are considered important but not critical that may be perfect candidates to be migrated to the cloud.  By moving these environments to the cloud they have the opportunity to reduce their overall cost and enable their existing IT departments to focus on building more valuable systems to drive more business value. 

In start-up companies, pure cloud hosting is the preferred route to market – in large companies it’s not going to be an all-or-nothing proposition – it’s going to be a “hybrid” approach. With a hybrid approach, enterprise companies create a secure connection between their private cloud and a public cloud (today a secure VPN or MPLS connection) and then move less critical workloads to the public cloud.

At BlueLock, we like to say that we’ve been in the cloud a “lifetime”, and we have the good fortune to be serving many companies in both of these camps:  start-ups (many that are SaaS companies specifically); and large enterprise clients that sought to leverage the cloud to lower their costs and focus their valuable IT resources on projects and systems that drive more business value. 

In July, I’m going to be presenting to software company CEOs at SaaS University in Washington, DC on the topic of “Infrastructure Choices”, where I’ll put a spotlight on the cost differences between building your own internal infrastructure vs. moving to the cloud.  I will also be discussing many considerations that companies face such as security and SLAs, two issues that should be top of mind when deciding which cloud is right for you.  

If you’re interested in attending the event as BlueLock’s guest – register for the event and use this code:  BLUELOCK100 to receive a $100 discount off the cost of registration.

If you have a comment or would like to contact me, you can reach me at bwolff@bluelock.com.  

Budding Buddists are most likely familiar with the idea that "The root of all suffering is desire." When it comes to Clould Computing Security, it's my observeration that at the root of all security concerns about moving data and applications to the cloud is control.

Kevin Fogarty at CIO.com wrote an interesting article last month titled "Cloud Computing Poses Control Issues for IT".  In the reality show that is Cloud Computing, "Security" plays a convincing foil to the main character known as "Advantages of Cloud Computing" but rarely, if ever, does the decision come down to which encryption algorithm you're using for sensitive data or whether or not you're using an IPSec or a SSL VPN solution.

For us geeks there are always heated, emotional debates about which technology has more speeds and feeds or which is a more elegant solution to a problem.  However, most IT managers and architects are willing to accept the argument that large service providers are able to acheive economies of scale as well as economies of security by making large investments in security technology and even larger investments in good security professionals then spreading those costs over their client base.  The real issue is whether or not the organization is willing to give up control of data and systems to another company.

Imagine on one end of the control spectrum Dedicated Private IT where the organization controls the entire stack - Data, App/Services, VM/Server and Storage.  The only portion of the stack which the organization has to share control of is the Network - because few organizations have the ability to provide the connectivity available from private telecommunications companies.  On the other end of that spectrum is Public SaaS solutions where the organization shares control of the Data (they decide what can go into the cloud and what can't) but the App/Services, VM/Server, Storage and Network is under the sole control of the service provider.  Even if the service provider is far more qualified to care for the outsourced service than the IT organization itself, the company's executive team may not be willing to give up that much control.

Public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions may provide the middle ground in this control struggle necessary for companies to be willing to start ot move to Cloud Computing.  Most Public IaaS models place the responsibility for managing the Network, Storage and Server portions of the computing stack; the company still maintains access and administrative control to the VM, App/Services and the Data.  This allows organizations to rely on service providers to manage the security of the underlying infrastructure but makes it easy to lock out the service provider and maintain control of everything else.

Cloud technology is rapidly evolving with new products, services, and organizations each with their own unique perspectives and value propositions. But with so much going on, how can one stay current with cloud computing?

In this special edition of Whiteboard Wednesday, Bob Roudebush talks us through how he stays on top of cloud news – from security and services to companies and user groups. We cover different SaaS aggregation and curation tools to help manage your information flow. And for those who like a more interactive way of digesting their news, we also talk about how to find great info with Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

Let us know what you think:

 

Cloud Computing means many things to many people.  It excites, motivates, and even scares some.  But what does it mean to you?

The advantages of cloud computing have been touted again and again - from flexibility, speed, versatility, convenience, and cost effective to green, secure and scalable.  But what makes cloud computing so interesting is that everyone has different thoughts and views around what it really does for them and means to them.

So first things first, what is cloud computing? At BlueLock we describe it in terms of 5 major things: on demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service.  It is provided in three different service models: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). (BlueLock does IaaS.)

But what's the real value of the cloud? These are the major values our clients have seen:

• Transitioning IT infrastructure costs from Capex to Opex
• Opportunity to lower overall costs
• Better match expenses to revenue
• Rapid provisioning (speed to market)
• Competitive advantage

 But again, I must ask, what does cloud computing mean to you?  

With cloud computing becoming more and more pervasive, IT's role is morphing towards one of governance rather than control.  Internal departments are going out and accessing resources from the cloud rather than waiting on their internal IT departments to come around and get to their requests. IT must be more and more aware and ready to govern the use of outside IT resources such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which in some companies is a fire-able offense.

Internal IT must make decisions - they need to choose what to provide (SaaS & IaaS) and make those options easy and accessible to their business units.  Why? Because leaving those business units to their own devices can be a huge risk.  They may be putting the company or its client's data at security risk.  

There are many benefits of cloud computing, but the right people must make the right decisions around where your data is stored and what options are OK for business units to use.  Cloud computing security must always be top of mind, especially when sensitive data is involved.

Cloud computing (virtual cloud or "vCloud") is buzzing everywhere now, but what is it?  InfoWorld has a good article about "What cloud computing really means". I find it to be a rather helpful overview, here is a quick snippet from the post:

BlueLock Cloud Hosting lets you choose which cloud service works best for you (see this article from ReadWrite Cloud - BlueLock Lets You Customize Your Cloud Infrastructure).  Using the "Cloud" means choices, and using BlueLock gives you the benefits of choices. 

We are a hosting service provider in the cloud space. Some call it Infrastructure-as-a-Service, others call it cloud hosting.  Whatever you call it we manage, maintain and run the IT infrastructure from the operating system down so you don't have to.  What do you do with all that extra time? Focus on your core business!

Tom Henderson and Brendan Allen with Extreme Labs did an excellent and even-handed job of comparing three Enterprise Cloud Services.   BlueLock was honored to be considered.  The costs came out exactly as I would have expected and for the reason I’ve pointed out many times in previous blog posts, including this one (see tip #13 from a recent post) – we were the “expensive” option.  I’m not saying that being the expensive option is a bad thing, but if you look at the bigger picture, we just aren’t. The difference is people and expertise.  
 

Our philosophy (and pricing model) is different than Terremark and Rackspace’s cloud hosting offerings.  At BlueLock we’re focused on the relationship and helping companies manage the infrastructure so that they can hire more developers and/or sales people rather than systems engineers.  You’ll pay “more” at BlueLock because there’s more value (hint: people) in our offering than just raw compute and storage.  If you don’t want to read further, just scroll down to the illustration and you’ll see just what I’m talking about.
 

In addition to delivering raw unmanaged infrastructure, BlueLock is delivering systems engineering expertise to manage the environment from the operating system down – which is all part of the bundled price.   I’ve presented many times to an audience of software company executives on making the best infrastructure choices for their SaaS offering and the cost numbers I use during that presentation are almost identical to Tom’s and Brendan’s.   
 

My point here and during the presentation is that when you load your applications to the cloud – someone (a person or people) MUST manage those environments – whether they are internal or external.  When you bring them to BlueLock and load them into our Enterprise Cloud Platform, you do not need to employ infrastructure experts – that’s what we do for you.  Companies that choose our competitors or Amazon for that matter must have infrastructure experts to manage the environment – and that cost is not in their numbers, so they look much cheaper.   
 

The chart below adds a single full-time resource to the costs to represent one employee managing the environment.  That doesn’t cover you if your employee would like to sleep, get sick or take a vacation, but you’ll get the picture without going off the deep end with costs.  
 

Finally, I recently competed against and beat one of these two cloud hosting companies mentioned in the Network World article (link) and based upon my discussions with the client the other guys did have an implementation fee….I’m just sayin’.

 

OK – time to take it home.  Hopefully you've already read my first and second post for SaaS CEOs, and now I’d like to finish up the final five tips for taking your applications to the cloud. 

I'd also like to ask you for feedback on what you think and whether you think I’m on the right track.  Please feel free to challenge and question me in the comments field below.


Tip #11:  Set financial penalties for downtime:  I agree, there should definitely be some financial incentive for the Cloud provider to perform for a couple reasons:  

Tip #12:  It takes time to see ROI on SaaS development:  Sage advice from Adam on this one – it’s going to take time and a concerted effort to make Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pay off for you.  His comments make me think about focus.  Our experience is that many SaaS companies have little to no experience running a hosted infrastructure – so that skill must either be hired or acquired.  Hiring people is hard, so I might argue (because this is our business) that SaaS companies can get further, faster by focusing on writing the code and driving demand, while leaving the hosting to experts like BlueLock.  That’s exactly what SaaS company Right On Interactive did – they focused on writing better code and allowed us to help them get further, faster by managing their infrastructure.  Check out their cloud computing case study.

Tip #13:  Savings are not in the cloud, but in headcount:  Oh man, I wish I could make this tip #1!!  Adam hit the nail on the head.  I’ve presented an infrastructure choices presentation to Rick Chapman’s Softletter SaaS University conferences several times and I tell the Software CEOs in the room that one of BlueLock’s key value propositions is about people.  I even take them through a little back of the napkin math around the difference in cost of 5-10 servers doing it on your own, doing it at Amazon or hosting it with BlueLock.  BlueLock wins and I tell the crowd that you could substitute BlueLock for another managed cloud provider because it’s not about my ability to pay my people less, it’s about my ability to “fractionalize” our labor cost, where they must have a full time equivalent (FTE) or 2 (if that person wants to take a vacation) or 3 (if you want 24x7 coverage and let someone take a vacation or get sick).  So the software company that has dedicated staff to “manage” their cloud environment at Amazon is, in the end more expensive, than allowing me to manage their environment for them at BlueLock.  If you’d like to see the analysis – send me a note at bwolff at bluelock.com and I’d be happy to share the slide and take you through my logic. 

Tip #15:  Let the cloud lead you to new innovations:  This last tip takes the previous tip and Lincoln’s presentation to the next level.  Companies that choose to deliver their software via SaaS (in the cloud) open up many new opportunities for revenue and value creation. The first step toward opening up new horizons for your software company is to migrate to SaaS and let the users take you to a better place.  The cloud will only continue to get better, and SaaS companies taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing will be leaps and bounds ahead of their competition in terms of cost efficiency and flexibility.

Thanks for reading this post – if you’d like to learn more about how BlueLock is helping enable other SaaS companies just like yours, drop me a note at bwolff at bluelock.com or visit our website to find out more about our cloud hosting services. 

I would also love to hear what you think about my take and if you think I’m on track or “off in left field”.

--Brian

BlueLock has been named to Nine Lives Media Inc.’s third-annual MSPmentor 100, a
distinguished research report identifying the world’s most progressive managed service providers.

“We are honored to be recognized by MSPmentor as one of the world’s most progressive managed service providers," said John Qualls, President and CEO, BlueLock. “We believe our selection is recognition of our continued company growth over the past year and further validates our business plan and the market’s need for different classes of managed IT and cloud hosting services. Three years of cloud experience has allowed us to deliver true cloud computing services that enable developers to Fortune 500 enterprises to deploy and operate their applications on a highly available and scalable platform that is tailored to the
needs of their apps.”

The free MSPmentor 100 report, available at www.MSPmentor.net, is based on data from MSPmentor’s global online survey, conducted October through December 2009. The MSPmentor 100 report recognizes managed service providers based on a range of revenue and management metrics.

Founded three years ago, BlueLock was one of the country’s first providers of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enabling companies to provision and manage their technology infrastructures more efficiently and cost-effectively. Delivering pre-configured, secure and resilient virtual IT environments which scale ondemand,

“Despite the challenging economy, MSPmentor 100 companies generated more than $700 million in combined recurring revenue and managed services revenue, up 31 percent from the companies’ combined results in 2008,” said Joe Panettieri, editorial director, MSPmentor. “Our report also reveals how MSPs are already profiting from SaaS and cloud services.”

MSPmentor, produced by Nine Lives Media Inc., is the ultimate guide to managed services. MSPmentor features the industry’s top-ranked blog, research, Webcasts, and FastChat videos. It is the number one online media destination for managed service providers in the world.

In my last post, I tackled tips 1-5.  This week I’d like to take a look at the next five tips Adam Stone referred to in regards to "Making sense of the cloud: 15 tips for software CEOs" and provide you with the BlueLock perspective on what companies looking to migrate to cloud computing should be thinking about.

Tip #6:  To Avoid vendor Lock-in, stick to open standards. 
This one makes a lot of sense to me – in the end, you need to make sure that whatever you put in the cloud you can get back easily and intact.  While some may argue that deploying VMware technology locks you into VMware’s virtualization platform, I would argue that VMware is the defacto standard for virtualization technology for the enterprise, by virtue of their large market share.  Deploying VMware gives clients a lot of flexibility to move that server to another VMware host if they wish to move.  We even have cases where companies wish to protect themselves from something happening to BlueLock as a cloud provider.  In that instance, we’re replicating the entire virtual machines to a neutral third party, Iron Mountain.  If a triggering event were to occur, the company simply contacts Iron Mountain and receives immediate access to the virtual machines, which can immediately be loaded on servers running VMware.  That’s just one straight-forward example of how “portable” the environment is as a result of running in a VM ware-based virtualization platform.

Tip #7:  Location, Location, Location. 
Yes, indeed, it’s difficult to bend the laws of physics and the speed of light.  This tip talks about two real issues – the first is latency and the second deals with the laws that govern the location where the data center sits, in both cases, BlueLock has engineered solutions to address our client’s specific challenges.   We have clients that need to have the data closer to them than our data centers in Indianapolis, IN or in Salt Lake City, UT for speed or data privacy issues.  For these clients, we introduced our version of a private data center called The BlueLock Box in October 2007.  This private cloud solution entails installing an HP C3000 blade chassis with redundant SAN shelves behind the client’s firewall.  This solution provides them with the same benefits of BlueLock’s public cloud such as fault tolerance and scalability, but puts the data closer to them for speed and/or privacy issues. 

Tip #8:  Consider using a middleman. 
I agree with Adam – there is a huge opportunity for cloud brokers or companies that have expertise in helping clients make thoughtful decisions about what can and/or should go into the cloud and then to actually help architect and deliver the cloud solution.  We’ve worked closely with several partners who have trusted advisor relationships with large fortune 1000 clients that have chosen BlueLock as their cloud solution.  In fact, we’ve been asked to present next week in VMware’s Partner Exchange keynote on the topic of how partners can work with a cloud providers to deliver real value to their clients.  I will be sharing the stage with Carl Eschenbach, EVP of Worldwide Field Operations and Casey Watson, VP Business Development for Apparatus to talk about how BlueLock and Apparatus have built a sizable business delivering cloud integration services for large clients.

Tip #9:  Monitoring uptime isn’t enough, you need an action plan. 
We couldn’t agree more with Adam on this point.  From day one, we’ve had a resolution-based 99.99% uptime SLA in place for our clients.  This means that not only will we respond quickly to the issue, but we’ll promise resolution of that issue.  On top of that, we’ve also patented a portal that we call “the VITAL signs portal” that provides our clients with an overall view of the health of their environment, as well as an ability to drill into each aspect of their environment, to see what’s actually happening.  Finally, we have also built capabilities in the portal to send alerts and alarms when something goes wrong or when the environment has reached a pre-determined limit on things like CPU, RAM and storage.   If those measures aren’t enough, we’ve also built tailored metrics for some clients that wish to monitor additional key metrics in their environment.

Tip #10:  A clause may look good in the contract, but be useless in the real World.  Adam’s tip in this area covered a “useless” escrow agreement.  In tip number six, I shared how we’ve put an escrow agreement in place that can be tested and actually works.  Having said that, I agree that empty legal promises are not the way to make sure you’re protected.  Testing the system is the best way to insure what’s being set aside actually works.  In addition to the escrow agreement, we also have numerous disaster recovery clients that have performed successful tests of our geographic failover disaster recovery service.  In the end, you want the “promise” in writing, but then you want to do a test to make sure it performs as expected.  Reminds me of an old Reaganism – “trust but verify”.

Next week, I’ll take us down the homestretch and walk through the final five tips for migrating successfully to the cloud. 

Tip #11:  Set financial penalties for downtime
Tip #12:  It takes time to see ROI on SaaS development
Tip #13:  Savings are not in the cloud, but in headcount
Tip #14:  Follow the cloud into new markets
Tip #15:  Let the cloud lead you to new innovations

If you'd like to read the original post by Adam Stone, go here.

Adam Stone over at Software CEO wrote a very timely article compiling the opinions of several respected industry experts into 15 tips for understanding cloud computing. 
I thought Adam’s article highlighted several ways that BlueLock thinks about the cloud differently (or the same in some instances).  I plan to break the 15 tips down into three blog posts providing my perspective on each point he makes.

Tip #1:  Be Careful how you use the term. 

Adam’s point is that “cloud is not cloud is not cloud” – so it’s best to think about what you need most for your applications and then look for cloud computing service(s) that solve those specific needs.  For example, if you need a better CRM system – you’re probably looking for a SaaS (software as a service) application.  If your developers are spending way too much time writing code for functionality that is not core to your software package – you’re probably looking for a PaaS (platform as a service) – an opportunity to use someone else’s code to extend your core software’s functionality (billing comes to mind).  If your developers or infrastructure team are spending too much time managing failed servers, network or patching OS’, or if they can’t keep up with the growth of your very successful company – you’re probably looking for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

Tip #2:  Make the Trendy Pitch. 

The din of people talking about Cloud Computing is deafening, even Dilbert has gotten into the act.  No doubt, your CEO and CFO have even been thinking about the proposed advantages of cloud computing and how they might help the business.  There are ways for almost every company to leverage cloud computing.  There are most likely servers or processes in your company that could be improved by a provider of SaaS, PaaS or IaaS, so take a look around, find a business need and explore ways that a cloud provider might be able to help cut costs and increase efficiencies - this should make your CEO and CFO happy.

Tip #3: Take One Step at a Time. 

One misconception/mistake that I see over and over again is that companies evaluate sending their most mission critical systems to the cloud first.  You should think about your IT environments and applications plotted on a graph of concentric circles with your most critical environments/applications in the middle.  As the number of users goes down or the criticality of the applications or the amount of attention an application receives from your IT staff goes down, move those applications to the outer circles.  The applications in the outer rings should be the ones that are evaluated for cloud first.  There’s less risk, less integration (maybe) and a higher chance for success with these environments.  We’ve built a very crude tool (that will be refined over time) to help you evaluate your applications and where they fit on the “circle of risk."

Tip #4: Keep Your Eyes Wide Open. 

I agree, due diligence on the provider is key.  As the gold rush continues, there are many companies rushing into the space to claim their fortune.  Many will come up with sand and dirt when they realize there’s a huge difference between running a data center and running an entire infrastructure with many, many clients.  In addition to all the points that Adam made about the questions to ask, my experience tells me that time in the market as a cloud provider (not just a co-location provider) is one of the best indicators of stability and staying power.  You’ll want to choose a provider with minimum of three years of success as a cloud hosting provider.  It was around the 2-year mark when we really started to hit our stride around managing the scale of our cloud environment, stabilized implementation and refined the management of our capital effectively, proving we could run a profitable business in the cloud.

Tip #5:  Make sure to get live support.

We’re a live support kind of company – because it’s relationships with our clients that matter, however, I would take a slightly different angle on this.  This is where I’m back to the criticality of the environments/applications.  If you’ve chosen a system that is less critical to the business, it might be perfectly acceptable to use chat, email or other means to get support from your cloud vendor.  Of course, they have to be responsive, that goes without saying.  But if you’ve chosen wisely, you may not need to talk to someone in order to get your problem resolved.  One caveat of course is that if you’re going to run mission critical applications in the cloud – then live support is a must.

So that’s the first five points around understanding cloud computing – stay tuned for the next five.  If you’re interested in learning more about how we do things at BlueLock  - send us a note here.

Coming in future posts:

Tip #6:  To avoid vendor lock-in, stick to open standards
Tip #7:  Location, location, location
Tip #8:  Consider using a middleman
Tip #9:  Monitoring uptime isn’t enough, you need an action plan
Tip #10:  A clause may look good in the contract, but be useless in the real world
Tip #11:  Set financial penalties for downtime
Tip #12:  It takes time to see ROI on SaaS development
Tip #13:  Savings are not in the cloud, but in headcount
Tip #14:  Follow the cloud into new markets
Tip #15:  Let the cloud lead you to new innovations

*If you’d like to read the original post by Adam Stone go here.

A recent study shows that the awareness of cloud computing in Asia is still relatively low at 46%.  That means over half of the survey respondents answered that they were not familiar with the concept of cloud computing.  This sound to me like half of Asia has never even heard of cloud computing!

So what does that mean for the market of cloud computing?  There is room for a lot of global growth.  While currently over two-thirds of the respondents say that cloud computing is "not relevant" to their businesses, I have a feeling that as the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing become more apparent, those thoughts will change, especially in a country where 95% of organizations are aware of or using Software as a Service.

“Cloud computing is the next phase in the delivery and consumption of IT-enabled services and a major evolutionary step in the maturing of the IT industry,” said Michael Barnes, vice president.. “It provides an opportunity for organisations in Asia Pacific to leapfrog competitors in other regions. We expect organisations across Asia Pacific to embrace Cloud Computing as a way to drive greater standardisation at the IT infrastructure level while simultaneously lowering the resources required to leverage technology solutions for business benefits,” Barnes added.

All schmoozing and business-card-swaping aside, there are some fantastic advantages of attending cloud computing conventions and expos. I've found meetups like Cloud Camps, ITEC, TechPoint Summits, and Cloud Users Groups to be a fuel source for both professional and personal growth.

Assimilation of knowledge through osmosis is simple.
There are usually tons of super-smart people at events like those listed above. Whether these people are cloud computing providers, vmware virtual server specialists, or others utilizing a cloud computing platform; just standing b and listening in on conversations can be a learning experience. Be curious, pay attention, and ask questions.

Networking -- the interpersonal relationships kind -- reaps rewards.
Meet some new people, nd expand your network. How can you help event attendees? I always make it a goal to make at least three connections that don't immediately benefit me in any way. While you should never help someone with the intent to gain something in return, the law of reciprocity always pays dividends.

Fluency increases competency.
The simple repetition of explaining the advantages of cloud computing has helped me build a certain level of confidence and competence around the benefits of virtualization, vmware hoted environments, and SaaS irtualization. Join in the conversation and learn to talk the talk. The act of speaking about cloud computing platforms, helps to organize thoughts, enhance comprehension, and vet new ideas.

Bottom line: get out of the office and learn somthing from somebody -- including yourself. Find the next cloud computing meetup in your area. Hope to see you there.

New to the idea of Software as a Service SaaS Virtualization? This video from Salesfor will help bring you up to speed:

This short video clip, produced by Salesforce.com, effectively points out that managed cloud hosting is a superior way to run your business. It's clear that multitenancy is simply a more efficient way to approach IT infrastructure.

For those of you who are new to cloud, some of the major benefits of cloud computing are that your data is:

• secure
• backed up in another location (redundant)
• not limited in storage or resources

To help you better understand Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Common Craft recently put out a cool little video that is put together like School House Rock for the 21st century.

You can check it out here: Cloud Computing Hosting in Plain English

I always keep an eye open for better ways to explain the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing to not-so-technically-inclined friends as well as potential clients. I found these quick videos to be expremely helpful in succinctly illustrating cloud computing hosting.

A recent email industry survey shows how businesses are reacting to email infrastructure being migrated to the cloud.  Osterman Research found that security-related email functions are dominating the software as a service market today and that the functions most likely to be outsourced in the future, if not already, include anti-spam, bulk email, anti-virus an anti-malware.

What factors are holding companies back from migrating to the cloud?  Findings show that more companies haven’t migrated to the cloud because of privacy concerns, data retrieval concerns (will they be able to grab that data back once it’s in the cloud?), because of regulatory compliance issues and because some companies are just plain scared of losing control.  However, upon a closer glance at cloud computing - a full-fledged look at what cloud hosting can do would show that cloud computing advantages include more choices, agility, control and protection than what a standard IT infrastructure environment can provide, which is why more than 20% of the users surveyed have outsourced their email functions to the cloud already.

Here are some of the results of the survey:

• 40% of companies surveyed are outsourcing some or part of their email infrastructure
• Anti-spam (64%) and bulk email (46%) are being outsourced by most companies
• Today:
  •  20% of users are served by a SaaS solution
  • 22% of email servers run as virtual servers
• In two years:
  •     38% of users will be served by a SaaS Solution
  •     49% of email servers will run as virtual servers

I think the two year projections are somewhat low, but the general growth towards using cloud hosting for email functions and/or using virtual servers is evident.  At BlueLock we’ve seen great success in migrating email to the cloud.  For many companies it makes the most sense to get email off of their machines freeing up space for them internally and getting their IT people working on more strategic applications.  Contact us today to learn more about migrating email to the cloud. 

Read the original post about the survey.

Earlier this week, the Open Group announced the creation of the Cloud Work Group which was established to ensure the effective and secure use of cloud computing in enterprise architecture as well as to continue previous Open Group efforts to develop and promote standards for cloud computing that will prevent vendor lock-in, which has been a hot topic these past few months.

As we all know, there are hundreds of “cloud experts” with hundreds of different definitions about what cloud computing really is.  I think we’re beyond that at this point.  Cloud computing has no official definition, but at this point there’s a general consensus around capacity on demand, access via internet with the use of virtualization, etc. etc.  So now that we’re no longer seeking the “what,” the focus has been drawn more towards the “how” in regards to how do we make this technology the best it can be, and in a format that is beneficial to the service providers and the end users.

And that is precisely where the Cloud Work Group fits in.  Defining the “how” starts with architectural requirements and works towards the different cloud computing platforms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS).  Vendor lock-in is important to consider as these standards are created – as it’s the main reason for them.  However, just because standards are defined, it doesn’t matter until the vendors and providers adhere to those and build their solution around them.  There’s the rub. 

There are tons of different providers out there, with lots of different solutions on different technology platforms.  And currently, there’s just no economic incentive to go towards interoperability (or is there?).  So how will we get all of the providers on the same page?  What will be the biggest obstacles?

1. It’s not all-or-nothing move, most will opt for a hybrid approach.
Cloud computing will not necessarily replace a company’s entire infrastructure or serve as a total outsourcing option for data center operations on-site.  Most companies will use the technology in addition to their resources, blending public and private clouds to maximize efficiencies and resources.  I would even argue that companies will begin to adopt different cloud providers for different business functions (i.e. test/dev vs. production environments) because of differing needs and requirements in addition to their on-site resources.

2. Workloads
Some argue that cloud computing is best used for pre-production workloads such as test/dev and storage rather than production.  I’m here to say that some providers are able to handle different workloads better than others.  For example, BlueLock offers 99.99% uptime in the cloud because our clients are enterprise-level companies with mission-critical production environment needs.  They can’t afford the downtime that would be threatened with a provider who can only promise 99.9% or 99.95% uptime.  But similarly, clients who only need test and development models don’t need to pay the premium for a 99.99% uptime cloud environment when they only require 99.9%.

3. One size doesn’t fit all in the cloud
Each company has its own needs and requirements when it comes to their computing environment.  A financial company cannot and should not use the same type of an environment a social media site does.  A cloud computing model or environment must be built to service the specific needs of that client.

4. It’s just a delivery model
Cloud computing isn’t a technology – it’s just a shift in the way the world does IT.  Cloud computing represents a combination of technologies such as SaaS, online storage, and grid or utility computing.

5. It’s for the big guys and the small
Many think cloud computing is just for the SMBs, but many large corporations have jumped on the bandwagon as well.  BlueLock has added on a number of large enterprise clients this year who are using the cloud because it makes the most business sense.  Outside of BlueLock, the market is seeing large companies consume a mix of cloud services – public, private and both.

6. Self-service
Self-service is one of the cornerstones of cloud infrastructure.  Some transactions just don’t require “people” to be there and the logical step was to remove that element in the service.  Therefore, the self-service aspect of cloud computing is a huge step in automation and cuts costs on both the buyer and seller sides of the hosting business.

7. Standardization
Cloud computing is highly touted for its ability to create efficiencies by cutting out the capital expenses and transferring those to lower operating expenses (subscription or pay-per-use model) and for its on-demand benefits.  But that’s not the big picture – cloud computing allows people all over the world to access, connect and work smarter, faster, better.