I was not surprised by any of the findings form a new study on IT outsourcing conducted by Savvis, Inc. More than 300 IT decision makers from the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore shared their perspectives on the economy and their plans to manage their costs more effectively by outsourcing infrastructure and incorporating virtualization. As you can see from the chart below, a significant portion of the IT executives around the world agree cloud computing will play an important future role in helping companies gain efficiencies and reduce costs.

These findings are consistent with the conversations we are having with IT professionals and business leaders around the country.   We are finding genuine interest in outsourcing infrastructure as a way to manage capital costs and staffing levels. This interest is coming from both established organizations looking to upgrade their systems, such as Marian University and relatively new software firms, hoping to expand rapidly. 

The study also discovered an interesting correlation between companies which defined themselves as succeeding in the downturn and those who outsourced more of their IT infrastructure.  What are you seeing in your market place?  Are companies which are specializing, and outsourcing going to be more successful in the long run?

In a recent special insert in the Indianapolis Business Journal, "Indianapolis Region" produced by the Indy Partnership featured thoughts from BlueLock's CEO and Chairman who both had lots to say about the emerging IT sector in Indiana and Indianapolis.

As you remember, back in February KPMG named Indianapolis one of 31 "locations to watch" around the world as business processing outsourcing hubs in information technology.  Its becoming more and more evident that Indiana is stirring up some commotion in the IT fields.  From internet marketing to IT services, the state is growing and building strong, viable and innovative businesses.

With regional universities such as Rose Hulman, Purdue, IU and Ball State who are generating lots of talent combined with a generally low cost of doing business, and companies in Indiana have a competitive advantage.

Mark Hill, Chairman of BlueLock and managing partner of Collina Ventures stated, "It's a relatively inexpensive place to do business.  By definition, I have cost advantages over my competitors in other parts of the country."

But the competitive advantages aren't just about the raw talent - BlueLock's CEO John Qualls adds, "They're getting workd class expertise at Indiana rates."

See what else they had to say:

Article

Around the world business leaders are making plans to manage the impact of the pandemic crisis on their business.  Contingency plans look at all areas of business operations from HR (will employees be paid if there is a forced shutdown, will they be compelled to come to work if the business stays open?) to communications Issues, travel and work at home plans, and of course IT.

Some of the key discussion points in an IT contingency plan include:

• Web capability for communications
• Staffing issues
• Data Center operations (lights out operation, automated patching)
• Remote Access
• Security
• Help Desk operations
• PC support for employee personal computers
• Ensuring security of access and data while dealing with employee personal computers
• Video-conferencing
• Recovering from cascading emergencies (flu combined with other crisis hurricanes, terrorism, etc.)

While a major outbreak is going to have an impact on every business, companies with a disaster recovery strategy which includes cloud computing, will see much less impacted of the crisis. At BlueLock, our clients supported by redundant data centers in Salt Lake City and Indianapolis, have 24/7 access to their data and applications.

Jian Zhen wrote an interesting article about Cloud Computing – stating that “You can outsource responsibility, but you can’t outsource accountability.”  At the top of most cloud customers/prospects minds is the issue of security and compliance - but when you give the cloud computing provider the responsibilty of protecting your data and environment, how do you know they'll take on accountability as well?

Zhen states that it doesn’t matter if data is in the cloud or on-premise, what matters is that the there is control and transparency on the client’s data, applications and identities.  Every client, no matter what their industry or specialty, must be compliant with whatever regulations and mandates they’re responsible for.  So this not only means that a cloud prospect looking to outsource their IT infrastructure must find a reliable cloud provider – they must also do their due diligence to make sure that the provider will go to any length necessary to build an environment that is not only secure but fully compliant.

Zhen states, “If you look across all of the regulations and mandates out there, like SOX, PCI, HIPAA, COBIT, ISO, etc etc, they all require essentially two things: transparency and control.”

Does your cloud computing provider allow you to see who’s accessing what data, when and where with documentation?  Are your data, applications and identity protected?



This image shows the three primary focuses when it comes to control and transparency – identity, applications and data.  If any of these come under attack, your entire business could falter.

Zhen argues that enterprises are better off in their own environment where they can “do many things…to ensure they are ‘as compliant as possible’” but in the cloud “they lose that control.”  However, it’s important to note that he’s mainly referring to Google App Engine and Amazon’s AWS.  He says that the problem is not necessarily that the clouds aren’t secure; it’s that the enterprise loses control and transparency when they move to those clouds.

So what if you want to outsource your IT and get into the cloud - but you don’t want to lose control or transparency? You want enterprise level IT security and compliance.  You want an IT environment that can withstand audits and attacks. 

You look for an enterprise-level cloud provider who has clients who came to them because they could build a secure and compliant environment that cost a fraction of what it would cost for that company to do it themselves – plus the provider has 24/7/365 management and monitoring (we call this full-service offering managed cloud hosting).  You don’t lose control and transparency.  That cloud provider takes on the responsibility of protecting your environment, data, applications and identities, all the while being accountable for what goes on in the environment.  You won’t get that in a GAE or AWS cloud, but you just might find it somewhere else…like the BlueLock Cloud.

The way we see it enterprises shouldn't feel like they can't reap the advantages of virtualization and managed IT hosting because of security and compliance.  If they want to virtualize and need security and compliance, it's just the beginning of a great conversation.

In case you missed the originaly article about BlueLock in the Indianapolis Business Journal, the same story was picked up this week by CIO Today!

What BlueLock does is complicated: It provides what is known as "virtual cloud computing." So when Vice President Brian Wolff explains the concept, he simplifies it...

Some other places you might have seen it:
Sci-Tech Today
VoIP In Detail
Tech News - REALHS

HP has recently published a BlueLock case study featuring our Infrastructure as a Service environment built with HP LeftHand SANs on VMware infrastructure.

"HP LeftHand SANs allow us to continuously scale.  We've gone from 2 TB to more than 300 TB without incident.  We just keep adding HP ProLiant DL320 Storage Servers as our business requires," said Pat O'Day, Chief Technology Officer at BlueLock.

BlueLock's objective was to create a flexible, high-performance architecture to meet the constantly changing needs of our virtual cloud clients.  BlueLock engineers used HP LeftHand SANs working with VMware to create a scalable, cost-efficient, 100 percent virtual platform.

Some of the technology outcomes include:

• Highly available and flexible technology environment
• Improved recovery time - from hours to minutes
• Disk failover without interruption
• Decreased storage-management work cycles

and the business outcomes:

• Performance on demand meets changing client infrastructure requirements
• Ability to offer clients aggressive service level agreements (SLAs)
• Reduced hardware footprint and energy and cooling consumption
• Support for innovative product development

To read more on the case study and learn about BlueLock's fully virtualized cloud computing environment click here.

In a controversial presentation last week titled “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” an analyst from McKinsey delivered his findings on the costs and benefits of cloud computing. His preliminary finding, based on one client, is that cloud computing would actually be more expensive.   The response to this report has varied dramatically. 

Personally, I felt the study was too narrow, and failed to consider the implications of a gradual transition, or the benefits of improved access to data and process. In fact, I might suggest that McKinsey is playing catch up in the cloud and showed us that they’re a little behind on content and vision.  There is a tremendous amount of energy being spent by many companies, especially VMware on creating cloud “inter-operability”, which will allow large and small companies to be very thoughtful about where they place certain applications. 

Thus, as John Foley suggests in his post, it will not be an either or proposition – it will likely be both.  I met a company last week at VMware by the name of IT Structures and their main value proposition was the ability to turn up and turn off quickly demo sites and test sites.  They can do in days what it would take internal IT departments weeks to do.  Now why wouldn’t a large enterprise “bless” that sort of behavior? It makes them more flexible and it keeps the business happy and moving forward.  This, of course is just one idea for how “specialty” clouds will add value to enterprise companies.
Here is what a few others had to say:

Amy Wohl, In a post entitled McKinsey Got it Wrong She says:

The value of cloud computing lies elsewhere: 

• In the flexibility of being able to gain immediate access to additional computing (or to shrink your system when you don't need it).
• In the difference in Time to Market for new business opportunities.
• In the additional value (not included in the McKinsey study) provided in clouds that offer to manage the hardware (via systems software and other offerings) or to provide applications (SaaS). 

Writing for Information Week, John Foley is less critical of the report overall, but he does say:

McKinsey paints cloud computing too much an either/or decision, and that's the wrong way to look at it. IT pros need to do both--virtualize internal systems like crazy and investigate cloud services as a fast, flexible, and cost effective (if not always cheaper) option to capital investment in on-premises software and hardware.

As the responses continue, what do you think or the McKinsey report?

In today's challenging economic climate, the most pressing IT mandate is cost reduction and finding ways to "do more with less." Central to this is dealing with the explosion of application deployment and systems management complexity, which has brought today's manual processes to the brink. Join us on Thursday, April 30 at 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM ET to hear from industry experts on emerging approaches to automating "the last mile" of IT processes, specifically as it relates to system configuration, deployment and maintenance across traditional, virtual and cloud-based execution environments. The result is lower cost, lower risk application delivery, and dramatically improved enterprise agility and business responsiveness.


Speakers include:

• Pat O’Day, CTO, Bluelock
• Jean-Pierre Garbani, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
• Erik Troan, Founder and CTO, rPath
• Sabine Soellheim, SUSE Appliance Program, Novell   

Attendees will learn:

• The business case and ROI for automated application delivery
• The transition from an infrastructure- to an application-centric approach to systems management and what this means for virtualization and cloud
• How to create seamless, automated transitions between all of the phases in application delivery to reduce costs and achieve true enterprise agility
• The role of the cloud as a "fabric" for application deployment

All registrants will receive complementary access to the Cutter Consortium essay, "Rethinking Application Delivery in the Age of Complexity," by Erik Troan.

Register Now for "Tackling the "Last Mile" of IT Process Automation"

As cloud computing continues to generate interest in broader communities, this writer from the London Financial Times (Winning with the cloud - registration required) hits on one of the issues which I believe will accelerate the transition to cloud computing environments; your data may actually be safer in a cloud environment.  He says:

Software security should always be a concern when discussing critical business data, wherever it’s kept. In many ways, cloud computing can be more secure than hosting data in-house. For example, it generally takes 30-60 days for businesses to patch vulnerability in their own computer systems. During that time, the corporation’s IT infrastructure is at risk. With the scale of cloud computing, everything can be fixed quickly and ensure the infrastructure is safe.

Here at BlueLock we’re working with two of our security partners ISS/IBM and Shavlik to continuously improve the methods we use to secure each of our individual client’s cloud environments and taking a holistic approach to securing our entire cloud more efficiently and effectively. 

VMware has finally released vSphere, the long-awaited overhaul of its core virtualization platform designed to aggregate the virtual resources in the data center into one centrally managed computing pool.

VMware continues to push the private cloud in its hopes that IT centers will build highly virtualized, fault-tolerant, self-service data centers that exist within the firewall for the benefit of the company’s users.  A future upgrade will allow private clouds to connect to commercial cloud services such as those provided by BlueLock.

According to Jon Brodkin of NetworkWorld, “Compared to VMware Infrastructure 3, vSphere will double the processors available to VMs, more than double the network interface cards available to VMs, quadruple memory, triple network throughput, and double maximum I/O operations per second more than 200,000.”

BlueLock will be hosting a product preview this Thursday 4/23 in collaboration with the Indianapolis VMware User Group.  For more information regarding the event and to register, click here.

BlueLock is a vCloud hosting partner with VMware.

Related articles on the vSphere launch can be found here:

NetworkWorld

Yahoo Personal Finance

Marketwatch

ChannelInsider

Opensource.sys-con.com

MSN Money

PCWorld

Cloud Computing Journal

VMware

Related Blog Posts:

Bmighty.com

Thevirtualblackhole.com

Time: May 6, 2009 from 6pm to 8:30pm
Location: Gene B. Glick Achievement Center
Organized By: Ed Saipetch
Sponsors: BlueLock & Network Storage, Inc.

Event Description:

Survival Tactics: Into the Cloud

The second Indy Cloud Users meeting will feature IT professionals from ShareThis.  The company built their business in the Amazon cloud.  ShareThis employees attended the first meeting and there was lots of interest and questions surrounding the strategy, cost and security of the Amazon cloud and what it allowed them to do with their business.  We're expecting much more in depth discussions this month.

ShareThis uses EC2 and other Amazon Web Services to host its entire operational infrastructure.  In this presentation, Michael Babineau will talk about the business and technical decisions that led SHareThis into the cloud, then dive into use cases of how they leveraged AWS for:

• Handling 12,000 HTTP requests per second with a customer-facing web application
• Processing 100MB of logs per minute with a queue-driven MapReduce cluster
• Launching 100-node MapReduce clusters on demand for batch processes Loading 350 million rows per day into a 6TB data warehouse

About ShareThis:

ShareThis is the sharing network that makes sharing simple. ShareThis allows users to access their contacts and networks from anywhere online and share through email, IM, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, mobile SMS, and more, without ever leaving the current page. Publishers can use ShareThis to drive traffic, stimulate viral activity and track the sharing of online content. ShareThis is currently available on 100,000 publisher sites and handles 120 million view and share events per day.

The event will sponsored by Network Storage, Inc and BlueLock.

Food and drinks will be provided.

A friend of mine is getting ready to move into a condo. The contents of his current home are being divided into three categories, things he will move, things he will give away, and things he will store in case one of his kids needs it later. 

He is going to rent a physical storage large enough to contain all the items he thinks his kids might want.  His rent will be determined by how much storage he needs. He expects it to be secure from theft, protected from destruction and accessible so he can reclaim his belongings whenever he wants.  As he gives away items or accumulates he can move to a smaller or larger storage unit.

In a nutshell, customers coming to BlueLock are looking many of the same items.  Our VMware virtual storage allows our customers to scale on demand; increasing or decreasing the size of the cloud to match their needs.

My friend expects a secure environment and so do our clients. This need for high levels of security is why we include the Shavlik Security Suite as part of our comprehensive cloud computing solution.

Partnering with Shavlik a recognized leader in the security software market allows us to deliver a proven solution for our customers which address the patch management and compliance challenges inherent in highly distributed physical and virtual environments.

For more on BlueLock’s cloud computing security, check out these posts:

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We are elated to announce that BlueLock has been chosen as a finalist for the 2009 Mira Awards in the Information Technology Gazelle category.  The "gazelle" denotes companies that have been incorporated less than three years and have experienced rapid growth.  This will be tough competition against innovative companies from all over Indiana, some of whom we have had the honor to work with.

We would like to extend a congratulations to the other companies who were chosen as finalists in the same category: Cantaloupe.TV, Compendium Blogware, FormSpring, Right On Interactive, Scale Computing, Sensory Ventures, The Basement Design + Motion, and Vontoo.  We wish you the best of luck and look forward to seeing you on May 16th.

Brian Wolff, co-founder of BlueLock, will present "Cloud Computing Landscape and Opportunities" in the Talking Tech Series webinar hosted by FormSpring on Wednesday, May 13th at 12pm EST.  Wolff will offer his views on the benefits of cloud computing and its differences from traditional data centers.

Attendees will learn about:

- the different types of clouds
- capabilities and characteristics of the cloud
- financial and organizational differences between traditional data centers and cloud computing environments
- different cloud options and the advantages of each
- how to leverage the benefits of cloud computing without the constraints of vendor lock-in

The webinar is part of a three part series featuring thought leaders in the business and technology fields. Lorraine Ball of Roundpeg and Troy Burke of Right On Interactive will provide their insight in the areas of marketing and automated software respectively.

Click here to register for the free event!

April 7th, 2009 : Rich Miller

Over the past week, there have been a series of electronic attacks on major Internet web hosts and domain service providers. These distributed denials of service (DDoS) attacks have disrupted service for tens of thousands of web sites. Here’s a recap of the recent activity:

Coincidence? Conficker? Obviously, there’s no way to know. But a worrisome common thread is that these were all large-scale attacks that disrupted providers who’ve seen plenty of DDoS attacks before.

BlueLock is excited to host the first Indy Cloud Users event tomorrow evening (4/8/09) from 6-8pm at the BlueLock office (6325 Morenci Trail).

The goal of the group is to provide a forum for the proliferation of knowledge surrounding cloud computing and virtualization.  After a successful bout at hosting CloudCamp Indy, it was very obvious that Indianapolis and the surrounding areas have a great interest and knowledge regarding these topics.  We're hoping to resurface those discussion from CloudCamp tomorrow and during future events.

If you are interested in attending but have not yet RSVP'd please contact me at aglick at bluelock dot com.

Although some of the furor around the Open Cloud Manifesto has died down, conversations around the industry continue. Rich Miller reports, a face-to-face meeting between many of the key participants was productive, with talks about the possibility of an industry trade association. 

Taking a contrarian view, William Hurley asks whether we really need a Manifesto. He questions whether the points outlined are realistic, viable, and worth pursuing.  He also wonders whether the IBM driven document was created to be deliberately structured with an anti-Microsoft bias.

And according to this recent post on ComputerWorld, Microsoft clearly has several issues with the Manifesto, but not necessarily the concept.  Steven Martin, Microsoft's senior director of platform product management, said in a blog post  Microsoft supports the need to create guidelines for cloud interoperability, it was "admittedly disappointed" in the process used to create the manifesto.

Jeff Kaplan of Think IT thinks it is a good idea, but sees it more as a defensive strategy on the part of some of the more established vendors, who are afraid of being left in the dust by the more nimble cloud vendors, as he says: “they are playing catch-up in the cloud computing market, and are threatened by the ‘game-changing’ nature of this new approach to IT.”

This is an exciting time to be involved in cloud computing.  My assumption is the debate will continue for quite awhile, but I hope the open debate will allow us as an industry to move forward to a future platform which allows us to deliver more value to our user community.

The green movement has lost a little bit of its fervor with all of the economic problems going on.  However, BlueLock still thinks being green is great when it comes to IT infrastructure.  Not only does being green help save the environment, but it saves your company money.  With the economic situation in hand, green (cloud) computing is a win-win game all companies should be playing.

So how do we make our data center green?  Two major things: VMware virtual servers and HP LeftHand SAN.  BlueLock has realized a strong "green technology" benefit in terms of reduced power and cooling consumption and space requirements.

BlueLock CTO Pat O'Day explains:


BlueLock has created a green, scalable, cost-efficient and 100% virtual platform by utiilizing the VMware vCloud and HP LeftHand P4000 SAN solution.

Every IT manager lives in fear of a power outage.  The interruption of process and potential loss of data can be devastating, even if it is only a short power interruption.   Our clients turn to BlueLock to protect their data and processes from just such an interruption. 


You might wonder, what happens if our building suffers a power outage?  How does it affect the clients who rely on us?  The answer, it’s not a problem.  With backup generators on site, and redundant systems in our Location in Salt Lake City, our clients don’t experience the outage, even if we do.  


This was put to the test on Sunday, a power outage occurred which lasted about an hour and half (about 2:30pm to 4:00pm). The cause: a utility pole anchor that holds the pole in place came out of the ground and allowed the pole to tilt into a 34,500 volt high tension line – it made lots of sparks and took out the power.


As soon as there was an interruption in our electric supply our backup generators came on line.  The generators are engineered to provide a backup power source for BlueLock in the event we lose commercial power.  So the generator in conjunction with the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) took the place of the commercial power during the outage.  Because of the design there was zero interruption to our clients – they couldn’t even tell that the lights flickered in our data center.  The generators provided power as needed to keep all of our clients systems running flawlessly.  

Thirty years ago, as desktop PCs entered the workplace; many assumed the “4 hour work week” would follow shortly.  Surely these processing marvels would reduce the time it took to complete routine tasks, freeing workers for more productive tasks, and more leisure time.   A generation later, what we have learned, is the ability to do more, brought with it more requirements to support and manage these machines and the applications they created. 

A generation later the same conversations are occurring surrounding the advent of cloud computing.  With expanded processing and storage capabilities the cloud will allow us to do more.  The challenge is that “more” will come with a premium.   As Alan Williamson, Editor-in-Chief of SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal says when describing the benefits of Cloud Computing:

Companies wishing to leverage the benefits of cloud computing have many choices.  They can tap into the very cost effective clouds provided by companies like Amazon and Google.  The challenge is they will need to be prepared to manage the process, configure their services and monitor the performance.  Or they can choice a more full service alternative (AKA managed cloud hosting), where the essentially transfer the control and the headaches, to experts who can manage the infrastructure so they can manage their business.