Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is transforming the hosting industry. Traditional hosting companies and fresh service provider faces both play an active role in this emerging market. IaaS offerings taut agility for early adopters, while slower moving enterprises—still managing their own cloud—watch from the sidelines. Ever expanding datacenters, operational responsibilities and security requirements, amidst shrinking IT budgets, means traditional infrastructure often only makes sense for the largest of organizations.

1. Is the IaaS model right for you, or are you  better off with PaaS, SaaS or other cloud models?
   Disseminating IaaS from PaaS and SaaS is simplest to understand using the cloud stack model. IaaS includes all datacenter and network plumbing and service and storage hardware. A virtualization layer on top encases the IaaS offering. PaaS handles the next two layers of the stack; operating systems and infrastructure software. Finally, SaaS delivers hosted applications, ranging from personal email to full blown CRM systems. Leveraging the on-demand nature of these mdoels requires that an organization understand how they intend to develop and deploy applications. IT agility and autonomy beckons an IaaS structure.
2. Will implementing IaaS require additional IT resources?
   Adjusting from a static on-premise datacenter to a dynamic IaaS model can be a tremendous shift for enterprise IT organizations. IaaS solution providers also vary in their delivery of managed services. Providers like Bluelock offer managed services traditionally handled by internal IT to streamline operational tasks. This allows organizations to focus on their core business, not running their business. Examples of Bluelock managed services include operating system patching, load balancing, virtual machine backup and antivirus. The ease of IT operations inherent in IaaS solutions makes cloud particularly attractive to nimble startups with limited resources. Cloud investment and resources can scale with fluctuating businesses.
3. How easy is it to scale up (or down) your services?
   A key characteristic of cloud computing is scalability, or more precisely the ease with which scalability can be achieved. IaaS enables scalability through dynamic provisioning of resources on a self-service basis to meet business demands. While easy cloud offering takes a different approach to scaling parameters, all IaaS models are far more flexible than traditional one-app-per-service computing.
   A good illustration of IaaS scalability existed when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LMHI) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008. Amist the sell off of business divisions, LMHI was left without the technology assets necessary to support the wind-down of the company. Lehmann formed an asset manager business, LAMCO. Tasked with building infrastructure able to assume peek capacity day one and slowly wind down over time, cloud computing was the logical choice. LAMCO selected Bluelock’s VMware-based Virtual Datacenters due in large part to its flexible scaling capabilities.
4. Does the IaaS provide adequate support?
   The ability to quickly and accurately diagnose and resolve issues with infrastructure not only ensures reduced downtime, but keeps one issue from threatening an entire network. Dedicated support teams ensure enterprise IT and infrastructure keep pace with your business. Keep in mind, select vendor’s customer service is not offered 24/7 or is only available at an additional cost.
   Transitioning to the cloud is no small task. A staff of cloud experts at your disposal for guidance and support may help organizations new to the cloud. Bluelock has a proven track record in providing scalability and client support.
5. What is your plan for outages?
   Outages are a problem for any computing model. On-premise datacenters are especially susceptible to outages. Designing for failure should be obvious, but each cloud providers approach to blackouts varies. For example, Bluelock offers 99.99% uptime in the cloud because our clients are enterprise-level companies with mission-critical production environment needs. You likely can’t afford the downtime that would be threatened with a provider who can only promise 99.9% or 99.95% uptime.

Battles over formats and standards in the technology industry aren't new. Whether it was e-mail, word processing, graphical images or even some more current like the apps on your smart phone, each new innovation typically starts out somewhat proprietary and incompatible.

Today we live in a world where a lot of those battles have been fought and won while some are only starting to heat up. Formats tend to resolve themselves through standards so that things like e-mail and web pages "just work." That or at a minimum the technology we use evolves and hides it all from us via various forms of automatic conversion. In a world where so many technologies seem to get along - why shouldn't clouds? The answer isn't so simple and, as is often the case, history has a way of repeating itself.

Different Approaches
Just as email initially emerged inside of private datacenters, so has cloud infrastructure. It was initially based on virtualization technology and, depending on what kind of IT shop was involved, you most likely ended up on VMware if you were trying to make your core datacenter more efficient by virtualizing legacy servers; Xen if you had a significant Linux or Java developer presence where the need to rapidly provision test and develop machines was important; and maybe even Citrix if you were using Metaframe for serving up applications to remote users or thin clients. For some companies, cloud adoption started outside the corporate datacenter inside of the VMware vCloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Different Platforms
These approaches initially evolved into distinctly different virtualization technologies. VMware's vSphere platform grew up in the heart of enterprise data centers so it focuses more on performance, manageability, stability and uptime. Amazon's platform is directed at rapid provisioning of instances that are great for developers and dynamic workloads. While they both promote the concept of virtual machines as the building blocks of their clouds, the formats are very different. Amazon breaks its workloads into images called Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which contain an operating system image from a limited library, memory and CPU resources. VMware uses a format called a Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) that contains not only the memory, but also a more flexible operating system image that can be based on any x86 and, as you can tell by the name, the disk storage itself. With Amazon's AMI model, any additional storage outside of the operating system image must be kept on a separate disk image on the network using either their S3 or EBS storage solutions. With VMware's VMDK, because the disk is included, you can move everything around. They call this a vApp.

Competitors
It also goes without saying that the war for cloud market share has started and is being waged in earnest. Given the amount of dollars at stake, it makes complete sense. The major players all want their share of the anticipated $241 billion that corporations are predicted to spend in the cloud over the next 9 years (according to Forrester Research). This kind of growth opportunity resembles a land grab of significant size and proportion that fosters only self-serving forms of compatibility.

History Will Repeat Itself
As we now know from the email platform wars, once the bulk of companies picked their initial email standard to implement, the green fields of opportunity started to dry up. As a result, email platform vendors found themselves in a situation where they could only gain market share by taking customers away from each other. This caused them to start offering various forms of migration services. The initial offerings were assistance with your email strategy, which was closely followed by professional services teams that could perform the migration for you. At some point, the professional services teams developed tools to make the migrations easier and those tools ended up being packaged and offered directly to end users.

We are starting to see this trend emerge in the cloud. Most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers have either a toolkit or a professional service offering that helps customers migrate from one SaaS provider to another. You can see this with Salesforce and Netsuite. VMware and Amazon are no exception. Amazon offers a tool that allows you to convert your VMDK virtual machines into AMI images. VMware has an extensive professional services offering and numerous channel partners that can help an Amazon customer migrate to a vCloud or back to their internal VMware vSphere environment if a customer found themselves locked in to the Amazon cloud.

Interoperability and Open Standards
It's clear that more help is on the way, but there may be some solutions that can help in the short term. The Distributed Management Task Force, also known as the DMTF, is a standards body that represents 160 member companies and organizations and more than 4,000 active participants crossing 43 countries. They have endorsed and are actively promoting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard for Virtual Machines(VMs) and Virtual Applications (vApps). OVF support is the foundation of the VMware vCloud and VMware vSphere 4.1. Workloads can be quickly converted to OVF and then moved or copied between clouds as the needs dictate. This gives the IT department and power users the ultimate flexibility as they begin to adopt a cloud-enabled approach to IT.

Which One Is Best?
Choosing the best cloud platform is a lot like deciding to upgrade from a tube television to a flat screen. It can be hard to choose when you see all of the different flat screen television technologies like DLP, LED, Plasma and LCD but once you've made the leap to High Definition, regardless of which technology you chose, it still puts you light years ahead of where you were with your old TV set.

How to Choose
The most important thing is to determine what the right use cases are for your organization to adopt cloud. For some companies that may be to make their existing IT resources more agile and efficient so placing some of the workloads they have already virtualized using VMware into a public vCloud make the most sense. For other companies that may need to perform thousands of calculations on a moment's notice, consuming that capacity from a commodity cloud like Amazon's EC2 might be the best fit. The real key is that this landscape is evolving and changing rapidly. Any workload placed into the cloud should conform to existing IT practices and should be able to be de-provisioned, redirected or moved as the cloud market matures and the understanding of which clouds best fit which workloads becomes clearer.

Global Washington’s mission is to help Washington State’s non-profits work together to alleviate world poverty, however they lacked the budget and IT expertise to build an effective technology solution. Bluelock, with Esri ArcGIS (Geographic Information Systems) and VMware, developed and launched a sophisticated database-driven GIS application delivered as SaaS from the cloud.

A membership association that promotes and supports the global development sector in Washington State, Global Washington’s vision was to create a cohesive, viable online community where non-profits can learn and collaborate with other members working in the same space. Technology implementation is especially difficult for international development organizations. Global Washington addressed this technology gap with Bluelock Virtual Datacenters, powered by VMware vCloud Director.

On-demand access to computing resources through Virtual Datacenters allowed Esri to package the GIS applications as a virtual appliance (or vApp) within 48 hours and complete the first phase of the project within two months. Future customers seeking this type of GIS cloud-based solution can now publish that vApp from the vCloud App Catalog on-demand.

The pilot was a resounding success and the GIS application dramatically improved service delivery. “With the help of Esri, VMware, and Bluelock, we’re using cloud technology from our Virtual Datacenter to help our non-profit members increase the visibility of their activities, improve communication and collaboration, and advocate more effectively for the causes they support.” stated Bookda Gheisar, Executive Director at Global Washington.

Read Entire Success Story >>

vCloud Director has allowed developers to create isolated, self-contained virtual applications that are easily replicated and shared across clouds. As we increasingly bring a number of ISVs and SaaS developers onto the BlueLock public cloud I have seen an interesting trend evolving - vApps (and the OVF metadata that wraps around them) have become an increasingly convenient way to package and distribute applications.

The practice of creating ready-made virtual machines is not a new one - in fact VMware Player exists for this very reason. A ready-made and pre-configured application can very easily be bundled inside of a virtual machine, compressed and made ready for download. Bundling more complex applications that span multiple virtual machines has been a more difficult thing to do; VMware Workstation attempted to tackle the issue with the concept of "teams," but it wasn't a complete solution. It took the advent of the OVF standard and the vApp construct within vCloud Director for a practical solution to arise.

vApp encasulation has made distribution of SaaS and complex multi-server applications easy - you just freeze-dry your vApp, save your vApp to your vCloud catalog or save the entire thing to disk. Want to easily spin up an n-tier application? Just deploy from the OVF and you're up and running within minutes.

Could this capability be exploited to help with the software release lifecycle? At first this sounds like a great idea: when your n-tier application is ready for quality assurance testing just clone the vApp and hand it off to your QA team. Once the application is tested and approved, you clone the vApp once more to place it into production. No more guessing about configuration files, no more wrestling with pushing binaries or creating automated deployment scripts. One big wrinkle exists with this strategy... the mega-problem that always comes back to bite every engineer with good intentions... data is rarely portable.

Current production data can't be blown away with every new release, even with stellar database backup procedures. Even if we isolate our data tier and place it in an immutable VM you still need to tweak your application configurations to point to a new database after every development/QA/production push. Even worse - what if you forget to make these configuration changes? Your production application could suddenly be serving up QA data. It's enough to make a release manager eat the entire bottle of antacids.

Without a doubt, vApps give you extremely more convenient and agile ways of promoting applications along with the infrastructure that hosts it. This is extremely useful for development, test, quality assurance and demo environments. Still, one has to be ever mindful that binaries don't make an application. Data makes an application.

BlueLock announces today that Trabian, a web development and hosting form specializing in financial institutions, has selected BlueLock as its cloud hosting partner. With the announcement, Trabian will use BlueLock’s Virtual Cloud Professional to host custom websites and web applications for its client base.

“Security is a major pain point for our clients who are regulated by the financial industry and we needed a hosting solution that could answer to those regulations,” said Matt Dean, President and CEO, Trabian. “BlueLock has met all of our security requirements and has made security information readily available which allows us to better serve our own clients. We look forward to not only utilizing BlueLock’s highly available, scalable and secure platform with our computing environment, but also their vast cloud experience as we see them as a trusted and proven partner.”

 “We are excited to work with Trabian and help them provide an apt and secure environment for their clients,” said Matt Hunckler, Client Specialist, BlueLock. “BlueLock Virtual Cloud Professional offers them the flexibility and scalability they will need as they continue to grow, with the performance, security and client services that are supported by the BlueLock team.”

Delivering pre-configured, secure and resilient virtual IT environments which scale on-demand, BlueLock’s CloudSuite offers a selection of tailored IaaS environments to best configure users’ computing resources. With CloudSuite’s array of public and virtual private cloud computing solutions, clients have the ability to utilize cloud resources based on their specific needs to optimize deployment, management and investment. Recently named the 2009 Service Provider of the Year for the Americas by VMware, the global leader in virtualization technology solutions, BlueLock offers solutions for the developer to the Fortune 500 executive. BlueLock was also recently named one of three North American VMware vCloud Datacenter providers offering compatible, secure and hybrid cloud-ready VMware-based public cloud resources.

About Trabian
Trabian Technology is a web development firm with a focus on credit unions that builds advanced, browser-driven content management systems. Trabian focuses on delivering technology to all its clients via a Software as a Service model (SaaS) while maintaining a custom branch of the codebase for each client.

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.

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?  

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!

Step 1: Research

Quality Programs typically consist of procedures, policies, audits, & the old saying “if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”  Before beginning any of these, I decided to research some industry best practices.

The IT world is filled with white papers, webcasts, blogs, etc…  Mike Durham and I started to filter through this information over the past week & came across an interesting concept
entitled ITIL Lite. 

ITIL (Information Technology Information Library) is a set of concepts and practices for managing IT services/operations.  This Lite approach focuses on the steps that need to be taken to achieve an organization’s desired level of ITIL implementation.

Could this concept be utilized here at BlueLock to help us define a Quality Control Program?  Stay tuned as we research ITIL Lite further, join local user groups, and continue the journey of quality implementation in a SaaS Virtualization environment.

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.

SaaS virtualization is creating an ocean entrepreneurial opportunities, where small, nimble businesses can create real value by making creating more efficient ways of doing things.

One thing that James Urquhart points out in his Wisdom of Clouds blog post is that there is still a lot of opporutnity in the SaaS virtualization realm. Businesses that currently use enterprise apps need experts who can transition them to more robust and reliable SaaS apps. There is certainly plenty of room for experts like these to create value, while collecting strategic consulting and referral fees.

As more and more companies take on SaaS apps to manage their business processes, the need for consolidation will increase. Imagine the ability to pay for your campany's blogging platform, accounting system, email marketing platform, and CRM tool -- all on one bill. Now wouldn't that be nice? Urquart rightly points out that SaaS meter consolidatoin could craete a level of convenience for which some companies would be willing to pay.

It will be interesting to see how enrepreneurial companies take advantage of the small pockets of opoprtunity in the SaaS industry next year. It's hard to say which ideas will win, be you can be certain that speed and agility in deploying new business models will be key ingredients to success in SaaS virtualization innovation.

 

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?

Cloud computing providers differ in two main ways: people and control.  No two cloud services are alike for that very reason and people and control are the two variables that differentiate cloud computing providers from one another.

The definition of cloud computing varies everywhere, but some main characteristics of “the cloud” are: virtualization, capacity on demand, shared resources and subscription-based pricing.  If you fit that bill you’re a cloud, but which segmentation of cloud?

It's either:

SaaS (Software as a Service) – The web-facing software that users interact with (i.e. SalesForce or Google Apps)
PaaS (Platform as a Service) – a platform that helps utilize cloud resources (i.e. RightScale or rPath)
Or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – the actual infrastructure behind the cloud, the virtualized servers and network (i.e. BlueLock, GoGrid or your internal cloud)

For purposes of this post, we’re going to focus on Infrastructure as a Service (makes sense because that’s what we’re experts at).  From here, there are also a few different type of IaaS clouds (surprise, surprise!) and their characteristics, to make things just a little more interesting.  Here they are:

Private internal cloud:
-    Limited Capacity
-    Expensive
-    Highly Secure
-    Enterprise Features
-    Self Managed

Public utility cloud
-    Limitless Capacity
-    Lower cost
-    Self Managed (DIY)
-    No/DIY SLA
-    No/DIY Security

Full-service public cloud
-    Large Capacity
-    Fully Managed
-    Customized Security
-    Enterprise Features
-    Enterprise Services
-    SLA

Back to IaaS cloud differentiation – again, all about people and control.  First, you have to decide how much control of the infrastructure you want, can manage or more importantly, can afford.  Then take a look at the other components that will affect your costs in the cloud (some of these you may already have):

-    Hardware & software
-    Licenses
-    People
-    Place

If you’re looking at a do-it-yourself platform like Amazon EC2, you’ll have to purchase your own people and they’ve have to monitor, control and manage the infrastructure.  With this option you’ve got a lot more control, but a much higher TCO – because those people are going to cost you lots of money.  But if you don’t have the people, or you want them to focus on something else, like your core business (i.e. your software solution) instead of the infrastructure then a trusted full-service cloud option like BlueLock makes a lot more sense and could save you about $50,000 a year. 

How’s that even possible?  When you purchase a BlueLock solution, you’re not only purchasing the infrastructure and place to house that infrastructure, you’re purchasing the people and expertise behind it – meaning less employee costs for you (or more beneficial employee costs).  Some would argue you lose a little control because your people, your team isn’t the one working on the infrastructure, but others think that a partner like BlueLock is just an extension of their own team – and a better use of their IT budget at that.  Take Projetech for instance – watch this video and you’ll see that they really see BlueLock as an extension of their company not just another vendor, and that’s the way we like to think about it too. 

Version One has produced the findings of a survey showing that 41% of Senior IT Professionals admit that they “don’t know” what cloud computing is.  However, this is by no means an aggregate of the findings of what could have been a much larger survey.  The findings are based on the responses of only 60 senior IT professionals all of whom are from the UK, in various private and public sector organizations.  They had released a prior study that showed that two-thirds of UK’s senior finance professionals were confused about cloud computing.

However, there are some small signs of life in cloud computing in the UK.  5% of respondents say they use cloud computing “a lot” and 19% say they use it “sparingly.”  Their definition of cloud computing may be a little blurred though, making those responses somewhat inaccurate.  59% said they know what it is:  17% say its internet-based computing, 11% believe it’s a combination of internet, software as a service, software on demand, outsourced or managed service and a hosted software service, and the remaining respondents say it’s a mixture of the above.   The definitions are loose, although in some manner they’re all cloud-related. 

Assuming the 41% that don’t know the definition of cloud computing didn’t claim to use the technology, we’ve still got about 25% of these UK IT professionals using cloud technology.  Now to me, that sounds like the technology is catching on.  The other 75% will just have to play some catch-up once their companies begin to see the value in SaaS, PaaS and/or IaaS.  As for the 41% who don’t even know what cloud computing is, well they’ll wake up one of these days and actually read something regarding their industry.

I couldn’t’ find the actual report, but to read VersionOne’s summary, click here.

Want to see a short video that explains virtualization and cloud technology...with LEGOs? We like to make things easy here at BlueLock, Click here.

Want to know why cloud computing will succeed?  Click here.

Brian Wolff's definition of cloud computing.