Per usual, James Urquhart published a thought provoking post on cloud computing and geopolitics. Recently, as part of my 100-day cloud watch, I’ve pointed out the importance of cloud computing environment location in respect to data residence. In his post, James goes further, or perhaps better stated, starts earlier. Raising awareness on the paths that data travels, to reach its destination:
“How would an application operator deploy applications at a minimum "distance" from users in a network sense, without finding themselves passing data through a country that would jeopardize the safety of that data? Again, the path your data takes between two physical locations may not be the path you expected.
You are already seeing some examples of how the governments and corporations are trying to mold the Internet and "the cloud" to fit into human geopolitical realities. Countries like China, Iran, Pakistan, and others have demonstrated their willingness to control the Internet transoms over their nation’s borders, and to apply technology to controlling the "border traffic" at those crossing points.”
In his post, James makes some great observations on computing versus world boundaries, and poses a challenge for cloud computing, networking, business and political leaders:
“What’s missing, however, is any form of formal infrastructure within the Internet/Intercloud itself to "automate" mapping the human world to the computer world. Is this even possible, I often wonder. Can we (or, more to the point, should we) try to "codify" the laws and regulations of the world into digital form, allowing computer networks and applications to self-regulate?
What would the political fallout of such a system be?
In cloud computing, "virtual" geography and "physical" geography are both extremely important, and it’s up to humans to keep the two aligned. Because this is complex and prone to error, it may be one of the great business opportunities to come out of the disruption that cloud computing is wreaking on IT practices.”
Read his post. Remember it’s not just the destination, but also the journey that counts.
Tagged as:
geopolitics,
intercloud,
James Urquhart,
location
Posted by brenda michelson at 11:38 am in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, data, networks | Permalink
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Continuing my survey of the cloud computing surveys, I’ve been staring at the results from the June 2009 CIO Magazine cloud computing survey, wondering what I’m missing. The responses that have me scratching my head are related to cloud computing drivers, budget spend and budget reductions. Snapshots of the three questions follow.
[Click on pictures to enlarge].
As you can see, the first question shows reduce hardware and staffing costs as the primary drivers of cloud computing. The second question attempts to quantify this savings (% budget reduction) over time. Take note of the Average (Mean) line. The expected reductions are 5.6%, 7.6% and 9.3% over 1, 3 and 5 years respectively. As a former Senior IT leader with budget responsibility, I recognize that 5.6-9.3% budget savings aren’t easy to come by, and certainly add up as savings, or provide an alternative source for strategic investments.
So, all good. Until you review the Average (Mean) line of the projected spend question. That line shows on-demand service expenditure as 5.6%, 8.0% and 10.2% of budget over 1, 3 and 5 years respectively. Comparing the spend against savings, you’ll see the spend is equal to, or greater than, the projected savings.
Ok. Initial years IT spend outpacing projected savings isn’t exactly a newsflash. IT is a long-term investment, and return isn’t immediate. Certainly, if respondents are building on-premise cloud computing environments, you would expect a longer time period to savings, with a more sustainable savings stream.
However, this survey focused on “on-demand services”, as in ‘from away’:
“The way most CIOs define cloud computing today is as a Software-as-a-Service-like arrangement where your company does not own the software, hardware or any specific equipment run by the provider. Access to the cloud vendor’s systems takes place over the Internet in some secured way and for that access, customers pay a subscription fee that rises or falls with the level of use. Cloud computing offerings are often referred to as “on-demand services”, “cloud services”, “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)”, etc.”
Translation: a subscription (rental) economic model. If that’s the case, then this survey shows that on average, organizations are paying more in rent than they expect to recoup as savings. Obviously, no CIO is consciously making that call, spend $1.00 to save 90 cents, indefinitely. Something is missing, and I don’t think it’s me.
Rather, there are business value benefits the survey didn’t consider, such as shortening time to value, increased focus on core capabilities, extending a value chain, or even the creation of short-term business innovation spaces.
So, this is a long-winded way of saying, do benchmark analysis, but then do your own math. In doing that math, don’t limit your sights to the IT side of the equation.
Tagged as:
business drivers,
CIO Magazine,
enterprise considerations
Posted by brenda michelson at 5:21 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, economics | Permalink
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Last week, in discussing findings from the BT Global Services Enterprise Intelligence survey, I wrote about why cloud computing environment location matters:
“Many of the clouderati will tell you that the physical location of the cloud computing environment shouldn’t matter to adopters. While technically and architecturally this might be true, given appropriate and reliable network connections, there are business implications of physical location. Most notably, regulatory and compliance concerns for cloud-resident data.”
Today, via Twitter, I became aware of an Interactive Data Protection Heat Map, published by Forrester, and shared on their Infrastructure & Operations Professionals blog:
“To help you grasp the varying scope of regulatory requirements at a high level, we’ve also created an interactive privacy heat map that denotes the degree of strictness — highlighting scope of protection, affected entities, ‘adequacy’ standards met, and heavily surveilled countries — across national data protection regulation.”
The map is in Flash, go check it out.
Tagged as:
enterprise considerations,
Forrester
Posted by brenda michelson at 2:31 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, data, regulatory | Permalink
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Next on my cloud computing survey list is BT Global Services Enterprise Intelligence survey. The survey is broader than cloud computing, covering “CIOs and their relationship with senior corporate executives and IT systems users.” The survey report includes:
- the relationship between corporate information business performance
- demand for information
- successful collaboration
- what the CIO needs to do in the recession
- the challenges facing cloud services
- security in the cloud
- global attitudes to business success
- the role of the CIO
As someone interested in active information and the business-IT relationship, I found interesting points throughout the report. However, the one cloud computing finding I want to call out is cloud location.
Many of the clouderati will tell you that the physical location of the cloud computing environment shouldn’t matter to adopters. While technically and architecturally this might be true, given appropriate and reliable network connections, there are business implications of physical location. Most notably, regulatory and compliance concerns for cloud-resident data.
The BTGS Survey focused on the likelihood to use cloud computing environments in another country:
“For example, the majority of CIOs (57%) and senior executives (53%) around the world are not happy to run applications and store data on servers based outside their country, for IT security reasons.
Perceptions of where servers should be based revealed a pro-European focus. For CIOs and senior executives, the UK was the most popular place in the world for servers to be based, with a quarter (25%) saying they would be extremely comfortable with servers being based there. This was followed by North America (22%), Western Europe (20%) and Nordic Europe (18%).
Conversely, two thirds (68%) of CIOs and senior executives said they would be uncomfortable with servers being based in Africa, closely followed by Latin America (53%), Russia/Central Asia (43%) and the Middle East (40%). The reasons cited for such unease were security/political issues, service quality, distance and time zone issues and cost. Perceived high cost was specifically mentioned in relation to North America and Nordic Europe.”
Survey methodology: “Conducted by Datamonitor Ltd. Total sample sizes were 274 CIOs and other senior corporate executives in 12 countries and 2,476 employees who use corporate IT systems in 13 countries. Fieldwork was undertaken between 1 September 2009 and 30 September 2009. The survey was carried out online.”
Tagged as:
BTGS,
enterprise considerations,
location
Posted by brenda michelson at 3:00 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, assurance, compliance, cyber risk, data, regulatory | Permalink
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After a short break for some client work, I’m back to my cloud computing survey list. This afternoon, I’ve reviewed the Google Communications Intelligence Report, October 2009, Rackspace’s No More Servers, November 2009 and F5 Networks’ Cloud Computing Survey, June- July 2009. The Google and Rackspace surveys were interesting, but small and midsize business oriented and therefore not relevant for my enterprise considerations project.
The F5 Networks survey presented findings in 5 areas:
- Confusion about the definition of cloud computing
- Cloud computing has gained critical mass
- Cloud computing is more than SaaS
- Core technologies for building the cloud
- Influencers go beyond IT
The section I found most interesting was the last, which covered the business drivers for public and private cloud computing adoption, as well as the organizational areas leading the adoption charge.
Business Drivers:
“77 percent of respondents reported that efficiency is a driver for public clouds. Additionally, respondents claim that reducing capital costs (68 percent) and easing staffing issues (61 percent) are key drivers behind public clouds.
For private cloud computing, respondents listed reducing capital cost (63 percent), agility (50 percent) and easing staffing issues (50 percent) as drivers.”
In a supporting chart, the remaining drivers of public cloud computing: agility (58%), make it easier to add/remove services (57%), avoid over provisioning (55%), infinite scalability (53%), reduce operating expense (51%), Green (51%), better choice (47%), and reliability (45%).
From the same chart, other drivers of private cloud computing: ease staffing issues (50%), infinite scalability (46%), efficiency (45%), reduce operating expense (45%), better choice (44%), make it easier to add/remove services (43%), avoid over provisioning (38%), reliability (37%), and Green (35%).
Although respondents might be confused about the definition of cloud computing, they clearly understand the benefits, and in particular how the benefits change between public and private cloud computing. In a private cloud computing environment, assuming on-premise ownership and management, the benefits for staffing, over provisioning avoidance, reliability and green still exist, but in smaller amounts.
Business Influencers:
“According to respondents, the top influencers for public clouds include IT (45 percent), application development (41 percent) and LOB business stakeholders (41 percent).
On a similar note, respondents claimed the top three influencers in the implementation process for private clouds are IT (45 percent), LOB business unit stakeholders (36 percent) and application development teams (24 percent).”
The accompanying chart describes the 41 and 36% business influence bars as “Drive the Initiative”. While the report doesn’t specify the types of initiatives, it’s not far fetched to imagine many of those public cloud computing adoption scenarios are business involvement only. In other words, the next wave (tsunami) of end-user development. Are you prepared?
Tagged as:
business drivers,
citizen development,
end user development,
enterprise considerations,
F5
Posted by brenda michelson at 6:15 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, economics | Permalink
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Although Software Design is further down my enterprise considerations list, when Gojko Adzoc’s post on lessons he has learned developing in Amazon’s AWS environment, I knew I had to pass it along. The post describes new challenges for developers who have previously worked in a purpose-built, directly controlled, infrastructure environment. These challenges range from server reliability to storage speed. After articulating the challenges, Adzic offers advice on “How to keep your sanity”:
“It took me a while to understand that just deploying the same old applications in the way I was used to isn’t going to work that well on the cloud. To get the most out of cloud deployments, applications have to be designed up-front for massive networks and running on cheap unstable web boxes. But I think that is actually a good thing. Designing to work around those constraints makes applications much better – faster, easier to scale, cheaper to operate. Asynchronous persistence can significantly improve performance but I never thought about that before deploying to the cloud and running into IO issues. Data partitioning and replication make applications scale better and work faster. Sections of the system that can work even if they can’t see other sections help provide a better service to customers. This also makes the systems easier to deploy, because you can do one section at a time.
To conclude, there are three key ideas to keep in mind:
- Partition, partition, partition: avoid funnels or single points of failure. Remember that all you have is a bunch of cheap web servers with poor IO. This will prevent bottlenecks and scoring an own-goal by designing a denial of service attack in the system yourself.
- Plan on resources not being there for short periods of time. Break the system apart into pieces that work together, but can keep working in isolation at least for several minutes. This will help make the system resilient to networking issues and help with deployment.
- Plan on any machine going down at any time. Build in mechanisms for automated recovery and reconfiguration of the cluster. We accept failure in hardware as a fact of life – that’s why people buy database servers with redundant disks and power supplies, and buy them in pairs. Designing applications for cloud deployment simply makes us accept this as a fact with software as well.”
In the post, Adzic maintains that he is a cloud computing advocate, his goal of the post, and the presentation it came from, was to “expose some of the things that you won’t necessarily find in marketing materials.”
Read Adzic’s post. Remember the 4th Enduring Aspect of Cloud Computing.
Tagged as:
Amazon,
EC2,
enterprise considerations,
Gojko Adzoc
Posted by brenda michelson at 5:28 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, networks, performance & reliability, readiness, software architecture, storage | Permalink
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