Features

The Business Value of Cloud Computing

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:30:00 EST

Cloud computing has caught the attention of business leaders around the world in every industry because of its enormous transformative potential. Visionary companies know that the value of the cloud is far greater than the current focus solely on technology and operating costs: when combined with a collaborative approach to designing processes, cloud computing will change how we do business.

Five Steps to Creating a Governance Framework for Cloud Security

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:15:00 EST

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations around the world use technology. Despite the fact that many refer to 2011 as the Year of the Data Breach, and cloud computing has earned a reputation of being inherently insecure, that stigma is simply just not true. Most cloud providers have much higher security measures for their systems than even the most sophisticated IT departments can afford to deploy. The perceived lack of security comes from the mismatch between on-premise security assumptions and the expanded needs driven by the use of cloud. Cloud computing is a significant technology trend that is set to dramatically change the nature of business. We have witnessed a recent spate of high-profile security attacks and data security breaches – from Amazon to Epsilon – and as worrisome as these incidents are, they are not as worrisome as the reputation of cloud computing being insecure. In fact, cloud computing seems to have become a scapegoat for failed security measures. On closer examination of some larger incidents, it’s clear that many data breaches are a result of inadequate cloud security practices.

Breaking the Storage Array Lifecycle

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:45:00 EDT

Anyone who purchases storage arrays is familiar with the many advantages of modular storage systems and storage area networks. However, they may also be familiar with one of the less desirable attributes of storage arrays: the typical three- to five-year lifecycle that forces decommissions and mandates upgrades on a regular basis. With many organizations expanding their need for storage by 20-60% on an annual basis [1], outgrowing capacity of existing storage arrays is a regular occurrence, effectively rendering upgrade cycles to be a fact of life. Although decommissioning and upgrading a storage array may not appear all that daunting, the process includes a number of cumbersome aspects.

Unleashing the True Power of Cloud Computing

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:00:00 EDT

The first generation of cloud computing was revolutionary in that it added business value to organizations by reducing development time, eliminating the need to procure infrastructure, providing massive scaling potential, establishing scale through multi-tenancy and by allowing IT people to focus on solving business problems versus technical ones. As cloud-based applications grew in prominence, they fought to achieve parity with legacy on-premise software solutions that were feature/functionality rich. These goals were achieved in short order, and thus the new generation of cloud solutions was born. Web 2.0 goes far beyond parity with legacy systems and leverages the power of information sharing, collaboration and the social grid to achieve value that would be impossible with a paradigm of pushing information out from a single location. The new age cloud applications are powerful because they break down silos and simplify the process of converting data into information. As Web 2.0 systems in the consumer space evolve, companies are taking notice and looking to unleash the same power in their enterprise applications.

Building the Perfect High Performance Network

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:15:00 EDT

Three years ago I began as IT Director for Fetch Technologies, where we started working on a new mission: to create the perfect network. Fetch wanted a network that would be cost effective, reliable and scalable, with a simple web interface to create and manage virtual servers. The innovation achieved is something that I have carried with me to my new position as a Cloud Architect at Activision.

The Top 100 Bloggers on Cloud Computing

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 04:15:00 EDT

Ever since I first published here my tentative list of Top 50 Bloggers on Cloud Computing it became clear that an expansion would be needed before too long. Thanks to community feedback via my Twitter account (@jg21) here goes with an expanded roster, listed as before in alphabetical order since I am making no attempt at this stage to rank the various blogs, merely to map - and celebrate - their existence.

A Four-Stage Journey to Cloud Computing

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:30:00 EDT

For almost a decade now, organizations of all sizes have been leveraging server virtualization, but few have fully gained the flexibility and efficiencies it promised. The emergence of cloud computing and the promise of delivering on-demand resources has introduced new challenges and opportunities. A company’s level of virtualization adoption maturity correlates to its readiness to deliver an on-demand, real-time infrastructure through a private cloud. An effective virtualization and cloud management solution can ease the journey toward that end.

Steps for Improving Capacity Management in the Age of Cloud Computing

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:00:00 EDT

When you wake up in the morning and flip on a light switch, you don’t think about whether the local power company has enough electricity available to power the light. Likewise, when you switch on the coffee pot or turn on your stove to make breakfast, you don’t wonder about the available capacity of your local power grid. Similarly, cloud computing is rapidly making the delivery of business services second nature to business users. They are able to access the services they need, when they need them, because the dynamic nature of the cloud offers unprecedented, highly elastic computing capacity.

IT as a Service Broker – Adopting a Hybrid Delivery Model

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EDT

The “cloud era” of information technology is upon us. Connectivity is pervasive and everyone and everything is connected. Readily available, low-cost, Internet-based services providing access to new capabilities and infinite amounts of information have given rise to a new set of experiences and expectations for technology users. Furthermore, a new generation is entering the workforce, one that has grown up with technology at their fingertips, one that expects immediate gratification and instant results and one that is ambivalent to traditional IT controls. These tech-savvy business users are mixing the technology experiences from their consumer lives with those of their profession to morph into a new “prosumer” workforce. And they are able to drive game-changing innovation without a dependence on IT intervention. This is the reality of the cloud computing economy; it’s the forcing function behind the creation of new goods and services, new business models, new routes to market, and new ways of engaging customers. Simply put, cloud services are the enablers for the next frontier in business and government, one where technology-enabled services are easily sourced and woven into the enterprise fabric. However, cloud sourcing can also introduce new levels of complexity and business risk without the appropriate levels of integration and governance. This has given rise to a new class of service provider – the cloud service broker.

Cloud Computing & Virtualization: Hot Trends Organizations Can’t Ignore

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 12:00:00 EDT

The use of virtualization and cloud computing is growing quickly among companies of all sizes. Currently, 30 percent of servers are virtualized, and surveys show that by 2012, that number will grow to 50 percent. Virtualization and cloud computing go hand-in-hand, and virtualizing servers is just the tip of the iceberg. The trend to virtualize everything from servers to processing power to software offerings actually started years ago in the personal sector. In the recent past, it was common for individuals within major organizations to use virtualized services or cloud computing when at home, but at work they weren’t using those services at all. Why? Because corporate IT didn’t trust the lack of security of the cloud and they weren’t sure it was a hard trend – something that was definitely here to stay. Today, we know better.

Building a Cloud Factory

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 05:45:00 EDT

Few areas of human endeavor can match the pace of change in IT. Even by IT standards, the change being driven by cloud computing sometimes seems surprising. To refer to a virtual environment that has only recently been deployed as “legacy,” as some organizations are now doing, underscores the fact that the only thing constant in the data center is change. To deal with change of this magnitude, which can involve transforming the workload hosting model of an entire organization, some industrial-strength thinking is required. In order to tackle this challenge, it’s important to properly frame the cloud transformation problem. Many associate cloud with agility, flexibility, cost transparency and other end-user-oriented benefits. But many of these attributes are primarily associated with new infrastructure requests, and specifically, the use of self-service portals to “spin up” infrastructure to host new applications or host transient processing demands. When it comes to migrating hundreds or thousands of existing workloads into cloud infrastructure, agility is not a benefit that is typically experienced. In fact the opposite is often the case: because clouds require a higher degree of standardization (i.e., a finite catalog of sizes and software options), migrating existing physical and virtual servers into cloud models can actually be quite difficult. In other words, the very features that make clouds agile for new workload deployments can actually make them less agile from a transformation perspective.

It’s a Brave New World for Business Intelligence

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:15:00 EDT

It’s no secret that today’s IT professionals need to help their organizations capture, track, analyze and share more information than ever before. From mass quantities of transactional data, Web data, and huge and growing volumes of “machine-generated” information, such as sensor and log data, volumes are expanding into the terabyte (and even the petabyte) range. At the same time, the way end users consume information is rapidly changing. Thanks to innovators like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, social computing technologies are spreading like wildfire, and companies are starting to look at how to harness social networks, blogs, wikis and more to share business intelligence and collaborate more effectively. As the data center strains under the need for more storage and faster performance (all while keeping costs in check,) cloud computing, open source technologies and other emerging approaches are presenting compelling new ways to manage data and consume IT services. How can IT practitioners best navigate today’s rapidly changing BI landscape?

Testing the Cloud

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:45:00 EDT

Cloud computing has now passed the stage of hype to reality. More and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of remote hosting of IT services rather than local IT management, especially as managing and operating IT networks and services is not getting any easier. Managing IT networks requires a broad set of competencies in a growing number of technologies and products. It therefore makes sense that these competencies are centralized in larger data centers providing cloud services to a number of smaller enterprises for which IT is not a core competency. Larger data centers also means larger installations with higher-speed interfaces as well as an obligation to maintain service availability. This requires extensive test and management capabilities to ensure service “up-time.” However, will test and management of cloud services differ from how they are performed today? What are the special challenges that cloud service providers face in this regard?

Risk and Its Impact on Security Within the Cloud - Part 1

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:15:00 EDT

These days when we hear the term "cloud computing" there is an understanding that we are speaking about a flexible, cost-effective, and proven delivery platform that is being utilized or will be utilized to provide IT services over the Internet. As end users or researchers of all things "cloud" we expect to hear about how quickly processes, applications, and services can be provisioned, deployed and scaled, as needed, regardless of users' physical locations. When we think of the typical traditional IT security environment, we have to be cognizant of the potential for an onslaught of attacks, be they zero day, the ever-evolving malware engines and the increase in attacks via social engineering, the challenge for any security professional is to develop and ensure as secure an IT system as possible.

Cloud Computing: Opportunities for Communication Service Providers

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:15:00 EDT

Cloud Computing is an evolution of existing technologies to deliver services to end users. Communication service providers have an early adopter opportunity to compete with new entrants, increase their bottom line and play a dominant role in delivering cloud services. Service providers have seen many so-called next- generation technology waves in the last 15 years. Cloud computing, which was seen as a new fad, has passed the initial test. Cloud computing is for real and not a vague idea anymore. It helps drive down costs for IT organizations by making infrastructure more distributed, more efficient and massively scalable. It’s being accepted by enterprises of different sizes as a smarter way to deliver services. The worldwide cloud computing market is growing fast. According to IDC, it will be a $148.8B market by 2014, of which the public cloud alone would be about $55.5B. Communication service providers (CSPs) have made a significant investment in technology, people and processes. They have customer knowledge and relationships. Public cloud computing offers a unique opportunity to CSPs to defend their hosting business and grow significantly by focusing on a much larger market than what they can do today. This article focuses on some of the areas where CSPs have an advantage over others to take the lead market share in public cloud computing.

Four Steps to Compliance Management in the Public Cloud

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:30:00 EDT

Feeling nervous about the cloud? Many CIOs understandably hesitate to send services requiring regulatory compliance to the public cloud. Though not outsourcing such services may seem like a good idea, this approach limits your flexibility in offering the best combination of services to meet business demands. As public cloud services continue to grow in both diversity and quality, IT and the business can’t afford to bypass opportunities offered there and hope to remain competitive. The compliance issue must be addressed, but how? Is it possible to ensure compliance when sending services to the cloud? Fortunately, the answer is “yes.” By using a strategy based on Business Service Management (BSM), a comprehensive approach and unified platform for running IT, you can extend the BSM processes and solutions that you use to manage your internal infrastructure to the public cloud environment.

Book Excerpt: Making Software a Service

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Developing your Software as a Service (SaaS) takes you away from the dark ages of programming and into the new age in which copyright protection, DMA, and pirating don’t exist. In the current age of computing, people don’t expect to pay for software but instead prefer to pay for the support and other services that come with it. When was the last time anyone paid for a web browser? With the advent of Open Source applications, the majority of paid software is moving to hosted systems which rely less on the users’ physical machines. This means you don’t need to support more hardware and other software that may conflict with your software, for example, permissions, firewalls, and antivirus software. Instead of developing a simple desktop application that you need to defend and protect against pirating and cloning, you can develop your software as a service; releasing updates and new content seamlessly while charging your users on a monthly basis. With this method, you can charge your customers a small monthly fee instead of making them pay a large amount for the program upfront, and you can make more money in the long run. For example, many people pirate Microsoft Office instead of shelling out $300 upfront for a legal copy, whereas if it were offered software online in a format such as Google Docs, those same people might gladly pay $12.50 a month for the service. Not only do they get a web-based version that they can use on any computer, but everything they save is stored online and backed up. After two years of that user paying for your service, you’ve made as much money from that client as the desktop version, plus you’re ensuring that they’ll stay with you as long as they want to have access to those documents. However, if your users use the software for a month and decide they don’t like it, they don’t need to continue the subscription, and they have lost only a small amount of money. If you offer a trial-based subscription, users can test your software at no cost, which means they’re more likely to sign up.

In the Service Oriented Cloud, All Roads Lead to SOA

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 09:45:00 EDT

Cloud Computing is intrinsically service-based. But this is not just in the highly generalized sense of the term ‘service’, but also in the more specific Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) use of the term, where capabilities are provided via published service interfaces. In this research note we consider why SOA should not be forgotten just because more fashionable terms have risen to the top of the toybox. It might be easy to conclude that SOA was yesterday’s issue. In fact according to some pundits SOA is dead and business transformation, application and IT modernization, and Cloud Computing are more fashionable terms today. But SOA hasn’t gone away! Achieving business improvement, modernized applications and leveraging cloud computing requires a solid foundation based on SOA. Most larger organizations have already adopted SOA to some extent, but few have achieved the critical mass that delivers on the original SOA vision. Moreover, organizations need to understand that all roads still lead to SOA. This is the key architectural style that is intrinsic to all strategic initiatives that will deliver radical improvements in cost and agility. It might be easy to conclude that SOA was yesterday’s issue. In fact according to some pundits SOA is dead and business transformation, application and IT modernization, and Cloud Computing are more fashionable terms today. But SOA hasn’t gone away! Achieving business improvement, modernized applications and leveraging cloud computing requires a solid foundation based on SOA. Most larger organizations have already adopted SOA to some extent, but few have achieved the critical mass that delivers on the original SOA vision. Moreover, organizations need to understand that all roads still lead to SOA. This is the key architectural style that is intrinsic to all strategic initiatives that will deliver radical improvements in cost and agility.

Book Excerpt: Service-Oriented Computing Fundamentals

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 11:45:00 EDT

This excerpt describes fundamental terms and concepts associated with service-oriented computing, including those related to service-oriented architecture, service-orientation, and cloud computing. Service-oriented computing is an umbrella term that represents a new generation distributed computing platform. As such, it encompasses many things, including its own design paradigm and design principles, design pattern catalogs, pattern languages, a distinct architectural model, and related concepts, technologies, and frameworks. Service-orientation (explained shortly) emerged as a formal method in support of achieving the following goals and benefits associated with service-oriented computing.

Cloud Expo Day Four: Still Very Cloudy in New York

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 07:00:00 EDT

The economics of the cloud, the rise of the mobile workforce and the consumerization of IT are making the transformation to the cloud a foregone conclusion within enterprise IT. But not every company, organization or government agency is necessarily keeping up. Are you?

In Cloud We Trust?

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:00:00 EDT

‘In God we trust,’ yet the currency of the Cloud is at odds with trust. Is it possible to trust applications that reside in a Cloud that seems so porous? Cloud Computing Journal sat down with GuardTime CEO Mike Gault, whose keyless signature technology is used to secure cloud hosting provider Joyent, whose customers include LinkedIn, Gilt, and Twitter.

From Virtual Machine to Cloud Deployment: An Appliance Deployment Guide

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:45:00 EDT

The one sure constant in the application deployment space is change. Over the last decade, many software OEMs have gone from shipping only packaged software to offering turnkey physical appliances, and more recently to providing packaged virtual appliances. The evolution from packaged software to appliance deployments, both physical and virtual, gives end users and IT departments a more streamlined approach to deploying and managing specific services in their environments, leading to better customer experiences and reduced support costs. So what changes when virtual appliances move to the cloud? More and more, customers are looking to move services into the cloud to reduce their physical infrastructure and cost. Several things change, however, when customers no longer control the physical hardware on which their critical services run. Moving virtual appliances into the cloud requires new strategies for development, provisioning, maintaining, and updating virtual appliances. In this article we will discuss the four core elements required for moving virtual appliances to the cloud and how software OEMs and ISVs can achieve cloud migrations with minimum impact on their development resources.

Forecasting Conditions for the 2011 Data Center

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:45:00 EDT

They say you can’t predict the weather. Like so many clichés, however, this one isn’t quite true. Meteorologists have a host of tools at their fingertips that help them recognize, track and analyze weather patterns in order to support predictions that are often accurate, or at least reasonably close. The same is true in the computing industry, where patterns emerge in data centers and enterprises much as cloud formations become apparent in the skies. With a careful eye and extensive knowledge informed by years of experience and frequent conversations with frontline IT professionals, we can predict future trends with a relatively high degree of accuracy. The beginning of a new decade is an opportune moment in which to forecast where virtualization – the primary IT initiative of our time – will encounter stormy weather and where it might be welcomed by clear skies.

Latency: The Achilles Heel of Cloud Computing

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 10:15:00 EST

Today, cloud computing is proliferating. For IT and corporate business units alike, there is strong interest in deploying applications in a cloud environment for its increased business flexibility and cost savings. However, common cloud computing solutions can introduce unexpected costs associated with the broader issue of latency from the cloud edge to the end user. IT and individual business units tend to focus on the aspect of performance within the cloud environment when deploying applications to the cloud, rather than the question of performance and reliability of the overall application and content delivery chain from the cloud environment to the end user. This is a serious miscalculation for two reasons. First, the cloud computing provider’s choice of network carrier shouldn’t penalize the cloud user when network performance is degraded. Second, end users will abandon applications and websites based on the smallest performance delays or downtime, jeopardizing the perceived value of the cloud initiative. For these reasons, it is critical that the discussion around cloud latency shift away from IT or business unit-defined acceptable levels of latency to end-user behavior judgments as to what level of latency is acceptable.

Building the Next-Generation Datacenter – A Detailed Guide / Stage 4

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:15:00 EST

In parts one, two and three of this article, we provided a brief overview of the CA Technologies virtualization maturity lifecycle, and focused on the server consolidation, infrastructure optimization, and automation & orchestration stages of the lifecycle. The capabilities described in each of those stages provide an essential foundation for a dynamic datacenter, which is an IT environment that not only supports the business but, at times, is part of the product delivered by the business. It is an agile IT environment, built on top of an optimized and automated virtual infrastructure, that is: Service oriented: Delivering on-demand, standardized services to the business (internal customers, partners, etc). Scalable: With the ability to span heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud environments. Secure: Providing security as a service to internal / external customers.

Instant-On Enterprises & Cloud Computing

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 06:15:00 EST

HP’s strategy is centered on empowering both commercial and enterprise class cloud computing. Research from HP indicates that senior business, government and technology executives believe that by 2015, 18 percent of their IT delivery will be through the public cloud and 28 percent by the private cloud. That leaves the remainder of IT delivery to be handled by traditional delivery methods, either managed in-house, outsourced, or both.

Is Hand-Coding Becoming Obsolete?

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:45:00 EST

Increasingly, IT managers, CIOs and software developers are turning to a new approach for rapidly building robust database applications without programming - application generators. Today’s business environment demands managers find ways to do more with less, and application generation allows both developers and non-developers to build applications quickly and efficiently. Application generation tools build database-driven applications that can be deployed to the Web, the Cloud, or to Microsoft SharePoint environments.

Building the Next-Generation Datacenter - A Detailed Guide / Stage 3

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 06:15:00 EST

In parts one and two of this article, we provided an overview of the CA Technologies virtualization maturity life cycle, and focused on server consolidation and infrastructure optimization. IT organizations that have successfully consolidated and optimized their virtual infrastructures face a unique set of virtualization management challenges. Server provisioning that used to take weeks can now be achieved in minutes, and results in increased virtualization adoption within the business. This increased adoption results in 'VM sprawl’ (the problem of uncontrolled workloads), increased provisioning and configuration errors, and the lack of a detailed audit trail – all of which significantly increase the risk of service downtime.

Windows Azure Series – Introduction to Windows Azure

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST

I’ve done a Windows Azure Series together with Mario Szpusta, Software Architect Evangelist at Microsoft Austria on Windows Azure. The Series is in German and I decided to bring it to Cloud Computing Journal. I will modify some of the articles to bring them up-to-date. This series will cover about 15 articles that will be published once a week. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s Platform as a Service offering for Cloud Computing. There are three major fields in Windows Azure. Figure 1 provides an overview of the platform. The three fields are Windows Azure, SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric. There are several other services that are part of each field. Windows Azure is a platform for web applications, SQL Azure is a comprehensive database in the cloud based on Microsoft SQL Server, and Windows Azure AppFabric contains enterprise techniques such as the service bus or access control. The name for Microsoft’s cloud platforms is “Azure Services Platform” and Windows Azure is one part of this platform. Nevertheless, most people say Windows Azure and mean all three parts. Let’s continue by examining each part of the Azure Services Platform.

Building the Next-Generation Datacenter – A Detailed Guide

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:30:00 EST

Virtualization has the power to transform the way business runs IT, and it’s the most important transition happening in IT today. It promotes flexible utilization of IT resources, reduced capital and operating costs, high energy efficiency, highly available applications, and better business continuity. However, the virtualization journey can be long and difficult as virtualization brings with it a unique set of challenges around the management and security of the virtual infrastructure. Most organizations struggle, sooner or later, with workload migrations, visibility and control, virtual machine (VM) sprawl, and the lack of datacenter agility.

Application Migration Considerations for Cloud Computing

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST

Moving an application from an enterprise environment to a cloud platform requires a careful assessment of the application and the target platform with factors such as suitability, maturity and cost benefits as part of the initial cloud migration assessment. Cloud Platform assessment, Application migration, Data migration and Cloud deployment are the key aspects that need to be taken into consideration as part of the migration. This article discusses aspects that are helpful to decision makers as well as development teams in their journey to cloud.

Morphlabs' Damarillo on Eve of Davos: Education Priority in Developing World

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 06:12:00 EST

Philippine native Winston Damarillo is CEO of Morphlabs, Inc. and G2IX (Global Gateway Innovation Exchange), and has also been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. I interviewed him shortly before he left for this year's Annual Meeting of the Forum in Davos. The first part of the interview covered his current business; below is the second part, which covers his activity with the Forum and outlines his vision. Roger Strukhoff: How has being named a Young Global Leader helped you present your vision to the world? Winston Damarillo: It's an honor to be able to see first-hand what the world needs, and to be a part of the formulation of the solution. Being cooped up in board meetings and product testing for years and now being able to recognize what the world needs is enriching and enlightening. We are blessed to be living in this generation of information sharing through communities of like-minded people, of solutions shared to break down barriers and to a world that is hungry not for individual recognition but a global way of addressing issues. And as an entrepreneur in the emerging and disruptive world of IT, I bring to the WEF solutions that can bridge everyday problems to a solution that can be developed and deployed in the web in minutes to hours, vs. legacy architecture. Roger: Speaking of the world of IT, wow do you see Cloud Computing and its evolving utility model playing out throughout the world? Who will benefit the most from it? Winston: We've seen how far-reaching Cloud Computing can be in addressing issues in the enterprise. Now, exposing it to issues in developing countries in Asia and Africa, for example, I think its use in the education sector will have to be the number one priority on my list. Roger: What are some examples of putting this into action? Winston: The use of current cloud technology using video-on-demand and web infrastructure will simplify the dissemination of basic education resources to the classrooms in far flung areas, where there are fewer teachers and resources are scarce. Imagine having elementary school materials shown over the web to islands in the Philippines, where the teachers have to be ferried from the main island to the smaller islands to do their advocacy! The government can only do so much, and we are all here to help technology work for all of us. Roger: OK, turning toward the Philippines specifically, how do you assess the IT scene there? Winston: The Philippine IT scene has evolved leaps and bounds from the first time I returned to the country in 2001 after being away for more than 10 years. For one thing, we now have a lot of technologists who have come home to help shore up efforts to build an IT-centric economy. There is a great opportunity to grow with the government, the academe and the private sector working closely and side by side. In my case, I'm excited to have been part of the board of PSIA (Philippine Software Industry Association) for three years. Seeing how other companies have helped inspires me to do more for the country. Roger: And how about the rest of Southeast Asia? Winston: Well, you know the rest of Southeast Asia, apart from Singapore, is a work-in-progress. There are ASEAN IT initiatives highlighting the cultural diversity, the physical structure of most countries being archipelagos--Indonesia and the Philippines being great examples of this--and the concern on security to do online transactions. We are pleased that these are being addressed in a master plan ratified by leaders in the region. Roger: Can you also comment on China and other places in Asia? Winston: Sure. Many places--including China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea--have developed their ICT capabilities by leaps and bounds. You will note that in the Red Herring Asia 100 companies, these four plus Australia and Singapore have dominated the Top 100 companies. We hope to see more Filipino companies there! Roger: When you start work each day, what do you wish to accomplish? Winston: I am a father of a 12-year old talented young man who hungers for new concepts and learning new skills, and a husband to a wife and life partner who believes that education is key to the success of any individual. It is always a routine for me to look at my day on how I can impart my knowledge to my family, ensure my son’s continuing education, and see how I can be of help to the companies and its employees I steward. Roger: What can people in the technology world do to inform and educate the global leaders of business, government, and NGOs about the economic and societal benefits that can be brought about by IT? Winston: That’s it. You just said it, inform and educate. We need to work harder to have an open line for communication, an open mind to learn, open ears to listen, and an open heart to accept change.

Top Ten Cloud Computing & Virtualization Myths

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:00:00 EST

Like many disruptive, evolving technologies, cloud computing is going through a phase characterized by opposites: hype and exaggeration on one side, and fear and skepticism on the other. How do you determine what’s really going to work for your organization? Separating the myths from the facts of cloud computing is a good place to start. Let’s take a look at the top 10 cloud computing myths as we see them, and the realities behind those myths that can help you make intelligent decisions about the cloud.

Morphlabs CEO Winston Damarillo Explains Why "Cloud is Cooler"

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 07:45:00 EST

Winston Damarillo is CEO of Morphlabs, Inc. and G2IX (Global Gateway Innovation Exchange). A native of the Philippines, he previously founded Gluecode Software Inc. and served as its CEO before selling the company to IBM in 2005. A native of the Philippines, Winston has also been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Before he headed off to Davos 2011, I was able to talk with him a bit about his business and his vision. Below is the first part of the interview, which covers his current business. Tomorrow, I'll post the second part of the interview, which addresses his global vision and participation with the Forum. Roger Strukhoff: So let's start with an overview of what Morphlabs is doing, and how that ties into G2iX. Winston Damarillo: G2iX was the innovation umbrella that nurtured the three companies I currently manage: Exist Global, Morphlabs, and MaestroDev. All three now operate autonomously. It was a perfect set-up at a time when the market was soft, as we waited for a rebound. At this stage, I sit as Chairman of all three companies, but both Exist Global and Maestrodev now have their own CEOs to lead them. Roger: You started in the Philippines, but are now present in the US as well, correct? Winston: Yes, Morphlabs has since then moved its operations to the US, but maintains development and engineering in Cebu (Philippines). It has also opened operations in Japan and Australia. It will continue to be an active cloud enabler with a complete product portfolio of an Saas, Paas, and IaaS for MSPs, datacenters and the enterprise--and the only one that can say that is Enterprise Cloud Architecture-compliant. Roger: As we were getting ready for this interview, you mentioned to me that "web services was cool, cloud is cooler." This seems to tie in with the idea that Cloud Computing is really the integration and culmination of a number of interesting things that have been going on for a few years. Winston: In 2010, Cloud Computing not only became the buzz of the industry, but the solution that a lot of enterprises have been clamoring for. From most of the surveys I've seen, more than 67 percent of the CIOs tell us that they have plans or are already implementing Cloud in their organization in 2011. This is important data. As it is, Cloud has permeated the enterprise fastest than any technology out there. Roger: You said "permeates" the enterprise... Winston: Yes, Cloud Computing impacts all aspects of the IT infrastructure. As just one example, look at the base layer--we are now seeing a practical implementation of technology methods to increase and optimize IT infrastructures utilization levels that currently stand at 9 percent. But what really makes Cloud super cool is that it touches the entire chain of IT delivery. Cloud Computing--done right--amplifies the performance of IT administrators, allowing them to serve a higher density of computing customers, Software development in the Cloud era is substantially accelerated by liberating the developers from concerns of infrastructure code, such as clustering and fault tolerance, and focus on application-level innovation. Roger: How is what you're doing today compare with the Gluecode days? Is is just the next logical step, given what's going on with IT today? Winston: In 2005, Gluecode was able to address a market niche that made it a disruptor to a big player. It was exciting to slug it out with a couple of major industry competitors. In 2010 and now, Morphlabs by comparison seems to be grouped with a crowded market. Although we pride ourselves to be able to offer a wider range of solutions and compliance to a legitimate Cloud Architecture, we have to make that known to the enterprise. Roger: Salesforce just acquired Heroku, most because of its multitenant approach to development. How significant does this seem to you? Winston: We are happy for Heroku. This is a very nascent market and success of any player should be viewed as success for the sector. The power of the Heroku solution is the fact that it enable a new level of productivity for the RoR developers by simplifying the environment that they need to program against, and automating the management of deployed applications. This is a concrete example of the power of the Cloud Architecture. Roger: And what can we expect from Morphlabs in 2011? Winston: Broad distributions and Cloud Solutions orientation and OpenStack. The Morph team is looking forward to making our technologies more accessible to end-users. For private cloud, we are going to be releasing a downloadable software appliance the mCloud Enterprise Platform to accelerate enterprise evaluation. That will be couple with the release of mCloud on Demand via Amazon AWS to deliver the same experience without tacking any hardware installs. Expect to see more solutions orientation for the release of the mCloud-branded products. Our broad platform allowed us to engage a lot of customers in 2010, and the key take-away from this is they prefer Cloud Solutions in the context of the client. We are planning to release Solutions Oriented Products in 2011. The most exciting part of the industry is the tremendous progress and acceptance of the OpenStack open-source project. This endeavor has the opportunity to unify and consolidate foundation of cloud computing infrastructure much like what Apache has done for the webservers, and Eclipse for the Java IDE. We are looking forward to stepping up our contributions to the projects and transitioning our product core to it.

Hybrid Cloud Computing: The Future Trend in Cloud

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:56:00 EST

Cloud computing has been a boon to conserving resources by providing a farm of servers that are concurrently used by multiple users. Cloud computing precludes the requirement for setting up per-user servers. In a recent InformationWeek survey of business technology professionals, most have indicated a preference for cloud computing for storage, archiving, and disaster recovery, for business applications, servers, raw computing power, dedicated data center space, databases, and specialized IT services such as security, management and compliance. Cloud computing may be public or private. In public cloud computing resources are shared over the Internet on a fine-grained self-service basis such as Amazon EC2. Private cloud computing is the equivalent of public cloud computing on a private network. Resource efficiencies associated with public cloud computing outweigh those associated with private cloud computing due to the limited scope of private cloud computing as it is isolated to an enterprise. Private cloud computing does provide the benefits of enterprise level security and reliability. Most applications are designed for the tightly coupled enterprise environment and switching costs are involved to migrate them to loosely coupled cloud environments.

Breaking Through the Virtual Glass Ceiling

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST

“Virtualizatio...all the cool, smart kids are doing it!” Or at least that is the message being pushed by the virtualization vendors. Mostly this is a true statement. There are plenty of market studies that show that more than three quarters of medium to large enterprises are leveraging server virtualization technologies of some kind. What is not evident in that statement is that for most enterprises, their overall use of the technology is not as widespread as is implied by the statement. For many organizations, virtualization utilization is in its infancy (from a maturity of use perspective) or not a material percentage of the overall IT infrastructure. Even with the exponential growth of virtualization usage over the last few years, the majority of applications have been based on simple consolidation ROI and used primarily in areas of low risk (IT assets, or test-development environments). Recently the term “VM Stall” has been thrown out along with some research that identifies some of the top reasons why organizations have initially deployed virtualization at a high rate but then significantly slowed that pace down – a virtual “glass ceiling” built on a number of common factors. The good news is that all of these concerns are addressable, and organizations can continue deploying virtualization and reap not only the simple consolidation ROI, but also start moving toward the operational efficiencies promised by utility or cloud computing. The following sections will outline some of the most common areas of concern and provide some guidance on how organizations can break through that ceiling and achieve their virtualization goals.

An Open Source-Based Cloud Data Storage and Processing Solution

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:45:00 EST

Applications are increasingly being made available over the Internet. Several applications have a large user base that produces a huge volume of data, for example, content in a community portal, emails in a web-based email system, and call log files generated at call centers. Due to a large amount of data being added every minute and the need to keep historical data for various requirements such as legal, reference, data warehousing, and analytics, the systems’ data size keeps growing exponentially. This requires a huge storage and processing infrastructure, incurring a high cost of procuring and maintaining it for companies. Other typical challenges with such large data sets are how to store the data reliably and economically. How do you process the data efficiently? How do you provide search?

A Recipe for Cloud Design

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 06:30:00 EST

The deployment of infrastructure systems to support applications has been a challenge since we first developed a choice beyond the venerable mainframe. To some it’s a simple formula; take a server, toss in a little network and storage, bake for a few weeks and you’re done. If you’re having a few friends over (need a little more) then simply add a few more servers and you’re done.

How to Build ROI from Cloud Computing

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 01:30:00 EST

As the hot, new “trend of the moment” in technology, cloud computing is touted to be a transformative way to provide computing resources faster and more efficiently through shared infrastructures. Due to the considerable hype surrounding the Cloud, organizations considering cloud as an option will need to begin seeing that this new model does indeed offer improvements in cost, revenue and margins in order for them to gain buy-in from their executives to pursue the model. Because the lines of business and the IT departments in most organizations often speak different languages, it’s critical for IT departments that are considering cloud adoption to show how a cloud model will help their businesses realize a return on their investment (ROI). An initiative from The Open Group has developed a set of considerations for how to build and measure ROI from cloud computing during the early stages that also speaks to a business perspective. Clearly, these indicators will change as the technology matures, but by implementing ROI models as part of the planning process for cloud implementations, companies can begin to take advantage of the potential cloud computing offers right away – from both incremental improvements to disruptive transformation of business processes.

Get Smart: The Case for Intelligent Application Mobility in the Cloud

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:15:00 EST

Traditional approaches to scaling and distributing transactional applications need careful consideration – the phrase walking on egg shells springs to mind – and are not amenable to frequent reconfiguration. Consequently, these approaches are only suitable for situations where you are master of all you survey and where you are prepared to over-provision resources in order to reduce the need for reconfiguration. Worse, they are major stumbling blocks to taking full advantage of the elasticity and cost benefits of cloud computing, whether you choose to work in private, public or hybrid clouds. In order to remove these roadblocks, a new approach to scaling and distributing applications is required. We need to get smart and exploit intelligent application mobility. To realize the full benefits of cloud computing, application services must be built in a way that gives cloud providers the freedom to deploy them in the most efficient way while respecting any business constraints. Any technical constraints that introduce rigidity into the application are sure to impede the cloud provider’s ability to do this.