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Cloud Appliances for Private Clouds

Cloud computing technologies have the ability to deliver a vast array of important benefits, including the option to leverage compute and storage resources on-demand. Public clouds are the most visible form of this. But, some organizations need important applications and workloads to be operated behind their firewall.

The size of modern data sets makes it difficult to send over the internet to a public cloud data center. Management most likely has security concerns about data being stored in a facility outside of IT’s control. Often times there is specific hardware, software, or storage requirements that cannot be adhered to in public cloud ecosystems. In response, many organizations are leveraging private clouds.

There are two basic approaches to deployment of a private cloud environment: Build your own or purchase an appliance.

Build Your Own Private Cloud

With organizations operating their own compute, storage and network resources, one option to look into is redeploying these existing instances into a private cloud. Due to the trend of server consolidation, many of these machines may already be operating a virtualization layer. Beginning from this point, deploying infrastructure (IBM, VMWare, etc.) is a logical nest step.

Erecting a private cloud takes more than piling software layers on top of existing resources. Unfortunately, many enterprises may not have the internal resources and expertise to take on this integration workload. This is where a consulting firm like Nubifer can play an integral role in solving these vexing problems.

The Open Source Alternative

With proprietary and trade-marked technology comes the issue of being stuck with a specific vendor. In response, open-source options have evolved. Rackspace CEO Lew Moorman said his company opted to leverage OpenStack to open-source the software behind the cloud computing stack “because we believe a widely adopted, open platform will drive standards.” In the past 6 months, more than 50 companies had joined the community.

Opposition to adopting open source does exist. For example, the OpenStack code base is still very immature, and features such as supporting ‘VMware hypervisors’ and live migration of instances are still in development.

Also, IT folks need to download the releases and install themwith the existing compute, storage and networking infrastructure. This brings up another potential deal breaker: do you burden your internal IT staff with these modifications? Nubifer is here to help…

Cloud Appliances

An evolving method to deploying a private cloud is by leveraging a cloud appliance. A cloud appliance is a rack of computing resources delivered tested and ready to go, with the software versioned and configured. When the appliance is plugged in to power and the network, you’re ready to go.

For example, Nubifer partner, IBM, sells a private cloud appliance. This appliance blends standard hardware components and x86-based servers. By deploying an integrated cloud appliance, IT is spared the time it would take to build its own. This frees up an organization to enterprise to focus on delivering business value rather than building IT componentry.

IBM’s private cloud offering is an integrated solution combining self-service, orchestration, and automation for heterogeneous resource pools.

Cloud appliances have drawbacks, though. For example, new equipment is bought as part of the appliance, versus redeploying existing components.Because of this, an organization would probably consider an appliance during a hardware refresh cycle. In addition, there are a limited amount of pre-configured models, leading to a one size does not fit all situation.

Organizations are attempting to focus more on primary business functions, which for most does not include constructing IT infrastructure. All while public clouds are leveraging standardization to lower costs and offer greater levels of agility.

However, many workload requirements inhibit moving data sets to public cloud environments, spawning the deployment of private clouds. However, when an enterprise considers building a private cloud, it’s back in the discussion of building out IT infrastructure.

Cloud appliances offer a potential solution. By pre-integrating all components, IT simply plugs in and turns the power on. And after all, when buying a new car, you would prefer to turn the key and go, versus huddling hour upon hour reading the user manual. Why shouldn’t your private cloud deliver a similar experience?

For more information on private cloud implementation contact a Nubifer representative.

2011: 08/18
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
IBM
Platform-as-a-Service
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5 Recommendations to Keep your Personal Data Secure in the Cloud

Apple’s iCloud offering is additional evidence of the unmitigated flow of data to the cloud. Despite the latest breaches of security at various organizations, including the issues that have affected many Sony customers, more and more of us are casting personal or business assets to the cloud.

Yet many of us remain uneducated about the required steps we should employ to keep our online data safe. Adhering to these five guidelines will go a long way towards aiding the average person keep online threats at a distance.

1. Don’t Take Security for Granted
There are two ways to your online data. One is through the cloud provider’s environment, and the second route is even more potent, and it’s much closer to home. The easiest and most available way for an intruder to get to your online records is through your login credentials. Of course you want the provider to be secure, but don’t let that make you listless about your personal log-in creds.

2. Use Strong, Memorable Passwords
The problem with having complicated passwords is that they are usually hard to remember. Thekey is to start with something notable and then merge it into a strong password — this entails mixing numbers, letters, lower and upper case, and symbols as well. Start with an address, car license numbers, telephone numbers, date of birth. Don’t use your own — use those you know; friends, kids, parents, partners, previous addresses; or old addresses you were at and cars you drove a decade ago. Choose something that can’t be linked to your online personality but always mix it up — half an area code, a name with half of a zip code, parts of an old address. Then add in a $, an !, or an @ sign to mix it up even more.

3. Guard your Inbox
You are going to recycle passwords, mostly for sites where you are not keeping important information like your credit card numbers, DOB, address or SSN. There’s one place where you should never neglect to use a unique password — your email inbox. Because this is the primary location where all your other logins come back to when you reset a password. This one location is the portal to all your other online personas.

Although it’s a bit of a hassle, you should opt for double-protecting your inbox with a two-factor authentication, which means you have to enter a second password in order to gain access. This is especially crucial if you have a habit of going to malicious websites, you don’t keep your anti-malware software up to date, or you have a habit of failing to identify phishing emails.

4. Don’t Leave the Password Recovery Backdoor Open
Quite often, users take many precautions to protect their personal information but make it very easy to reset their password through the password recovery service. If your user ID is simple to guess (it’s often your email) then do not use something easy to figure out for your password reset, such as your DOB, wife’s maiden name or some other easily accessible piece of personal information.

5. Have an Alternate to Fall Back on
Security is mostly about risk avoidance, and however careful your execution, you can’t eliminate all risk. So give yourself a fallback option. Don’t put all your money in one account, have a separate emergency email address, make sure you’ve got local coffee shop with WiFi you can resort to if your main Internet connection disappears. Knowing that you’ve got a second option if something bad happens helps you remain calm in an emergency, which gives you a better chance of surviving a crisis.

For more information regarding the security of your online data, visit Nubifer.com.

2011: 06/14
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Security
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Fujitsu to Deliver First Windows Azure Appliance This Summer

The “private cloud” Windows Azure appliances that Microsoft announced a year ago are here. There’s an August, 2011 ship date slated for the first of them.

Fujitsu, one of three OEMs that announced initial support for the Azure Appliance concept, is going to deliver its first Azure Appliance in August 2011, Fujitsu and Microsoft announced on June 7. Fujitsu’s offering is known as the Fujitsu Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform, FGCP/A5, and will be running in Fujitsu’s datacenter in Japan. Fujitsu has been running a trial of the service since April 21, 2011, with 20 companies, according to the press release.

Microsoft officials had no further updates on the whereabouts of appliances from Dell or Hewlett-Packard. Originally, Microsoft told customers to expect Azure Appliances to be in production and available for sale by the end of 2010.

Windows Azure Appliances, as initially described, were designed to be pre-configured containers with between hundreds and thousands of servers running the Windows Azure platform. These containers will be housed, at first, at Dell’s, HP’s and Fujitsu’s datacenters, with Microsoft providing the Azure infrastructure and services for these containers.

In the longer term, Microsoft officials said they expected some large enterprises, like eBay, to house the containers in their own data-centers on site — in other words, to run their own “customer-hosted clouds.” Over time, smaller service providers also will be authorized to make Azure Appliances available to their customers as well.

Fujitsu’s goal with the new Azure-based offering is to sign up 400 enterprise companies, plus 5,000 small/medium enterprise customers and ISVs, in the five-year period following launch, a recent Fujitsu press release noted.

For more information regarding the Azure Appliances, and how they can provide you with a turn-key private cloud solution, visit Nubifer.com/azure.

2011: 06/09
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Windows Azure
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Intriguing Cloud Computing Statistics

If you remain skeptical about cloud computing, the following stats may put any lingering confusion to rest:

CRN predicts that by 2014 small business spending on cloud computing will reach nearly $100 billion.
IDC approximates that the market for public cloud products and services are at $16B in 2010 and will expand to $56B by 2014.
An estimation by Gartner places the cloud market at $150B by 2013, while Merrill Lynch places it at $160B by 2012.
SandHill recently conducted a survey of 500 IT decision-makers and when asked to name their primary reason for adopting cloud applications, 50% of the respondents cited business agility.
Enterprise applications will need to adapt to the rapid growth of mobile and social computing, which is unprecedented in the history of technology.
According to an estimation made by Gartner, the rapid growth of virtualization will mean that 60% of server workloads will be virtualized by 60%.
Although public cloud infrastructure, applications and platforms are growing at 25%, IDC estimates that the market for enterprise servers will increase two-fold by 2013.
A recent survey revealed that every enterprise was using a SaaS application, while less than 25% of IT departments were aware that they were using one.

To learn more about cloud computing and how it can benefit your organization, contact Nubifer today.

2011: 04/20
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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How Cloud Computing Could Change the Role of the CIO

Cloud computing is at the top of conference agendas and a common buzz word online, so it should come as no surprise that it is also on the minds of many IT executives. And as more and more enterprise IT departments move to the cloud, many are beginning to wonder how this will affect the traditional role of the CIO.

The role of the CIO will change if the IT department shifts from a service provider to a utility model, with usage-based metering. This will result in a shift in core tasks from developing applications and user interfaces and result in a new set of tasks involving the definition of service-level agreements, selecting cloud management tools and understanding customer service. The role of the CIO could shift to become more like an independent business manager running a public service.

Usage-Based
The CIO used to be involved in strategic technology planning for the organization and was likely making strategic decisions, such as when to upgrade Microsoft Office and Windows and which strategic vendor to use for hardware. But this changes when an organization implements a cloud architecture, as new tasks and skills come into play. Some of the traditional roles of the CIO remain, while the CIO is also required to play a new role as a cloud manager. This requires providing the tools and computing power to meet the changing needs of users in a quicker, more efficient manner. This may also include setting up a private cloud, in which users have access to consistent, repeatable services from a services portal available via standard Internet protocols.

Earlier this year, an InformationWeek article revealed that a survey of IT executives found that, when stating the top reasons for moving to cloud computing, cutting costs was nearly just as important to respondents as faster response to end users. The same survey found that although 58 percent of respondents were making the move to the cloud, most were taking a slow approach to do so.

The Future Lies in the Cloud
With that said, a Mashable post citing a different cloud computing survey predicts that by 2011, a vast majority of computing will take place in the cloud. Although this survey seemed to focus more on the consumer side of things, most IT executives see a future in the cloud. The CIO job will adapt and change as this transition occurs, and will function more as a logistical manager.

As cloud services move outside the firewall, understanding how the vendor is providing the services your company needs will become increasingly important. As will understanding that your company’s information is safe and secure wherever it is stored.

To learn more about the cloud, and how it can help your organization, contact Nubifer today.

2011: 04/13
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Cloud Computing: A Guide for Small Businesses

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, being generally described as a computing model in which services and storage are provided online When small business owners or new software companies refer to cloud computing, they most often mean an application that runs on the Internet; as opposed to operating from a desktop that is connected to the Internet—Software as a Service (SaaS).

Everything from phone services to marketing operations has a cloud based solution. Oftentimes, you are using SaaS without even realizing it. For example, your email provider is likely delivering service from the cloud, without on-premise hardware and software.

The following is a guide of different factors to consider when deciding to adopt a cloud solution for your business.

The growth of cloud computing is astonishing.
The worldwide cloud computing market is estimated at $8 billion, with the U.S. market accounting for $3.2 billion of that sum, or 40%. Gartner’s 2011 predictions place Cloud Computing at the top of their list of Top Strategic Technologies. Additionally, Gartner predicts that the SaaS market will reach $14 billion in 2013.

Says Gartner, “Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes. Vendors will offers packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor’s public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer’s enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation.”

A recent study conducted by AMI-Partners revealed: “Small and medium business (SMB) spending in the U.S. on software-as-service (SaaS) will increase exponentially over the next five years, eclipsing growth in investments in on-premise software by a significant margin. AMI forecasts growth in investments in on-premise software by a significant margin. AMI forecasts a 25% CAGR in hosted business application services spending through 2014. This will come against a modest 5% uptick for all other categories of on-premise software combined. However, this growth will not be uniformly spread across all hosted applications. Mature applications such as ERP, SCM, procurement, finance, and core HR will turn over more slowly than those that are less saturated and have lower switching costs.”

Cloud computing software solutions vs. desktop applications.
Small businesses choose cloud computing solutions over desktop applications because it is less expensive. You pay a small monthly amount rather than a one-time fee, like with traditional desktop software.

Another reason small businesses choose cloud computing solutions is that the SaaS application is often a simplified version of what you are currently using, which is installed on your machine. The developers of many cloud computing apps have created just the basics required to get the job done.

One of the market leaders in the cloud computing industry, Salesforce.com, has over 52,000 customers in 2009 while hosting provider Rackspace has over 1,000 SaaS apps in its new AppMatcher.com service.

Cloud computing solutions are available whenever you want, wherever you are.
The application often needs to be accessible from a web browser for many small business users operating virtual offices or operating remotely on different machines depending on location. Cloud computing is available wherever you have access to a computer and browser, and that is one of its biggest advantages.

If you aren’t connected and operating your laptop offline, many apps have either a mobile app or a widget that you can download to run a lighter version of the software. Some Google Apps, for example, offer a desktop version called Google Gears, which will sync your data when you’re back online. Google Apps has over two million businesses and 25 million users in its cloud computing marketplace.

Simple, focused cloud computing solutions can often get the job done.
If you don’t use all of the features of your desktop, a cloud computing application might offer a “forever free” plan, which will allow you to do the same work as a desktop application, but limited in some way. A billing solution might let you run an unlimited number of voices, for example, but only for two separate clients.

With that said, all apps that live in the cloud are not more basic than their desktop equivalents, but rather they offer a paired down basic package that can help you complete the task at hand when you don’t require the feature-risk version. Zoho, for example, offers a simple bookkeeping app that is free. You can also integrate it with other financial SaaS apps to do more, or purchase the more feature-rich SaaS version.

Pay attention to the security of your data.
It is important to remember that you are still responsible for making sure data is where it needs to be—onsite or in a cloud. Your cloud computing vendor isn’t responsible for your data, security or data privacy. They may promise certain aspects of security, but your are responsible if regulators come calling if you are a financial institution, for example. It is important to make sure you aren’t violating any compliance concerns and that your data is safe.

A May 2010 ‘USA Today’ article told the story of a small business owner whose store was robbed. Eight desktops were stolen. They purchased eight new computers and were back in business in no time thanks to cloud services, like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office 365 and QuickBooks Online.

Choose a stable and reliable cloud computing vendor.
It is important to ask questions like, What type of Service Level Agreement (SLA) do they have? How long have they been in business? Can you talk to users directly? How many customers do they have? It is often possible to read testimonials and get good information, and if the testimonials are real, they will often link to the person who made the comment. You can also do a search on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Consider the uptime of your cloud computing applications.
Uptime refers to the time a hosted application’s performance record and most are in the range of 98-99.9%–which acknowledges that servers go down for maintenance or unexpected issues. Make sure to read SLAs carefully and talk about changing terms with the vendor if you have to.

Pay attention to customer support.
Be sure to check if there is an extra charge for support and maintenance or if it is included in your monthly subscription fee. While it is often included, it important to read the fine print to check and also to see if you have access to a customer support team via phone, email or social media.

Choose a flexible cloud computing vendor.
Your monthly frees are usually dependent on how many users you have and you can add and subtract users as needed. Your capital outlay to “purchase” cloud based apps is often lower than traditional on-premise or desktop apps. Cloud computing is one streamlined way to scale with your needs.

Evaluate your requirement for software upgrades.
Cloud computing apps are regularly improved and upgraded, and you benefit from each and every improvement without additional direct cost and without the effort and time of downloading and configuring upgrades. Enhancements often happen more quickly and in shorter development cycles, often based on customer requests.

Make sure your cloud solutions integrate well.
Cloud computing might just be for you if your need involves some type of integration, as many of the current cloud based apps offer an API (application programming interface) which other synergistic apps will leverage. You might find an accounting package, for example, that ties into a CRM package. You would have to pay someone to customize both apps for you if you wanted to do this with your current desktop application. A web-based app would save you time and money and might have already done it for you.

You can look into an offering like CastIron (recently acquired by IBM) if integration is your concern, as it “pre-configures a number of apps” so that you can connect to the solutions you are using already.

Cloud computing offers a distinct advantage if rapid deployment is integral to your project, as many cloud computing projects are up and running in hours—sometimes in minutes. Although you may not get every feature set configured to your need, you can start working right our of the gate oftentimes. If the provider you evaluate has an API connected to another application you need, it may offer advantages over a desktop application—which will require more money to customize later.

Cloud computing isn’t always the least exciting solution.
Cloud computing may be the perfect option if cash-flow is an issue. While on-premise software purchases often involve high upfront licensing costs, cloud computing apps often require no large up-front licensing fees requiring department or board approval. There are usually no annual maintenance fees either.

On a website pricing page, SaaS pricing is often clear, and if a cloud computing app vendor requires a demo or doesn’t reveal its pricing, it usually means that there is a more complicated solution that demands some installation process or customization that will cost more upfront.

Pay attention to how quickly your software needs to change.
User are often forced to choose between a.) Upgrading at a high cost and experiencing delays as the new features are evaluated and plans for adoption are formulated, and hire or enlist local IT talent to develop, test, debug, deploy and train personnel on the new application, or b.) Continue using the older version of the software and avoid advantages of an upgraded version when an application packages requires an upgrade.

You are left waiting for software changes to be made by the software company in both cases, but with the cloud computing model, you will see those upgrades sooner than with a desktop application. The vendor applies upgrades at the data center and the upgrades are made available to users immediately via online connection and there are only minor delays—they also come at no cost to the user.

Remember: your monthly fee covers the upgrades so make sure to compare this when you need to consider this. If you upgrade each year, than the monthly outlay may be lower from a total cost perspective over time, while with a desktop application you are waiting until the next—often annual—release.

Many goals can be accomplished without all of the bells and whistles.
Because they are often focused on a particular area or business niche, cloud based applications can be less robust. While it can be argued that you have to operate your business—from a software perspective—using the Pareto Principle in which 80% of the effects come from 20% of the solution, this isn’t entirely accurate because most desktop users routinely admit that they don’t use all of the features of a desktop application. This partly explains how many cloud based applications get developed—they look at core problems rather than a large feature set that most users won’t even try.

If the cloud computing application lacks some of the features you need, you can add features via customization or premium levels of vendor service. Each application provider is different, but most offer extensive interface capability, usually via Web services that integrate both internal and hosted systems.

A common myth is that cloud computing software doesn’t play well with legacy applications/data sources, but there are two primary methods of integrating cloud computing apps: batch synchronization (which initially involved exporting/importing your data into a cloud based applications, after which your data can be incrementally synchronized on a scheduled basis) and real-time integration via Web services (which is like a neural middle layer where your application talks to the cloud computing company).

It is important to note that you have to evaluate the implications and limitations of cloud computing software for your needs. Some gaps remain for complex end-to-end processes that require complicated workflows or business processes.

Engage your technical team.
It is important to keep lead technical people in the loop for security and integration issues for a number of reasons. If you are a business owner and are unsure about what information you are sharing, you could be sending information out that onsite applications need or you could even be putting corporate information at risk.

Applications and services are now easily accessible to end-users, who can acquire SaaS capabilities without input from their IT or data management teams, which is a major challenge with cloud computing. Other related issues like data replication, outages and the complications of outsourced data storage can complicate cloud integrations. And if your tech team isn’t aware that your are running certain cloud based apps, you could create challenge in multiple functional areas.

Good cloud computing companies have built their web apps on a Web-services based architecture because it is less proprietary and easier for these apps to share data with one another. These standards make it easier for companies to integrate services, but they can inadvertently create security problems by making a hacker’s job easy if the proper security isn’t in place.

Internal training is still required.
Most SaaS vendors provide online video tutorials in addition to robust user communities and forums where you can get your questions answered. This makes cloud applications easier to use with less training involved. Direct access to these teams means less of a burden on your own internal technical teams.

Conclusion
Cloud computing is drastically shaping the current small business market and if you are trying to grow your business and are limited by cash flow, cloud computing is an attractive option. The addition of Smartphones and other mobile technologies—aka mobile computing—makes for a dwindling audience for on-premise applications. The previously listed 16 things to consider before choosing cloud computing solutions will help give you a new outlook on how to get work done and solve problems.

For more information on how cloud computing can help your small business contact a Nubifer representative today.

2011: 04/05
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Windows Azure
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Zoho Corp. Adding an SMB Accounting Application: Zoho Books

Zoho Corp., a leader in Software as a Service business applications, announced Wednesday January 19th that they are adding an accounting application to their portfolio: Zoho Books. Over the past few years, Zoho has had over 300,000 apps created on their platform, and as Zoho evolves as a leading work-flow engine, they are introducing application Integration with online payment gateways like Paypal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net.

Zoho offers SaaS applications and provides a wide, integrated portfolio of rich online applications for businesses. With 26 different applications spanning Collaboration, Business and Productivity, Zoho helps businesses and organizations get work done. Zoho’s applications are delivered via the Internet, requiring nothing but a browser, enabling organizations to focus on their business while leveraging Zoho in order to maintain the servers and keep data safe.

Detailing Zoho Books

Zoho Books is an online accounting application that gives organizations complete visibility of their finances and aides management of cash moving in and out of the business. Zoho defines its’ Books application as “accounting for rest of us”. A primary selling point is that users need not be an accountant to mange their business and make informed financial decisions.

Those interested can view Zoho’s Youtube video describing Zoho Books here.

Features of Zoho Books:

Money In
Get a clear picture of how much cash-flow your business is generating. Manage your customers and invoice them either online or by direct mail. Automate recurring invoices, payment reminders and payment thank-you notes.

Money Out
Manage and control expenses and cash flow. Record invoices and commitments for purchase, services and even for reimbursable expenses, such as client travel. Keep track of the outstanding balances with vendors.

Banking and Credit Cards
Record and monitor your bank and credit card transactions such as deposits, fund transfers, checks, expenses, credits and refunds.

Go Global
Transact globally with multi-currency capabilities. Record foreign currency invoices and expenses.

Collaborate
Share accounting duties with anyone in your organization, but set different permissions for those with access employees.

Stay on Top of Your Business
Glance through the dashboard to know what’s going well with your business and what’s not. Make smart and quick business decisions with the help of our insightful, available-anywhere reports.

Zoho Books integrates seamlessly with other Zoho applications. For example, users can import their contacts from Zoho CRM, view data from various modules in Zoho Sheet, etc. In particular, Zoho Invoice customers will be able to seamlessly migrate from Zoho Invoice to Zoho Books – and go beyond invoicing to full-blown accounting without having to start over.

Zoho Books is also immediately available for Google Apps users through the Google Apps Marketplace.

Zoho Books is priced at $24/month (or $240/year with a 2 month discount). This includes access for 2 users. If you’d like to provide access for additional users, it’ll be an additional $5/user/month.

For more information on Zoho Books or any other Zoho application contact a Nubifer representative today.

2011: 01/19
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Zoho
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The Public Sector Cloud Model

With technological innovations in security, storage, network and connectivity making cloud infrastructure increasingly cost effective, cloud computing is becoming increasingly prevalent in enterprise IT environments. Cloud service brokers are quickly adopting these new technologies and are looking to deliver reliable, scalable, cost efficient options to their customers.

The concept of ‘shared compute resources’ has existed for awhile, with the industry full of ideas to eliminate the need for the desktop and computer sprawls in data centers, with these concepts centering on hosted applications. Hosted applications can be accessed from any place using an Internet connected device, but recently a new paradigm of similar hosted computing has come forth. This new concept is to create compute power in the cloud and make it available to anyone—while simultaneously hiding all of the complexity of managing it.

Cloud computing can not only be used as a vehicle of quicker service deployment and delivery for enterprises, but can aid governments as well. This is because the combined scale, sprawl and complexity of the government sector IT requires a simpler solution. Governments commonly reach out to widely dispersed geographies, people and sectors, which have different agendas, Internet connectivity, require different scales, applications of different complexity and other variables.

Because of this, governments have been maintaining IT environments of their own, creating an inability to reach people and deploy applications being limited by their capacity to create more data-centers.

A cloud platform may be an effective option for the public sector because it can provide a scalable way of building and facilitating computing infrastructures for their computing needs. The government’s ability to reach people on a broader scale can be made possible by the cloud’s increased availability, also resulting in simplified maintenance requirements for their own in-house IT environments.

Compute Resource Distribution
In order to guarantee that compute resources are readily available for various departments, governments usually require large geo-located deployments of IT infrastructure. In the past, this was completed with the help of distributing and allocating budgets for IT within siloed departmental budgets, making it difficult for governments to track and control the expenditures various departments make in their disparate IT ecosystems.

Lower investments in IT equals lower automation of processes and subsequently lower quality of service, but this can be changed by IT infrastructure provisioning using a pubic cloud platform. Cloud infrastructures can help entities ensure that that IT needs of its department are dispersed in the form of computing capacity as opposed to budgets.

Provisioning
A users scale of usage dictates deeper discounts on the platform pricing, but not in provisioning of compute efficiencies. Governments are essentially buying IT solutions in bulk—which is why cloud computing is able to provide a solution to the provisioning challenge of governments’ IT needs. Governments should readily consider centralized cloud deployments with quick provisioning of computing power.

In anticipation and expectation of providing better access to information and services to the people, most governments entities are aiming to distribute compute resources to as many sectors of the country as possible. The time to deliver a service is currently dependent on factors like bottlenecks, availability and processes, but cloud computing can shift the focus of governments to extending the reach of IT applications and information.

Standards in Regulation
It is necessary for governments to ensure that complex regulatory frameworks are implemented and followed in their IT environments. A large portion of these regulatory needs are followed through by IT departments today, and regulatory controls are executed through IT policies. Most often, security and governance are dependent on individual or standardized procedural controls—and the cloud can facilitate the shift from procedural controls to standards.

Managing Information Availability
Governments’ focus is on dispersing meaningful information to their citizens and their various departments, and cloud computing can help facilitate this focus. Governments will be able to scale to unforeseen new heights with a renewed focus on information disbursement.

Essentially, shifting the priority from managing infrastructure to managing information can drive social change, and the cloud is positioned to make this a reality for governments organizations.

For more information regarding the Cloud Computing’s role in the public sector, visit Nubifer.com.

2011: 01/03
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Start Me Up….Cloud Tools Help Companies Accelerate the Adoption of Cloud Computing

Article reposted form HPC in the Cloud Online Magazine. Article originally posted on Nov. 29 2010:

For decision makers looking to maximize their impact on the business, cloud computing offers a myriad of benefits. At a time when cloud computing is still being defined, companies are actively researching how to take advantage of these new technology innovations for business automation, infrastructure reduction, and strategic utility based software solutions.

When leveraging “the cloud”, organizations can have on-demand access to a pool of computing resources that can instantly scale as demands change. This means IT — or even business users — can start new projects with minimal effort or interaction and only pay for the amount of IT resources they end up using.

The most basic division in cloud computing is between private and public clouds. Private clouds operate either within an organization’s DMZ or as managed compute resources operated for the client’s sole use by a third-party platform provider. Public clouds let multiple users segment resources from a collection of data-centers in order to satisfy their business needs. Resources readily available from the Cloud include:

● Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Provides users with business applications run off-site by an application provider. Security patches, upgrades and performance enhancements are the application provider’s responsibility.

● Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Platform providers offer a development environment with tools to aide programmers in creating new or updated applications, without having to own the software or servers.

● Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Offers processing power, storage and bandwidth as utility services, similar to an electric utility model. The advantage is greater flexibility, scalability and interoperability with an organization’s legacy systems.

Many Platforms and Services to Choose From:

Cloud computing is still in its infancy, with a host of platform and application providers serving up a plethora of Internet-based services ranging from scalable on-demand applications to data storage services to spam filtering. In this current IT environment, organizations’ technology ecosystem have to operate cloud-based services individually, but cloud integration specialists and ISVs (integrated software vendors) are becoming more prevalent and readily available to build on top of the emerging and powerful platforms.

Mashing together services provided by the worlds largest and best funded companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, Rackspace, Oracle, IBM, HP and many others, gives way to an opportunity for companies to take hold and innovate, and build a competitive, cost saving cloud of their own on the backs of these software giant’s evolving view of the cloud.

Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, licensing and maintenance of new software. Cloud computing involves all subscription-centric or pay-for-what-you-use service that extends your IT environments existing capabilities.

Before deciding whether an application is destined for the cloud, analyze you current cost of ownership. Examine more than just the original licenses and cost of ownership; factor in ongoing expenses for maintenance, power, personnel and facilities. To start, many organizations build an internal private cloud for application development and testing, and decide from their if it is cost-effective to scale fully into a public cloud environment.

“Bridging the Whitespace” between Cloud Applications

One company, Nubifer.com (which in Latin, translates to ‘bringing the clouds’) approaches simplifying the move to the Cloud for its enterprise clients by leveraging a proprietary set of Cloud tools named Nubifer Cloud:Portal, Cloud:Connector and Cloud:Link. Nubifer’s approach with Cloud:Portal enables the rapid development of “enterprise cloud mash-ups”, providing rich dash-boards for authentication, single sign-on and identity management. This increased functionality offers simple administration of accounts spanning multiple SaaS systems, and the ability to augment and quickly integrate popular cloud applications. Cloud Connector seamlessly integrates data management, data sync services, and enables highly available data interchange between platforms and applications. And Cloud:Link provides rich dashboards for analytic and monitoring metrics improving system governance and audit trails of various SLAs (Service Level Agreements).

As a Cloud computing accelerator, Nubifer focuses on aiding enterprise companies in the adoption of emerging SaaS and PaaS platforms. Our recommended approach to an initial Cloud migration is to institute a “pilot program” tailored around your platform(s) of choice to in order to fully iron-out any integration issues that may arise prior to a complete roll-out.

Nubifer’s set of Cloud Tools can be hosted on Windows Azure, Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine. The scalability offered by these Cloud platforms promote an increased level of interoperability, availability, and a significantly lower financial barrier for entry not historically seen with current on-prem application platforms.

Cloud computing’s many flavors of services and offerings can be daunting at first review, but if you take a close look at the top providers offerings, you will see an ever increasing road map for on-boarding your existing or new applications to “the cloud”. Taking the first step is easy, and companies like Nubifer that provide the platform services, and the partner networks to aid your goals, are resourced and very eager to support your efforts.

2010: 12/16
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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BPOS to be Enhanced with Office Web Apps

Although the software giant has yet to reveal a specific timeline for the integration, Microsoft announced plans in October to add Office Web Apps to its hosted Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). This integration will give Microsoft a much-needed edge, and keep BPOS ahead of rivals like Google Apps. Google Apps offers office productivity applications as part of their broader cloud-based collaboration and communication suites.

Described by Microsoft officials as “online companions” to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, Office Web Apps offers hosted versions of Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that feature the use-ability found in the on-premise Microsoft Office suite. The software company says they are aiming to let users “access, view and edit” documents via a the Internet.

With about 20 million users, Office We Apps is currently available free for individual consumers as part of the Windows Live online services. Office Web apps is also a component to the free Live@EDU collaboration and communication suite for educational institutions. Office Web Apps can also be accessed by organizations that own the on-premise versions of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

It has been widely reported that the absence of Office Web Apps from BPOS has not hindered the adoption of that collaboration and communication suite for businesses (which features Exchange Online, Office SharePoint Online and Microsoft Office Live Meeting).

According to industry analysts, BPOS licenses have more than tripled since the start of 2010, but it is unknown how many BPOS seats have been sold overall. Microsoft stated recently that there are 40 million paid seats of Microsoft Online Services—of which BPOS is a part of. In October, Microsoft announced a number of big customer wins for BPOS, such as DuPont (58,000 end users), Volvo (18,000 end users), Australia’s Spotless Group, Godiva and Sunoco.

Industry analysts have observed that the familiarity of Microsoft’s software interfaces and tools (because it is present in many enterprises), as well as the links between Microsoft’s cloud and on-premise software, will be an advantage for the company.

Gartner explains, “I’d expect to see a growing opportunity for companies looking to move to a more cost-effective collaboration environment to consider Microsoft in the mix because of its experience in delivering enterprise collaboration.”

Analysts have also seen that Microsoft’s sales-teams are being aggressive about spreading the word about BPOS and promoting it as part of the renewing of enterprise contracts. A Gartner analyst has been quoted as saying, “Microsoft has tapped a deep root of demand for cloud services with BPOS.”

Additionally, Microsoft announced new customers, including several California State University schools, the University of Montana, Northern Kentucky University, the College of DuPage, Washington University in St. Louis and Aston University in the U.K., for Live@EDU. Live@EDU now features more than 10,000 academic institutions with over 11 million end users. Live@EDU includes Office Web Apps, Windows Live Sky Drive and Outlook Live.

For more information regarding BPOS contract a Nubifer representative today. Nubifer is a Microsoft Certified Partner.

2010: 12/09
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Hosting-as-a-Service
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
1 comment

Zoho CRM Adds QuickBooks and Telephony Integration

Zoho Corp., a leader in Software as a Service business applications, announced Wednesday December 8th that their ‘Zoho CRM’ offering now allows users to leverage QuickBooks software and Telephony Integration. Over the past few years, Zoho has had over 300,000 apps created on this platform, and as Zoho CRM evolves as a leading work-flow engine, they are introducing two key modules to Zoho CRM – QuickBooks & Telephony integration.

Zoho offers SaaS applications and provides a wide, integrated portfolio of rich online applications for businesses. With more than 20 different applications spanning Collaboration, Business and Productivity, Zoho helps businesses and organizations get work done. Zoho’s applications are delivered via the Internet, requiring nothing but a browser, enabling organizations to focus on their business while leveraging Zoho in order to maintain the servers and keep data safe.

Zoho CRM for QuickBooks

Zoho’s most recent CRM integration will help users sync information between their Zoho CRM and QuickBooks applications. This update now enables a business’ Customer and Inventory data to be synced between these two leading-edge officing and productivity systems. As QuickBooks doesn’t offer a per user model, this Add-on can be licensed for the entire organization for $25/Month.

Key features of the QuickBooks update for Zoho CRM include:

Zoho CRM for QuickBooks syncs Contacts, Vendors, Products, Quotes, Invoices and the Sales Orders modules.
Users can choose to import data from both systems or the Sync data automatically
Users have the option to choose which system gets a priority when there is conflicting data
Users have options to map data fields between Zoho CRM & QuickBooks
Zoho CRM Integrates with on-premise versions of QuickBooks Premier from 2008 to 2010 and also Simple Start 2008

Zoho PhoneBridge – Telephony Integration

As the name suggests, PhoneBridge connects your Telephone system(PBX) with Zoho CRM and allows you to interact with your CRM account during all your inbound and outbound calls. This add-on connects data from Zoho CRM with the telephony systems. For incoming and outgoing calls from your telephone, Zoho CRM can pull up the information of the caller, if available in the CRM system, and display that information in the app allowing you to log information for the contact.

Where is it used? Consider the case of a Call Center. Cold Calling, telemarketing calls, telesales calls,customer care, customer support - these are the typical operations of call centers. They can leverage the data from the CRM System during a call.

This feature is available immediately. This module is proceed at $6/user/month after a 15 day trial.

Contact Nubifer representative to discover how Zoho CRM can work for your business.

2010: 12/08
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Zoho
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Gartner Discovers 10% of IT Budgets Devoted to Cloud Computing

A recent survey conducted by Gartner reports that companies spend approximately 10 percent of their budget for external IT services on cloud computing research, migrations and implementations.

Gartner conducted the survey from April to July 2010, surveying CIOs across 40 countries, discovering that nearly 40% of respondents allocated IT budget to cloud computing. Almost 45% of the CIOs and other senior IT decision makers questioned about general IT spending trends provided answers pertaining to cloud computing and its increased adoption rates.

Among the questions asked were how organizations’ budgets for cloud computing were distributed. Detailing the results, a Research Director at Gartner noted that, “One-third of the spending on cloud computing is a continuation from the previous budget year, a further third is incremental spending that is new to the budget, and 14 percent is spending that was diverted from a different budget category in the previous year.”

Organizations polled in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and North America spent between 40 and 50 percent of their cloud budget on cloud services from external providers. The survey also discovered that almost half of respondents with a cloud computing budget planned to ramp up the use of cloud services from external platform providers.

According to Gartner analysts, the survey results demonstrated a “shift towards the ‘utility’ approach for non-core services, and increased investment in core functionality, often closely aligned with competitive differentiation.”

Additionally, more than 40% of respondents anticipated an increase in spending in private cloud implementations designed for internal or restricted use of the enterprise, compared to a third of those polled seeking to implement public clouds.

Gartner called the investment trends for cloud computing as “healthy” as a whole. Said Gartner, “This is yet another trend that indicates a shift in spending from traditional IT assets such as the data-center assets and a move towards assets that are accessed in the cloud. It is bad news for technology providers and IT service firms that are not investing and gearing up to deliver these new services seeing an increased demand by buyers.”

Discussing the findings, Chad Collins, CEO of Nubifer Cloud Computing said, “This survey supports what we are seeing at ground zero when working with our enterprise clients. Company executives are asking themselves why they should continue with business as usual, doling out up-front cap/ex investments while supporting all the risks associated with large scale IT implementations.” Collins elaborates, “Cloud platforms allow these organizations to eliminate risks and upfront investments while gaining greater interoperability and scalability features.”

Collins went on to add, “Forward thinking organizations realize that by using external providers and cloud computing models, they can gain more flexibility in their cost and management of thier application base, while also getting the elasticity and scalability needed for growth.”

To learn more about adopting a cloud platform and how your organization can realize the benefits of cloud computing technologies, contact a Nubifer representative today.

2010: 11/16
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Emerging Trends in Cloud Computing

Due to its reputation as a game-changing technology set, Cloud Computing is a hot topic when discussing emerging technology trends. Cloud Computing is defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) “as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

IT optimization has largely been the reason for the early adoption of Cloud Computing in “Global 2000” enterprises, with the early drivers being cost savings and faster infrastructure provisioning. A December 2009 Forrester Report indicated that over 70% of IT budget is spent on maintaining current IT infrastructure rather than adding new capabilities. Because of this, organizations are seeking to adopt a Cloud Computing model for their enterprise applications in order to better utilize the infrastructure investments.

Several such organizations currently have data center consolidation and virtualization initiatives underway and look to Cloud Computing as a natural progression of those initiatives. Enterprise private cloud solutions add capabilities such as self-service, automation and charge back over the virtualized infrastructure and thus make infrastructure provisioning quicker, helping to improve the over-all utilizations. Additionally, some of these organizations have been beginning to try public cloud solutions as a new infrastructure sourcing option.

IT spending of “Global 2000” enterprises makes up less than 5% of their revenues, thus optimizing IT isn’t going to impact their top or bottom line. In the current economic state, IT optimization is a good reason for these large enterprises to begin looking at Cloud Computing. So what is the true “disruptive” potential of Cloud Computing? It lies in the way it is going to aid these large enterprises in reinventing themselves and their business models in order to rise to the challenge of an evolving business landscape.

Social Networking Clouds and e-Commerce

Worldwide e-Commerce transactions will be worth over $16 trillion by 2013, and by 2012 over 50% of all adult Internet users in the U.S. will be using social networks. Currently, 49% of web users make a purchase based on a recommendation gleaned from social media. This increased adoption of social media makes it easier for consumers to remain connected and get options on products and services. Basically, the consumer has already made up their mind about a produce before even getting to the website or store. This is causing major changes in consumer marketing and the B2C business models. The relationship used to be between the enterprise and the consumer, but it is now changed to a deeper relationship that encompasses the consumer’s community.

Large enterprises can’t afford to have “websites” or “brick-and-mortar stores” any longer if they want to remain relevant and ensure customer loyalty—they need to provide online cloud hosted platforms that engage the consumers constantly along with their social community. That way, they incorporate the enterprise business services in their day-to-day life. When the Gen Y consumers reach the market, for example, “community driven” social commerce just may replace traditional “website based” e-commerce. Enterprises need to begin building such next-generation industry specific service platforms for the domain they operate it in anticipation of this.

Computing’s Pervasiveness

One half of the world population—roughly 3.3 billion—have active mobile devices, and the increased use of these hand held devices is altering the expectations of consumers when it comes to the availability of services. Consumers expect that the products and services should be available to them whenever they need the service, wherever they are, through innovative applications, the kinds of applications that can be better delivered through the cloud model.

The number of smart devices is expected to reach one trillion by 2011, due to increasing adoption of technologies like wireless sensors, wearable computing, RFIDs and more. This will lead to significant changes in the way consumers use technology, as future consumers will be used to (and be expecting) more intelligent products and services such as intelligent buildings that conserve energy and intelligent transportation systems that can make decisions based on real-time traffic information. An entirely new set of innovative products and services based on such pervasive computing will need to be created for the future generation.

Service providers will look to increase customer loyalty by providing more offerings, better services and maintaining deeper relationships as products and services become commoditized. Several industry leaders are increasingly adopting open innovation models, there by creating business clouds supported by an ecosystem of partners, in order to increase the portfolio of offerings and innovate faster. A new generation of applications must be created as Cloud Computing becomes more pervasive with the increased adoption of smart devices.

To gain a competitive edge, reduce CAPEX on infrastructure and maintenance, and take advantage of powerful SaaS technologies offered in the Cloud, Companies need to build their next generation business cloud platforms in order to better manage the scale of information.

To learn more about Cloud Computing and how companies can adopt and interoperate with the cloud, Visit Nubifer.com

2010: 11/05
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
1 comment

Microsoft Announces Office 365

Announced October 19th 2010, Microsoft is launching Office 365, the software giants’ next cloud productivity offering syncing Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online in an “always-on” software and platform-as-a-service. Office 365 makes it simpler for organizations to get and use Microsoft’s highly-acclaimed business productivity solutions via the cloud.

With the Office 365 cloud offering, users can now work together more collaboratively from anywhere on any device with Internet connectivity, while collaborating with others inside and outside their enterprise in a secure and interoperable fashion. As part of today’s launch announcement by Microsoft, the Redmond based software company is opening a pilot beta program for Office 365 in 13 different regions and countries.

Microsoft relied on years of experience when architecting Office 365, delivering industry-acclaimed enterprise cloud services ranging from the first browser-based e-mail to today’s Business Productivity Online Suite, Microsoft Office Live Small Business and Live@edu. Adopting the Office 365 cloud platform means Microsoft users don’t have to alter the way they work, because Office 365 works with the most prevalent browsers, smart-phone hand-sets and desktop applications people use today.

Office 365 developers worked in close association with existing customers to develop this cloud offering, resulting in a platform that is designed to meet a wide array of user needs:

“Office 365 is the best of everything we know about productivity, all in a single cloud service,” said Kurt DelBene, president of the Office Division at Microsoft. “With Office 365, your local bakery can get enterprise-caliber software and services for the first time, while a multinational pharmaceutical company can reduce costs and more easily stay current with the latest innovations. People can focus on their business, while we and our partners take care of the technology.”

With Office 365 for small businesses, professionals and small companies with fewer than 25 employees can be up and running with Office Web Apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and an external website in just 15 minutes, for $6 per user, per month.

Microsoft Office 365 for the enterprise introduces an wide range of choices for mid and large organizations, as well as for governmental entities, starting at $2 per user, per month for basic e-mail. Office 365 for the enterprise also includes the choice to receive Microsoft Office Professional Plus on a pay-as-you-use basis. For less than $25 per user, per month, organizations can get Office Professional Plus along with webmail, voicemail, business social networking, instant messaging, Web portals, extranets, voice-conferencing, video-conferencing, web-conferencing, 24×7 phone support, on-premises licenses, and more.

Office 365 is creating new growth opportunities for Microsoft and its partners by reaching more customers and types of users and meeting more IT needs — all while reducing the financial burden for its customers.

Product Availability

Office 365 will be available worldwide in 2011. Starting today, Microsoft will begin testing Office 365 with a few thousand organizations in 13 countries and regions, with the beat expanding to include more organizations as the platform matures. Office 365 will be generally available in over 40 countries and regions next year.

Towards the end of next year, Microsoft Office 365 will offer Dynamics CRM Online in order to provide their complete business productivity experience to organizations of all varieties and scales. Additionally, Office 365 for education will debut later next year, giving students, faculty and school employees powerful technology tailored specifically to their needs.

October 19th at Noon PDT, Microsoft will launch http://www.Office365.com. Customers and partners can sign up for the Office 365 beta and learn more at that site, or follow Office 365 on Twitter (@Office365), Facebook (Office 365), or the new Office 365 blog at http://community.office365.com to get the latest information.

Nubifer is a Microsoft Registered Partner with expertise in Office, Windows 7, BPOS and Windows Azure. Contact a representative today to learn how the Office 365 cloud platform can streamline your business processes or visit www.nubifer.com and fill out our online questionaire.

2010: 10/19
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
1 comment

Protecting Data in the Cloud

When it comes to cloud computing, one of the major concerns is protecting the data being stored in the cloud. IT departments often lack the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions regarding the identification of sensitive data—which can cost an enterprise millions of dollars in legal costs and lost revenue.

The battle between encryption and tokenization was explored in a recent technology report, and the merits of both are being considered as securing data in the cloud becomes more and more important. Although the debate over which solution is best continues, it is ultimately good news that protection in cloud computing is available in the first place.

It is essential that data is secure while in storage or in transit (both inherent in cloud computing) in the current business climate; the protection is necessary whether dealing with retail processing, accessing personal medical records or managing government information and financial activity. It is necessary to implement the correct security measure to protect sensitive information.

So what is tokenization? Tokenization is the process in which sensitive data is segmented into one or more pieces and replaced with non-sensitive values, or tokens, and the original data is stored encrypted elsewhere. When clients need access to the sensitive data, they typically provide the token along with authentication credentials to a service that then validates the credentials, decrypts the secure data, and provides it back to the client. Even though encryption is used, the client is never involved in either the encryption or decryption process so encryption keys are never exchanged outside the token service. Tokens protect information like medical records, social security numbers, financial transactions, etc prevent unauthorized access.

Encryption, on the other hand, is the process of changing the information using an algorithm to ensure it is unreadable to anyone expect those who possess a key or special knowledge. The military and government have been using this method for some time to make sure that their sensitive information remains in the hands of the right people and organizations.

Tokenization and encryption can be applied when using cloud computing to protect the information is used in the cloud. For organizations seeking to determine which method is a better fit for them, it is necessary to ask questions about the security of the method and whether one has more pros than the others. It is necessary in this case to clearly define the objectives of the business process as well.

A clear method of protecting information is essential if cloud computing is posing benefits for the enterprise. Conversely, this can also be an obstacle to launching a cloud computing strategy. Gartner reports that 85 percent of participants cited security as a key factor that could prevent them from launching cloud-based apps.

In conclusion, there is no clear winner in the debate over tokenization versus encryption. Rather, it depends on the goals of the business and how the company plans to manage the security of their sensitive information. The data needs to be protected in a way that is easily manageable when launching a cloud computing strategy—and it is only at this point that cloud computing can be both successful and secure. For more information regarding securing data int eh cloud via tokenization, contact a Nubifer representative today.

2010: 10/11
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Security
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
2 comments

Predicting, Building Toward and Defining the Future of Cloud Automation

Cloud computing is an outcome of efficient IT automation, and is a model that is only possible by standardizing core elements of computing and the automation of their operation. The cloud cannot be a self-sustaining platform without automation, nor can it scale to very large numbers of customers or systems.

As the modern IT landscape becomes more concentrated, new computing complexities begin to surface. Although this has occurred in the past with evolving programming languages, computer networks, software design architectures and system virtualization, IT automation has raised the bar on that concept more than any other.

By most industry estimations, we are only at an early stage in the grand scheme of operations automation, just the second or third of several unavoidable evolutionary stages in the growing capability of systems to stand on their own in a global IT ecosystem.

Organizational Automation
Organizational automation of server deployment is the first stage of automation. When the server is the unit of deployment, server automation is a prime idea. Each server can host a single operating system, creating that OS and formatting to apps to include is an ideal method of streamlining operations of a single server.

The difficulty of this method is that it’s difficult to execute efficiently at large scales because the system administrator is still burdened to make operational decisions on behalf of the application. You may now be wondering about the number of servers is an ideal amount to deploy? And, which types of servers should you should add instances to in order to meet peak loads and what the time-frame should be for doing that? The result of this method of operation is a significantly cumbersome manual operations environment, with most organizations Nubifer has Consulted with at this stage and scale, implementing strategic capacity planning and erect a system for expected peak.

Application Implementation
The implementation of a sectioned distributed application where the different data-sets of the application are aimed for a deployment location is a significant upgrade to single server deployment. This type of automation essentially ensures that each set of data ends up where it’s supposed to be stored and that it’s configured correctly.

Standards in Source Code
We also noticed that standardized operations code adds important functionality to simple distributed deployment automation which shifts capacity consumption based on application needs in real time. This type of scaling automation ensures that your organization pays only for what you use.

Implementing Cloud Automation
Nubifer has noticed that modern scaling automation has one primary limitation: the fashion in which the health of the application is determined has to be built into application OS’s ahead of time. The developer has to determine what conditions to examine, what state requires an adjustment to scale and what layers of the application are scaled in response. This all has to be effectively architected prior to the application being deployed into your organization’s IT environment.

Interop and Identity Management
Leveraging the interoperability and intelligence of behavior learning algorithms enabling cloud systems to receive a wide variety of monitoring data is the next logical step, followed by picking through that data to determine normal and abnormal behaviors and to determine appropriate ways to react to any anomalies. These forms of learned behavior turn the application system an adaptive system which becomes increasingly better at making efficient choices the longer the application is in production.

Even though the issue discussed above is a complicated one, successful migrations will be exceedingly important as they will continuously evolve strategies for dealing with app performance, security and cost management.

Why Give Up Control?
You may be wondering why you want to give up control over operations of your key apps to an automation system. The reasoning lies under the same motivation for turning over of your operating systems to virtual machines, your phone systems to managed service providers or your compute resources to cloud environments: agility, interoperability, scalability and cost.

The Take-Aways
Companies that adopt one or more cloud models for a large percentage of their workloads will see key advantages over those that don’t, and cloud providers that adopt the best infrastructure and service automation systems will improve their chances in the marketplace. Visit Nubifer.com to learn more about the past, present and future states of cloud computing and to gain insights and key research into the field of cloud computing, software-as-a-service, platform and infrastructure-as-a-service.

2010: 09/10
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Security
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Google Apps Receives Federal Certification for Cloud Computing

On July 26, Google released a version of its hosted suite of applications that meets the primary federal IT security certification, making a major leap forward in its push to drive cloud computing in the government. Nearly one year in the making, Google announces its new edition of Google Apps as the first portfolio of cloud applications to have received certification under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

The government version of Google Apps has the same pricing and services as the premier edition, including Gmail, the Docs productivity site and the Talk instant-messaging application.

Google Business Development Executive David Mihalchik said to reporters, “We see the FISMA certification in the federal government environment as really the green light for federal agencies to move forward with the adoption of cloud computing for Google Apps.”

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced a broad initiative to embrace the cloud across the federal government last September, as a way to reduce both costs and inefficiencies of redundant and underused IT deployments. The launch of that campaign was accompanied by the launch of Apps.gov. An online storefront for vendors to showcase their cloud-based services for federal IT manager, Apps.gov was revealed at an event at NASA’s Ames Research Center and attended by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. At the same time, Google announced plans to develop a version of its popular cloud-based services that would meet the federal-government sector’s security requirements.

Mike Bradshaw, director of Google’s Federal Division, said, “We’re excited about this announcement and the benefits that cloud computing can bring to this market.” Bradshaw continued to say that “the President’s budget has identified the adoption of cloud computing in the federal government as a way to more efficiently use the billions of dollars spent on IT annually.” Bradshaw added that the government spends $45 million in electrical costs alone to run its data-centers and servers.

Security concerns are consistently cited by proponents of modernizing the deferral IT apparatus as the largest barrier to the adoption of cloud computing. Google is including extra security features to make federal IT buyers at agencies with more stringent security requirements feel more at ease. These extra security features are in addition to the 1,500 pages of documentation that came with Google’s FISMA certification.

Google will store government cloud accounts on dedicated servers within its data centers that will be segregated from its equipment that houses consumer and business data. Additionally, Google has committed to only use servers located in the continental U.S. for government cloud accounts. Google’s premier edition commercial customers have their data stored on servers in both the U.S. and European Union.

Mihalchik explained that security was the leading priority from the get-go in developing Google Apps for Government saying, “We set out to send a signal to government customers that the cloud is ready for government.” Adding, “today we’ve done that with the FISMA certification, and also going beyond FISMA to meet some of the other specific security requirements of government customers.”

Thus far, Google has won government customers at state and local levels such as in the cities of Los Angeles, California and Orlando, Florida. Mihalchik said that over one dozen federal agencies are in various stages of trialing or deploying elements of Google apps. Mihalchik states that several agencies are using Google anti-spam and anti-virus products to filter their email. Others, like the Department of Energy, are running pilot programs to evaluate the full suite of Google Apps in comparison with competitors’ offerings.

Find out more about cloud security and FISMA certification of Google Apps by talking to a Nubifer Consultant today.

2010: 09/02
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Google Apps
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Zoho Sheet 2.0 launches on August 31st 2010, with support for Million Cell Spreadsheets

Zoho, an industry leader in cloud hosted officing software, announced today the launch of Zoho Sheet 2.0. Among the many added features of Zoho Sheet, is the newly added support for million cell spreadsheets.

When a user logs-in to Zoho Sheet 2.0, they will not notice much change visually, but there have been many performance improvements on the back-end. Frequent users of Zoho’s increasingly popular spreadsheet app will notice the performance and interoperability improvements instantly. Regarding the performance of the app, Zoho enhanced the back-end engine significantly upgrading its performance, allowing users of Zoho Sheet 2.0 to load large and complex spreadsheets with instant response times.

Zoho Sheet’s One Million Cell Spreadsheet

At Nubifer Inc., we are constantly working with extensive spreadsheets, and were infinitely familiar with constant freezes and over-consumption of local compute resources. This is no longer an issue for our teams, as Zoho Sheet is completely online with all the heavy lifting being done on the server side, keeping our client side agile and nimble.

With Zoho’s latest product update, subscribers can now create a million cell spreadsheet. Zoho Sheet 2.0 supports 65,536 rows and 256 columns per worksheet, creating 1 Million Cells per spreadsheet project. Supporting a million cells is an important feature, but maintaining efficient load-times with large spreadsheets was the primary goal with Zoho Sheet 2.0. Waiting as long as 5 minutes to load very large spreadsheets is no longer an issue, this can now be experienced instantly within your web browser. We here at Nubifer encourage you to give it a test drive, and witness for yourself how agile and efficient response is while using Zoho Sheet 2.0.

Here is an example embedded spreadsheet with 25,000 rows. The performance on the return is quite impressive.

In addition to the improved performance metrics, here are some other great features designed to aid functionality and work flow.

Chrome & Safari Browser Support

Zoho Sheet now officially supports Chrome 4+, Safari 4+, Firefox 2+ and IE 6+.

Some Additionally Impressive Improvements

Users can now directly input Chinese, Japanese & Korean characters without having to double-click on a cell.
Improved ‘Find’ functionality. Control+F will now bring up the ‘Find’ panel at the bottom of the spreadsheet with options to search within the row, column or sheet.
The ‘Undo’ and ‘Redo’ actions now work across the spreadsheet and are maintained on a per-user basis while collaborating with other users.
You can now set formats and styles on column, row, and sheet tiers.

Are you an existing user? If not, you probably wont see many changes visually, but you will experience these enhancements when working with Zoho Sheets 2.0.

Zoho is tirelessly working on performance updates to their cloud-hosted officing applications. Some updates are cosmetic for look and feel, while others are performance based. The overwhelming majority of Zoho’s updates go under the hood. For these updates, users may not notice anything visually, but these updates are significant and lay the groundwork for things to come in the future.

For more information about Zoho Sheet, or other Zoho officing applications please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 09/01
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Zoho
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Understanding the Cloud with Nubifer Inc. CTO, Henry Chan

The overwhelming majority of cloud computing platforms consist of dependable services relayed via data centers and built in servers with varying tiers of virtualization capabilities. These services are available anywhere that allows access to the networking platform. Clouds often appear as single arenas of access for all subscribers’ enterprise computing needs. All commercial cloud platform offerings are guaranteed to adhere to the customers’ quality of service (QoS) requirements, and typically offer service level agreements. Open standards are crucial to the expansion and acceptance of cloud computing, and open source software has layed the ground work for many cloud platform implementations.

The article to follow is what Nubifer Inc. CTO, Henry Chan, recently described to be his summarized view of what cloud computing means, its benefits and where it’s heading in the future:

Cloud computing explained:

The “cloud” in cloud computing refers to your network’s Internet connection. Cloud computing is essentially using the Internet to perform tasks like email hosting, data storage and document sharing which were traditionally hosted on premise.

Understanding the benefits of cloud computing:

Cloud computing’s myriad of benefits depend on your organizational infrastructure needs. If your enterprise is sharing large number of applications between a varying number of office locations, it would be beneficial to your organization to store the apps on a virtual server. Web-based application hosting can save time for people traveling without the ability to connect back to the office because they can have access to everything over their shared virtual private network (VPN).

Examples of cloud computing:

Hosted email (such as GMail or Hotmail), online data back-up, online data storage, any Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application (such as a cloud hosted CRM from vendors like Salesforce, Zoho or Microsoft Dynamics) or accounting applications, are examples of applications that can be hosted in the cloud. By hosting these applications in the cloud, your business can benefit from the interoperability and scalability cloud computing and SaaS services offer.

Safety in the cloud:

Although there are some concerns over the safety of cloud computing, the reality is that data stored in the cloud can be just as secure as the vast majority of data stored on your internal servers. The key is to implement the necessary solutions to ensure that the proper level of encryption is applied to your data while traveling to and from your cloud storage container, as well as when being stored. This can be as safe as any other solution you could implement locally when designed properly. The leading cloud vendors all currently maintain compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, SAS90, FISMA and HIPPA.

Cloud computing for your enterprise:

To determine which layer of cloud computing is optimally suited for your organization, it is important to thoroughly evaluate your organizational goals as it relates to your IT ecosystem. Examine how you currently use technology, current challenges with technology, how your organization will evolve technologically in the years to come, and what scalability and interoperability will be required going forward. After a careful gap analysis of these determinants, you can decide what types of cloud-based solutions will be optimally suited for your organizational architecture.

Cloud computing, a hybrid solution:

The overwhelming trend in 2010 and 2011 is to move non-sensitive data and applications into the cloud while keeping trade secrets behind your enterprise firewall, as many organizations are not comfortable hosting all their applications and hardware in the cloud. The trick to making cloud computing work for your business is to understand which applications should be kept local and which would benefit most from leveraging the scalability and interoperability of the cloud ecosystem.

Will data be shared with other companies if it is hosted in the cloud:

Short answer: NO! Reputable SaaS and cloud vendors will make sure that your data is properly segmented according to the requirements of your industry.

Costs of cloud computing:

Leading cloud-based solutions charge a monthly fee for application usage and data storage, but you may be outlaying this capital expenditure already, primarily in the form of hardware maintenance and software fees—some of which could be wiped out by moving to the cloud.

Cloud computing makes it easy for your companies’ Human Resource software, payroll and CRM to co-mingle with your existing financial data, supply chain management and operations installation, while simultaneously reducing your capital requirements on these systems. Contact a Nubifer representative today to discover how leveraging the power of cloud computing can help your business excel.

2010: 08/27
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Security
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Examining Cloud Adoption Trends

The ongoing management of patch updates, service pack updates, hardware failure risk and scaling challenges can disappear or decrease substantially when leveraging a Cloud Service Solution. To describe what a ‘cloud’ solution is, three key components to the cloud model architecture need to be examined.

Although the industries definition of cloud computing has evolved over the years, there is a tremendous amount of options to explore when it comes to cloud computing. Similar to the eCommerce boom in the late 90’s, cloud computing can be considered the most likely candidate to be labeled as the next IT revolution. This is because cloud computing is an entirely new sector of IT, a division with unlimited possibilities available to be built upon.

Cloud computing primarily encompasses three fields of service offerings:

Software as a Service
A model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand.
Platform as a Service
Generates all facilities required to support the complete cycle of construction and delivery of web-based applications wholly available via the Internet without the need of downloading software or special installations by developers.
Infrastructure as a Service
Provides informatics resources, such as servers, connections, storage and other necessary tools to construct an application design prepared to meet different needs of multiple organizations, making it quick, easy and economically viable.

All three offerings are presented as shared services delivered via the Internet, while the Infrastructure-as-a-Service concept’s primed to reorganize IT sectors of businesses.

Traditionally, Nubifer identifies three different fashions of classifying infrastructure services:

1. Which IT service is being most heavily affected

· Employee facing IT infrastructure (internal officing, email, etc.)

· Client facing services and applications

2. Organizational reason for outsourcing

· Reduce IT expenditures

· Increased need for interoperability and scalability

3. Types of cloud offerings

· Public Cloud (shared services)

· Private Cloud (exclusive and customizable)

· Hybrid cloud (most popular)

These three infrastructure services are not mutually exclusive of each other. Rather, every time an Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering is leveraged, it would be a combination of any or all of these.

For example, a large financial institution may employ a cloud solution utilizing an IaaS approach in order to maintain its email domains, employee work stations, databases, officing applications, etc. The organizational goal would be to reduce costs while not losing functionality, and may potentially lead decision makers to the conclusion that a public cloud offering is optimally suited to meet their internal IT requirements.

The optimally suited combinations of IaaS solutions would be dependent on the industry and the business, so one way of identifying motivations for adoption is to separate industries and examine the scenarios independently of one another. The benefits derived from the adoption of an IaaS solution are numerous, and listed below are a few sectors that traditionally have a significant employee workforce, large customer base and a heavy reliance on automated IT processes where cloud solutions may solve a great number of technology issues:

· Finance

o Better, faster and innovative value added services through a professionally managed Cloud Infrastructure lead to a more intuitive customer experience

o Reduce costs by outsourcing the management of your burdensome data-centers which store employee and customer databases and servers.

o Achieve greater operational efficiency through the standardized hosting of applications in the cloud.

· Retail

o Maximize supply chain efficiency by leveraging public data-centers. This creates the opportunity to focus on innovation and not logistics.

· IT

o In order to focus on your core business models you need to outsource your tedious Infrastructure management and maintenance duties to cloud vendors.

At Nubifer, our Programs and Services are about creating and offering choices in the way you choose to configure and architect your cloud-based software tools and technologies. Learn more about the Nubifer Mission, technology tools and consultancy support which help grow and maintain your enterprise. We hope this article was informative and insightful, please contact a Nubifer representative today if you have any question regarding leading Cloud Computing solutions.

2010: 08/25
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Confidence in Cloud Computing Expected to Surge Economic Growth

The dynamic and flexible nature of cloud computing, software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service may help organizations in their recovery from the current economic downturn, according to more than two thirds of IT decision leaders and makers who participated in a recent annual study by Vanson Bourne, an International Research Firm. Vanson Bourne surveyed over 600 IT and business decision makers across the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore. Of the countries sampled, Singapore is leading the shift to the cloud, with 76 percent of responding enterprises using some form of cloud computing. The U.S. follows with 66 percent, with the U.K. at 57 percent.

This two year study about Cloud Computing reveals that IT decision makers are very confident in cloud computing’s ability to deliver within budget and offer CapEx savings. Commercial and public sector respondents also predict cloud use will help decrease overall IT budgets by an average of 15 Percent, with others expecting savings as much as 40 Percent.

“Scalability, interoperability and pay-as-you-go elasticity are moving many of our clients toward cloud computing,” said Chad Collins, CEO at Nubifer Inc., a strategic Cloud and SaaS consulting firm. “However, it’s important, primarily for our enterprise clients, to work with a Cloud provider that not only delivers cost savings, but also effectively integrates technologies, applications and infrastructure on a global scale.”

A lack of access to IT capacity is clearly labeled as an obstacle to business progress, with 76 percent of business decision makers reporting they have been prevented from developing or piloting projects due to the cost or constraints within IT. For 55 percent of respondents, this remains an issue.

Confidence in cloud continues to trend upward — 96 percent of IT decision makers are as confident or more confident in cloud computing being enterprise ready now than they were in 2009. In addition, 70 percent of IT decision makers are using or plan to be using an enterprise-grade cloud solution within the next two years.

The ability to scale resources up and down in order to manage fluctuating business demand was the most cited benefit influencing cloud adoption in the U.S. (30 percent) and Singapore (42 percent). The top factor driving U.K. adoption is lower cost of total ownership (41 percent).

Security concerns remain a key barrier to cloud adoption, with 52 percent of respondents who do not leverage a cloud solution citing security of sensitive data as a concern. Yet 73 percent of all respondents want cloud providers to fully manage security or to fully manage security while allowing configuration change requests from the client.

Seventy-nine percent of IT decision makers see cloud as a straight forward way to integrate with corporate systems. For more information on how to leverage a cloud solution inside your environment, contact a Nubifer.com representative today.

2010: 08/17
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Security
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Taking a Closer Look at the Power of Microsoft Windows Azure AppFabric

Microsoft’s Windows Azure runs Windows applications and stores advanced applications, services and data in the cloud. This baseline understanding of Windows Azure, coupled with the practicality of using computers in the cloud makes leveraging the acres of Internet-accessible servers on offer today an obvious choice. Especially when the alternate option of buying and maintaining your own space in data centers and hardware deployed to those data centers can quickly become costly. For some applications, both code and data might live in the cloud, where the systems they use are managed and maintained by someone else. On-premise applications—which run inside an organization—might store data in the cloud or rely on other cloud infrastructure services. Ultimately, making use of the cloud’s capabilities provides a variety of advantages.

Windows Azure applications and on-premises applications can access the Windows Azure storage service using a REST-ful approach. The storage service allows storing binary large objects (blobs), provides queues for communication between components of Windows Azure application, and also offers a form of tables with a simple query language. The Windows Azure platform also provides SQL Azure for applications that need traditional relational storage. An application using the Windows Azure platform is free to use any combination of these storage options.

One obvious need between applications hosted in the cloud and hosted on-premise is communication between applications. Windows Azure AppFabric provides a Service Bus for bi-directional application connectivity and Access Control for federated claims-based access control.

Service Bus for Azure AppFabric

The primary feature of the Service Bus is message “relaying” to and from the Windows Azure cloud to your software running on-premise, bypassing any firewalls, network address translation (NAT) or other network obstacles. The Service Bus can also help negotiate direct connections between applications. Meanwhile, the Access Control feature provides a claims-based access control mechanism for applications, making federation easier to tackle and allowing your applications to trust identities provided by other systems.

A .NET developer SDK is available that simplifies integrating these services into your on-premises .NET applications. The SDK integrates seamlessly with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and other Microsoft technologies to build on pre-existing skill sets as much as possible. These SDKs have been designed to provide a first-class .NET developer experience, but it is important to point out that they each provide interfaces based on industry standard protocols. Thus, making it possible for applications running on any platform to integrate with them through REST, SOAP and WS-protocols.

SDKs for Java and Ruby are currently available for download. Combining them with the underlying Windows Azure platform service produces a powerful, cloud-based environment for developers.

Access Control for the Azure AppFabric

Over the last decade, the industry has been moving toward an identity solution based on claims. A claims-based identity model allows the common features of authentication and authorization to be factored out of your code, at which point such logic can then be centralized into external services that are written and maintained by subject matter experts in security and identity. This is beneficial to all parties involved.

Access Control is a cloud-based service that does exactly that. Rather than writing your own customer user account and role database, customers can let AC orchestrate the authentication and most of the user authorization. With a single code base in your application, customers can authorize access to both enterprise clients and simple clients. Enterprise clients can leverage ADFS V2 to allow users to authenticate using their Active Directory logon credentials, while simple clients can establish a shared secret with AC to authenticate directly with AC.

The extensibility of Access Control allows for easy integration of authentication and authorization through many identity providers without the need for refactoring code. As Access Control evolves, support for authentication against Facebook Connect, Google Accounts, and Windows Live ID can be quickly added to an application. To reiterate: over time, it will be easy to authorize access to more and more users without having to change the code base.

When using AC, the user must obtain a security token from AC in order to log in; this token is similar to a signed email message from AC to your service with a set of claims about the user’s identity. AC doesn’t issue a token unless the user first provides his or her identity by either authenticating with AC directly or by presenting a security token from another trusted issuer (such as ADFS) that has authenticated that user. So by the time the user presents a token to the service, assuming it is validated, it is safe to trust the claims in the token and begin processing the user’s request.

Single sign-on is easier to achieve under this model, so a customer’s service is no longer responsible for:

• Authenticating users
• Storing user accounts and passwords
• Calling to enterprise directories to look up user identity details
• Integrating with identity systems from other platforms or companies
• Delegation of authentication (a.k.a. federation) with other security realms

Under this model, a customer’s service can make identity-related decisions based on claims about the user made by a trusted issuer like AC. This could be anything from simple service personalization with the user’s first name, to authorizing the user to access higher-valued features and resources in the customer’s service.

Standards

Due to the fact that single sign-on and claims-based identity have been evolving since 2000, there are a myriad of ways of doing it. There are competing standards for token formats as well as competing standards for the protocols used to request those tokens and send them to services. This fact is what makes AC so useful, because over time, as it evolves to support a broader range of these standards, your service will benefit from broader access to clients without having to know the details of these standards, much less worry about trying to implement them correctly.

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) was the first standard. SAML specified an XML format for tokens (SAML tokens) in addition to protocols for performing Web App/Service single sign-on (SAML tokens are sometimes referred to inside Microsoft as SAMLP–for the SAML protocol suite). WS-Federation and related WS-* specifications also define a set of protocols for Web App/Service single sign-on, but they do not restrict the token format to SAML, although it is practically the most common format used today.

To Summarize

The Service Bus and Access Control constituents of the Windows Azure platform provide key building block services that are vital for building cloud-based or cloud-aware applications. Service Bus enables customer to connect existing on-premises applications with new investments being built for the cloud. Those cloud assets will be able to easily communicate with on-premises services through the network traversal capabilities, which are provided through Service Bus relay.

Overall, the Windows Azure platform represents a comprehensive Microsoft strategy designed to make it easy for Microsoft developers to realize the opportunities inherent to cloud computing. The Service Bus and Access Control offer a key component of the platform strategy, designed specifically to aid .NET developers in making the transition to the cloud. These services provide cloud-centric building blocks and infrastructure in the areas of secure application connectivity and federated access control.

For more information on the Service Bus & Access Control, please contact a Nubifer representative or visit these Microsoft sponsored links:

• An Introduction to Windows Azure platform AppFabric for Developers (this paper)
o http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=150833

• A Developer’s Guide to Service Bus in Windows Azure platform AppFabric
o http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=150834

• A Developer’s Guide to Access Control in Windows Azure platform AppFabric
o http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=150835

• Windows Azure platform
o http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

• Service Bus and Access Control portal
o http://netservices.azure.com/

2010: 08/13
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Microsoft
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Windows Azure
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Two Kinds of Cloud Agility

CIO.com’s Bernard Golden defines cloud agility and provides examples of how cloud computing fosters business agility in the following article.

Although agility is commonly described as a key benefit of cloud computing, there are two types of agility that are real, but one of them packs more of a punch.

First, however, it is important to define cloud agility. Cloud agility is tied to the rapid provisioning of computer resources. In typical IT shops, new compute instances or storage can take weeks (or even months!), but the same provisioning process takes just minutes in cloud environments.

Work is able to commence at a rapid pace due to the dramatic shortening of the provisioning timeframe. For example, in a cloud environment submitting a request for computing resources and waiting anxiously for a fulfillment response via email does not happen. In this way, agility can be defined as “the power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness,” and in his way it is clear how this rapid provisioning is commonly referred to advancing agility.

It is at this point that the definition of agility becomes confusing, as people often conflate both engineering resource availability and business response to changing conditions or opportunity under agility.

While both types of agility are useful, business response to changing conditions or opportunity will prove to be the more compelling type of agility. It will also come to be seen as the real agility associated with cloud computing.

The issue with this type of agility, however, is that it is a local optimization, meaning that it makes a portion of internal IT processes more agile. However this doesn’t necessarily shorten the overall application supply chain, which extends from initial prototype to production rollout.

It is, in fact, very common for cloud agility to enable developers and QA to begin their work more quickly, but for the overall delivery time to stay the same, stretched by slow handover to operations, extended shakedown time in the new production environment and poor coordination with release to the business units.

Additionally, if cloud computing comes to be seen as an internal IT optimization, with little effect on the timeliness of compute capability rolling out into mainline business processes, IT potentially may never receive the business unit support it requires to fund the shift to cloud computing. What may happen, is that cloud computing will end up like virtualization, in which in many organizations remains at 20 or 30 percent penetration, unable to gather the funding necessary to support wider implementation. Necessary funding will probably never materialize if the move to cloud computing is presented as “helps our programmers program faster.”

Now, for the second type of agility, which affects how quickly business units can roll out new offerings. This type of agility does not suffer the same problems that the first one does. Funding will not be an issue if business units can see a direct correlation between cloud computing and stealing a march on the competition. Funding is never an issue when the business benefit is clear.

The following three examples show the kind of business agility fostered by cloud computing in the world of journalism:

1. The Daily Telegraph broke a story about a scandal regarding Members of Parliament expenses which was a huge cause celebre featuring examples of MPs seeking reimbursement of for building a duck house and other equally outrageous claims. As can be imagined, the number of expense forms was huge, and overtaxed the resources of the Telegraph available to review and analyze them. The Telegraph loaded the documents in Google Docs and allowed readers to browse them at their own will. CIO of the Telegraph Media Group, Toby Wright, used this example during a presentation at the Cloud Computing World Forum and pointed out how interesting it was to see several hundred people clicking through the spreadsheets at once.

2. The Daily Telegraph’s competitor, the Guardian, of course featured its own response to the expenses scandal. The Guardian quickly wrote an application to let people examine individual claims and identify ones that should be examined more closely. As a result, more questionable claims surfaced more quickly and allowed the situation to heat up. Simon Willison of the Guardian said of the agility that cloud computing offers, “I am working at the Guardian because I am interested in the opportunity to build rapid prototypes that go live: apps that live for two or three days.” Essentially, the agility of cloud computing enables quick rollout of short-lived applications to support the Guardian’s core business: delivery of news and insight.

3. Now, for an example from the United States. The Washington Post took static pdf files of former First Lady Hillary Clinton’s schedule and used Amazon Web Services to transform them into a searchable document format. The Washington Post then placed the documents into a database and put a simple graphic interface in place to allow members of the public to be able to click through them as well–once again, crowds-ourcing the analysis of documents to accelerate analysis.

It can be argued that these examples don’t prove the overall point of how cloud computing improves business agility–they are media businesses, after all, not “real” businesses that deal with physical objects and can’t be satisfied with a centralized publication site. This point doesn’t take into account that modern economies are shifting to become more IT-infused and digital data is becoming a key part of every business offering. The ability to turn out applications associated with the foundation business offering will be a critical differentiator in the future economy.

Customers get more value and the vendor gets competitive advantage due to this ability to surround a physical product or service with supporting applications. In order to win in the future, it is important to know how to take advantage of cloud computing to speed delivery of complimentary applications into the marketplace. As companies battle it out in the marketplace, they will be at a disadvantage if they fail to optimize the application delivery supply chain.

It is a mistake to view cloud computing as a technology that helps IT do its job quicker, and internal IT agility is necessary but not sufficient for the future. It will be more important to link the application of cloud computing to business agility, speeding business innovation to the marketplace. In summary, both types of agility are good but the latter should be the aim of cloud computing efforts.

2010: 08/11
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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A Guide to Choosing CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software lets you effectively manage your business, but choosing the right software is often a daunting process. This nubifer.com blog is aimed at alleviating some of the more challenging decision making processes.

CRMs offer several levels of organization to help strengthen and deepen customer relationships, ranging from basic contact management software, to tracking and managing sales, or tweets on Twitter. The Return on Investment (ROI) usually is an increase in sales, and should also translate to better customer service. The following guide will help you through the process, from pinpointing your customer relationship needs to ultimately selecting a CRM software application.

Choosing CRM Software: Why Invest in a CRM?

CRM is a term used to describe methodologies, software and Internet capabilities designed to help businesses effectively manage customer relationships. Traditionally, CRMs have been seen as an automated way to track and maintain client contact information, but the CRMs of today are faster, smarter and highlight the most current computing technologies available.

In this way, the CRM can be used as a tool to set and measure sales goals, devise, deliver and track email marketing campaigns up through and including interfacing with social media accounts. The importance of CRMs in the marketplace has grown as well, and with sales, marketing and customer service on the playing field, an enterprise can match customer needs with company offerings, thus becoming more efficient and profitable.

Raju Vegesna, Executive Evangelist for Zoho, an online CRM company based in Pleasanton, California, adds that beyond managing customer relations, “A CRM system comes in handy in such situations as it helps you aggregate all customer related information in a single place,” which is crucial for a small business owner trying to keep track of contracts, invoices and emails.

Vegesna added that if small business owners frequently personalize and email customers manually–or if they are unaware of the status of each customer in the pipeline–they will likely need a CRM system.

Chad Collins, CEO of Nubifer Inc., a Cloud, SaaS and CRM strategic advisory company based in San Diego, California, says that, essentially, CRMs offer “business functionality at your fingertips that will save a ton of time for front-line personnel by streamlining your varied sales processes.”

Collins suggests a top-down approach, in which management sets the example by using the tool, as a way to encourage employee buy-in. Collins also suggests having a designated go-to employee (someone that is not the boss) who really knows the ins and outs of the system, called the “CRM Evangelist.” He also suggested offerings rewards and incentives to help employees approach the new system without fear.

The cost is the next major challenge to CRM success. According to Collins, it can cost anywhere from $300 to $2,000 per user per year to implement a CRM. “The CEO needs to understand the cost of CRM goes beyond simple licensing, rather it encompass the license, training, and whatever business process changes they need to make,” says Collins.

According to Chad Collins of Nubifer Inc., there are three main areas to consider when evaluating the pros and cons of a CRM: Platform, how easy it is to implement the CRM and vendor strength and weakness.

Platform

How much flexibility is there in the software/product so the company can create their own process?
How easy is it to configure the software or to get started with on-demand (Internet-based) solutions?
How easy is it to integrate data from other sources into the software or on-demand solution?
How scalable is the software or on-demand solution?
Will it deliver what you need it to deliver in terms of performance?
Will it offer portals or front end screens to help you and your colleagues to collaborate with one another?

Ease of Implementation

Are you looking for on-demand, SaaS, cloud, and Internet-based solutions?
Thin or thick clients: Will you have the software on your machine when you travel or do you need to dial up using a browser?
How much mobility do you want? Can it be done on a laptop or can it be done using mobile phones?

Vendor Strength and Weakness

How long has the company been around?
Where have they gone in terms of their vertical thrust –do they specialize in just one sector?
What computing platform are they using to make sure it’s compatible with your system?
What’s their domain expertise in terms of your particular business area?
What professional services do they offer to help you get up and running?
What partnerships do they have with companies like Microsoft Outlook to work with your CRM?

It will be easier to determine what technology is the best fit for your company once these questions are answered.

Choosing CRM Software: Social CRMs

The latest trend to emerge in CRM is social networking, but industry executives are still trying to figure out whether or not small businesses need their CRM to track their social networking. Collins of Nubifer Inc. says that the advantages of social CRM—for those that are ready to embrace it—are three-fold:

The ability to connect with people using free (or very cheap) means.
The ability to find those that you want to do business with on social networks and learn what’s important to them using monitoring tools.
The ability to create a message that responds directly to what customer challenges are right then and there.

Collins added, “What’s [also] really important today is leveraging the web and creating opportunities to engage people. Traditional CRMs weren’t built for that. Now with online social networks you can create content that works for you 24/7 and builds leads for you. People can find what you’re talking about and ask you for questions. You can create more online relationships than you can face to face.”

An example is given by Collins: “If you have a large group of people on Twitter talking about a specific problem they are trying to solve, you want to be able to grab those Tweets or Facebook posts and route them to the appropriate person in your company so the customer can get the answer they require directly from the source.”

When you are ready to take the leap, there is a CRM available to fit your needs, whether you need to simply organize contact information or require robust assistance in meeting and tracking your sales goal. For more information regarding choosing the right CRM for your business contact a Nubifer Consultant.

2010: 08/09
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Zoho
1 comment

Jabber Now Supported on Zoho Chat

Launched Wednesday August 4th, the ever-popular Jabber protocol will be supported on Zoho Chat. This enables users to log-in with their personal Zoho credentials and chat with colleagues and personnel if the enterprise network contains a Jabber client. This latest Zoho update interoperates with a multitude of Jabber clients including desktop, web and mobile clients.

HIGHLIGHTS

Zoho Chat now supports Jabber. Users can connect to Zoho Chat from any desktop/web/mobile clients
Zoho Chat is a multi-protocol IM App that is integrated across all Zoho Apps
Zoho Chat can also be used for support when embedded on websites
Supports notifications on the desktop clients (for document sharing, missed messages)

In Zoho’s previous release, Jabber on the client side was supported, thus permitting users to connect to other Jabber networks from the Zoho Chat client. With this most recent update, Zoho Chat supports Jabber protocol on the server side allowing you to connect to Zoho from any chat client (encrypted connections only), creating many interesting business use case scenarios.

If your business environment is anything like ours here at Nubifer.com, you need to remain constantly connected to your partners, clients and colleagues. This newest release from Zoho allows users to log-in to their mobile device and run the application in the background. While on Jabber clients, Zoho Chat users can view the status of other connected members, view their profile photos, receive ‘Typing’ notifications, set a users current status and much more. Users will also be notified whenever a connection tries to establish a chat (if the mobile app supports push notifications).

‘Idle Detection’ is also supported with this newest Zoho Chat release. A primary feature in the Zoho Chat Jabber Support release is the ability to retrieve Zoho Groups (Personal groups) from a users account and initiate a group chat from the subscribers preferred desktop Client.

Site Support and Notifications

A highly sought after feature from us here at Nubifer, as well as from other Zoho users, was the ability to support customers chat requests from a desktop client. With this recent release, Zoho Chat can now be embedded on a subscribers website to receive support requests. With this update, users can receive notifications from their website visitors in the subscribers’ preferred desktop client. Once these invitations to chat are received, a user can accept the invitation and initiate a chat session with the website visitors.

Available on users’ desktop clients, Zoho Chat now contains a notification system which alerts a subscriber a document is shared, when someone responds to a topic in Zoho Discussions, or when a chat is missed. Please contact a Nubifer.com representative to learn more about Zoho’s multitude of Cloud hosted officing applications.

Here is what you need to try Zoho Chat on your favorite chat client.

Protocol: XMPP/Jabber
Username: Zoho username
Password: Your Zoho Password
Domain: zoho.com
Jabber ID: username@zoho.com

For more information about Zoho Apps, please visit nubifer.com

2010: 08/04
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Zoho
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Rackspace Announces Plans to Collaborate with NASA and Other Industry Leaders on OpenStack Project

On July 19, Rackspace Hosting, a specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, announced the launch of OpenStack^TM, an open-source cloud platform designed to advance the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. Rackspace is donating the code that fuels its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project, which will additionally incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. NASA and Rackspace plan on collaborating on joint technology development and leveraging the efforts of open-source software developers on a global scale.

NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT Chris C. Kemp said of the announcement, “Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand. To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.”

OpenStack is poised to feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store that is based on Rackspace Cloud Files (currently available at OpenStack.org). A scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology are the next components planned for release, anticipated to be available sometime in late 2010. Organizations using these components would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving large government projects and tens of thousands of customers.

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies. We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres,” Lew Moorman, President and CSO at Rackspace, said at the time of the announcement.

Both organizations have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, while Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among service providers and enterprises. Rackspace hosted an OpenStack Design Summit in Austin, Texas from July 13 to 16, in which over 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members teamed up to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap. Among the more than 25 companies represented at the Design Summit were Autonomic Resources, AMD, Cloud.com, Citrix, Dell, FathomDB, Intel, Limelight, Zuora, Zenoss, Riptano and Spiceworks.

“OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability. As a longtime technology partner with Rackspace, Citrix will collaborate closely with the community to provide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products,” said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix Systems.

Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General manager of Server Platforms, Dell, added, “We believe in offering customers choice in cloud computing that helps them improve efficiency. OpenStack on Dell is a great option to create open source enterprise cloud solutions.”

2010: 08/03
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Updated User Policy Management for Google Apps

Google has released a series of new features granting administrators more controls to manage Google Apps within their organizations, including new data migration tools, SSL enforcement capabilities, multi-domain support and the ability to tailor Google Apps with over 100 applications from the recently-introduced Google Apps Marketplace. On July 20 Google announced one of the most-requested features from administrators: User Policy Management.

With User Policy Management, administrators can segment their users into organizational units and control which applications are enabled or disabled for each group. Take a manufacturing firm, for example. The company might want to give their office workers access to Google Talk, but not their production line employees, and this is possible with User Policy Management.

Additionally, organizations can use this functionality to test applications with pilot users before making them available on a larger scale. Associate Vice President for Computer Services at Temple University Sheri Stahler says, “Using the new User Policy Management feature in Google Apps, we’re able to test out new applications like Google Wave with a subset of users to decide how we should roll our new functionality more broadly.”

Customers can transition to Google Apps from on-premise environments with User Policy Management, as it grants them the ability to toggle services on or off for groups of users. A business can enable just the collaboration tools like Google Docs and Google sites for users who have yet to move off old on-premises messaging solutions, for example.

These settings can be managed by administrators on the ‘Organizations & Users’ tab in the ‘Next Generation’ control panel. On balance, organizations can mirror their existing LDAP organizational schema using Google Apps Directory Sync or programmatically assign users to organizational units using the Google Apps Provisioning API.

Premier and Educational edition users can begin using User Policy Management for Google Apps at no additional charge.

2010: 07/29
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Monitoring
Google Apps
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Dell and Microsoft Partner Up with the Windows Azure Platform Appliance

Dell and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership in which Dell will adopt the Windows Azure platform appliance as part of its Dell Services Cloud to develop and deliver next-generation cloud services at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference on July 12. With the Windows Azure platform, Dell will be able to deliver private and public cloud services for its enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers. Additionally, Dell will develop a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance for enterprise organizations to run in their data-centers.

So what does this mean exactly? By implementing the limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance to host public and private clouds for its customers, Dell will leverage its vertical industry expertise in offering solutions for the speedy delivery of flexible application hosting and IT operations. In addition, Dell Services will produce application migration, advisory migration and integration and implementation services.

Microsoft and Dell will work together to develop a Windows Azure platform appliance for large enterprise, public and hosting customers to deploy to their own data centers. The resulting appliance will leverage infrastructure from Dell combined with the Windows Azure platform.

This partnership shows that both Dell and Microsoft recognize that more organizations can reap the benefits of the flexibility and efficiency of the Windows Azure platform. Both companies understand that cloud computing allows IT to increase responsiveness to business needs and also delivers significant efficiencies in infrastructure costs. The result will be an appliance to power a Dell Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Cloud.

The announcement with Dell occurred on the same day that Microsoft announced the limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance, a turnkey cloud platform for large service providers and enterprises to run in their own data centers. Initial partners (like Dell) and customers using the appliance in their data centers will have the scale-out application platform and data center efficiency of Windows Azure and SQL Azure that Microsoft currently provides.

Since the launch of the Windows Azure platform, Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) has been working with Microsoft to built out and power the platform. Dell will use the insight gained as a primary infrastructure partner for the Windows Azure platform to make certain that the Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance is optimized for power and space to save ongoing operating costs and performance of large-scale cloud services.

A top provider of cloud computing infrastructure, Dell’s client roster boasts 20 of the 25 most heavily-trafficked Internet sites and four of the top global search engines. The company has been custom-designing infrastructure solutions for the top global cloud service providers and hyperscale data center operations for the past three years and has developed an expertise about the specific needs of organizations in hosting, HPC, Web 2.0, gaming, energy, social networking, energy, SaaS, plus public and private cloud builders in that time.

Speaking about the partnership with Microsoft, president of Dell Services Peter Altabef said, “Organizations are looking for innovative ways to use IT to increase their responsiveness to business needs and drive greater efficiency. With the Microsoft partnership and the Windows Azure platform appliance, Dell is expanding its cloud services capabilities to help customers reduce their total costs and increase their ability to succeed. The addition of the Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance marks an important expansion of Dell’s leadership as a top provider of cloud computing infrastructure.”

Dell Services delivers vertically-focused cloud solutions with the combined experience of Dell and Perot Systems. Currently, Dell Services delivers managed and Software-as-a-Service support to over 10,000 customers across the globe. Additionally, Dell boasts a comprehensive suite of services designed to help customers leverage public and private cloud models. With the new Dell PaaS powered by the Windows Azure platform appliance, Dell will be able to offer customers an expanded suite of services including transformational services to help organizations move applications into the cloud and cloud-based hosting.

Summarizing the goal of the partnership with Dell, Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft Server and Tools said at the Microsoft Windows Partner Conference on July 12, “Microsoft and Dell have been building, implementing and operating massive cloud operations for years. Now we are extending our longstanding partnership to help usher in the new era of cloud computing, by giving customers and partners the ability to deploy Windows Azure platform in their datacenters.”

2010: 07/26
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Windows Azure
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Do You Still Need to Worry About Cloud Security?

The answer to the question posed above is … maybe, but definitely not as much as before! A few recent studies in a handful of technologically conservative industries suggest that people and businesses are becoming increasingly comfortable with storing and managing their data in the cloud.

Markets like health care, finance and government, which are typically technology risk-averse, are quickly adopting (and even advocating) disruptive cloud technologies.

Those that have yet to adopt Software-as-a-Service continue to raise two fears when considering making the move into the cloud: Who is in control of my data? Is it safe to store my data somewhere other than the office? These concerns are valid and must be understood by those making the move to the cloud, but the idea that my data must be stored under my roof is shifting.

One expert from Accenture was recently quoted in an article on InformationWeek.com as saying, “Healthcare firms are beginning to realize that cloud providers actually may offer more robust security than is available in-house.” Within that same story a recent study was cited that stated that about one-third of the health care industry currently uses cloud apps and that over 70% of respondents plan to shift more and more to SaaS and cloud apps. While these estimates are interesting in any field, the intrigue is heightened when it comes to health care, where HIPPA compliance rules are notoriously strict.

The finance world is seeing similar shifts. For example, a recent study conducted by SIFMA explained how cloud computing is enabling the financial industry to move forward with technology in spite of budget restraints. “The [finance] industry is showing a larger appetite for disruptive technologies such as cloud computing to force business model change,” said the study.

Even the federal government is showing traces of similar trends, with federal CIO Vivek Kundra singing the praises of cloud computing even more than Marc Benioff! “Far too long we’ve been thinking very much vertically and making sure things are separated. Now we have an opportunity to lead with solutions that by nature encourage collaboration both horizontally and vertically.”

Cloud security remains an important issue that vendors take seriously, but there is definitely a shifting mood towards acceptance of cloud security. In a recently blog post, John Soat summarized the current mood saying, “It’s not that security in the cloud isn’t still a concern for both [health care and finance] industries, but it’s a known, and perhaps better understood factor … So while security is still a legitimate concern, it doesn’t seem to be the show stopper it used to be …”

2010: 07/23
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Security
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Evaluating Zoho CRM

Although SalesForce.com may be the name most commonly associated with SaaS CRM, Zoho CRM is picking up speed as a cheap option for small business or large companies with only a few people using the service. While much attention has been paid to Google Apps, Zoho has been quietly creating a portfolio of on-line applications that is worth recognition. Now many are wondering if Zoho CRM will have as large of an impact on SalesForce that SalesForce did on SAP.

About Zoho

Part of Advent, Zoho has been producing SaaS Office-like applications since 2006. One of Zoho’s chief architects, Raju Vegesna, joined Advent upon graduating in 2000 and moving from India to the United States. Among Vegesna’s chief responsibilities is getting Zoho on the map.

Zoho initially offered spreadsheet and writing applications although the company, which targets smaller businesses with 10 to 100 employees, now has a complete range of productivity applications such as email, a database, project management, invoicing, HR, document management, planning and last but not least, CRM.

Zoho CRM

Aimed at businesses seeking to manage customer relations to transform leads into profitable relationships, Zoho CRM begins with lead generation. From there are lead conversion, accounts set up, contacts, potential mapping and campaign tabs. One of Zoho CRM’s best features is its layout. Full reporting facilities with formatting, graphical layouts and dashboards, forecasting and other management tools are neatly displayed and optimized.

Zoho CRM is fully email enabled and updates can be sent to any user set up along with full contact administration. Time lines ensure that leads are never forgotten or campaigns slipped. Like Zimbra and ProjectPlace, Zoho CRM offers brand alignment, which means users can change layout colors and add their own logo branding. Another key feature is Zoho’s comprehensive help section, which is constantly updated with comments and posts from other users online. Contact details from a standard comma separated value (.CSV) file from a user’s email system or spreadsheet application (such as Excel, Star or Open Office) can be imported by Zoho CRM. Users can also export CRM data in the same format as well.

The cost of Zoho CRM is surprisingly low. Zoho CRM offers 100,000 records storage in Free Edition and Unlimited data storage in Professional and Enterprise Editions. In FE, users can “import” up to 1,500 records per batch in contrast to 20,000 records in the Enterprise Edition.

2010: 07/19
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Zoho
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Protected: Microsoft Azure® Platform-as-a-Service Breaks Away from the Pack

2010: 07/18
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Four Key Categories for Cloud Computing

When it comes to cloud computing, concerns about control and security have dominated recent discussions. While it was once assumed that all computing resources could be had from outside, now it is going towards a vision of a data center magically transformed for easy connections to internal and external IT resources.

According to IDC’s Cloud Services Overview report, sales of cloud-related technology is growing at 26 percent per year. That is six times the rate of IT spending as a whole; although they comprised only about 5 percent of total IT revenue this year. While the report points out that defining what constitutes cloud-related spending is complicated, it estimates global spending of $17.5 billion on cloud technologies in 2009 will grow to $44.2 billion by 2013. IDC predicts that hybrid or internal clouds will be the norm, although even in 2013 only an estimated 10 percent of that spending will go specifically to public clouds.

According to Chris Wolf, analyst at The Burton Group, hybrid cloud infrastructure isn’t that different from existing data-center best practices. The difference is that all of the pieces are meant to fit together using Internet-age interoperability standards as opposed to homegrown kludge.

The following are four items to consider when making a “shopping list” when preparing your IT budget for use of private or public cloud services:

1. Application Integration

Software integration isn’t the first thing most companies consider when building a cloud, although Bernard Golden, CEO at cloud consulting firm HyperStratus, and CIO.com blogger, says it is the most important one.

Tom Fisher, vice president of cloud computing at SuccessFactors.com, a business-application SaaS provider in San Mateo, California, says that integration is a whole lot more than simply batch-processing chunks of data being traded between applications once or twice per day like it was done in mainframes.

Fisher continues to explain that it is critical for companies to be able to provision and manage user identities from a single location across a range of applications, especially when it comes to companies that are new in the software-providing business and do not view their IT as a primary product.

“What you’re looking for is to take your schema and map it to PeopleSoft or another application so you can get more functional integration. You’re passing messages back and forth to each other with proper error-handling agreement so you can be more responsive. It’s still not real time integration, but in most cases you don’t really need that,” says Fisher.

2. Security

The ability to federate—securely connect without completely merging—two networks, is a critical factor in building a useful cloud, according to Golden.

According to Nick Popp, VP of product development at Verisign (VRSN), that requires layers of security, including multifactor authentication, identity brokers, access management and sometimes an external service provider who can provide that high a level of administrative control. Verisign is considering adding a cloud-based security service.

Wolf states that it requires technology that doesn’t yet exist. According to Wolf, an Information Authority that can act as a central repository for security data and control of applications, data and platforms within the cloud. It is possible to assemble that function out of some of the aspects Popp mentions today, yet Wolf maintains that there is no one technology able to span all platforms necessary to provide real control of even an internally hosted cloud environment.

3. Virtual I/O

One IT manager at a large digital mapping firm states that if you have to squeeze data for a dozen VMs through a few NICs, the scaling of your VM cluster to cloud proportions will be inhibited.

“When you’re in the dev/test stage, having eight or 10 [Gigabit Ethernet] cables per box is an incredible labeling issue; beyond that, forget it. Moving to virtual I/O is a concept shift—you can’t touch most of the connections anymore—but you’re moving stuff across a high-bandwidth backplane and you can reconfigure the SAN connections or the LANs without having to change cables,” says the IT manager.

Virtual I/O servers (like the Xsigo I/O Director servers used by the IT manager’s company) can run 20Gbit/sec through a single cord and as many as 64 cords to a single server—connecting to a backplane with a total of 1,560Gbit/sec of bandwidth. The IT Manager states that concentrating such a large amount of bandwidth in one device saves space, power and cabling and keeps network performance high and saves money on network gear in the long run.

Speaking about the Xsigo servers, which start at approximately $28,000 through resellers like Dell (DELL), the manager says, “It becomes cost effective pretty quickly. You end up getting three, four times the bandwidth at a quarter the price.”

4. Storage

Storage remains the weak point of the virtualization and cloud-computing worlds, and the place where the most money is spent.

“Storage is going to continue to be one of the big costs of virtualization. Even if you turn 90 percent of your servers into images, you still have to store them somewhere,” says Golden in summary. Visit Nubifer.com for more information.

2010: 07/16
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Zuora Releases Z-Commerce

The first external service (SaaS) that actually understands the complex billing models of the cloud providers (which account for monthly subscription fees as well as automated metering, pricing and billing for products, bundles and highly individualized/specific configurations) arrived in mid-June in the form of Zuora’s Z-Commerce. An upgrade to Zuora’s billing and payment service that is built for cloud providers, Z-Commerce is a major development. With Z-Commerce, storage-as-a-service is able to charge for terabytes of storage used, or IP address usage, or data transfer charges. Cloud providers can also structure a per CPU instance charge or per application use charge and it can take complexities like peak usage into account. Zuora has provided 20 pre-configured templates for the billing and payment models that cloud providers use.

What makes this development so interesting that that Zuora is using what they are calling the “subscription economy” for the underlying rationale for their success: 125 customers, 75 employees and profitability.

Tien Tzou, the CEO of Zuora (also the former Chief Strategy Officer of Salesforce.com, described subscription economy below:

“The business model of the 21st century is a fundamentally different business model.

The 21st century world needs a whole new set of operational systems — ones that match the customer centric business model that is now necessary to succeed.

The business model of the 20th century was built around manufacturing. You built products at the lowest possible cost, and you find buyers for that product.

They key metrics were all around inventory, cost of goods sold, product life cycles, etc. But over the last 30 years, we’ve been moving away from a manufacturing economy to a services economy. Away from an economy based on tangible goods, to an economy based on intangible ideas and experiences.

What is important now is the customer — of understanding customer needs, and building services & experiences that fulfill those customer needs. Hence the rise of CRM.

But our financial and operational systems have not yet evolved! What we need today are operational systems built around the customer, and around the services you offer to your customers.

You need systems that allow you to design different services, offered under different price plans that customers can choose from based on their specific needs. So the phone companies have 450 minute plans, prepaid plans, unlimited plans, family plans, and more. Salesforce has Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition, and Group Edition, and PRM Edition, and more. Amazon has Amazon Prime. ZipCar has their Occasional Driving Plan and their Extra Value Plans.

You need systems that track customer lifecycles — things such as monthly customer value, customer lifetime value, customer churn, customer share of wallet, conversion rates, up sell rates, adoption levels.

You need systems that measure how much of your service your customers are consuming. By the minute? By the gigabyte? By the mile? By the user? By the view? And you need to establish an ongoing, recurring billing relationship with your customers, that maps to your ongoing service relationship, that allows you to monetize your customer interactions based on the relationship that the customer opted into.

The 21st century world needs a whole new set of operational systems — ones that match the customer centric business model that is now necessary to succeed.”

To summarize, what he is saying is that the model for future business isn’t the purchase of goods and services, but rather a price provided to a customer for an ongoing relationship to the company. Under this model, the customer is able to structure the relationship in a way which provides them with what they need to accomplish the job (s) that the company can help them with (which can be a variety of services, products, tools and structured experiences).

This is also interesting because your business is measuring the customer’s commitments to you and the other way around in operation terms, even as the business model is shifting to more interactions than ever before. If you are looking at traditional CRM metrics like CLV, churn, share of wallet, adoption rates and more, as they apply to a business model that has continued to evolve away from pure transactions, Tien is saying that the payment/billing, to him, is the financial infrastructure for this new customer-centered economic model (i.e. the subscription model).

Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research Group, LLC commented on this on his blog recently, pointing out that a subscription model does not guarantee a business will be successful. What does have significant bearing on the success of failure of a business is how well the business manages it or has it managed (i.e. by Zuora).

This can be applied to the subscription economy. Zuora is highlighting what they have predicted: that companies are increasingly moving their business models to subscription based pricing. This is the same model that supports free software and hardware, which charges customers by the month. How it is managed is another can of worms, but for now Zuora has done a service by recognizing that the customer-driven companies are realizing that the customers are willing to pay for the aggregate capabilities of the company in an ongoing way—as long as the company continues to support the customer’s needs in solving problems that arise. To learn more about cloud computing and the subscription model, contact a Nubifer.com representative.

2010: 07/14
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Microsoft Releases Security Guidelines for Windows Azure

Industry analysts have praised Microsoft for doing a respectable job at ensuring the security of its Business Productivity Online Services, Windows and SQL Azure. With that said, deploying applications to the cloud requires additional considerations to ensure that data remains in the correct hands.

Microsoft released a version of its Security Development Lifecycle in early June as a result of these concerns. Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle, a statement of best practices to those building Windows and .NET applications, focuses on how to build security into Windows Azure applications and has been updated over the years to ensure the security of those apps.

Principle security program manager of Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle team Michael Howard warns that those practices were not, however, designed for the cloud. Speaking in a pre-recorded video statement embedded in a blog entry, Howard says, “Many corporations want to move their applications to the cloud but that changes the threats, the threat scenarios change substantially.”

Titled “Security Best Practices for Developing Windows Azure Applications,” the 26-page white paper is divided into three sections: the first describes the security technologies that are part of Windows Azure (including the Windows Identity Foundation, Windows Azure App Fabric Access Control Service and Active Directory Federation Services 2.0—a core component for providing common logins to Windows Server and Azure); the second explains how developers can apply the various SDL practices to build more secure Windows Azure applications, outlining various threats like namespace configuration issues and recommending data security practices like how to generate shared-access signatures and use of HTTPS in the request URL; and the third is a matrix that identifies various threats and how to address them.

Says Howard, “Some of those threat mitigations can be technologies you use from Windows Azure and some of them are threat mitigations that you must be aware of and build into your application.”

Security is a major concern and Microsoft has address many key issues concerning security in the cloud. President of Lieberman Software Corp., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in enterprise security Phil Lieberman says, “By Microsoft providing extensive training and guidance on how to properly and securely use its cloud platform, it can overcome customer resistance at all levels and achieve revenue growth as well as dominance in this new area. This strategy can ultimately provide significant growth for Microsoft.”

Agreeing with Lieberman, Scott Matsumoto, a principal consultant with the Washington, D.C.-based consultancy firm Cigital Inc., which specializes in security, says, “I especially like the fact that they discuss what the platform does and what’s still the responsibility of the application developer. I think that it could be [wrongly] dismissed as a rehash of other information or incomplete—that would be unfair.” To find more research on Cloud Security, please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 07/12
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Windows Azure
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Five Best Practices for Private Cloud Computing

Industry experts state that private cloud computing enables enterprise IT executives to maximize their organization’s resources and align IT services with business needs while they wait for public cloud computing standards to become defined.

Even for enterprises that like to manage infrastructure and application in-house, building a private cloud is good practice. Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, a research firm in Framingham, Massachusetts, says, “With virtualization and the private cloud, CIOs are much closer to that goal of efficient and dynamic IT service delivery and capability.”

Automation minimizes the IT staff’s involvement when the cloud is up and running and is thus a key goal. “The end user is the constituent who is going to leverage the workload for productive work,” says vice president for services and support at Surgient Inc. Brian Wilson. An Infrastructure as a Service provider in Austin, Texas, Surgient Inc. has deployed 150 private clouds for enterprises in the Fortune 500.

According to Wilson, the most important aspect of a private cloud is self-service. With that said, “a self-service portal does not guarantee self-service. Self-service needs to be layered on top of automation services.” CIOs need to consider the service’s design, definition, library and life-cycle. Additionally, the service should integrate applications which report usage for charge-back (preferable with an administrative dashboard and event broadcasting).

A private cloud doesn’t mean a less complex cloud, and as more enterprises launched their private clouds, best practices are beginning to emerge. Here is a list of five best practices for private cloud computing, according to Wilson:

1. Access

Evaluate current and planned hardware, hypervisors, network architecture and storage.
Understand corporate security standards and existing vendor relationships ad know where you vendors are going (so you don’t buy into dead-end technology).
Begin with a defined project and plan for scale, heterogeneity and change. Plan for and document your deployment plans using client-specific use cases and success criteria.

2. Deploy

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer compares the usage curve for cloud computing to a hockey stick, so be prepared for the uptick by establishing a deployment schedule.
Ensure that essential content is available in a centralized library.
Introduce critical members of the team, finalize use cases and confirm the schedule from the beginning.
Dynamically manage IT policies by automating self-service provisioning of applications while remaining flexible and understanding of change.
Plan for on-site training.

3. Analyze

Review usage trends, resource consumption trends, server use and administration overhead–a step that is skipped often, according to Wilson.
Understand the metrics for RIO and TCO and gain executive buy-in with formal ROI evaluations monthly and quarterly.
Continue to evaluate your processes, as the cloud is a fundamental shift from traditional processes. Ask yourself if there is a better way to do this throughout the process.

4. Create Reusable Code

Plan your service catalog wisely by creating reusable building blocks of virtual machines and services.
Take the time to understand your users needs and plan for their experience, as your content is critical.
Take the centralized view that is possible with a private cloud; avoid discrete stacks and multiple operating systems.

5. Don’t Forget to Charge Back

According to Wilson, very few organizations actually charge back, even though one of the pillars of the cloud is its ability to meter services on an as-needed-basis.
Saint Luke’s Health System, for example, operates 11 hospitals and clinics in the Kansas City, Missouri metropolitan area. CIO Debe Gash opted for public cloud computing because of the speed with which it enabled her organization to comply with new HIPPA regulations and says charge-back helps keep IT costs down and prove its mettle.
“The bill of IT for each entity is valuable. They can see what they’re using. The visibility into what something actually costs is very helpful to them,” says Gash. The charge-back also shows which systems are driving IT costs, thus Gash can “validate that we’re spending money on what’s strategic to the organization.”

To receive more information regarding best practices for private cloud computing contact a Nubifer.com representative today.

2010: 07/09
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
1 comment

Microsoft Makes Strides for a More Secure and Trustworthy Cloud

Cloud computing currently holds court in the IT industry with vendors, service providers, press, analysts and customers all evaluating and discussing the opportunities presented by the cloud.

Security is a very important piece to the puzzle, and nearly every day a new press article or analyst report indicated that cloud security and privacy are a top concern for customers as the benefits of cloud computing continue to unfold. For example, a recent Microsoft survey revealed that although 86% of senior business leaders are thrilled about cloud computing, over 75% remain concerned about the security, access and privacy of data in the cloud.

Customers are correct in asking how cloud vendors are working to ensure the security of cloud applications, the privacy of individuals and protection of data. In March, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told an audience at the University of Washington that, “This is a dimension of the cloud, and it’s a dimension of the cloud that needs all of our best work.”

Microsoft is seeking to address security-related concerns and help customers understand which questions they need to ask as part of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing efforts. The company is trying to become more transparent than competitors concerning how they help enable an increasingly secure cloud.

Server and Tools Business president Bob Muglia approached the issue in his recent keynote at Microsoft’s TechEd North America conference saying, “The data that you have is in your organization is yours. We’re not confused about that, that it’s incumbent on us to help you protect that information for you. Microsoft’s strategy is to deliver software, services and tools that enable customers to realize the benefits of a cloud-based model with the reliability and security of on-premise software.”

The Microsoft Global Foundations Services (GFS) site is a resource for users to learn about Microsoft’s cloud security efforts, with the white papers “Securing Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure” and “Microsoft’s Compliance Framework for Online Services” being very informative.

Driving a comprehensive, centralized Information Security Program for all Microsoft cloud data-centers and the 200+ consumer and commercial services they deliver –all built using the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle–GFS covers everything from physical security to compliance, such as Risk Management Process, Response, and work with law enforcement; Defense-in-Depth Security controls across physical, network, identity and access, host, application and data; A Comprehensive Compliance Framework to address standards and regulations such as PCI, SOX, HIPPA, and the Media Ratings Council; and third party auditing, validation and certification (ISO 27001, SAS 70).

Muglia also pointed out Microsoft’s focus on identity, saying, “As you move to cloud services you will have a number of vendors, and you will need a common identity system.” In general, identity is the cornerstone of security, especially cloud security. Microsoft currently provides technologies with Windows Server and cloud offerings which customers can use to extend existing investments in identity infrastructure (like Active Directory) for easier and more secure access to cloud services.

Microsoft is not alone in working on cloud security, as noted by Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist Peter Cullen. “These truly are issues that no one company, industry or sector can tackle in isolation. So it is important to start these dialogs in earnest and include a diverse range of stakeholders from every corner of the globe,” Cullen said in his keynote at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) conference. Microsoft is working with customers, governments, law enforcement, partners and industry organizers (like the Cloud Security Alliance) to ensure more secure and trustworthy cloud computing through strategies and technologies. To receive additional information on Cloud security contact a Nubifer.com representative today.

2010: 07/07
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Windows Azure
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Don’t Underestimate a Small Start in Cloud Computing

Although many predict that cloud computing will forever alter the economics and strategic direction of corporate IT, it is likely that the impact of the cloud will continue to be largely from small projects. Some users and analysts say that these small projects, which do not project complex, enterprise-class, computing-on-demand services, are what to look out for.

David Tapper, outsourcing and offshoring analyst for IDC says, “What we’re seeing is a lot of companies using Google (GOOG) Apps, Salesforce and other SaaS apps, and sometimes platform-as-a-service providers, to support specific applications. A lot of those services are aimed at consumers, but they’re just as relevant in business environments, and they’re starting to make it obvious that a lot of IT functions are generic enough that you don’t need to build them yourself.” New enterprise offerings from Microsoft, such as Microsoft BPOS, have also shown up on the scene with powerful SaaS features to offer businesses.

According to Tapper, the largest representation of mini-cloud computing is small- and mid-sized businesses using commercial versions of Google Mail, Google Apps and similar ad hoc or low-cost cloud-based applications. With that said, larger companies are doing the exact same thing. “Large companies will have users whose data are confidential or who need certain functions, but for most of them, Google Apps is secure enough. We do hear about some very large cloud contracts, so there is serious work going on. They’re not the rule though,” says Tapper.

First Steps into the Cloud

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 71 percent of the “technology stakeholders and critics” believe that most people will do their work from a range of computing devices using Internet-basd applications as their primary tools by 2020.

Respondents were picked from technology and analyst companies for their technical savvy and as a whole believe cloud computing will dominate information transactions by the end of the decade. The June report states that cloud computing will be adopted because of its ability to provide new functions quickly, cheaply and from anywhere the user wishes to work.

Chris Wolf, analyst at Gartner, Inc.’s Burton Group, thinks that while this isn’t unreasonable, it may be a little too optimistic. Wolf says that even fairly large companies sometimes use commercial versions of Google Mail or instant messaging, but it is a different story when it comes to applications requiring more fine tuning, porting, communications middleware or other heavy work to run on public clouds, or data that has to be protected and documented.

Says Wolf, “We see a lot of things going to clouds that aren’t particularly sensitive–training workloads, dev and test environments, SaaS apps; we’re starting to hear complaints about things that fall outside of IT completely, like rogue projects on cloud services. Until there are some standards for security and compliance, most enterprises will continue to move pretty slowly putting critical workloads in those environments. Right now all the security providers are rolling their own and it’s up to the security auditors to say if you’re in compliance with whatever rules govern that data.”

Small, focused projects using cloud technologies are becoming more common, in addition to the use of commercial cloud-based services, says Tapper.

For example, Beth Israel Deaconnes Hospital in Boston elevated a set of VMware (VMW) physical and virtual servers into a cloud-like environment to create an interface to its patient-records and accounting systems, enabling hundreds of IT-starved physician offices to link up with the use of just one browser.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art started using workgroup-on-demand computing systems from CloudSoft Corp. last year. This allowed the museum to create online workspaces for short-term projects that would otherwise have required real or virtual servers and storage on-site.

Cloud computing will make it clear to both IT and business management that some IT functions are just generic when they’re homegrown as when rented, in about a decade or so. Says Tapper, “Productivity apps are the same for the people at the top as the people at the bottom. Why buy it and make IT spend 80 percent of its time maintaining essentially generic technology?” Contact Nubifer.com to learn more…

2010: 07/06
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Nubifer Cloud:Link Mobile and Why Windows Phone 7 is Worth the Wait

Sure, Android devices become more cutting-edge with each near-monthly release and Apple recently unveiled its new iPhone, but some industry experts suggest that Windows Phone 7 is worth the wait. Additionally, businesses may benefit from waiting until Windows Phone 7 arrives to properly compare the benefits and drawbacks of all three platforms before making a decision.

Everyone is buzzing about the next-generation iPhone and smartphones like the HTC Incredible and HTC EVO 4G, but iPhone and Android aren’t even the top smart phone platforms. With more market share than second place Apple and third place Microsoft combined, RIM remains the number one smartphone platform. Despite significant gains since its launch, Android is in fourth place, with only 60 percent as much market share as Microsoft.

So what gives? In two words: the business market. While iPhone was revolutionary for merging the line between consumer gadget and business tool, RIM has established itself as synonymous with mobile business communications. Apple and Google don’t provide infrastructure integration or management tools comparable to those available with the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES).

The continued divide between consumer and business is highlighted by the fact that Microsoft is still in third place with 15 percent market share. Apple and Google continue to leapfrog one another while RIM and Microsoft are waiting to make their move.

The long delay in new smartphone technology from Microsoft is the result of leadership shakeups and the fact that Microsoft completely reinvented its mobile strategy, starting from scratch. Windows Phone 7 isn’t merely an incremental evolution of Windows Mobile 6.5. Rather, Microsoft went back to the drawing board to create an entirely new OS platform that recognizes the difference between a desktop PC and a smartphone as opposed to assuming that the smartphone is a scaled-down Windows PC.

Slated to arrive later this year, Windows 7 smartphones promise an attractive combination of the intuitive touch interface and experience found in the iPhone and Android, as well as the integration and native apps to tie in with the Microsoft server infrastructure that comprises the backbone of most customers network and communications architecture.

With that said, the Windows Phone 7 platform won’t be without its own set of issues. Like Apple’s iPhone, Windows Phone 7 is expected to lack true multitasking and the copy and paste functionality from the get-go. Additionally, Microsoft is also locking down the environment with hardware and software restrictions that limit how smartphone manufacturers can customize the devices, and doing away with all backward compatibility with existing Windows Mobile hardware and apps.

As a mobile computing platform, Cloud Computing today touches many devices and end points. From Application Servers to Desktops and of course the burgeoning ecosystem of smart phone devices. When studying the landscapes and plethora of cell phone operating systems, and technology capabilities of the smart phones, you start to see a whole new and exciting layer of technology for consumers and business people alike.

Given the rich capabilities of Windows Phone 7 offering Silverlight, and/or XNA technology, we at Nubifer have become compelled to engineer the upgrades to our cloud services to inter-operate with the powerful new upcoming technologies offered by Windows Phone 7. At Nubifer, we plan to deploy and inter-operate with many popular smart phones and hand-set devices by way of linking these devices to our Nubifer Cloud:Link technology and offering extended functionality delivered by Nubifer Cloud:Connector and Cloud:Portal which enable enterprise companies to gain a deeper view into the analytics and human computer interaction of end users and subscribers of various owned and leased software systems hosted entirely in the cloud or by way of the hybrid model.

It makes sense for companies that don’t need to replace their smartphones at once to wait for Windows Phone 7 to arrive, at which point all three platforms and be compared and contrasted. May the best smartphone win!

2010: 07/01
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud:Link
Microsoft
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Cloud Computing in 2010

A recent research study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project released on June 11 found that most people expect to “access software applications online and share and access information through the use of remote server networks, rather than depending primarily on tools and information housed on their individual, personal computers” by 2010. This means that the term “cloud computing” will likely be referred to as simply “computing” ten years down the line.

The report points out that we are currently on that path when it comes to social networking, thanks to sites like Twitter and Facebook. We also communicate in the cloud using services like Yahoo Mail and Gmail, shop in the cloud on sites like Amazon and eBay, listen to music in the cloud on Pandora, share pictures in the cloud on Flickr and watch videos on cloud sites like Hulu and YouTube.

The more advanced among us are even using services like Google Docs, Scribd or Docs.com to create, share or store documents in the cloud. With that said, it will be some time before desktop computing falls away completely.

The report says: “Some respondents observed that putting all or most of faith in remotely accessible tools and data puts a lot of trust in the humans and devices controlling the clouds and exercising gate keeping functions over access to that data. They expressed concerns that cloud dominance by a small number of large firms may constrict the Internet’s openness and its capability to inspire innovation—that people are giving up some degree of choice and control in exchange for streamlines simplicity. A number of people said cloud computing presents difficult security problems and further exposes private information to governments, corporations, thieves, opportunists, and human and machine error.”

For more information on the current state of Cloud Computing, contact Nubifer today.

2010: 06/30
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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The Impact of Leveraging a Cloud Delivery Model

In a recent discussion about the positive shift in the Cloud Computing discourse towards actionable steps as opposed to philosophical rants in definitions, .NET Developer’s Journal issued a list of five things not to do. The first mistake among the list of five (which included #2. assuming server virtualization is enough; #3 not understanding service dependencies; #4 leveraging traditional monitoring; #5 not understanding internal/external costs), was not understanding the business value. Failing to understand the business impact of leveraging a Cloud delivery model for a given application or service is a crucial mistake, but it can be avoided.

When evaluating a Cloud delivery option, it is important to first define the service. Consider: is it new to you or are you considering porting an existing service? On one hand, if new, there is a lower financial bar to justify a cloud model, but on the downside is a lack of historical perspective on consumption trends to aid an evaluating financial considerations or performance.

Assuming you choose a new service, the next step is to address why you are looking at Cloud, which may require some to be honest about their reasons. Possible reasons for looking at cloud include: your business requires a highly scalable solution; your data center is out of capacity; you anticipate this to be a short-lived service; you need to collaborate with a business partner on neutral territory; your business has capital constraints.

All of the previously listed reasons are good reasons to consider a Cloud option, yet if you are considering this option because it takes weeks, months even, to get a new server in production; your Operation team is lacking credibility when it comes to maintaining a highly available service; or your internal cost allocation models are appalling—you may need to reconsider. In these cases, there may be some in-house improvements that need to be made before exploring a Cloud option.

An important lesson to consider is that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you necessarily should, and this is easily applicable in this situation. Many firms have had disastrous results in the past when they exposed legacy internal applications to the Internet. The following questions must be answered when thinking about moving applications/services to the Cloud:

· Does the application consume or generate data with jurisdictional requirements?

· Will your company face fines or a public relations scandal is there is a security breach/data loss?

· What part of your business value chain is exposed if the service runs poorly? (And are there critical systems that rely on it?)

· What if the application/service doesn’t run at all? (Will you be left stranded or are there alternatives that will allow the business to remain functioning?)

Embracing Cloud services—public or private—comes with tremendous benefits, yet a constant dialogue about the business value of the service in question is required to reap the rewards. To discuss the benefits of adopting a hybrid On-Prem/Cloud solution contact Nubifer today.

2010: 06/28
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Asigra Introduces Cloud Backup Plan

Cloud backup and recovery software provider Asigra announced the launch of Cloud Backup v10 on June 8. Available through the Asigra partner network, the latest edition extends the scope and performance of the Asigra platform, including protection for laptops, desktops, servers, data centers and cloud computing environments with tiered recovery options to meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). Organizations can select an Asigra service provider for offsite backup, choose to deploy the software directly onsite, or both. Pricing begins at $50 per month through cloud backup service providers.

V10 expanded the tiers of backup and recovery (Local-Only Backup and Backup Lifecycle Manager (BLM) enables cloud storage) and also allows the backup of laptops in the field and other environments, enabling businesses to back up and recover their data to and from physical, virtual or both types of servers. Among the features are DS-Mobile support to backup laptops in the field, FIPS 140-2 NIST certified security and encryption of data in-flight and at-rest and new backup sets for comprehensive protection of enterprise applications, including MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, MS SQL, Windows Hyper-V Oracle SBT, Sybase and Local-Only backup.

Senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group Lauren Whitehouse said, “The local backup option is a powerful benefit for managed service providers (MSPs) as they can now offer more pricing granularity for customers on three levels—local, new and aging data. With more pricing flexibility, more reliable and affordable backup service package to attract more business customers and free them from the pain of tape backup.”

At least two-thirds of companies in North America and Europe have already implemented server virtualization, according to Forrester Research. Asigra added enhancements to the virtualization support in v10 as a response to the major server virtualization vendors embracing the cloud as the strategic deliverable of a virtualized infrastructure. The company has offered support for virtual machine backups at the host level; Cloud Backup v10 is able to be deployed as a virtual appliance with virtual infrastructures. The company said that the current version now supports Hyper-V, VMware and XenServer.

“The availability of Asigra Cloud Backup v10 has reset the playing field for Asigra with end-to-end date protection from the laptop to the data center to the public cloud. With advanced features that differentiate Asigra both technologically and economically from comparable solutions, the platform can adapt to the changing nature of today’s IT environments, providing unmatched backup efficiency and security as well as the ability to respond to dynamic business challenges,” said executive vice president for Asigra Eran Farakjun. To discover how a Cloud back-up system can benefit your enterprise, contact Nubifer Inc.

2010: 06/25
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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The Future of Enterprise Software in the Cloud

Although there is currently a lot of discussion regarding the impact that cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service will have on enterprise software, it comes mainly from a financial standpoint. It is now time to begin understanding how enterprise software as we know it will evolve across a federated set of private and public cloud services.

The strategic direction being taken by Epicor is a prime example of the direction that enterprise software is taking. A provider of ERP software for the mid-market, Epicor is taking a sophisticated approach by allowing customers to host some components on the Epicor suite on premise rather than focusing on hosting software in the cloud. Other components are delivered as a service.

Epicor is a Microsoft software partner that subscribes to the Software Plus Services mantra and as such is moving to offer some elements of its software, like the Web server and SQL server components, as an optional service. Customers would be able to invoke this on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.

Basically, Epicor is going to let customers deploy software components where they make the most sense, based on the needs of customers on an individual basis. This is in contrast to proclaiming that one model of software delivery is better than another model.

Eventually, every customer is going to require a mixed environment, even those that prefer on-premise software, because they will discover that hosting some applications locally and in the cloud simultaneously will allow them to run a global operation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week more easily.

Much of the argument over how software is delivered in the enterprise will melt away as customers begin to view the cloud as merely an extension of their internal IT operations. To learn more on how the future of Software in the Cloud can aide your enterprise, schedule a discussion time with a Nubifer Consultant today.

2010: 06/23
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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What Cloud APIs Reveal about the Budding Cloud Market

Although Cloud Computing remains hard to define, one of its essential characteristics is pragmatic access to virtually unlimited network, compute and storage resources. The foundation of a cloud is a solid Application Programming Interface (API), despite the fact that many users access cloud computing through consoles and third-party applications.

CloudSwitch works with several cloud providers and thus is able to interact with a variety of cloud APIs (both active and about-to-be-released versions). CloudSwitch has come up with some impressions after working with both the APIs and those implementing them.

First, clouds remain different in spite of constant discussion about standards. Cloud APIs have to cover more than start/stop/delete a server, and once the API crosses into provisioning the infrastructure (network ranges, storage capacity, geography, accounts, etc.), it all starts to get interesting.

Second, a very strong infrastructure is required for a cloud to function as it should. The infrastructure must be good enough to sell to others when it comes to public clouds. Key elements of the cloud API can inform you about the infrastructure, what tradeoffs the cloud provider has made and the impact of end users, if you are attuned to what to look out for.

Third, APIs are evolving fast, like cloud capabilities. New API calls and expansion of existing functions as cloud providers add new capabilities and features are now a reality. On balance, we are discussing on-the-horizon services and with cloud providers and what form their API is poised to take. This is a perfect opportunity to leverage the experience and work of companies like CloudSwitch as a means to integrate these new capabilities into a coherent data model.

When you look at the functions beyond simple virtual machine control, an API can give you an indication of what is happening in the cloud. Some like to take a peek at the network and storage APIs in order to understand how the cloud is built. Take Amazon, for example. In Amazon, the base network design is that each virtual server receives both a public and private IP address. These addresses are assigned from a pool based on the location of the machine within the infrastructure. Even though there are two IP addresses, however, the public one is just routed (or NAT’ed) to the private address. You only have a single network interface to your server—which is simply and scalable architecture for the cloud provider for support—with Amazon. The server will cause problems for applications requiring at least two NICs, such as some cluster applications.

Terremark’s cloud offering is in stark contrast to Amazon’s. IP addresses are defined by the provider so they can route traffic to your servers, like Amazon, but Terremark allocates a range for your use when you first sign up (while Amazon uses a generic pool of addresses). This can been seen as a positive because there is better control of the assignment of networking address, but on the flip side is potential scaling issues because you only have a limited number of addresses to work with. Additionally, you can assign up to four NIC’s to each server in Terremark’s Enterprise cloud (which allows you to create more complex network topologies and support applications requiring multiple networks for proper operation).

One important thing to consider is that with the Terremark model, servers only have internal addresses. There is no default public NAT address for each server, as with Amazon. Instead, Terremark has created a front-end load balancer that can be used to connect a public IP address to a specified set of servers by protocol and port. You must first create an “Internal Service” (in the language of Terremark) that defines a public IP/Port/Protocol for each protocol and port. Next, assign a server and port to the Service, which will create a connection. You can add more than one server to each public IP/Port/Protocol group since this is a load balancer. Amazon does have a load balancer function as well, and although it isn’t required to connect public addresses to your cloud servers, it does support connecting multiple servers to a single public IP address.

When it comes down to it, the APIs and the feature sets they define tell a lot about the capabilities and design of a cloud infrastructure. The end user features, flexibility and scalability of the whole service will be impacted by decisions made at the infrastructure level (such as network address allocation, virtual device support and load balancers). It is important to look down to the API level when considering what cloud environment you want because it helps you to better understand how the cloud providers’ infrastructure decisions will impact your deployments.

Although building a cloud is complicated, it can provide a powerful resource when implemented correctly. Cloud with different “sweet spots” emerge when cloud providers choose key components and a base architecture for their service. You can span these different clouds and put the right application in the right environment with CloudSwitch. To schedule a time to discuss how Cloud Computing can help your enterprise, contact Nubifer today.

2010: 06/21
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
1 comment

Cloud Computing Business Models on the Horizon

Everyone is wondering what will follow SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, so here is a tutorial on some of the emerging cloud computing business models on the horizon.

Computing arbitrage:

Companies like broadband.com are buying bandwidth at a wholesale rate and reselling it to the companies to meet their specific needs. Peekfon began buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice it up to sell to their customers as a way to solve the problem of expensive roaming for customers in Europe. The company was able to negotiate with the operators to buy bandwidth in bulk because they intentionally decided to steer away from the voice plans. They also used heavy compression on their devices to optimize the bandwidth.

While elastic computing is an integral part of cloud computing, not all companies who want to leverage the cloud necessarily like it. These companies with unique cloud computing needs—like fixed long-term computing that grows at relatively fixed low rate and seasonal peaks—have a problem that can easily be solved via intermediaries. Since it requires hi cap-ex, there will be fewer and fewer cloud providers. Being a “cloud VAR” could be a good value proposition for the vendors that are “cloud SI” or have a portfolio of cloud management.

App-driven and content-driven clouds:

Now that the competition between private and public clouds is nearly over, it is time to think about a vertical cloud. The needs to compute depend on what is being computed, and it depends on the applications’ specific needs to compute, the nature and volume of data that is being computed and the kind of content that is being delivered. The vendors are optimizing the cloud to match their application and content needs in the current SaaS world, and some are predicting that a few companies will help ISV’s by delivering app-centric and content-centric clouds.

For advocates of net neutrality, the current cloud-neutrality that is application-agnostic is positive, but innovation on top of raw clouds is still needed. Developer’s need fine knobs for CPU computes, I/O computes, main-memory computing and other varying needs of their applications. The extensions are specific to a programming stack like Heroku for Ruby but the opportunity to provide custom vertical extensions for an existing cloud or to build a cloud that is purpose-built for a specific class of applications and has a range of stack options underneath (making it easy for the developers to leverage the cloud natively) is here. Nubifer Inc. provides Cloud and SaaS Consulting services to enterprise companies.

2010: 06/14
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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U.S. Government Moves to the Cloud

The U.S. Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board recently announced the move of its Recovery.gov site to a cloud computing infrastructure. That cloud computing infrastructure is powered by Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and will grant the U.S. Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board more efficient computer operation, reduced costs and improved security.

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud technology was selected as the foundation for the move by Smartronix, which acted as the prime contractor on the migration made by the U.S. Recovery Accountability and Transparency. Also in the May 13 announcement, the board said Recovery.gov is now the first government-wide system to make the move into the cloud.

The U.S. government’s official Website that provides easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending, Recovery.gov allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste and abuse. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 created the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board with two goals in mind: to provide transparency related to the use of Recovery-related funds, and to prevent and detect fraud, waste and mismanagement.

CEO of Smartronix John Parris said of the announcement, “Smartronix is honored to have supported the Recovery Board’s historic achievement in taking Recovery.gov, the standard for open government, to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This is the first federal Website infrastructure to operate on the Amazon EC2 and was achieved due to the transparent and collaborative working relationship between Team Smartronix and our outstanding government client.”

The board anticipates that the move will save approximately $750,000 during its current budget cycle and result in long-term savings as well. For fiscal year 2010 and 2011 direct cost savings to the Recovery Board will be $334,800 and $420,000 respectively.

Aside from savings, the move to the cloud will free up resources and enable the board’s staff to focus on its core mission of providing Recovery.com’s users with rich content without worrying about management of the Website’s underlying data center and related computer equipment.

In a statement released in conjunction with the announcement, vice president of Amazon Web Services Adam Selipsky said, “Recovery.gov is demonstrating how government agencies are leveraging the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform to run their technology infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of owning and managing it themselves. Building on AWS enables Recovery.giv to reap the benefits of the cloud–including the ability to add or shed the resources as needed, paying only for resources used and freeing up scarce engineering resources from running technology infrastructure–all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security.”

The Board’s Chairman, Earl Devany, said, “Cloud computing strikes me as a perfect tool to help achieve greater transparency and accountability. Moving to the cloud allows us to provide better service at lower costs. I hope this development will inspire other government entities to accelerate their own efforts. The American taxpayers would be the winners.”

Board officials also said that greater protection against network attacks and real time detection of system tampering are some of the security improvements from the move. Amazon’s computer security platform has been essentially added to the Board’s own security system (which will continue to be maintained and operated by the Board’s staff).

President of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Jack Dangermound also released a statement after the announcement was made. “Recovery.gov broke new ground in citizen participation in government and is now a pioneer in moving to the cloud. Opening government and sharing data through GIS are strengthening democratic processes of the nation,” said Dangermound. “The Recovery Board had the foresight to see the added value of empowering citizens to look at stimulus spending on a map, to explore their own neighborhoods, and overlay spending information with other information. This is much more revealing than simply presenting lists and charts and raises the bar for other federal agencies.” For more information please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 06/08
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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EMC CEO Joe Tucci Predicts Many Clouds in the Future

EMC isn’t alone in focusing on cloud computing during the EMC World 2010 show, as IT vendors, analysts and the like are buzzing about the cloud. But according to EMC CEO Joe Tucci, the storage giant has a new prediction for the future of cloud computing. During his keynote speech on May 10, and a subsequent discussion with reporters and analysts, Tucci said that EMC’s vision of the future varies from others because it sees many private clouds. This exists in stark contrast with the vision of only a few vendors—like Google, Amazon and Microsoft—offering massive public clouds.

“There won’t be four, five or six giant cloud providers. At the end of the day, you’ll have tens of thousands of private clouds and hundreds of public clouds,” said Tucci.

EMC plans on taking on the role of helping businesses move to private cloud environments, where IT administrators have the ability to view multiple data centers as a single pool of resources. These enterprises with their public clouds will also work with public cloud environments, according to Tucci.

The increased complexity and costs of current data centers serve as a catalyst for the demand for cloud computing models. Tucci says that this explosion of data—which comes from multiple sources, including the growth of mobile device users, medical imaging advancements, increased access to broadband and smart devices—is poised to grow further. “Obviously, we need a new approach, because … infrastructures are too complex and too costly. Enter the cloud. This is the new approach,” Tucci said.

According to Tucci, clouds will be based mainly on x86 architectures, feature converged networks and federated resources and will be dynamic, secure, flexible, cost efficient and reliable. These clouds will also be accessible via multiple devices, a growing need due to the ever-increasing use of mobile devices.

EMC’s May 10 announcements were focused on the push for the private cloud, including the introduction of the VPlex appliances and an expanded networking strategy. Said Tucci, “Our mission is to be your guide and to help you on this journey to the private cloud.”

Tucci said that because of the high level of performance in x86 processors from Intel and Advances Micro Devices, he isn’t predicting a long-term future for other architectures in cloud computing. Tucci used Intel’s eight-core Xeon 7500 “Nehalem EX” processors, which can offer up to 1 terabyte of storage, with systems OEMs prepping to unveil servers with as many as eight processors as an example.

Speaking about the overall growth of x86 processor shipments and revenues, Tucci said that RISC architectures and mainframes will continue to slip: “What I’m saying is, we’re convinced, and everything, that EMC does, and everything Cisco does, will be x86-based. Yes, we’re placing a bet on x86, and we’re going to an all-x86 world.” EMC is currently in the midst of a three-year process of migrating to a private cloud environment. This will include abandoning platforms like Solaris and moving to an all-x86 environment. For more information, please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 06/03
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Hosting-as-a-Service
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Cloud-Optimized Infrastructure and New Services on the Horizon for Dell

Over the past three years, Dell has gained experience in the Cloud through its Data Center solutions and group-designed customized offerings for cloud and hyperscaled IT environments. The company is now putting that experience to use, releasing several new hardware, software and service offerings optimized for cloud computing environments. Dell officials launched the new offerings—which include a new partner program, new servers optimized for cloud computing and new services designed to help business migrate to the cloud—at a San Francisco event on March 24.

Based on work the Dell Data Center Solutions group has completed over the past three years, the new offerings were outlined by Valeria Knafo, senior manager of business development and business marketing for the DCS unit. According to Knafo, DCS has built customized computing infrastructures for large cloud service providers and hyperscale data centers and is now trying to make their solutions available to enterprises. Said Knafo, “We’ve taken that experience and brought it to a new set of users.”

Dell officials revealed that they have been working with Microsoft on its Windows Azure cloud platform and that the software giant will work with Dell to create joint cloud-based solutions. Dell and Microsoft will continue to collaborate around Windows Azure (including offering services) and Microsoft will continue buying Dell hardware for its Azure platform as well. Turnkey cloud solutions—including pre-tested and pre-assembled hardware, software and services packages that businesses can use to deploy and run their cloud infrastructures quickly—are among the new offerings.

A cloud solution for Web applications will be the first Platform-as-a-Service made available. The offering will combine Dell servers and services with Web application software from Joyent and will come with challenges, caution Dell officials, like unpredictable traffic and the migrating of the apps from development to production. Dell is also offering a new Cloud Partner Program. According to officials, it will broaden options for customers seeking to move into private or public clouds. Dell announced three new software companies as partners as well: Aster Data, Greenplum and Canonical.

Also on the horizon for Dell is its PowerEdge C-series servers, which are designed to be energy efficient and offer features that are vital to hyperscaled environments—HPC (high-performance computing), social networking, gaming, cloud computing, Web 2.0 functions—like memory capacity and high performance. The C1100 (designed for clustered computing environments), the C2100 (for data analytics, cloud computing and cloud storage) and the C6100 (a four-node cloud and cluster system which offers a shared infrastructure) are the three servers that make up the family.

In unveiling the PowerEdge C-Series, Dell is partaking in the increasing industry trend of offering new systems optimized for cloud computing. For example, on March 17 Fujitsu unveiled the Primergy CX1000, a rack server created to offer the high performance environments need when lowering costs and power consumption. The Primergy CX1000 can also save on data center space through a design which pushes hot air from the system through the top of the enclosure as opposed to the back.

Last, but certainly not least, are Dell’s Integrated Solution Services. They offer complete cloud lifecycle management and include workshops to assess a company’s readiness to move to the cloud. Knafo said that the services are a combination of what Dell gained with the acquisition of Perot Systems and what it had already. “There’s a great interest in the cloud, and a lot of questions on how to get to the cloud. They want a path and a roadmap identifying what the cloud can bring,” said Knafo.

Mike Wilmington, a planner and strategist for Dell’s DCS group, claimed the services will decrease confusion many enterprises may have about the cloud. Said Wilmington, “Clouds are what the customer wants them to be,” meaning that while cloud computing may offer essentially the same benefits to all enterprises (cost reductions, flexibility, improved management and greater energy efficiency) it will look different for every enterprise. For more information please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 05/28
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Cisco, Verizon and Novell Make Announcements about Plans to Secure the Cloud

Cisco Systems, Verizon Business and Novell announce plans to launch offerings designed to heighten security in the cloud.

On April 28, Cisco announced security services based around email and the Internet that are part of the company’s cloud protection push and its Secure Borderless Network architecture; Cisco’s Secure Borderless Network architecture seeks to give users secure access to their corporate resources on any device, anywhere, at anytime.

Cisco’s IronPort Email Data Loss Prevention and Encryption, and ScanSafe Web Intelligence Reporting are designed to work with Cisco’s other web security solutions to grant companies more flexibility when it comes to their security offerings while streamlining management requirements, increasing visibility and lowering costs.

Verizon and Novell made an announcement on April 28 about their plans to collaborate to create an on-demand identity and access management service called Secure Access Services from Verizon. Secure Access Services from Verizon is designed to enable enterprises to decide and manage who is granted access to cloud-based resources. According to the companies, the identity-as-a-server solution is the first of what will be a host of joint offerings between Verizon and Novell.

According to eWeek, studies continuously indicate that businesses are likely to continue trending toward a cloud-computing environment. With that said, issues concerning security and access control remain key concerns. Officials from Cisco, Verizon and Novell say that the new services will allow businesses to feel more at ease while planning their cloud computing strategies.

“The cloud is a critical component of Cisco’s architectural approach, including its Secure Borderless Network architecture,” said vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security technology business unit Tom Gillis in a statement. “Securing the cloud is highly challenging. But it is one of the top challenges that the industry must rise to meet as enterprises increasingly demand the flexibility, accessibility and ease of management that cloud-based applications offer for their mobile and distributed workforces.”

Cisco purchased ScanSafe in December 2009 and the result is Cisco’s ScanSafe Web Intelligence Reporting platform. The platform is designed to give users a better idea of how their Internet resources are being used, and the objective is to ensure that business-critical workloads aren’t being encumbered by non-business-related traffic. Cisco’s ScanSafe Web Intelligence Reporting platform can report on user-level data and information on Web communications activities within second, and offers over 80 predefined reports.

Designed to protect outbound email in the cloud, the IronPort email protection solution is perfect for enterprises that don’t want to manage their email. Cisco officials say that it provides hosted mailboxes (while keeping control of email policies) and also offers the option of integrated encryption.

Officials say Cisco operates over 30 data centers around the globe and that security offerings handle large quantities of activity each day—including 2.8 billion reputation look-ups, 2.5 billion web requests and the detection of more than 250 billion span messages—and these are the latest in the company’s expanding portfolio of cloud security offerings.

Verizon and Novell’s collaboration—the Secure Access Services—are designed to enable enterprises to move away from the cost and complexity associated with using traditional premises0based identity and access management software for securing applications. These new services offer centralized management of web access to applications and networks in addition to identity federation and web single sign-on.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian released a statement saying, “Security and identity management are critical to accelerating cloud computing adoption and by teaming with Verizon we can deliver these important solutions.” While Verizon brings the security expertise, infrastructure, management capabilities and portal to the service, Novell provides the identity and security software. For more information contact a Nubifer representative today.

2010: 05/24
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Uncategorized
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Cloud Interoperability Brought to Earth by Microsoft

Executives at Microsoft say that an interoperable cloud could help companies trying to lower costs and governments trying to connect constituents. Cloud services are increasingly seen as a way for businesses and governments to scale IT systems for the future, consolidate IT infrastructure, and enable innovative services not possible until now.

Technology vendors are seeking to identify and solve the issues created by operating in mixed IT environments in order to help organizations fully realize the benefits of cloud services. Additionally, vendors are collaborating to make sure that their products work well together. The industry may still be in the beginning stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability, but has already made great strides.

So what exactly is cloud interoperability and how can it benefit companies now? Cloud interoperability specifically concerns one cloud solution working with other platforms and applications—not just other clouds. Customers want to be able to run applications locally or in the cloud, or even on a combination of both. Currently, Microsoft is collaborating with others in the industry and is working to make sure that the premise of cloud interoperability becomes an actuality.

Microsoft’s general managers Craig Shank and Jean Paoli are spearheading Microsoft’s interoperability efforts. Shank helms the company’s interoperability work on public policy and global standards and Paoli collaborates with the company’s product teams to cater product strategies to the needs of customers. According to Shank, one of the main attractions of the cloud is the amount of flexibility and control it gives customers. “There’s a tremendous level of creative energy around cloud services right now—and the industry is exploring new ideas and scenarios all the time. Our goal is to preserve that flexibility through an open approach to cloud interoperability,” says Shank.

Paoli chimes in to say, “This means continuing to create software that’s more open from the ground up, building products that support technologies such as PHP and Java, and ensuring that our existing products work with the cloud.” Both Shank and Paoli are confident that welcoming competition and choice will allow Microsoft to become more successful down the road. “This may seem surprising,” says Paoli before adding,” but it creates more opportunities for its customers, partners and developers.”

Shank reveals that due to the buzz about the cloud, some forget about the ultimate goal: “To be clear, cloud computing has enormous potential to stimulate economic growth and enable governments to reduce costs and expand services to citizens.” One example of the real-world benefits of cloud interoperability is the public sector. Microsoft is currently showing results in this area via solutions like their Eye for Earth project. Microsoft is helping the European Environment Agency simplify the collection and processing of environmental information for use by the general public and government officials. Eye on Earth obtains data from 22,000 water monitoring points and 1,000 stations that monitor air quality through employing Microsoft® Windows Azure, Microsoft ® SQL Azure and already existing Linux technologies. Eye on Earth then helps synthesize the information and makes it accessible for people in 24 different languages in real time.

Product developments like this emerged out of feedback channels which the company developed with its partners, customers and other vendors. In 2006, for example, Microsoft created the Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, which is comprised of 35 chief technology officers and chief information officers from a variety of organizations across the globe. The group meats two times per year in Redmond and discuss issues concerning interoperability as well as provide feedback to Microsoft executives.

Additionally, Microsoft recently published a progress report which—for the first time—revealed operational details and results achieved by the Council across six work streams (or priority areas). The Council recently commissioned the creation of a seventh work stream for cloud interoperability geared towards developing standards related to the cloud which addressed topics like data portability, privacy, security and service policies.

Developers are an important part of cloud interoperability, and Microsoft is part of an effort the company co-founded with Zend Technologies, IBM and Rackspace called Simple Cloud. Simple Cloud was created to help developers write basic cloud applications that work on all major cloud platforms.

Microsoft is further engaging in the collaborative work of building technical “bridges” between the company and non-Microsoft technologies, like the recently-released Microsoft ® Windows Azure Software Development Kits (SDKs) for PHP and Java and tools for the new Windows ® Azure platform AppFabric SDKs for Java, PHP and Ruby (Eclipse version 1.0), the SQL CRUD Application Wizard for PHP and the Bing 404 Web Page Error Toolkit for PHP. These examples show the dedication of Microsoft Interoperability team.

Despite the infancy of the industry’s collaboration on cloud interoperability issues, much progress has already been made. This progress has had a major positive impact on the way even average users work and live, even if they don’t realize it yet. A wide perspective and a creative and collaborative approach to problem-solving are required for cloud interoperability. In the future, Microsoft will continue to support more conversation within the industry in order to define cloud principles and make sure all points of view are incorporated. For more information please contact a Nubifer representative today.

2010: 05/21
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Security
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Windows Azure
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Amazon Sets the Record Straight About the Top Five Myths Surrounding Cloud Computing

On April 19, the 5^th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (Cloud Expo)opened in New York City, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) used the event as a platform to address some of what the company sees as the lingering myths about cloud computing.

AWS officials said that the company continues to grapple with questions about features of the cloud-ranging from reliability and security to cost and elasticity—despite being one of the first companies to successfully and profitably implement cloud computing solutions. Adam Selipsky, vice president of AWS, recently spoke about the persisting myths of cloud computing from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, specifically addressing five that linger in the face of increased industry adoption of the cloud and continued successful cloud deployments. “We’ve seen a lot of misperceptions about cloud computing is,” said Selipsky before debunking five common myths.

Myth 1: The Cloud Isn’t Reliable

Chief information officers (CIOs) in enterprise organizations have difficult jobs and are usually responsible for thousands of applications, explains Selipsky in his opening argument, adding that they feel like they are responsible for the performance and security of these applications. When problems with the applications arise, CIOs are used to approaching their own people for answers and take some comfort that there is a way to take control of the situation.

Selipsky says that customers need to consider a few things when adopting the cloud, one of which is that the AWS’ operational performance is good. Selipsky reminded users that they own the data, they choose which location to store the data (and it doesn’t move unless the customer decided to move it) and that regardless of whether customers choose to encrypt or not, AWS never looks at the data.

“We have very strong data durability—we’ve designed Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for eleven 9′s of durability. We store multiple copies of each object across multiple locations,” said Selipsky. He added that AWS has a “Versioning” feature which allows customers to revert to the last version of any object they somehow lose due to application failure or an unintentional deletion. Customers can also ensure additional fault-tolerant applications by deploying their applications in various Availability zones or using AWS’ Load Balancing and Auto Scaling features.

“And, all that comes with no capex [capital expenditures] for companies, a low per unit cost where you only pay for what you consume, the ability to focus on engineers on unique incremental value for your business,” said Selipsky before adding that the origin of the reliability claims come merely from an illusion of a control, not actual control. “People think if they can control it they have more say in how things go. It’s like being in a car versus an airplane, but you’re much safer in a plane,” he explained.

Myth 2: The Cloud Provides Inadequate Security and Privacy

When it comes to security, Selipsky notes that it is an end-to-end process and thus companies need to build security at every level of the stack. Taking a look at Amazon’s cloud, it is easy to note that the same security isolations are employed as with a traditional data center—including physical data center security, separation of the network, isolation of the server hardware and isolation of storage. Data centers had already become a frequently-shared infrastructure on the physical data center side before Amazon launched its cloud services. Selipsky added that companies realized that they could benefit by renting space in a data facility as opposed to building it.

When speaking about security fundamentals, Selipsky noted that security could be maintained by providing badge-controlled access, guard stations, monitored security cameras, alarms, separate cages and strictly audited procedures and processes. Not only is Amazon’s Web Services’ data center identical to the best practices employed in private data facilities, there is an added physical security advantage in the fact that customers don’t need to access to the servers and networking gear inside. Access to the data center is thus controlled more strictly than traditional rented facilities. Selipsky also added that the Amazon cloud as equal or better isolation than could be expected from dedicated infrastructure, at the physical level.

In his argument, Selipsky pointed out that networks ceased to be isolated physical islands a long time ago because, as companies increasingly began to need to connect to other companies—and then the Internet—their networks became connected with public infrastructure. Firewalls and switch configurations and other special network functionality were used to prevent bad network traffic from getting in, or conversely from leaking out. Companies began using additional isolation techniques as their network traffic increasingly passed over public infrastructure to make sure that the security of every packet on (or leaving) their network remained secure. These techniques include Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and encryption.

Amazon used a similar approach to networking in its cloud by maintaining packet-level isolation of network traffic and supporting industry-standard encryption. Amazon Web Services’ Virtual Private Cloud allows a customer to establish their own IP address space and because of that customers can use the same tools and software infrastructure they are familiar with to monitor and control their cloud networks. Amazon’s scale also allows for more investment in security policing and countermeasures than nearly and large corporation could afford. Maintains Selipsky, “Our security is strong and dug in at the DNA level.”

Amazon Web Services invests in testing and validating the security of its virtual server and storage environment significantly as well. When discussing the investments made on the hardware side, Selipsky lists:

After customers release these resources, the server and storage are wiped clean so no important data can be left behind.

Intrusion from other running instances is prevented because each instance has its own customer firewall.

Those in need of more network isolation can use Amazon VPC, which allows you to carry your own IP address space with you into the cloud; your instances are only accessible through those IP addresses only you know.

Those desiring to run on their own boxes—where no other instances are running—can purchase extra large instances where only that XL instance runs on that server.

According to Selipsky, Amazon’s scale allows for more investment in security policing and countermeasures: “In fact, we often find that we can improve companies’ security posture when they use AWS. Take the example lots of CIOs worry about—the rogue server under a developer’s desk running something destructive or that the CIO doesn’t want running. Today, it’s really hard (if not impossible) for CIOS to know how many orphans there are and where they might be. With AWS, CIOs can make a single API call and see every system running in their VPC [Virtual Private Cloud]. No more hidden servers under the desk or anonymously places servers in a rack and plugged into the corporate network. Finally, AWS is SAS-70 certified; ISO 27—1 and NIST are in process.”

Myth 3: Creating My Own In-House Cloud or Private Cloud Will Allow Me to Reap the Same Benefits of the Cloud

According to Selipsky, “There’s a lot of marketing going on about the concept of the ‘private cloud.’ We think there’s a bit of a misnomer here.” Selipsky continued to explain that generally, “we often see companies struggling to accurately measure the cost of infrastructure. Scale and utilization are big advantages for AWS. In our opinion, a cloud has five key characteristics: it eliminates capex; allows you to pay for what you use; provides true elastic capacity to scale up and down; allows you to move very quickly and provision servers in minutes; and allows you to offload the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure so your engineers work on differentiating problems.

Selipsky also pointed out the following drawbacks of private clouds: still own the capex (and they are expensive!); not pay for what you use; not have true elasticity; still manage the undifferentiated heavy lifting. “With a private cloud you have to manage capacity very carefully … or you or your private cloud vendor will end up over-provisioning. So you’re going to have to either get very good at capacity management or you’re going to wind up overpaying,” said Selipsky before challenging the elasticity of the private cloud: “The cloud is shapeless. But if it has a tight box around it, it no longer feels very cloud-like.”

One of AWS’ key offerings is Amazon’s ability to save customers money while also driving efficiency. “In virtually every case we’ve seen, we’ve been able to save people a significant amount of money,” said Selipsky. This is in part because AWS’ business has greatly expanded over the last four years and Amazon has achieved enough scale to secure very low costs. AWS has been able to aggregate hundreds of thousands of customers to have a high utilization of its infrastructure. Said Selipsky, “In our conversations with customers we see that really good enterprises are in the 20-30 percent range on utilization—and that’s when they’re good … many are not that strong. The cloud allows us to have several times that utilization. Finally, it’s worth looking at Amazon’s heritage and AWS’ history. We’re a company that works hard to lower its costs so that we can pass savings back to our customers. If you look at the history of AWS, that’s exactly what we’ve done (lowering price on EC2, S3, CloudFront, and AWS bandwidth multiple times already without any competitive pressure to do so).”

Myth 4: The Cloud Isn’t Ideal Because I Can’t Move Everything at Once

Selipsky debunks this myth by saying, “We believe this is nearly impossible and ill-advised. We recommend picking a few apps to gain experience and comfort then build a migration plan. This is what we most often see companies doing. Companies will be operating in hybrid environments for years to come. We see some companies putting some stuff on AWS and then keeping some stuff in-house. And I think that’s fine. It’s a perfectly prudent and legitimate way of proceeding.”

Myth 5: The Biggest Driver of Cloud Adoption is Cost

In busting the final myth, Selipsky said, “There is a big savings in capex and cost but what we find is that one of the main drivers of adoption is that time-to-market for ideas is much faster in the cloud because it lets you focus your engineering resources on what differentiates your business.”

Summary

Speaking about all of the myths surround the cloud, Selipsky concludes that “a lot of this revolves around psychology and fear of change, and human beings needing to gain comfort with new things. Years ago people swore they would never put their credit card information online. But that’s no longer the case. We’re seeing great momentum. We’re seeing, more and more, over time these barriers [to cloud adoption] are moving.” For additional debunked myths regarding Cloud Computing visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 05/20
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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