As the end of the year for 2011 makes its inexorable approach, the forecasts for 2012, in particular for cloud computing are flying helter-skelter. Both IDC and Gartner have weighed in with their forecasts and many more continue to release their forecasts regarding cloud computing for next year. Key amongst these predictions is the fact that this time around many of them are saying that 2012 will mark the beginning of the cloud computing revolution. While some newcomers to the cloud bandwagon will gush with great gusto and enthusiasm about the upcoming landslide of cloud converts for next year, many have forgotten that nearly the same statement was given for 2011.

More seasoned Cloud watchers are as usual watching carefully. While consumerization and multiple device access may well drive more conversions to the Cloud, it is wise to note that most studies or surveys have revealed that 2011 conversions based on these reasons have never been overwhelmingly so.

It isn’t a bad thing to take all of these forecasts with a pinch of salt, not only so that you don’t end up over-extending yourself by end of 2012, but also because it may turn you and yours into a pioneer with no support and your ass very much uncovered. Covering your own ass is still the number 1 priority for most employees, even Cloud pioneers so swallow down that gusto and keep a watch for the Cloud pitfalls for 2012. Thankfully, some 2012 forecasts have revealed such pitfalls. Some of these forecast Cloud pitfalls include revelations such as:

• The public Cloud isn’t really green – While many proponents of Cloud Computing have mentioned that the Cloud offers great ‘green’ environment saving potential it is in actuality just another method of passing the buck. This is because all the public Cloud service operators must have some form of server or data storage themselves to create their Cloud solutions. As more people move to the Cloud in 2012 these public Cloud service providers may also have to increase the size of their data centres to accommodate these new Cloud adopters. More energy will be required to power these data centres which will attract attention one way or another. Eventually (very soon more like) everyone is going to catch on, especially as public Cloud service provider data centres continue to grow exponentially. Playing the ‘green’ card in your deck at this time may lead you to a pitfall you may not be able to climb out of, especially if your only excuse is feigning ignorance.

• A major Cloud security breach is expected and no one will know who to blame – Despite all the security trials and tribulations of 2011, an even larger security breach is expected in 2012, with particular focus on Cloud solutions and storage. While this is still pure speculation, the fact that many users of the Cloud as well as Cloud providers themselves are rather unclear about who should be watching the security for Cloud solutions and storage is even more troubling (based on the Security of Cloud Computing Providers Study). In the likely event that such a large security breach were to happen, a company and its IT administrator could be literally caught with their pants down. This could be even more devastating if there is insufficient backup procedures in place, so do make sure about this beforehand regardless of your position in the Cloud.

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When: November 7-10
Where: Santa Clara Convention Center, 5001 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, CA 95054

Cloud Expo Guest of Interxion & CoreSite Exhibitor (Booth 868) “VIP Gold” Pass Registration 3 Easy Steps:

1. Click here for our special registration page
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3. The price will re-set from $2,000 to $0, and you can then complete the brief registration process for full access to all sessions, all days and all tracks

(For these complimentary VIP Gold passes, Luncheon, access to the Cloud Computing Bootcamp and the Collectible Conference Bag are NOT included.)

The Internet Is Fundamental Resource for the Humankind, Cisco Survey

Future leaders, workers, and customers will rely increasingly on cloud resources

More than half of all students and young professionals consider Internet as an “integral part of their lives,” according to Cisco’s Connected World Technology Report 2011. In fact, the report’s findings are comparable and somewhat similar to the results published in 2010, when the first such report was conducted. The next generation of leaders and workers is so accustomed to a Internet-rich life that the years to come would witness growing number of connected devices and gadgets, more mobile lifestyle and booming cloud market to meet the fast growing expectations of young people not to rely on fixed storage devices for their data and software applications they use.

The Internet is now a fundamental resource for the humankind with 33 percent of those polled considering it is of equal importance to their daily life as air, water, food, and shelter, according to the survey. Almost half of the respondents, or 49 percent of college students and 47 percent of employees, younger than 30, believe the World Wide Web and the Internet are “pretty close” to the level of importance water, food and shelter have for the human race. Overall, four of every five college students and young professionals is of opinion the Internet is vital part of their daily life although it would be interesting to see a study, asking questions why and how the Internet is vital for young peoples’ lives.

The majority of young employees, 62 percent, and 55 percent of college students polled believe their life’s daily sustenance is in jeopardy if they are denied access to the Internet, while 64 percent of students would select an Internet connection instead of a car. A very interesting choice indeed, especially in the light of global environmental issues and air pollution that cars produce globally.

Online interaction is becoming integral part of the lifestyle of the next generation with 27 percent of college students preferring to update their social network profiles, while social networks are more important to them than partying, dating, listening to music, or hanging out with friends. On paper, it should be good news for online social networks that compete fiercely in the cloud but it is an alarming trend too for contacts in person cannot be substituted by online chats, psychologists agree.

The coming customers are going to be increasingly mobile after the study found that 66 percent of college students and 58 percent of young professionals consider their mobile devices like laptops, tablets, or smarthphones “the most important technology in their lives”. Therefore, we are to witness an unprecedented growth of mobile devices and applications market with cloud services destined to play an important role in this mobile revolution due to the overwhelming volume of data people are going to store, share, and use online.

Moreover, smartphones and desktops are now equally important to the next generation: 19 percent of students believe their smartphone is their “most important device” they use daily while 20 percent consider their desktop as their ultimate device. Thus, hardware and software vendors will be forced to switch to a new type of highly mobile customers that will ask for more power, applications, functionality, and productivity offered by their smartphones. Part of the solution is shift to cloud-based services but telephone makers will be forced to seek new hardware solutions as well.

In fact, corporations would be forced to change their business and Internet strategies, including cloud adoption and cloud services, much faster than expected, according to Marie Hattar, vice president, Enterprise Marketing, Cisco. “The results of the Cisco Connected World Technology Report should make businesses re-examine how they need to evolve in order to attract talent and shape their business models. Without a doubt, our world is changing to be much more Internet-focused, and becomes even more so with each new generation,” she said in a statement.

Click here to continue reading or visit www.cloudtweaks.com.

 Cisco’s Connected World Technology Report 2011

Microsoft raised some eyebrows when Corporate VP Brad Anderson boldly proclaimed that, “Virtualizations is not cloud computing.” While this statement garnered a lot of buzz due to its timing – Anderson said this during the VMWorld annual event – that doesn’t make this statement any less true.

It is critical to remember that the principle concepts behind both cloud computing and virtualization have been in practice for decades. It is only enormous leaps in PC hardware architecture and the reliability of the Internet that have brought these terms into the general public’s accepted technical vocabulary. Virtualization and cloud computing are major catalysts to flexibility and innovation in the deployment of business applications. However, they have been erroneously lumped together by the public and I’d like to take a moment to set the record straight.

Virtualization is a systems admin and data management tool that has many technical uses; most of which have nothing to do with the cloud. The technology allows enterprises to use a single piece of physical hardware, to perform the work of many. Multiple operating system instances running on one hardware device are far more economical than a single piece of hardware for every server task. Still, there is no direct link to the cloud from pure virtualization.

Cloud computing, on the other hand, is access through the Internet to business applications running in a non-local environment. Cloud computing can certainly take advantage of virtualization but cloud computing can be (and has been) accomplished without the use of virtualization.

One way to describe the difference between virtualization and cloud computing in non technical terms is through the following thought experiment. Imagine you could be controlled by taking command inputs from another person – like you had a keyboard interface in your brain. Now imagine that the person controlling you is viewing you through a closed circuit TV link (a network), that is cloud computing.

To describe virtualization, imagine that you are standing between two mirrors, and now you see dozens of copies of yourself, only each copy was capable of doing tasks independent of the other copies. All the copies are “on” one piece of hardware (the real you). That is virtualization.

To bring the two together you would take all those virtualized copies of you and beam them out over many different links to an individual(s) who would control and interact with them remotely. Now, you have cloud computing leveraging virtualization!

The delineation between virtualization and cloud computing is important to make at this critical juncture in the technologies’ adoption.

Unlike most IT projects, cloud computing and virtualization impact almost everyone in the enterprise which means that non-technical people are involved in the implementation and deployment processes. By trying to “dumb down” the technical language, these vendors are leading their customers astray. This is not a simple case of semantics as there are distinct circumstances as to why why an organization would prefer virtualization over cloud computing and vice versa – especially since the two concepts are not two of the same thing.

Cloud computing and virtualization may be the lynch pin to modernizing today’s IT business environment. Together, they are ushering in a new era where companies are granted freedom to run their workspaces without having to conduct non-strategic IT functions such as patches, updates, and backups. The risk of not knowing the difference between virtualization and cloud computing can be a costly one as hype around these two technologies reaches a crescendo. Do yourself a favor and learn about the strengths and weaknesses of virtualization and cloud computing and map them to your organization’s needs before moving forward with an implementation.

 Click here to read more or visit www.cloudtweaks.com.

“To the Cloud!” exclaims a couple in one of Microsoft’s TV commercials for Windows Live, advertising how the couple can use Windows Live while at the airport to watch a TV show that they have recorded on their PC at home. Perhaps commercials like these contribute to the pervasive buzz surrounding the term “cloud” that has swept the globe. Despite this buzz, it has become clear to me that many people do not really understand what it means to be “hosted on the cloud.”

Recently, at an industry networking event focused on managed hosting and outsourced IT, I met the CEO of a local company. He was actually already familiar with InfoRelay, and he mentioned that he had planned to contact us because he was tired of hosting servers at the office on his business cable connection, and wanted to “plug into the cloud.” When I asked him which features of the cloud interested him the most, he promptly and confidently replied, “well, the cloud has a very direct and reliable connection to the Internet, which is one of the reasons why I think it is important for us to host in the cloud.”

This man, the CEO of a multi-million dollar business, was describing the cloud as some sort of centralized holy grail of connectivity and trustworthiness; a system to which apparently InfoRelay had managed to connect directly in an effort to offer this service to our clients. Now, let me assure you — even the nicest guy might have found it difficult to avoid laughing out loud in this situation. And apparently I must be the nicest guy, because I also found it very hard to suppress the hardy snickering I felt brewing within my rib cage.

What I’ve realized though, is that this CEO is not in the minority; the general public does not truly understand the cloud. Although “cloud” has become a buzzword, it is becoming evident that perhaps the cloud has staying power — real companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, to develop robust cloud offerings. But just as suspended water droplets need an atmosphere to form puffy clusters in the sky, servers and SAN storage often require complex connectivity to form a redundant, high-performance computing environment.

As the company selected by CoreSite to sponsor CloudCommunity, a program which began in San Jose and Los Angeles and is now spreading to Reston, InfoRelay has gained even more insight into some of the technical challenges and requirements facing cloud-based service providers, and the carriers that provide these clouds with connectivity. While the true definition of cloud computing varies depending on who you ask, most agree that the main tenets include virtualization, scalability, and redundancy. Clouds don’t rely on a single server, and have no single point of failure.

From the carrier point of view, one of the first requirements that clients have is some level of redundant connectivity to the Internet. Some clients; the ones with the budget, staff, and wherewithal to purchase and manage their own routing equipment and manage BGP sessions with multiple providers, prefer to handle network redundancy on their own. The vast majority, however, are not about reinventing the wheel; they are happy to accept multiple diverse connections from InfoRelay, with VRRP or another redundancy protocol enabled to ensure maximum uptime.

Of course, as it turns out, redundant connectivity to the Internet is one of the simpler requirements. Today’s clouds are expected to meet strict criteria usually specified within service level agreements (SLAs), and while most consumers don’t realize it, based upon my observations and those of my peers, most clouds cannot withstand the catastrophic failure of a single data center. This is changing, but as of early 2011, this is still the case — not for all, but for most cloud providers. This is one aspect of cloud computing with which our clients have sought our assistance.

In InfoRelay’s three main multi-facility metropolitan markets (Washington, DC / Northern Virginia, San Jose/Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles/Southern CA), we use dark fiber to connect multiple data centers. This dark fiber has proven to be useful not only to carry basic Internet connectivity to remote POPs, but also to link the locations and provide a medium for direct intra-site IP connectivity. This allows our clients to get creative. While it may be impractical to replicate all client data across the country, replication within the same metropolitan area or even within several hundred miles is often technically feasible and cost effective. This is one main reason why we launched our New York City location: to provide a replication site for our Reston, Virginia cloud that is more than 200 miles away from the primary location, but still within 6 milliseconds, roundtrip via the Internet.

Of course, some of our Northern Virginia clients would never sleep knowing that their data is in the city that never sleeps — or in other words, New York isn’t geographically diverse enough for them to feel comfortable. So the question our clients then ask is whether or not we can provide direct long-haul layer 2 connectivity between coasts. Yes, this can be done, though it’s a bit more expensive than standard Internet bandwidth. As we’ve explained to our clients, however, there is no way to get around latency — generally in the range of 50-60 ms. roundtrip. Clients generally aren’t concerned about data taking 1/20th of a second to get to the other side of the country; what they usually do not realize, however, is that there is a relationship between latency and throughput — or transfer speeds, on a TCP/IP network (the Internet). Even if we provide one gigabit (1,000Mbps) or ten gigabits (10,000Mbps) of cross-country capacity, without the use of advanced TCP acceleration techniques or other technologies, technical limitations of TCP/IP will only allow clients to use a small fraction of the available pipe (or “bandwidth”).

As the cloud has evolved, I believe that carriers have followed suit, or are at least beginning to do so. This has been largely demand-driven, and the carriers that choose to remain in touch with the needs of their clientele will ultimately be rewarded. Just as the unique requirements of cloud based offerings have served as a catalyst for changing paradigms amongst other carriers, they have also pushed us at InfoRelay to see things a bit differently. Years ago, our Network Engineering department’s mission was to ensure that our network was highly optimized in performance, extremely reliable, and redundant with no single point of failure. Today, those points remain requisite for our network, but a detailed understanding of client requirements as they relate to global cloud deployments is often required to engineer the proper solution. Seems like a lot of work — so why do we do this? I concede; I suppose it’s all in the name of creating the holy grail of connectivity and trustworthiness — to allow others to “plug into the cloud.”

Russell Weiss is President of InfoRelay Online Systems. For more information on InfoRelay Online Systems, please visit www.InfoRelay.com.

CHICAGO – August 22, 2011 – Model Metrics, the leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today identified the top five enterprise cloud computing priorities for 2011, based on more than 150+ enterprise customer projects completed so far this year. As one of the earliest cloud services companies, Model Metrics has a unique vantage point from its role advising enterprises on how to successfully transform their businesses using the cloud. As a result, Model Metrics identified the top trends the company is seeing across customers implementing new cloud initiatives in 2011.

“The cloud has taken a new shape in 2011,” said Adam Caplan, CEO of Model Metrics. “It’s no longer just moving business processes to the cloud; it’s about deploying cutting-edge mobile and social apps that enable businesses to change the way their employees work.”

Top five enterprise cloud computing priorities:

Mobilize the cloud to deliver business value. Eighty percent of Model Metrics’ customers have smart phone and tablet adoption plans as part of their cloud deployment initiatives, growing Model Metrics’ number of mobile projects by nearly three times in 2011. Examples include dynamic illustrations of medical products on iPads to guide surgeons in operating rooms to custom mobile apps that track product inventory. Enterprises who approach their mobile strategies with the goal to improve business processes are experiencing business return.

Engage communities with social technologies. In addition to leveraging social technologies such as Facebook and Twitter to more closely engage with their communities, 60 percent of Model Metrics’ customers are exploring social enterprise technologies to improve employee collaboration. Enterprises are looking for guidance on how to turn this new paradigm of community engagement into business value using the cloud.

Transition any business process to the cloud. From compensation and supply chain management to customer facing retail systems, the sky is the limit when it comes to what enterprises are building in the cloud. New enterprise projects this year continue to diversify and the growth of custom apps on cloud platforms continues to accelerate to touch new areas of the business, including mobilizing customer-facing business processes, budget management and vertical industry apps.

Design cloud business apps that drive adoption. Enterprises want customized business and customer-facing apps that reflect their brand and are designed for usability, especially when it comes to mobile apps. This requires new design methodologies specific to cloud user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). Eighty percent of Model Metrics’ customers customize their UI and UX, including designing the most efficient clickstream for their specific business process. As a result, Model Metrics recently launched Model FX, the first creative design lab focused on cloud computing, to accelerate and extend its leadership in cloud app design.

Deploy globally, customize locally. Sixty percent of Model Metrics’ cloud deployments have global reach in 2011, double from a year ago. This is a result of multi-national enterprise adoption of the cloud and an increase in enterprise-wide use cases. These deployments feature multi-language support, localization and customer and partner access from anywhere in the world.

Click here to read the original blog post…

In Part I, I talked about how it is important to think about cloud use from the application’s point of view. We need to digitally centralize our best-practice institutional knowledge so that it can be used to easily replicate application environments from development to test, and then on towards production. Centralizing these steps helps you manage and automate what used to be manual labor. But how do you go from securing VMs within the cloud to actually deploying applications and their environments in the cloud with a single click?

Transformation never happens overnight, and must involve systematic change (a roadmap). Many large organizations and small businesses still do not have battle-tested processes in place governing areas such as change management and disaster recovery. Now we’ve all heard of best practice frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT. If you peel back the onion, you will see that the idea of making sure your house is in order to enable business agility and transformation is the common theme of those frameworks. Deploying and managing applications in the cloud will undoubtedly force you to do exactly that - get your IT house in order - so that you can capitalize on an agile platform that is the cloud. You may have been able to get away with it on-premise, but the speed of the cloud will enable you to correct the flaws.

Many of you have already virtualized to some degree the infrastructure underneath your applications. The optimizations come through establishing best practices for areas such as: change management, lifecycle management (development –> testing –> production), hardware independence & VM configuration, responses to dynamic events (overutilization, underutilization, server recovery, etc.), and timely responses for application health (e.g. the need to restart a particular component due to memory leak issues). In addition, household tasks such as backups and replication batch jobs must be implemented and working. Let’s also not forget security at the user and group level. Even if you perform some of these tasks by hand, it’s important to document everything so that if you are unable to perform these duties someone else can pick up the baton. If you have Disaster Recovery plans (which you should), the documentation of these steps helps toward this critical business function. You may even be able to lift a lot of these steps from those plans, especially the ORDER in which you execute these steps. Make sure you have also captured the steps to bring your application up from scratch on top of vanilla compute/storage/network resources; for example, what middleware needs to be installed and where can you get those packages from, and what specific software/security configurations do you need to enable your application. As you gain confidence in these best practices, you can then implement automation to execute some of these tasks.

Click here to read more or visit soacloud.ulitzer.com.

NPD’s “Digital Software and the Cloud Report” Covers Both Consumer Familiarity with and Use of Cloud Computing

According to a recent study from The NPD Group, a market research company, just 22 percent of U.S. consumers were familiar with the term “cloud computing,” which denotes software applications or processes that are accessed from the Internet, rather than on personal computer hard drives. While the term “cloud computing” is still confusing to many consumers, the activities that constitute cloud computing are being performed by the vast majority of consumers.

More than three quarters (76 percent) of U.S. respondents in NPD’s “Digital Software and the Cloud Report” reported using some type of Internet-based cloud service in the past 12 months — with email, tax preparation and online gaming leading the way. Even so, the enormous usage of these cloud-based services has not completely supplanted desktop-computer-based applications: Nearly one quarter (24 percent) of U.S. consumers reported purchasing a computer-based software application in the past six months.

“Whether they understand the terminology or not, consumers are actually pretty savvy in their use of cloud-based applications,” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for NPD. “They might not always recognize they are performing activities in the cloud, yet they still rely on and use those services extensively. Even so, they are not yet ready to completely give up on traditional PC-based software applications.”

Consumers who are familiar with cloud computing tend to use it more than those who are unfamiliar with the term; however, depending on the type of activity, there are some relative differences between savvy and non-savvy users. For example cloud-savvy consumers are far more likely to use cloud-based email (84 percent of savvy consumers versus 68 percent for non-savvy consumers), while there is more parity between savvy and non-savvy consumers when it comes to tax preparation (44 percent versus 39 percent).

Click here to read more or visit soacloud.ulitzer.com.

It is amazing how I continue to hear people talk about how they are still not familiar with “cloud”, what it is and how it will help their specific business. Just the other day I spoke to a customer prospect who believed they had a private cloud – as it turns out they had a virtual server farm which still could not be accessed through a self-service portal. But I am not surprised – after years of “cloud-washing” incumbent IT management solutions that cost a lot of money, time, and resources to implement, vendors have dictated how YOU should use the cloud. But, you need to figure out how the cloud actually applies to your specific business.

Now I won’t go through a Cloud 101 definitions check. I think we all know now that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) delivers compute/storage/network services in a pay-as-you-go on-demand model from the network (internal or external). Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) delivers development environments in the same style, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are applications. We can get cute and also talk about Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) for processes such as payment services. At the end of the day, businesses today are driven by applications and services. So while IaaS is a quantum leap for provisioning servers, it does not by itself get you to laying down applications in the cloud. But how do you get from getting servers on-demand to running applications/services in the cloud?

Let’s face it, even the simplest of applications are all configured specifically for your own business and IT needs. SAP in my deployment model may be very different than how it is deployed in your shop. But the knowledge to lay down these applications, after gaining access to the servers/storage/network, is in our heads. And, as humans, the way you deploy an application could very well be different then the way I would lay it down. So we need a way to capture these best-practice steps so that anyone can follow the same methodology, especially as you take an application from development through testing and into production. Enter Kaavo IMOD…

Click here to read more or visit soacloud.ulitzer.com.