One Year in the Cloud

The other day I had the epiphany that I've been working on my company's Cloud effort for a year now.  It was around this time a year ago when a few of us, holed up in a room, were doing some next-gen data center planning with a topic being 'clouds'.  I hadn't given the subject too much thought with regard to our product set up to that point.  But a few promising concepts came out of that meeting and the larger effort took off. 

It's all shaping up to be a big inflection point in the IT business, in some ways a lot like server virtualization, ASPs before that, and the web before that.  Hang on for another great ride.    :)

Share any interesting anecdotes of your experience to date with the Cloud. 

Early Cloud Investment makes for a Buyers Market

The $250mil HP-Microsoft deal announced a couple weeks ago speaks to how quickly and seriously the big players have converged on the Cloud opportunity.  Literally before the market has even come to understand what 'Cloud' means, we've seen Cloud deals involving many of the top global IT players including Cisco, EMC, VMware, HP and Microsoft.  Only Oracle-Sun is dialing back their cloud investment.

This is different than the uptake around ASPs many years ago.  Small pure-play start-ups like Corio and Jamcracker were prominent in the market for years with little competition from top IT firms, who instead chose to sit out the market wave and acquire ASP capabilities after the bubble burst. This early involvement of larger players means more vendors with capabilities and expected staying power; in effect two Savvis' for every one GoGrid.  So customers don't have to choose between start-ups who "get it" and dinosaurs who don't.

With more investment, sooner, we can expect the life cycle of the category to be similarly accelerated.  It bodes well for customers looking for validation and future-proofing from leading vendors.  It will probably also shake out the smaller players sooner, as they find themselves competing with established tech brands touting seemingly less-risky solutions.  Perceived security and 'trust' will be key aspects of success, especially in the hosted cloud space.

So with more M&A and investment expected relating to the Cloud, take your time before making big investments, plan with an eye towards federating your external Cloud services with your internal data center environment (rather than creating a hodge-podge of cloud silos), and enjoy a developing buyers market in all things Cloud.

Same Cloud Different Day

A useful story on Cloud storage shows a real customer addressing the trade-offs of cloud computing, in this case around EMC Atmos storage. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston is balancing cost, performance, functionality, reliability and security. Despite some new aspects there's a familiarity to this "cloud" scenario: "It's a new buzzword for an old technology. It's up to you to define what it means to you and what it means to your business," said storage architect Michael Passe. Includes a helpful paragraph with key players by category.

Another article addresses this same balancing act, but along the local/remote dimension.  More from a user perspective, it illustrates that the decision to go to the cloud can be a logical one, based on a method of dividing your data into types, along the lines of access, application, performance and security.  In other words, high performance, high priority, high availability apps and data living in Oracle databases and the SAN should stay there.  And for things like archival file data, or less-business critical apps, you should look to the cloud to realize savings.

Speaking of Security, a new study from MIT and UC-San Diego has supposedly uncovered a new class of vulnerabilities in public compute clouds. This may become a bump-in-the-road for the vCloud and Compute-on-demand market.  Or maybe a basis of differentiation.

The cloud space is shaping up to be very similar to the ASP market a decade ago. Customers demanded that providers address all the tradeoffs and shortcomings that arose.  And vendors became squeezed between the cost of meeting these requirements and the slow payback of monthly usage fees.  As time went on, there were a handful of survivors, those that got exits with large IT players, and many more who faded away.  Keep this in mind as you make your Cloud vendor selections.

Having said all this, the outlook looks good for cloud when carriers like AT&T are seeing 35% growth in their network traffic in the midst of a global downturn.  We're all still doing more online, customers and users are expecting more web-based systems and thus, deploying more of your data, applications and compute into 'the cloud' seems logical and inevitable.

Welcome to Cloud Itch

According to Merriam Webster, an Itch is "to have a restless desire or hankering for something." This blog will share updates and insights on the "Cloud Computing" space, as well as my own restless desire to provide some clarity within a really foggy market... clouded mostly by disparate vendor messaging along with some emerging technologies and standards.

A very widely cited report from Berkeley defines cloud computing as having 3 key elements: the illusion of limitless resources, the elimination of upfront commitment, and the ability to pay-per-use. I'd offer these along with a couple other common criteria that help define what Cloud means: services connected-to over a network connection, typically the Internet, and Immediacy or fast-time to-solution.

For many managed service vendors, cloud computing is a circa 1999 ASP offering with new messaging. But there are many others who are incorporating completely virtualized infrastructures, offering new classes of web-based services and in some way delivering innovation that moves the industry forward. I'll do my best to take a moment now and then and share info on this latter group as I run into them during my work.

I'm eager to start this conversation - let's make this an active and mutually beneficial forum on Cloud Computing. Thanks! Mike Harding