Cloud Computing Blog

Seeing Through the Clouds

Bill Ahlstrom — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:47:00 GMT

From the opening moments of the plenary session when the audience dubbed cloud services as their top interest, the focus of this year’s TM Forum Management World Conference in Orlando was clear: Service providers and their suppliers are moving rapidly to understand how to apply the cloud to their businesses and monetize the resultant services.

In May, at TMWorld in Nice, attendees were skeptical of cloud hype. In Orlando, the pace of experimentation was apparent and a flurry of announcements confirmed that SPs are rapidly becoming cloud services providers. Google and Amazon have been joined by substantial AT&T and Verizon offerings, with more sure to announced soon.

As a result of these sorts of offerings, experiments range from using external public clouds for application dev/test and data storage to private clouds for on-demand services for the full range of internal IT needs. And while everyone is talking about hybrid clouds that link internal and external cloud environments, a few (my company, CA among them) are actually doing that.

Nonetheless, the accelerating hype breeds skepticism.

Providers and their potential customers are still not clear about how rapidly cloud services will become mainstream. There is clearly an adoption cycle that reflects maturity both of the offerings and of the ability of individual users to successfully take advantage of them. Almost everyone is still experimenting. (The single largest exception may be startup companies that have flooded to cloud computing offerings to avoid creating internal IT staffs and compute capacity, who have adopted cloud-based services such as salesforce.com or cloud-based HR and financial services -- enabling them to avoid “overhead costs” that divert scare capital away from product development, sales and marketing. Extinct is the VC who will allow a young company to spend on building its own data center for development and operations.)

Even as experimentation accelerates, and before large-scale deployments actually occur, most observers as well as cloud providers agree with an emerging consensus that the typical cloud deployment will be a hybrid model. As cloud users build out their internal virtualized data centers and provide on-demand services for their internal users, they will rely on external clouds to cover peak demands. Obvious examples cited in numerous presentations were: retailers and e-tailers that need extra capacity on Black Friday and Cyber Monday at the start of the holiday shopping season. But all IT users have such peaks – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually -- regardless of reasons. And CFOs and CIOs are saying: Why build for the peaks and leave much of the capacity idle or underused for the majority of the time when we can purchase what we need when we need it from external suppliers? “Just in case” thinking about IT capacity has shifted to “just in time” models – as it has in so many other areas of business operations.

But many presenters said the peak-demand based hybrid would rapidly evolve into an on-going hybrid where more and more IT departments would rely on external cloud providers for continuing support of non-core functions, such as data conversion and storage, as well as peak-load compute power.

This will create a permanent link between internal private clouds and external public clouds, where the boundaries of the traditional IT environment are stretched and blurred, creating new and interesting challenges for the traditional IT management and security disciplines.

While security in its many facets remains a major concern, opinion appears to be moving toward a consensus that security of access to and of data in cloud environments will be “at least as good” as in private data centers. Some find this comforting---others scary.

SPs who have rolled out various early cloud services offerings are already hearing from their initial customers that they expect to be able to use the same management and security policies and systems and ITIL processes in hybrid cloud environments as they use internally or in private clouds. They want the same levels of visibility and control over “their resources” as they are used to in internal IT and network operations. They expect their tried and true methods to extend seamlessly into the hybrid cloud. It is yet to be seen if they will be more tolerant of variations in managing “just-in-time” capacity from a public cloud.

Conversations in the hallways as well as in panels swirled around how SPs can differentiate their cloud offerings. Two answers appear to be emerging: Cloud services providers will specialize on what services they actually offer and will back them with demonstrable brand value; and they will differentiate the quality of the offered services by the quality of management and security they provide to their customers --- both in reporting validation of SLAs, and in actual visibility and control. But these are very early days and the conversations are still very speculative.

A key initiative to help accelerate adoption of cloud services was announced by TMForum in Orlando. Drawing together major technology and services providers with a core group of major enterprise customers who form the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council, the TMForum cloud initiative also draws in other industry organizations including the DMTF and itSMF. Founding members include AT&T,BT, Telecom Italia, and Telstra, CA, EMC, HP, IBM and Microsoft, Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks. The charter is to accelerate commercial availability and adoption of secure and managed cloud services.

So, while cloud hype clearly remains, it no longer dominates. Real, demonstrable, substantial projects are underway and global companies are making significant cloud-based services available in the marketplace. One can’t help but wonder where all this will be at the TMForum conference in Nice in May 2010.

A Cloud by Any Other Name

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:28:00 GMT

Most of us have had the experience of travelling to acountry where we can’t speak the language and trying to function. Except for a few words like “please,”“thank you” and “where is a restaurant” we are filled with a mix of excitement, uncertainly and confusion.

That pretty much sums up where users are with respect tocloud computing services these days. The brochure looks great but what’s the reality? And while there the list ofuncertainties and questions is lengthy, one of the most basic issues is that of language.

Today, the marketplace is filled with a baffling array ofterms such as public cloud, private cloud, internal and external clouds, hybrid clouds and on and on. And for the most part, everyone defines these terms a little differently – sometimes to suit their own purposes. Sometimes to obscure reality.

Within each of these terms are other names for various products and services. And company A may not use a particular name the same way as company B. In other words, ‘a rose is not a rose by any other name.’ This makes it impossible for a user to make a fair and honest comparison when trying to procure a given cloud service.

This is one of the first problems the TM Forum’s Cloud Initiative will solve. Starting with our soon to be announced buyers council, we will set out to define a consistent set of product and service definitions so users can compare offerings and make intelligent buying decisions.

In parallel with this activity, our Cloud9 Service Model Catalyst demonstration at Management World America is working to incorporate those common definitions into an Active Catalog environment so help automate the ordering, provisioning and delivery processes for Cloud Service Providers.

This is a very exciting time in the cloud space and TM Forum is poised to make a major announcement at Management World Orlando.

I’ve been with TM Forum since its inception and been a part of countless press announcements. Trust me – you don’t want to miss this one.

Clouds - Where Should Users Start

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:27:00 GMT

Any discussion of cloud computing has to acknowledge that on one hand, it holds huge promise while on the other hand, is possibly the most over-hyped technology trend to come down the pike in many a year.

That aside, the potential to save costs and gain flexibility in offering new services is compelling. And between those two,my advice is to make the business case on the new service flexibility aspectsas most new technologies that promise significant costs savings end up not delivering on that promise because of unanticipated hidden costs or simple over-estimation.

As far as guidance,like any transformation endeavor, the TM Forum recommends starting with a thorough examination of the business processes that support the strategic aimsof the company. This allows you tore-design the key processes needed to achieve the desired levels of efficiency,flexibility, time-to-market, customer service and profitability. From there, one can decide what sortsof systems and applications are needed to support those processes and whether these are best delivered via a cloud-based environment or not.

Cloud Security

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:26:00 GMT

Was thumbing through a past issue of Network World and came upon a very good perspective on Cloud Computing.

http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2009/091509antonopoulos.html

LA, Google and what to expect

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:25:00 GMT

By now, most everyone has heard the the City of LA has decided to replace much of it's Microsoft and Novell apps with Google Apps.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/telecoms/article6894607.ece

While much of the talk has has centered around GMail, the deal in fact is much broader and encompasses all of the Google Apps that compete with Office and Novell's GroupWise.

The most obvious issues involve security and quality of service and it's interesting to note that an agreement on penalties should a security breach occur has been added to the contract. But we've had penalties for SLAs for decades so this isn't anything new.

Of greater concern is should a breach happen, what will this do to confidence in the market for cloud services? The recent outage with Sidekick caused a huge stir but frankly, that's nothing compared to someone getting access to Financial files, Law Enforcement records or just email from the City Council or Mayor's office.

I hope we aren't running before we can walk but would like to hear other's opinions on this.

Internal Clouds - peeling the onion

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:24:00 GMT

A new term has cropped up - Internal Cloud - which replaces the term Private Cloud. But whatever you call it, users are still peeling away the layers of the onion to understand exactly what a cloud environment means in terms of IT capabilities as well as benefits for users.

As expected, it's a lot more complex than just hosting a virtual machine on a server and sooner or later, we have to start being more specific about what a cloud service is and what it isn't (today, almost every online/web service is being called a cloud service and that's just going to add to the confusion and potentially stall or derial a very promising technology.

For more - read: https://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/101409-internal-clouds.html

Making the case for Open APIs

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:23:00 GMT

I defy anyone to read this and tell me the author isn't 10001% right. Go on - I dare you!

http://telephonyonline.com/home/commentary/mobile-data-network-expansion-0908/

Cloud Computing: Taking an Holistic View

Martin Creaner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:16:00 GMT

The speed at which Cloud computing has planted its feet firmly in the center stage of the IT and Communications world is quite interesting. It's not a technology play - in fact I would be hard pushed to identify a single piece of new technology that is fundamental to cloud. And unlike Twitter or Facebook it's not a social-psychology phenomenom in any real sense - there is no "man-in-the-street' movement that is driving the uptake or need for cloud computing. It is one of those rare beasts - a practical, common-sense driven initiative.

Putting it simply, cloud computing makes much more efficient use of resources. In the early stages these resources are essentially processing power and storage, but increasingly the focus of cloud will converge on efficient use of software resources from a bewildering array of sources. The concept of a user being able to gain access to and pay for these resources on a per-use basis makes great economic sense for everyone from the lone mobile game developer in his garage, to the uber-large scale financial institution. It also happens to be industry changing. Unless someone spots a fatal flaw with the concept, over the next ten years we will move from a predominantly distributed computing and storage world, to a centralised computing and storage world. Conspiracy theorists and thriller writers may make hay from this global IT shift, but I don't see fear stopping this happen. Major investment in new levels of security are inevitable, and I do predict that cloud's road to success will hit the odd pothole around the area of security, but I don't see this stopping the party.

What makes cloud so interesting is that every one of the global vertical industries (Telecoms, Financials, Retail, etc) has to have two conversations about the cloud - firstly how do we become a cloud user to enable more efficient operations; secondly, how do we leverage our existing platform assets to become a cloud provider. Telco's in particular are questioning how do they shift their own business models to allow them to emerge as one of the winners in the new cloud world. They are looking at everything from opening up their own data centers to host other third parties, to (more realistically I believe) opening up their own 'crown jewel' applications such as billing and service management applications.

So if you are not yet discussing cloud in your business, now is the time to start.

Sitting on Cloud Nine: How Cloud Computing Will Change Communications as We Know It

Martin Creaner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:15:00 GMT

Over the past year or so, cloud computing has become all the rage. Everyone is talking about it as the next great hope for the IT industry in general and communications in particular. But I have to wonder if those who see cloud computing as a sort of miracle worker really know what it is. If you ask 10 people to supply a definition of cloud computing, you’ll likely get 10 divergent responses.

But first things first – cloud computing is not a technology play - in fact I would be hard-pressed to identify a single piece of new technology that is fundamental to cloud. And unlike Twitter or Facebook, it's not a social-psychology phenomenon in any real sense - there is no “man-in-the-street” movement that is driving the uptake or need for cloud computing. It is one of those rare beasts - a practical, common sense driven initiative.

Putting it simply, cloud computing makes much more efficient use of resources. In the early stages, these resources are essentially processing power and storage, but increasingly the focus of cloud will converge on efficient use of software resources from a bewildering array of sources. The concept of a user being able to gain access to, and pay for, these resources on a per-use basis makes great economic sense for everyone from the lone mobile game developer in his garage, to the uber-large scale financial institution. It also happens to be industry changing. Unless someone spots a fatal flaw with the concept, over the next 10 years we will move from a predominantly distributed computing and storage world to a centralized computing and storage world.

What makes cloud so very interesting is that every one of the global vertical industries (Telecom, Financial, Retail, etc.) has to have two conversations about the cloud – first, how do we become a cloud user to enable more efficient operations; second, how do we leverage our existing platform assets to become a cloud provider?

It’s About the Bottom Line

The best way to understand the force behind cloud computing and make it accessible to the masses is to talk about it in purely financial terms. Let’s say you’re a developer in a large communications company, and you want to launch a new project. You’d probably have to sit down and write out a purchase requisition to buy the new hardware and software. That will go through the approval cycle, and once it’s been signed off, you’re probably looking at a 6-12 week order timeframe. So all told you’ve been delayed about 3 to 4 months before your project can really get off the ground.

By contrast, in the world of cloud computing, you’d log on to something like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and purchase capacity for a few cents or dollars an hour. Instead of spending $30,000 or more on hardware and software – to say nothing of being delayed by weeks or even months – you can be up and running instantly and with a completed solution for a few hundred dollars in infrastructure cost. This is the propaganda anyway from the cloud suppliers, and it is a reasonably credible argument.

From the point of view of an IT department within a large service provider, this is a stunningly brilliant idea. It gives them the flexibility they need and takes away the pain of maintaining the infrastructure. Instead, the entire infrastructure resides with a third party who is getting huge economies of scale.

Amazon has very publicly run with this concept, and undoubtedly we’ll see many other giant players such as Google, Cisco, IBM, Juniper and Sun making a big splash in this world. With their access to hardware and/or data centers, they won’t have any trouble scaling this type of environment and offering it at an attractive price. This is the concept known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

But the cloud vision also embraces Platform as a Service (PaaS), and the long established Software as a Service (SaaS). In these two scenarios, we have companies offering either a comprehensive solution stack as a service – referred to as PaaS; or online use of discrete software applications on a per-use basis – referred to as SaaS.

So a model like this makes a lot of sense, but there’s always a downside, isn’t there? I’d say one of the biggest concerns people have with cloud computing is security. I’m not questioning the cloud providers’ ability to shore up their infrastructure and platforms; rather whether potential customers genuinely trust them enough to put their mission-critical data in there where they may or may not be able to touch it when they most need it.

It’s an irrational fear…but a fear nonetheless. To counter this, I expect a lot of companies are eyeing opportunities for security overlays on top of the public cloud. There’s also a movement toward private clouds, where a big corporation might build its own cloud where hundreds or thousands of employees can plug into it. This would certainly alleviate any fears of losing control of your data or processes.

Clouds: The Great Communications Savior?

Communications companies in particular are questioning how they shift their own business models to allow them to emerge as one of the winners in the new cloud world. They are looking at everything from opening up their own data centers to hosting other third parties, to (more realistically I believe) opening up their own “crown jewel” applications and offering them in a “Platform as a Service” fashion.

For example, a service provider might expose their billing system as a third-party service in the cloud. Customers would be able to pay a fee on a per-transaction or other revenue sharing basis and plug into the billing system. Other opportunities surround their service delivery systems, their location systems and so on.

This goes back to the idea of a “two-sided” business model that TM Forum has been talking about for the past year, where traditional communications companies morph from only delivering services to end users downstream to also opening up their core capabilities and offering them to upstream customers. In this case, the services would be offered through the cloud.

Now whether any service provider is doing this today is another matter entirely. It’s certainly something they are talking about, but it’s not a trivial task to take your formerly internal systems and reconfigure them so they are suitable for consumption by the outside world. Risk and scalability are the two key watchwords here. On one hand, they could make the significant investment to open up their typically closed internal systems only to find that there is no market for such a platform. On the other hand, they could find the service is a resounding success and realize that they just can’t handle the global scale that cloud services imply.

At TM Forum, we’re in a great position to help providers who want to reach for the cloud. Our Service Delivery Framework feeds very strongly into enabling providers to manage their environments so they can open up their interfaces and expose their services in a cloud setting. We’ve also got our IPsphere program, which is all about creating federated services from multiple providers in a cloud. Our Information Framework (SID) and our SOA-based Solution Frameworks (NGOSS) architecture is the underpinning for the expansion of communications companies into the cloud. This and many more of our cloud initiatives (and those of our member companies) will be showcased at our Management World Americas event in Orlando this December.

We may still be a ways from pervasive cloud computing, but I’m confident that the cost savings, time-to-market and other advantages of this kind of infrastructure will get communication companies to see cloud computing as a mainstream challenge and opportunity for their enterprise. So if you’re not discussing this within your company, now is the time to start!

How Secure is the Cloud?

Martin Creaner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:14:00 GMT

It should come as no surprise that security is the 800-pound gorilla in the room of cloud services for the larger companies. I wrote a few months ago (Cloud Computing: Taking an Holistic View) that the only way I could see public cloud failing is if there was a big security scare. True to form, at the recent Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, a number of security researchers demonstrated new ways of attacking cloud computing services. Claims were made about how to hack through Amazon's cloud infrastructure, Apple's MobileMe service, and Salesforce.com's cloud platform.

Of course external hacking is only one of the 'security' concerns. Other concerns related to fears about

· all your eggs being in one basket and the provider internal processes being either inadequate or suffering a catastrophic failure which damages or loses your data irreparably

· Putting too much trust in the applications already created within existing cloud infrastructures – many of which have been created by unrelated third parties.

· Lack of encryption in some of the cloud environments. Seemingly encryption in a virtual environment is somehow more difficult than encryption in a dedicated environment – I’ll leave that up to the mathematicians to explain!

Whether any of these concerns stand up to serious scrutiny is unknown, but the key point as far as I’m concerned is that perception is reality in this sort of new trust based industry. If people believe public cloud to be insecure, then ..... watch this space !