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The Cloud...

Offers Security. Continuity. Simplicity. Increased performance from the workforce. Flexibility. Control. Compliance andFreedom.

“The future ain't what it used to be.”
– Yogi Berra, baseball legend

This time, the revolution will be televised – on the web, via the Cloud.

The advent of the Internet promised to change every element of life, society, business and the economy on a global scale. The Cloud delivers on all of those promises with the capabilities to realize so much more, so much faster, offering greater advantage over those who cling to ROI models from the nuclear age.

Remember when we thought some companies were too big to fail? Think Nortel, Bear Sterns, Tower Records, Borders Group, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. Market cap is yesterday’s news, time to market is measured in moments and the lights in your rearview mirror may not be that which you expect.

The what and why are easy; it is the how that proves vexing. How you compete against the main competition is an article of faith, but how do you fight off the little guys that now have the resources to look, act and behave as big boys when the financial barriers to entry in your market space suddenly disappear?

It’s a weird world out there. Some of us got our feet wet with Utility Computing, some of us jumped into Grid Computing and unfortunately, the technology was not ready for the concept. And it is a high concept. It changes the paradigm from “what can I do with the existing information technology my company purchased in the past?” to “what do I need to do?” The most modern, patched and optimized IT factor is built in. You are not at the mercy of deferred procurement cycles and shrinking IT budgets.

It’s vexing. Bad information from Grid and Utility Computing is circulating with good information about the Cloud. Marketing speak won’t help, but it seems to have a bullhorn versus the meaningful analysis of the experts. Those who make procurement decisions based on an advertisements usually get what they pay for.

So what does this mean for you?

Take your time (but not too much, Cloud adoption is increasing exponentially – and the leap-frog factor dictates that a tiny competitor, barely a blip on the radar, can easily steal the bacon faster than possible at any point in history). Do your homework. Too many companies are making promises beyond the realm of physics, and the consequences could make you look foolish, or worse.

There are excellent analyst houses that understand the Cloud. Unfortunately, they can provide a guidepost, but not a cookbook specific to the needs of your company. Without the cookbook, choosing the right path is problematic and the potential for the Grid deployment debacle is all too real.

We’ve been here through the fads, the unrealized promises and failures. We’ve also been at the vanguard of testing, breaking, fixing and deploying the newest, underlying technologies that enable the Cloud for customers for more than 25 years. Our customers include service providers, enterprises of all stripes, heavily-regulated industries and three-letter U.S. Government departments and agencies (some of which may not officially exist).

Do yourself a favor, kick the tires. Pull some information from the Internet. Buy an analyst report or get an hour on the phone with one. But when all is said and done, give us a call and get a reality check and determine what specifics will be required to maximize your investment, thrill your end users and drive productivity through the roof.

After all, when the barrier to entry in your market disappears, the game changes from Chess to Chinese Checkers. Your competitive landscape now has domestic, foreign and even third world participants you never saw coming. If you can’t know what you don’t know, talk to someone in the very thick of advising, consulting, customizing and deploying Cloud Solutions with the industry’s best providers, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle and Cisco, to name a few.

Lightning in a Bottle

The Cloud is a paradigm shift. It changes the way we operate – the way we share and process information. It changes how humans interact, collaborate, cooperate and reach for the sky. Does old, inflexible information technology stymie operational work flow? You know it does. Bet on the wrong horse in an operational setting and everyone loses. Free the workforce to collaborate by their preferred medium and you will have freed them from the shackles whereby the medium stifles interaction. Productivity skyrockets.

Behavioral and operational advantages aside, Cloud technology is a new milestone in computing. It is disruptive, but the stakes for introducing new, bleeding-edge technologies into the infrastructure have never been lower and the price of a bad choice is mere pennies on the dollar compared to being a career-ender.

The foundation of the Cloud is virtualization. Virtualization can bring all of your IT assets to bear on a previously-unavailable scale, enable lean data center crews to manage the increasing reliance on automated operations and provisioning. Without it, the dream of smooth, predictable operations will become a nightmare of complexity and if remediation efforts are less than stellar, could put you in a worse situation than if you ventured nothing.

But it is a technology, as virtualization provides the foundation for the Cloud, but it isn’t the Cloud.

It's a given that latency-intolerant traffic is skyrocketing. The steadily-increasing reliance on always-on applications, such as video, collaboration and telephony require greater resources. That used to be remedied with more bandwidth, but bandwidth is not infinite, nor inexpensive, nor does it ensure the performance required for real-time media to eliminate latency and jitter.

Adding more boxes is a stop-gap. The result is inevitably data center sprawl, complete with power-sucking, real-estate and IT staff to manage it all.

In terms of the technical definition of the Cloud, that’s a bit esoteric. However, the business definition isn’t, and it is compelling: the Cloud is IT that someone else runs for you.

Security is a bugbear for CIOs. Each day, news stories reveal companies and government agencies that have lost sensitive data. Can anyone be completely certain all the holes are plugged in their infrastructure? This is one of the biggest draws of going to the Cloud, all patches, all security updates, all elements of powerful security are there, and are meticulously maintained.

But data isn’t in a server that can be stolen or hacked into. It is literally in cyber space. Even if someone could potentially extract an element of the data they seek by blind luck, they would be able to intercept little more than a lonely packet, fortified with encryption and offering precious little information.

It is that the power of virtualization that enables us to take the next step in IT. However, the real revolution isn’t in how your data is handled, delivered and stored – it is in the very real break from the physical world in terms of our communication and computing needs.

True Mobility

The Road Warrior. If you’re one, you know the challenges that are the stuff of nightmares. You can’t have the capabilities afforded the medium without the medium. That used to be the case. Mobility meant we have computers we could carry, telephones with more intelligence than our PCs.

For all that freedom and unconstrained computing, there have proven to be horrible mistakes that have cost organizations their credibility and untold millions of dollars in the mad scramble to fix the situation. Lost credit card data, personal health data, banking information, government secrets and competitive as well as proprietary information have been recently compromised. Sessions were left open on public computers, bad security practices and lost computers were the overwhelming culprits.

Is that true mobility? Sounds more like a tethered version of locked-down, no mobility. Think of your people running faster, working more efficiently and comfortably. Think of your data and applications. No more subservient to the old-school client-server construct, virtual data is the free-range information that lives everywhere you need it, but nowhere where the bad guys can find.

The next step in virtualization is the end-game. Virtualized Desktop Integration can free organizations of the shackles and shortcomings of the physical media. What if you could take it all with you? The desktop of your PC. Access to the specific applications, generic or custom, in-house at your fingertips. No laptop to lug or lose. A PC at the hotel Business Center anywhere in the world. Your phone. An Internet Café. The choice is yours. The medium is of your choosing.

The power of VDI is that it keeps the desktop and storage content of the personal computer, as well as the centrally-served applications that are user-agnostic, all within the data center. Nothing is reliant on the hard drive of a personal computer – you don’t even need a PC!

Maybe some workers prefer their iPads to the company notebook, or a netbook or even a smart phone. No big deal, they summon their information from the network, customized to their look and feel, do their business and they’re done. Literally. The session no longer exists anywhere outside of the walls of you data center infrastructure.

Accounting for mobile user-error security incidents, the rate approaches zero quickly, simply because there is no back-door to open in the end-user device and the stateless nature of operations means there is no connection to house whatever nasty network surprises may lurk.

Stripping the processing out of the end device means more intelligence must be provided by the infrastructure. This is the power of VDI.

Researchers, for example, often have wildly varying demands for their compute environment. By not being locked into a specific machine or a specific pool of resources, they may instead access what they need for their specific activity. Maybe it’s minimal resources for research, more for design and a great deal for simulation and modeling. Rather than reconfigure their allocation of resources (which make them and reasonable bandwidth no longer available for other applications and network users), virtual resources can be added on the fly – with no network downtime and other operational difficulties.

Of greater importance is the enterprise with multi sites, maybe campus-size, maybe much smaller. The ability to remotely fix and resolve issues on the user’s PC without the time, security concerns and expense of mail-ins or contracting with local computer repair businesses is a huge benefit. Being able to update the entire install base in a snap and ensuring that no users are operating out-of-bounds is of particular importance.

Virtual Desktop Integration solutions mean you’ll have access to whatever you need, infrastructure, software, platforms, storage – all with the highest level of assured security, mobility and continuity, but without the pain and hit-or-miss nature of network administration.

Flavors of Cloud

The all-in model isn’t expected to reach the adoption levels at which it will eventually plateau for a number of years. Industry analysts that usually disagree all agree that 80 percent of entities (enterprises, agencies, non-profits, government – any company that fits this demographic) are balking at adoption because of security concerns.

Most of them and many of the others are also tied to their previous network investment and have great reservations about swapping horses in mid-stream, especially when their current horse works just fine. Many will take baby steps into the cloud, outsourcing commodity applications, such as e-mail and non-sensitive administrative data.

Other companies, especially those that deferred data center investments, will more quickly move to the cloud, especially as years of economic belt-tightening have yielded uncertainty about the condition of the data center. A number of enterprise customers across all verticals privately concede that they aren’t certain about a number of critical factors related to their data, the lifeblood of any organization.

The economic model makes it a no-brainer. The capital and operational expenditures to upgrade ill-maintained the data center is prohibitive. It is a steak dinner for someone who doesn’t like nor can afford steak. Going to buffet to select exactly what you want and how much, and paying only for what you consume is much more attractive.

The Cloud comes in three flavors:

Private – the infrastructure is designed to solely serve an organization. It may be hosted or in-house, and may have distributed centers.

Public – A service provider, such as Amazon Web Services, sells services to entities, most often with a wide-array of options for service delivery, usage and bandwidth, for example. Options enable customers to select what services they require, such as platform, infrastructure, applications and software delivery.

Hybrid – This represents the best option for companies seeking to take advantage of the Cloud while continuing to employ their install base. The in-house Private Cloud is connected and interacts with the Public Cloud, but remains distinct. Data and application portability can be open-stand or proprietary, according to the desire of the customer.

The private Cloud is the best option for most companies that require absolute control over data, have myriad customized applications and have built a solid infrastructure may decide not to use an external Cloud provider. Faced with the understanding of the Cloud’s compelling model, efficiency, security and elasticity; using virtualization to maximize the performance (and investment) of the network is certainly worth investigating.

Is virtualization a simply overlay? No! It is a fundamentally different way of using network assets, such that a single server can act as ten, processing in ten operating systems across virtual local area networks, each segmented for functional, security, application or whatever methodology is right for your organization.

Virtualized storage and caching make information retrieval not only optimized for speed to the end-user, regardless of their physical location, but provides iron-clad security as well. Perhaps it isn’t common knowledge, but encrypted packets in a virtualized environment might as well be invisible.

Creating the Private Cloud may prove much more palatable for companies that loath the risk of being early-adopters when the stakes are high. Those with a solid virtualized infrastructure, utilizing automated provisioning, management and orchestration, have already proved the concept of the Cloud with their infrastructure.

While the hybrid model sounds like the most simple, it is not. A thorough audit and understanding of each element of the data center, user demand, anticipated growth and myriad factors must be taken into account. At the same time, a holistic view of requirements and capabilities (such as for the hosting of proprietary applications) must be compiled for the Cloud service provider for your efforts to met with success.

That’s complicated, if done properly. The fact is, few enterprises are able to strike meaningful relationships with service providers, and some providers won’t work directly with end-customers because of the complexity and frustration. They prefer to certify qualified network experts to serve as the reseller. Some service providers have candidly expressed frustration that a high proportion of end-customers think they know their network topography, but in fact, do not.

Is the Cloud for You?

Yes. In a few years, we’ll look back and laugh at how we compute and access data today. There are security concerns. National Security, Defense, Public Safety, Healthcare, Finance – all were considered least likely candidates to adopt the cloud model.

That has changed. Super-critical data, the “crown jewels,” will stay within the virtual walls, but a significant majority of administrative, non-secure, and operationally-insignificant data can be hosted safely by the Cloud. To underscore the implied trust of the security, President Barak Obama mandated Cloud adoption for Government agencies, and is slashing more than 40 percent of the Government’s data centers.

Once the perception hurdle of security is diminished, the real attributes of the Cloud will be realized. Yes, we’ve all been burned by “Swiss Army Knives” and “God Boxes” that promise to be all things to all people and ends up being an unacceptable compromise to all customers. Is the Cloud the next big “Swiss Army Knife?”

Maybe. It depends on what you need.

Infrastructure as a Service. Sometimes it really is your virtual plumbing, groomed and maintained as you like. You can service and configure each of your virtual servers, switches, routers, appliances, etc., as if they were in your data center, only much faster. A simple hypervisor allows you to chart your own desiny, or part of it, such as leaving the security and patching posture to your service provider. It also provides a composable reality model to determine what the generation after the next generation of data centers may look like, as well as to experiment without cost and risk.

Platform as a Service. Focused on building a step forward for developers and users, the platform as a service structure changes the calculus on applications. No longer is life-cycle applicable. It’s all about the applications. The ability to access best-of-breed applications, tuned to your specific applications is one facet. Another is being able to develop critical applications with ed-user colleagues regardless of their location and to test their utility in real-time. More importantly, it allows for the application to be pulled back, analyzed and improvements to made, not as bolt-on solutions, but for solid, foundational applications. The loop is as continuous as the evolution of applications.

Software as a Service. On-demand software, as much as you need, when you need it. Think of all of the non-customized, commodity software applications that drive your business. Think of the royal pain it is for your IT team to manage, optimize, patch, upgrade to newer versions and fix when the dam breaks. Offload it all to the Cloud. CRM, ERP, Human Resource tools, these need not sit idle in your data center until needed. Most importantly, by relying on the Cloud, you can ensure that everyone is literally working from the same page, eliminating pockets of the functionally-challenged when they end up with a previous version from the rest of the team.

The Inevitable Disruption

It’s coming. Easy street or skid row, change is the only constant, but the pace is skyrocketing. Consider that the number of network users will increase. Each will impact the network as high-bandwidth operations and applications increase. The days of throwing bandwidth at the problem are gone.

Does it make sense to keep investing money into products that will degrade with age? Self-induced data infrastructure sprawl and all its baggage will yield to disruption on a grand scale, hopefully in terms of degradation and not catastrophic systems failure.

Does it make sense to migrate to an infrastructure that has no expiration date (not for you, anyway)? The migration route offers the path of least resistance, the ability to plan for the resources you need and to get them when you need them. IT projections (notoriously hit-or-miss) may accurately plan for future needs and budget accordingly. Those with faulty assumptions will pay a steep price.

In the Cloud, capabilities and capacity can be added in a blink. If the IT projection was mistaken, those capabilities can be made to vanish, without the pain of procurement, installation, configuration, maintenance, etc.

Essentially, it gives you the power to experiment and the price of failure is infinitesimal. Think phone call versus network downtime and truck-roll.

Business Continuity

The simple fact is that bad stuff happens. Buildings burn and cities flood. Too many enterprises learned too late that keeping their data in one location created a single point of failure. Some lose ground in the competitive landscape that cannot be recovered, others just die. Maintaining multiple data centers is expensive and out of reach of many enterprises.

That’s a key advantage of the Cloud. Good Cloud Service Providers maintain a global presence, which ensures your data will be beyond the reach of regional calamities. Also of critical importance, it means that those who rely on the network will enjoy the best possible capabilities for real-time applications, regardless of location. Bound by the laws of physics, such capabilities are not feasible for someone accessing a lone data center from half-way around the globe.

Leverage Cloud Expertise

Anytime, anywhere on any device – that’s how we communicate in the modern world. That’s how we should communicate in the modern world. In the final analysis, a business should be focused on business, and not on ameliorating communication headaches.

Cloud services enable rich capabilities that, until recently, exceeded the financial reach of many companies. Using critical applications, such as sales force applications, all who need to know, anytime, anywhere on any device can access the information they need, seamlessly.

What could be done to beef up your business if there was no up-front investment in installation, deployment and maintenance? What if you could extend the functionality of your data infrastructure globally? What if you could change your mind, your architecture and your business strategy in real-time?

You can.

The road seems clear, but it is fraught with the bleached bones on the side of the road of businesses, large and small, that failed to understand what the Cloud is and what it means to them, specifically. Very specifically what it means to them.

It’s all about choices and decisions. Take the wrong turn and you’re the company goat, a cautionary tale. Find the right path, and you will be anointed the chosen one.

Give us a call.

Pretty words and smart advertising campaigns mean nothing if your reality is that what you thought you were getting wasn’t exactly what you were getting.

Prudent network planners will be watching this space closely. They know that a technology company that can draw from multiple sources derives no benefit from trying to shoehorn a customer into something that doesn’t fit.

We have no vested interest in anything save delivering the best possible, tailored solutions for our customers.

The revolution is upon us. You can do nothing (and hope your reward isn’t a mushroom cloud), you can do something (test the Cloud waters and pray for a silver lining) or do the right thing with a trusted partner, a Cloud Sherpa, and realize Cloud Nine for your business!

Consider this Cloud Advantage: Salesforce.com’s VP of Technical Operations Frank Guerrera is responsible for the delivery of more than 240,000 applications globally in a distributed Cloud model. Without the Cloud, he publicly estimates that some 2,000,000 dedicated servers would be required to meet demand. Using the Cloud – Salesforce.com is able to deliver the goods with a mere 3,000 servers across seven locations.

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