You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2009.
The US Federal Government is looking at cloud computing adoption as a way to reduce its annual 70 billion dollar IT budget. Reuven Cohen recently spent some time in Washington DC in conversations with some of the officials who are shaping federal cloud computing policy.
I really enjoyed the blog posting by Lew Moorman, President & CSO at Rackspace, debating the challenges raised by a recent McKinsey report on cloud computing. I love this statement:
Currently businesses spend 75% of their IT budget on maintenance, 25% on strategic activities. The real promise of cloud computing is inverting that equation.
According to Romak Stanek big server vendors like HP, Sun, Dell and Microsoft will be the big losers as services evolve to the clouds. I agree with this thinking expect for the inclusion of Microsoft. The Microsoft folks are busy transitioning their software and licensing model to cloud-based services. And many customers living in infrastructure clouds will still want to utilize a windows operating system.
Here’s a bit of a departure from the clouds. My latest article was published today in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The article describes the security challenges facing employers that are laying off technology employees. I’ve worked with thousands of technology people over the years and the vast majority of them are decent ethical people. Every once in a while you encounter that bad apple. It’s just a fact of life in our business and probably every other business.
I was reading the description for a cloud educational session sponsored by a local development company when I came across this copy:
IT Leaders: You’d prefer to focus on critical data and security issues without the hassle of servers, software licenses, installation, and maintenance; and ultimately you want to be able to scale your infrastructure dynamically as the need arises. The cloud can give you that freedom.
I have to believe this organization was referring to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds like Google Apps, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce Sites vs. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud servers. Because IaaS clouds require a certain level of software installation and system management knowledge. This begs the question: Will IT leaders eventually favor PaaS cloud solutions over IaaS because of perceived management efficiencies? I don’t think so and here’s why:
1. PaaS is the ultimate form of vendor lock-in. If I create a Google application I won’t be able to port it over to Salesforce or Microsoft. I will never be able to walk away from my cloud provider once I’m fully invested.
2. PaaS can’t run 99.999% of the existing software on the planet. My investments in legacy applications and custom code are negated by PaaS clouds. Why would my company rebuild perfectly reliable IT solutions just so that they can work the way a particular PaaS cloud provider wants them to work?
3. My IT resources and expertise will cease to be a competitive advantage if everything runs in a PaaS cloud. And I will only be able to utilize the capabilities that my PaaS platform vendor offers me.
4. PaaS cloud security will never be as transparent as IaaS cloud security. One minute Google is showing your secret documents to the whole world and the next minute they aren’t. All my data is one username and password away from being compromised.
You might get the impression that I don’t like PaaS cloud architectures. Nothing of the sort. I think the PaaS model makes an awful lot of sense for SaaS-based startups and social applications. I don’t think it makes sense for most enterprise IT applications. Tell me why I’m wrong. 
I am presenting a session on cloud computing at the upcoming TechPulse 2009 conference on June 18th at the Minneapolis Hilton hotel. Here is the summary description for my session:
What You Need to Know about Cloud Computing
The move to cloud computing is changing the landscape of IT in significant and far-reaching ways. This quick overview of cloud computing gives you the facts you need, so you can separate the facts from the hype and understand how your company can utilize cloud computing to reduce infrastructure costs while dynamically increasing or decreasing those resources as your needs dictate.
I’m speaking at the Secure360 conference in St. Paul on Wednesday, May 13th. I will discuss cost-effective technologies for disaster recovery architectures. Hopefully session participants will find the topic and the content relevant during this recessionary period.
I stumbled across an interesting open-source cloud computing platform developed by an organization called Abiquobased in Spain. Their abiCloud management platform uses a rich web interface that looks very similar to 3Tera. The current technology is based on the VirtualBox hypervisor that has been so warmly embraced by European organizations. It looks like they plan to support Vmware and Xen in the future. I wonder if this solution will support windows guests. I couldn’t find any details on their website. I know that VirtualBox supports Windows guests so it is likely that this support is possible.
