As the curtain lifts on 2010, issues around adopting and migrating to the cloud continue to hinder take-up. For every customer diving in the deep end, there are many organisations sitting on the edge of the pool, wary of dipping their toes in.
Tending the cloud seeds and nurturing early signs of growth will require channel partners to adopt new business models and skill sets. But the stage is now set for a considerable channel play in the cloud. TREVOR CLARKE reports.
During the early days of technological development, IT was traditionally seen as a nice embellishment to any company's operations, providing any firm with the right push in being competitively advantageous against other companies.
Despite enhancements on both cloud and virtual computing products, major vendors aren't taking into account many of the ways even a technology designed to save IT resources can unintentionally waste them.
Cloud computing. For some, the term is wildly nebulous. Not long ago, even Oracle's Larry Ellison publicly asked what the heck people meant by "the cloud."
There is no doubt that cloud computing is dominating today's IT conversation among C-level security executives. Whether it's due to the compelling cost saving possibilities in a tough economy, or because of perceived advantages in provisioning flexibility, auto-scaling, and on-demand computing, CSOs are probing the capabilities, costs and restrictions of the cloud. At the same time, security and compliance concerns are at the forefront of issues potentially holding large enterprises back from capitalizing on the benefits that cloud computing has to offer.
A venerable New Year's tradition in the tech world entails trotting out year-old predictions by analyst shops and laughing at their off-base prognostications. But here's a surprise: The two biggest analyst firms still standing -- Gartner and IDC -- did a pretty good job a year ago forecasting the shape of IT in 2009, as did the smaller Forrester Research and 451 Group.
A host of substantial problems with porting legacy apps to the cloud will keep most companies from diving in for now, say analysts reporting on weaknesses in the cloud and ISVs trying to fill in the gaps.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to moderate an HP-sponsored meeting on the subject of virtualization. Predictably, most of the discussion (attended by press and vendors including Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware) focused on cloud computing. It was a pretty lively session, but what I want to address here is an HP product portfolio called "IT Financial Management" that was discussed, along with its implications for cloud computing. As you might guess, the product focuses on financial analysis of IT operations, which is extremely relevant to the adoption of cloud computing.
You've probably seen a hundred-or even a thousand-articles criticizing cloud computing Service Level Agreements (SLAs). A common example in those articles is the putatively low Amazon Web Services SLA. Typically authors of these kind of articles go on to cite recent outages by cloud providers, implying (or stating directly) that cloud computing falls woefully short of the true SLA requirements of enterprises, often described as "five nines," i.e., 99.999 per cent availability.
In last week's post, I discussed why dev/test can be a good first use of cloud computing. Without rehashing the entire post, it's clear that dev/test is often hampered in its activities by the difficulty of getting enough computing resources to its job.
When Microsoft's storage service for Sidekick users broke down, cloud computing questions sprang up -- both fair and unfair.
Did you think all those legacy apps would just float up into someone else's cloud infrastructure? Management, licensing and migration concerns highlight the list of troubles that vendors are now trying to address.
Both tech vendors are aiming to change the rules of game for enterprise software. And while they're going about it with two different business models, the companies share some things in common.
Security researchers are warning that Web-based applications are increasing the risk of identity theft or losing personal data more than ever before.
