Cloud Requires Business & IT teams to be in sync

In cloud, what would you think it be the most disastrous step for an organization? Well, the business leader not being in sync with the IT team while investing on new technology has burnt many a company. Often the CIOs see (or presume) a business need in a new technology, and invests on the services and features. And then once the hiccups start, the CIO approaches the IT team to support and manage the ‘presumed’ business critical application/solution.

These has happened quite a number of times in the recent past. And Cloud being at a nascent stage, we will see more of such incidents. So it imperative for the business and IT teams to work together and chart out the approach to Cloud adoption in a more matured way.

2012 Cloud Predictions by James Staten of Forrestor

Stumbled upon an rather interesting write-up by James Staten of Forrestor: Top 10 Cloud Predictions For 2012: The Awkward Teenage Years Are Upon Us.

He predicts:

1. Shadow IT enters the light – deal with it.
2. The uncool attempting to be cool – not cool.
3. A risky idea lands a big fish in jail.
4. Conservative leaders ban the cloud as unhealthy.
5. The channel will face the music – reselling isn’t good enough anymore.
6. Cloud cred will matter.
7. Cloud battles will showcase talent and advance best practices.
8. Monkeys will go legit.
9. Your company will survive a major cloud outage.
10. You will finally have to budget for public cloud spend.

Read the article for a great insight.

Oracle Wins the Washies

This post is in continuation of my earlier post, Washies for the Worst Cloud Vendor.

The best cloud Washies awardees take a bow. Appirio announced and toasted the winners of in a fun filled ceremony. As per a blog post by Narinder Singh of Appirio, the 2011 winners are:

• The biggest overall cloud washer - Oracle: This mega-vendor couldn’t utter the word “cloud” without some kind of skeptical comment until recently, at which time they jumped wholeheartedly on the bandwagon.
• The worst case of cloud washed advertising - Microsoft: “To the cloud!” During a television commercial staged with two people bored at an airport, the world saw this company introduce “the cloud” to consumers. Until then it was simply known as “the Internet.” While Microsoft does have some legit cloud solutions in their portfolio, these and their other TV commercials handed them the win in this category.
• The most cloud washed statement - Larry Ellison and Oracle: This one was a toss-up, but ultimately, Oracle’s Larry Ellison edged out the competition with his past Churchill Club sound bite, "...we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do.”
• The biggest personal cloud washer - Larry Ellison: This was a controversial category that perhaps rightly so raised the ire of some of the nominees, but we have to give the award to Larry. We were a bit surprised that one of the nominees launched a social media campaign to win the award, and had he not set up a bot to auto vote for himself, he may have taken home the prize. But it wouldn’t be right to reward a cheater and, in hindsight, he probably didn’t deserve to be nominated to this category in the first place, so Larry Ellison earned himself his second award of the night.
• The most enthusiastic use of the word cloud - salesforce.com: Love for the cloud can sometimes lead to excessive use of the word and other over the top behavior - even among true cloud companies. We freely admit that Appirio often sits in that camp - everything we touch seems to be incomplete without a cloud image. However, salesforce.com edged us out for this category win. Given their strong voice in cloud advocacy, we respectfully accept defeat.

You can read the whole post here. Enjoy the fun!!

 

Washies for the Worst Cloud Vendors

14th Dec will be announcement of this year's Washies, annual award given to the worst offenders of painting over traditional IT technology with the word cloud, even though it offers little-to-none of the benefits that cloud computing brings to be announced. Similar to the Razzies, the Cloud Washies Ceremony is to make harmless fun and tease the cloud vendors, and just to say " What were they thinking?"

I will update you tomorrow with Washies Winners.For the time being read the excellent write-up in Information Week -- 5 Worst Cloud Washers Of 2011. The write appropriately points out, "Many vendors want to be cloud vendors. The cloud has come to connote flexibility, scalability, and economy of scale. Wouldn't you want those attributes to be on your side when you're trying to make the sale? There's just one problem. Despite the fact that some parts of the cloud are loosely defined, not everybody is bringing products to market worthy of the name "cloud." As a matter of fact, there's a lot of cloud washing--renaming existing products, after a few tweaks, with the word cloud insert.

Amazon S3 & Azure are top Cloud Storage Providers - Nasuni

The Cloud storage industry is booming. Although it’s still at a nascent stage, large organizations across the world depend on the cloud storage companies to securely store their data and access them whenever and wherever required. But it is always a difficult task to decide which cloud storage provider you should select. Nasuni, the enterprise storage company, recently came out with a report titled State of Cloud Storage Providers Industry.

 

Interestingly, only 6 of the 16 providers (that were part of the rigorous test) could pass Nasuni’s testing.

 

• Amazon S3
• Microsoft Azure
• AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service
• Nirvanix
• Peer1 Hosting
• Rackspace Cloud

As per the report, “Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure were clearly the standouts, with Amazon S3 offering the best overall results. Though Nirvanix was faster than Amazon S3 for large files, and Microsoft Azure was slightly faster when it comes to writing files, no other vendor posted the kind of consistently fast service across all file types as did Amazon S3. Amazon S3 had the fewest outages and best uptime, and was the only CSP to post a 0.0% error rate in both writing and reading objects. And though Microsoft Azure had a slightly faster average ping time than Amazon S3 (likely because Amazon S3 is much more heavily used than Microsoft Azure), Amazon nevertheless had the lowest variability”.

 

You can click here, to read the whole report.

Video in the Cloud

Cloud is rapidly catching on the consumeristic atttitude. Earlier seen largely as a B2B solution, it has emerged as a great C2C & P2P application -- thanks to songs and photo storing/sharing need of the consumers. Now with a perfect belnd of the power of social media and cloud, a new company called WeVideo (http://www.wevideo.com/) has emerged as one stop shop to create and store your videos in the cloud.

I am not saying it gives you the ability to store video for the first time-- people have been storing and sharing music, photos and videos via cloud. But this company gives you the power to create great videos and effortless store them or exhibit them to whole wide world of the web. Just check them out!

Cisco Global Cloud Index reveals some interesting facts

I recently read the inaugural Cisco Global Cloud Index, released in November 2011. It indicates that global data center traffic has already reached the zettabyte era, and cloud-based traffic will reach that milestone by 2014. (One zettabyte is equal to a sextillion bytes or a trillion gigabytes.)

 

There are some rather interesting facts in the report. Some notable projections and findings are listed below:

 

• Globally, cloud traffic will grow from just 11 percent of total data center traffic in 2010 to more than a third (34 percent) of total data center traffic by 2015.
• Global data center traffic is forecast to more than fourfold from 1.1 zettabytes in 2010 to 4.8 zettabytes annually in 2015, a 33 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2010 to 2015
• The transition to cloud services is driving global cloud traffic at a growth rate that is twice as fast as global data center traffic. Global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from 130 exabytes in 2010 to 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015, a 66 percent CAGR from 2010 to 2015
• 2014 is the first year where the balance of workloads shifts toward the cloud—51 percent of total workloads will be processed in a cloud environment versus 49 percent in the traditional IT space
• All regions included in the study—Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and North America—can support today's basic cloud-computing applications

Learn more from Cisco's Global Cloud Index.