Cloud Computing - Part Two

In part two of this two part blog post on cloud computing, we will cover:

1. Concerns related to cloud computing
2. Factors which can accelerate wide spread adoption of cloud computing

1. Concerns related to cloud computing

(a) Security: One of the biggest concerns related to cloud computing is security. This is because sensitive data may no longer reside on dedicated hardware, secured within the enterprise’s own data centers. If the cloud is not secure enough enterprises will hesitate to migrate their business related data to the cloud platform.

(b) Poor Service Level Agreements: Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an integral part of the business relationship between a service provider and a customer. An SLA is essentially a contract between a service provider and a customer which clearly defines the business relationship, assures the customer that the service will meet stated requirements, and provides contingencies in case issues arise.

Due to poor or non-existent Service Level Agreements, cloud computing confidence and adoptions is affected. Most Enterprise IT organizations will not adopt cloud services on a large scale until service levels can be clearly spelled out and backed up. For many IT organizations Service Level Agreements are a requirement to use any vendor’s service since the absence of an SLA puts the business at risk from an operational, financial, or liability standpoint.

The main issues commonly found in cloud computing related Service Level Agreements are:

•    Lack of guaranteed availability
•    Lack of guaranteed performance
•    Lack of guaranteed support and response time

(c) Inadequate Risk Assessment: Risk Assessment and Management is often considered the greatest concern in cloud computing. Risks associated with cloud computing can be generally classified into:

(i) Legal, compliance and reputation risks
(ii) Operational risks

Legal, compliance and reputation risks can result from cloud computing vendors leaking, losing, breaching, damaging or impeding access to various types of sensitive or valuable information. When information is leaked, damaged, or lost by a cloud computing vendor, the customer organization may face legal or regulatory consequences for which there is little recourse. Cloud customers are unlikely to repair the reputation damage by transferring the responsibility to the cloud vendor.

The majority of the operational risks for cloud computing services are related to IT security, performance or availability. Small to medium sized organizations could see a net gain operational security by using a professional cloud computing service. However, larger enterprises may see lower levels of security in the areas of strong encryption, access control, monitoring and physical separation of resources.

(d) Vendor Lock-in: Vendor lock-in is a real and major concern in cloud computing. The factors that lead to vendor lock-in are:

(i) Lack of interoperability between cloud services 
(ii) Inability to migrate to other cloud services
(iii) Vendor management limitations at the customer’s end

(e) Management Issues: There are two management issues often associated with cloud computing – performance monitoring & troubleshooting and data management. Many cloud computing service providers do not provide adequate tools for performance monitoring. Many vendors also do not have the ability to effectively trouble shoot when issues arise. Similar to performance monitors some vendors do not provide tools for meta-data manipulation or extraction of data.

2. Factors which can accelerate wide spread adoption of cloud computing

(a) Expenditure and ROI: As mentioned in part one of this post, cloud computing enables customers to defer large capital expenditure. This will probably be the biggest factor which will drive the wide spread adoption of cloud computing. The current model is to buy as much infrastructure as is needed to meet estimated peak capacity and in most cases this results in under-utilized IT resources. Cloud computing offers the ability to scale up and scale down as per demand and a pay-as-you-go business model where the customer pays only for the services actually used. In financial terms, this translates into less capital expenditure and more operational expenditure. The advantage of operational expenditure is that it can be fine tuned as per need, thereby resulting in more efficient utilization of financial resources and better return on investment (ROI).

(b) Wide spread Mobile Internet Access: It is fair to assume that in another 5 to 6 years, significant progress will be made in the field of Internet connectivity resulting in the ability to connect to the Internet at all places where it is possible to connect to a mobile telecommunication tower. Further, the spread of 4G wireless standards will bring broadband Internet access to remote locations and will introduce true broadband connectivity to automobiles, trains and even commercial aircrafts. This will boost cloud computing acceptance as internet access is a pre-requisite most for cloud computing models. Another factor which will help acceptance of cloud computing is the availability of smart phones and net-books which help mobile users connect to the Internet.

(c) Offline Access for Online Applications: Google Mail or GMail is a commonly cited example where an online application is available for offline use when there is no Internet connectivity. This allows the user to continue working while being disconnected from the online application, hosted on a cloud computing platform. On restoration of Internet connectivity changes made to the offline version are synchronized with the online version of the application. For cloud computing applications, this means that Internet connectivity is not always required for users to work with the application.

(d) Separation of Data from Applications: In application development, it is becoming increasingly common practice to separate data from applications. For enabling users to connect with minimum of system pre-requisites, application front ends are being delivered via web pages which can be accessed from any browser. The backend is maintained separately, powered by highly scalable databases. Factors like WAN (Wide Area Network) speeds of over 100 Mbps, decreasing bandwidth costs and WAN acceleration technologies will assist the separation of data and applications.

This concludes part two of this two part blog post on “Cloud Computing”.

Thank you for your interest.

Cloud Computing - Part One

Cloud computing, which extends the enterprise beyond the traditional data center walls is quietly winning over CIOs across the world. Cloud computing not only offers a viable solution to the problem of addressing scalability and availability concerns for large-scale applications, but also displays the promise of sharing resources to reduce cost of ownership. The concept has evolved over the years starting from data centers to present day infrastructure virtualization.  Although Cloud Computing is bringing about major changes in the way traditional IT infrastructure is being managed, it is still not mature enough for wide spread adoption in the IT industry.

We will try and look at a few aspects of Cloud Computing such as:

1.    What is cloud computing?
2.    Advantages of cloud computing
3.    Concerns related to cloud computing
4.    Factors which can accelerate wide spread adoption of cloud computing

In part one of this two part blog post we will cover:

1. What is cloud computing?
2. Advantages of cloud computing

1. What is Cloud Computing?

A commonly found definition of cloud computing is:  

A set of disciplines, technologies, and business models used to render IT capabilities as on-demand services.

A frequently asked question is about the origin of the term ‘cloud’. In most documents related to the internet it is common practice to represent the internet as a diagrammatic representation of a cloud, due to the distributed nature of internet. Cloud computing also has a similar distributed nature and hence the term ‘cloud’ was adopted.

Cloud computing is also often referred to as ‘the cloud’.

The common characteristics of cloud computing includes:

(a) Shared Infrastructure: As per the cloud business model, the cloud service provider invests in infrastructure necessary to provide software, platforms and related infrastructure, as a service to multiple consumers. Hence the service providers have a financial incentive to leverage the infrastructure across as many consumers as possible. 

(b) On-demand self-service: On-demand self-service is the cloud customer’s ability to purchase and use cloud services as per need. For example, as the number of users supported by the customer's application increases, the customer can add more storage space or processing power as per need. When the enhanced computing power/storage is no longer needed, the customer can scale down as well. Thus the cloud computing’s ability to quickly provision and deprovision IT services creates an elastic and scalable IT resource. It is a pay-as-you-go model where the customers pay only for the services that they actually use.

As an added advantage, it is also possible for cloud vendors to provide an application programming interface (API) that enables the customer to programmatically (or automatically through a management application) scale-up or scale down cloud services.

(c) Consumption based pricing model: As explained at (b) above, the customers pay only for the services they actually use, resulting in per hour or per GB (Gigabytes) prices. For example, CPU (Central Processing Unit; refers to computing power) time can be billed in minutes or an hour during which the CPU is actually is in use. Data storage can be charged on the basis of GB stored. Data Transfer also can be billed on the basis of MB (Megabytes) or GB. In practice, it is also common for vendors to vary the pricing model for data storage and data transfer based on the geographic proximity of customers to the vendor’s data centers.

2. Advantages of Cloud Computing

Some of the key advantages of cloud computing can be listed as below:

(a) Simplifies and optimizes IT resources: In the current IT scenario, many organizations own and operate all of the IT resources for meeting their business objectives. Such organizations are often forced to install, maintain and upgrade complex solutions integrating different applications, operating systems, servers, networks and storage, to meet ever growing business needs. This drives up the IT operational costs and prevents IT organizations from focusing on strategic business initiatives. This in-house management of IT resources also results in large capital expenditures which return little value to the business. 

In future, as cloud computing gains acceptance, organizations can reduce the size and complexity of internal IT operations by shifting non-strategic, but essential IT resources to a cloud computing platform. Internal IT resources can then focus on more important, higher level projects which can drive core business initiatives.

(b) Cuts costs and moves CAPEX to OPEX: Complex internal IT infrastructures consume a lot of electric power and also need operational personnel to monitor and manage expensive and underutilized IT equipment on a 24x7 basis. Also, in the case of some business scenarios, highly intensive computing power and storage capacity is required only for a few hours or days per month. Capital expenditure (CAPEX) is often more tightly controlled by finance departments than operational expenditures (OPEX). 

Moving to the cloud helps IT organizations release the work-load on their already strained data centers. Cloud computing’s on-demand, consumption based pricing model can help IT organizations defer large capital expenses or even avoid costs altogether. 

Another classic case is the Test Hub that software development companies employ to simulate real-world scenarios. In Test Hubs, the IT resource configurations are often much larger and complex then typical development environments. Cloud computing provides a quick and cost-effective way to boost computing power and data storage to simulate real world scenarios in Test Hubs.

Since cloud computing expenses get classified as operational expenditure there is less budgetary controls as explained above. 

(c) Improved IT Resource Management: IT resource procurement model in typical organizations is often an inefficient supply chain. The procurement cycle starts with System Administrators predicting and factoring usage patterns into buying decisions to ensure sufficient capacity to satisfy growth over time. The procurement process should also allow for contingencies like delayed delivery of equipment, non-working equipment delivered, slow budgetary approvals and poor forecasting. In effect, more resources than is needed are purchased and the operating resources are underutilized. 
 
Cloud computing’s on-demand, pay-as-you-go consumption based procurement model enables IT organizations to efficiently mange their IT resources and ensure better return on investment.

(d) Inexpensive Disaster Recovery: Building data centers with enough redundancy for disaster recovery can be an expensive proposition. Using an out of the region co-location facility is also difficult with out incurring high costs. Hence many organizations have poorly tested or even non-existent disaster recovery plans.

Here again, cloud computing services provides a viable alternative to increase business continuity by disaster planning without incurring the high costs as mentioned above.

This concludes part one of this two part blog post on “Cloud Computing”. In part two of this post, we will look at:

3.Concerns related to cloud computing
4.Factors which can accelerate wide spread adoption of cloud computing

Thank you for your interest.

Open Source Software and Enterprise Computing – An Introduction

If we ask the software fraternity to define ‘Open Source’ in one word, the answer will most likely be ‘collaboration’. To elaborate further, we can define ‘Open Source’ as public collaboration on a software project with contributors from across the globe.

The Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org) provides a ten-point definition of open source, which can be summarized as follows. More information on each of these ten aspects of open source can be found at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php.

1. Free redistribution 2. Source Code
3. Derived Works
4. Integrity of the Author’s Source Code
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
7. Distribution of License
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

Some of the reasons that make ‘Open Source’ important are:

(a) A community process based approach, which influences the technical leadership to accommodate a collaborative approach.
(b) Open Source can be a major source of innovation, with collaborators beyond physical boundaries participating in open source projects
(c) Wide distribution and deployment of standards, which evolve from Open Source
(d) Increases choice and flexibility for enterprise customers.

We will focus the rest of this discussion on Open Source Computing and its adoption by Enterprises.

There is little doubt that Open Source Software is experiencing explosive growth and coupled with that growth, adoption of Open Source Software by enterprises is growing. Some of the factors that are prompting enterprises to adopt Open Source Software are:

1. Reducing IT budgets
2. Increasing Software Licensing Costs
3. Move toward Integrated Systems – one system for all Enterprise Users
4. Move to Web 2.0 initiatives to support marketing and enhance customer relationship management.

Given the above background, the key factors that push adoption of Open Source in Enterprises are:

(a) Cost: Reduced budgets obviously results in measures that will save costs. Overall Information Technology costs can be reduced by implementing free or low cost Open Source Software.(b) Innovation: Open Source can be used to create new business offerings or innovative operation models, with substantial reduction in costs.
(c) Agility and Scale: Open Source Software provides the ability to quickly scale up and modify software systems to meet rapidly changing business requirements.
(d) No vendor lock-in: Reduces dependence on proprietary software vendors
(e) Quality and Security: Improves the operational efficiency of enterprise architecture by leveraging the open source characteristics of transparency and rapid improvement.

Some of the Open Source characteristics that make it particularly suitable and appealing to Information Technology organizations are:

1. Ability to inspect and modify source code: Open source mandates the availability of source code. This enables the enterprise adopters to inspect the source code to gain a better understanding of the software. It also helps in integrating Open Source Software with other systems. The ability to modify the source code enables enterprises to add new features and functionality. It also helps in adding security related modifications to meet the organization’s Information Security Audit requirements.

2. Development Transparency: Development Transparency means that the development process is carried out in public with all code changes available for inspection. It is relatively easy for a user to ascertain the current state and history of an open source product. Testing is also carried out on a large scale by collaborating developers, reported bugs are listed, and bug status maintained.

3. Liberal Licensing Terms: Proprietary Software licenses are restrictive in nature with limits on installations, simultaneous users (floating licenses), fixed number of users, etc., and obviously, there is a fee associated with such licenses. On the other hand, Open Source licenses are expansive in nature and encourage wide spread use (please see definition of Open Source at the start of this blog post). Open source licenses do not impose limits like fixed number of users and number of installations. Acquiring Open Source Software is also free. Service providers may charge fees for services like customization, security audit, testing, etc., but for accessing the software fees are not involved.

This concludes our discussion on ‘Open Source Computing and Enterprise Computing’. 

Thank you for your interest.