RayooTech – IT Outsourcing

By J.A. McLynne

Techno geeks have been chatting up cloud computing all over the Internet over the past few years. It has reached deep into the lives of Internet surfers in more ways that were only dreamed of just a few years ago. The development of cheap storage devices has allowed establishment of huge data centers that reach across the globe and into your home. These servers stand ready to accept any data that you want to feed them. In some cases they may even take data without you even being aware of the theft.

These data centers contain thousands of servers and disk drives whose primary task is to collect and save data from the Internet. All that these computers do all day and night is slurp up as much data as they can from the Internet. For example, a recent CNN article reported that a cloud computing center run by IBM outside of San Jose stored more than a petabyte of data. This is enough storage to hold billions of photographs and books.

It will not take long for this data storage facility to fill to capacity and more storage devices will need to be added to the facility. One company that is looking forward into the cloud computing era is Apple. Yes, Apple is jumping into the cloud computing market. The Chief Financial Officer for Apple, Peter Oppenheimer stated in the 2010 Third Quarter Earnings Call that Apple was building a billion dollar data storage center in Malden, NC. Oppenheimer said that the facility construction was on schedule.

Apple has stated in a recent press release that the data server center will support the iTunes and iPhone Apps store. However there is some speculation among Apple bloggers, like Paul Acciavatti at modmyi.com, that this center contains a huge amount of data storage capacity, much greater than being stated by Apple. The new center may be used to allow anyone with iTunes to store their music and videos on line ie, "in the cloud," so that the files and information can be accessed anywhere they may travel. Apple may also include a MobileMe capacity as well. A well connected applications database may virtually eliminate the need for an operating system on your computer.

by Bernard Golden (CIO (US))

The most interesting cloud computing I saw this week was the announcement that the General Services Administration (GSA) has awarded 11 companies the opportunity to participate in the apps.gov portal, offering IaaS services.

The list of companies is an interesting mix, including cloud pioneer Amazon, large companies like Verizon, defense contractors like General Dynamics, and relatively small players. Almost all of the awarded contracts are offered via a joint venture arrangement between two or more players, typically one with technology and one with government knowledge and experience.

This award has been a long time coming. Apps.gov has been up for over a year, offering SaaS services. If you’re not familiar with apps.gov, it’s a portal, sponsored by the GSA, that allows government agencies (including state and local entities) to obtain cloud computing services on-demand with the contracts and due diligence already performed and in place. The IaaS portion of the award process was put out for bid and then withdrawn, to be released for bid once more. So the IaaS portion of the portal is finally, at long last, underway (the awardees still have to complete a FISMA (Federal security regulation) Certification and Accreditation process before finally being ready to do business via the portal).

Apps.gov reduces the burden for agencies that want to use cloud computing but don’t want to take the time (or don’t have the ability) to perform assessments and contract negotiations on their own. And, presumably, the GSA obtained very favorable pricing by combining all of those entities’ demand. This allows individual government agencies to save even more by taking advantage of cloud computing via the apps.gov portal.

So, the awards mean that, subject to the FISMA process, government agencies will have immediate, on-demand access to IaaS services. What will that mean? Here are five things that Federal (and state and local) agencies should expect:

1. More adoption than they foresee

I wrote about the way on-demand IaaS has been driven by developers. The government employs lots of developers and contracts to companies with tons of developers. Now that developers will have an approved method of using on-demand IaaS, look for a onslaught. A year ago I spoke with several members of the Federal Cloud Computing Steering Committee and shared that they should expect a ton of use once IaaS went up on apps.gov. Just as commercial software engineers have embraced AWS as a low-friction way to develop systems, once an approved government IaaS offering is available, the same phenomenon will occur.

2. An enormous acceleration to application development

People used to everything taking forever react to on-demand IaaS with a dumbfounded look, amazed that resources can be so easily obtained. Once you clear out all the endless, time-consuming back-and-forth necessary in most environments to obtain resources, it’s astonishing how much more productive people become.

3. Lots of confusion

To its credit, the Federal government is being extremely aggressive about cloud computing. The Department of Defense has its RACE cloud. The Department of Interior is building a cloud, with the vision of sharing it with other agencies. There are undoubtedly many more cloud construction initiatives underway as well. Inevitably, some of the "private vs. public" cloud controversy will adhere to the decision process regarding which cloud offering to use. Moreover, just the plethora of choices tends to induce paralysis by analysis.

4. An ongoing challenge to developers

Creating elastic, scalable apps doesn’t just happen. New design patterns need to be applied to allow applications to gracefully grow and shrink without operations personnel getting involved in software installation and configuration. There’s a learning curve to getting the hang of creating cloud apps, and that curve affects every group in application development. From this perspective, having an easy onramp to IaaS resources like apps.gov can make it easier to experiment with these new design patterns and provide an ideal learning environment.

5. An ongoing challenge to process

Applications developed on the apps.gov IaaS with the belief that "it’s just for the dev and test part of the project" will naturally end up becoming production applications–especially once the realization sinks in that the application that has been developed now has to go back through the tedious and lengthy ‘official’ release to production process. The temptation to just get started, perhaps with the rationalization that "we’re just testing it as a prototype" will be impossible to resist. I’ve written about this challenge several times, and if you haven’t seen our video on the "cloud boomerang," discussing the unforeseen return of applications to unprepared operations groups, you might find it helpful.

The Federal Government really deserves a hat tip for its aggressive pursuit of cloud computing (and not a moment too soon: it just announced that it has found another 1000 data centers that heretofore were unaccounted for!). The apps.gov offering is an outstanding initiative and should be acknowledged as a signal achievement. I’m looking forward to when the first offering gets through FISMA.

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of "Virtualization for Dummies," the best-selling book on virtualization to date.

by Scott Stewart (CIO)

The same question continues to be asked about Cloud computing: what is Cloud computing?

The IT industry seems more confused than ever before as it struggles to define and pigeon hole this disruptive change and there seems little agreement or consensus on what Cloud computing actually is.

In the US, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) attempted to alliviate the situation by putting out a definition – but this is now in version 15, has more than 760 words, includes five characteristics, three service models and four deployment models. It also comes with a disclaimer that, in essence, says their definition is likely to change. So they don’t really know how to define what Cloud computing is because it is a changing paradigm.

Presenters at Cloud conferences cannot resist putting up their own new definitions, when Web search engines are queried on ‘what is Cloud computing’ they return an increasing number of new results each day and the tweets continue to scroll down with many different viewpoints as the pro and ante Cloud camps continue to posit their own new theories and definitions.

On top of all this, many vendors are simply taking their existing services and products such as hosting, outsourcing and co-location and rebranding them as a ‘Cloud’ product which means that their definition of Cloud is translated into ‘our product’.

But while the IT industry grapples with the definition and argues amongst itself about whether this is something new or just a fad or hype, many in the industry are also just sitting back to see what happens. Sadly they may be missing the real point that this Cloud computing disruption is not about a technology, it is not about a product, it is not about a service offering, it is not something that we have always done, it is not even about a deployment model, rather it is a transformation, a paradigm shift and a change in attitude and behavior that is occurring under their very noses.

Customer’s attitudes and behaviors towards how they want to buy IT are changing forever and this is the real transformation that is occurring. Sadly, many vendors may not be prepared for it.

Despite the criticism here of the various attempts to define Cloud computing, some much-needed thought leadership comes from Simon Wardley of CSC’s Leading Edge Forum in the UK, who bravely adds his definition of Cloud computing to the confused mix:

“Cloud Computing is a generic term used to describe the disruptive transformation in I.T. towards a service based economy driven by a set of economic, cultural and technological conditions”.

Cloud computing is a fundamental shift of the IT industry from a product based industry to a services based industry driven by factors other than just technology and products. This lifts the current thinking of Cloud computing out of the technology product space and into the realms of economics and culture, attitude and behaviour.

Looking deeper into Simon’s definition and his thinking on this, we find that he also presents the best comparative analogy of Cloud computing …the industrial revolution.