Tag Archives: application

Why the in-crowd is outsourcing

technology

The 2013 InvestmentNews Technology Study suggests that top-performing firms are more likely to outsource and that most firms are interested in optimizing their existing technology versus investing in new technology.

So why are just a handful of firms (many of them top-performing, no less) investing in outsourcing and training?

My own hunch is that outsourcing in particular is often just too much of a paradigm shift for many advisers. I suspect that many advisers who are reluctant to embrace outsourcing are the principals of mature advisory firms: These advisers are well-aware of the movement by Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies to adopt cloud-based and outsourced technologies but have yet to see a real direct benefit.

These firm owners often have little in the way of personal experience using cloud-based or outsourced solutions — and ultimately relying on them in their businesses.

But our study has started to establish a track record for advisory firms that have embraced outsourcing: When it comes to annual average technology spending, Top Performers spend significantly more on technology-related consulting and outsourcing (by almost one-third, on average, than all other firms.)

Viewed in terms of median spending on technology, though, both Top Performers and Innovators spent twice as much on technology-related consulting and outsourcing in 2011, and respondent estimates showed that gap expanding in 2012.

There has been movement among providers, though that makes me more optimistic about increased adviser adoption of outsourced technologies. The two most popular providers of advisory customer relationship management systems are either in the cloud or will be soon.

Specifically, both CRM Software Inc.’s Junxure product and Redtail Technology Inc.’s CRM offering come out annually as the most popular products in their category among both InvestmentNews’ annual technology usage survey and that of Financial Planning magazine.

While Redtail’s CRM system has always been a cloud-based software as a service, the lion’s share of Junxure’s installations have been on-premises (a minority of firms do use a hosted version of the application over the Internet), yet the latter company has designed an entirely new offering for the cloud. It is expected to be available in late 2013 or early 2014, and anecdotally, many advisers have indicated that they are interested in trying out the offering.

Similarly, Schwab Performance Technologies is in the middle of a pilot program providing a fully hosted and managed version of its PortfolioCenter portfolio management application. Thousands of advisory firms rely on the product despite its, at best, lukewarm reputation among advisers. Being so tied to and dependent on this application, many advisers have told me they are strongly considering adoption of the hosted option when it becomes generally available.

Why? They want to get out of the business of IT support and turn that over to Schwab, which they perceive will be better able to maintain it.

And when it comes to the types of technology that can — and should — be outsourced, I believe that every core category can be included. These include CRM, document management, portfolio management (especially performance reporting) and financial planning.

Less encouraging, and certainly more confounding, is another result.

When asked which areas in which they plan to invest (1 = the highest priority and 4 = the lowest), the highest priority across the board among advisers was “investing in new software,” with the second priority being hardware.

Sadly, technology training tied with “consultants and outsourcing” for third place.

A case can be made that improved efficiency could be gained simply by shifting toward more and better training on the software that advisers already have.

In fact, another question, “Which of the following would be most critical to achieving your goals for growth?” resulted in a seemingly counterintuitive response across the board — especially considering the top priority above.

A full 70% of Innovators selected “fully utilizing my firm’s current technology.”

This does not jibe with the lack of interest in additional training discussed above. This choice (“fully utilizing my firm’s current technology”) also was selected most among both the “all participants” category and Top Performers, though to a lesser degree (58% and 59%, respectively).

I noted another surprising result among that question’s response.

Among those same Innovators, only 12% selected “investing in new and emerging technologies,” compared with almost double that percentage among “all” (22%) and Top Performers (21%), and all this despite it being selected as the highest priority among all types of firms in a previous question.

One interpretation of this is that Innovators believe they already have solid technology and think they need simply to improve their efficiency in using it, whereas other firms view their current technology as at least somewhat inferior, hence those firms place a higher priority on investing in new tech over better utilizing what they have.

This interpretation does not explain why so many firms do not invest in training their employees, which is something I have noted anecdotally for years.

My own take on this is simple: When it comes to day-to-day operations, most advisers are unwilling to allow the necessary personnel or themselves to attend such training, because they cannot draw a clear line to increased profitability.

Quite a few technology providers, in fact, offer their own user conferences where advanced training is provided, and at least anecdotally, advisers report improved efficiency.

Source: http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20130403/FREE/130409991

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Why Cloud Computing & Green Manufacturing Are Good for Your Business and the Environment

As more subcontract manufacturers face increasing federal regulations, rising consumer demand for green products and the need to protect their margins, more organizations are looking to transform their operations and gain new efficiencies.

Implementing systems is the easy part; changing philosophies, policies, procedures and practices is where real organizational gains are made. I enjoy helping organizations to transform; to embrace lean philosophies and practices; and the systemic elimination of waste from all areas of manufacturing operations.

Being Green Helps Eliminate Waste

At their heart both lean and green hold a common objective: eliminating waste. In the case of lean, it’s relentlessly driving all forms of waste from operations. In the case of green, it’s reducing the amount of waste generated by the production and operation processes.

Another example of waste that touches on both lean and green objectives would be reducing the amount of power consumption used on the shop floor. Nearly 70 percent of energy consumed in industrial applications is due to high energy-consuming machines and drives. For this reason, evaluating the energy consumption of your motors and mechanical systems can yield significant savings.

LED Lighting can save your Business up to 50% on Electric Costs

By using energy-saving fixtures, as an example, you can drive down costs and eliminate waste. Businesses who switch from conventional incandescent and fluorescent to LED lighting can save as much as 50 percent of their electric costs and realize a return on investment in less than three months.

Moving your business applications to the cloud is another way to realize savings. Instead of maintaining a room full of servers that run around the clock and must be cooled — not to mention the expense of maintaining those machines — you can outsource your applications to providers with large economies of scale. GigaOm found that using the cloud could reduce a user’s carbon footprint by 30 to 90 percent, which represents an industry-wide savings of greater than $25 billion per year in energy consumption.

Green Manufacturing Reduces Wastes and Saves Money

Many traditional manufacturers have looked down their noses at green manufacturing as a frivolous, tree-hugging exercise. This viewpoint is short-sighted because it fails to take into account the advantages of reducing waste and conserving limited and costly materials. Using components made from recycled or renewable materials can be less expensive than more traditional alternatives.

When you consider implementing lean manufacturing practices, be sure to do your homework. There are a wide variety of grants available from the federal and state governments designed to assist you with retooling and implementing green practices.

Source: http://technorati.com/technology/cloud-computing/article/why-cloud-computing-green-manufacturing-are/

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Oracle acquires Nimbula for hybrid cloud software

With the intent of rounding out its software stack for building hybrid clouds, Oracle is acquiring Nimbula, a provider of private cloud infrastructure management software.

Based in Mountain View, California, Nimbula was co-founded by Chris Pinkham, who managed the development of Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), along with a number of other EC2 team members now with Nimbula. The company also has expertise with the OpenStack cloud software stack.

Nimbula’s flagship software, Nimbula Director, is designed to deploy and manage workloads across both private and public clouds. The software can be used for managing such cloud jobs as distributed software development, IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) hosting, batch processing and Hadoop deployments. The company recently provided Nimbula Director with API (application programming interface) access to OpenStack, allowing customers to manage the open-source cloud platform through Nimbula.

Nimbula’s products are complementary to Oracle’s own, Oracle said in a brief statement announcing the pending acquisition.

Thus far, much of Oracle’s efforts around cloud computing have been in providing hardware and software to run private clouds, through engineered systems such as Exalogic, and by customizing its databases, applications, and middleware to run in cloud configurations.

Oracle also has a publicly hosted cloud service that offers a number of its Oracle applications, databases and middleware as services.

Oracle was not the only company on the prowl for hybrid cloud management software. Red Hat also recently acquired a company, ManageIQ, which offered similar technologies.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2013. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/oracle-acquires-nimbula-hybrid-cloud-software-214489

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Cloud computing presents big savings opportunities

With some kind of major budget cutting around the corner, no matter what happens with sequestration, government organizations need to lower their information technology costs. One option that works: Leverage cloud technology. And don’t stop with “routine” IT processes — the impressive savings come when you leverage cloud to truly support your mission.

The government’s Cloud First strategy requires agencies to evaluate secure cloud computing options before making new investments in IT. The strategy identified $20 billion in potential savings from cloud computing; this represents 25 percent of the total IT budget. For agencies to tap into this cost savings opportunity, they must leverage the cloud for mission efficiency and IT efficiency.

The government’s 2009-2010 inventory of its data centers identified more than 3,000 data centers, providing a great opportunity for cost savings and increased efficiency by moving to the cloud. A recent Deltek report estimates that the average use of federal servers is 24 percent — the target is 60 to 80 percent. This means the average federal server operates at only 24 percent of capacity.

Imagine if an employee worked only 24 percent of the time. If you did not look at how to improve that employee’s productivity, you might unnecessarily hire two to three more employees to fill the gap. You might also forgo projects because you think you don’t have manpower to complete them.

When you translate this scenario to IT infrastructure, it’s easy to see room for savings. As IT infrastructure and operations account for 60 percent to 75 percent of an organization’s IT spend, closing that gap is crucial to lowering the cost of government.

Organizations that reduce costs and increase IT resource use have demonstrated three ways to tap into the full cost savings opportunity of the cloud through the delivery of mission efficiency:

• Build a strong foundation through Infrastructure as a Service. By consolidating IT infrastructure through virtualization, among other things, agencies can pool underused resources and create efficient, resilient IT infrastructure. Cost savings are real, because when you consolidate underused servers into a common pool of resources, agencies are in a better position to extend the life and capabilities of existing infrastructure and make smarter future purchases.

• Pay for the software applications you actually use, and make them broadly available on multiple devices via Software as a Service. In this model, cloud providers install and operate application software in the cloud, and users access the software from the cloud clients. This eliminates the need to install and run the application on the user’s own computers, and significantly increases scalability. Price is also adjustable based on the number of users. This is valuable when a lot of users want to access the same application.

Across government, there are many common applications, such as email, collaboration, content management, project management, human resources, finance, grants and procurement. This presents a significant consolidation opportunity, as SaaS is the most efficient model available for the adoption of such applications. Leveraging the SaaS model for these applications has another significant advantage — it will make them more accessible to an increasingly mobile or field-based workforce. This saves money and enhances productivity, motivation and flexibility.

• Use the cloud to make software development easier, faster and more cost-effective. Most application development in the government happens outside of the IT department. As agile development methodologies have entered the mainstream, combining them with the Platform as a Service technologies will result in another level of cost savings. Modern PaaS environments, where applications can be deployed without requiring users to purchase and maintain additional hardware and software, reside upon the IaaS infrastructure model. By combining these approaches, agencies can reduce software development times and costs.

PaaS environments also enable applications to take advantage of the cloud’s flexibility and agility. And some PaaS environments feature tools that allow for the rapid development of mobile applications, which could accelerate the migration of core government services to support a mobile workforce and empower citizens to interact with their government in the same way they do with their insurance companies and banks.

A recent MeriTalk report on migrating mission-critical applications to the cloud reveals that the government could save approximately $16.6 billion annually if all agencies move just three mission-critical applications to the cloud. Of those that have moved a mission-critical application to the cloud, 91 percent report success.

One of the biggest challenges the study found was security. Predictably, 73 percent of IT managers and systems integrators surveyed said security concerns are a primary barrier to virtualization. As a result, most favor private clouds, where the agency owns the cloud and all the information residing there. Despite the challenges that come with virtualization, the study found that the government clearly recognizes the benefits that moving to the cloud would bring in cost savings, efficiency, availability and agility: Federal IT executives say they expect 26 percent of their mission-critical applications to live in the cloud in two years and 44 percent in five years.

Virtualization solutions, which provide the foundation for a smoother transition to cloud solutions, are currently run by all 15 executive branch agencies, including all Defense Department agencies, services and joint commands, and throughout both the legislative and judicial branches. However, recent reports estimate that only one-third of federal servers are virtualized, leaving enormous opportunity to realize savings.

Virtualization is defined as the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a server, storage device or operating system. Virtualization addresses IT’s most pressing challenge — the infrastructure sprawl that compels IT departments to channel 70 percent of their budget into maintenance, leaving scant resources for business-building innovation. Virtualization helps reduce capital expenses through server consolidation, leaving more budget room for business-building innovation.

Tapping into the significant advantages of the cloud will also increase mobile workforce capabilities, reduce energy costs and consumption, increase agility and, most importantly, allow agencies to more effectively and efficiently meet their missions.

Source: http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20130303/ADOP06/303030004/Cloud-computing-presents-big-savings-opportunities?odyssey=nav%7Chead

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9 top threats to cloud computing security

9 top threats to cloud computing security

Cloud computing has grabbed the spotlight at this year’s RSA Conference 2013 in San Francisco, with vendors aplenty hawking products and services that equip IT with controls to bring order to cloud chaos. But the first step is for organization to identify precisely where the greatest cloud-related threats lie.

To that end, the CSA (Cloud Security Alliance) has identified "The Notorious Nine," the top nine cloud computing threats for 2013. The report reflects the current consensus among industry experts surveyed by CSA, focusing on threats specifically related to the shared, on-demand nature of cloud computing.

First on the list is data breaches. To illustrate the potential magnitude of this threat, CSA pointed to a research paper from last November describing how a virtual machine could use side-channel timing information to extract private cryptographic keys in use by other VMs on the same server. A malicious hacker wouldn’t necessarily need to go to such lengths to pull off that sort of feat, though. If a multitenant cloud service database isn’t designed properly, a single flaw in one client’s application could allow an attacker to get at not just that client’s data, but every other clients’ data as well.

The challenge in addressing this threats of data loss and data leakage is that "the measures you put in place to mitigate one can exacerbate the other," according to the report. You could encrypt your data to reduce the impact of a breach, but if you lose your encryption key, you’ll lose your data. However, if you opt to keep offline backups of your data to reduce data loss, you increase your exposure to data breaches.

The second-greatest threat in a cloud computing environment, according to CSA, is data loss: the prospect of seeing your valuable data disappear into the ether without a trace. A malicious hacker might delete a target’s data out of spite — but then, you could lose your data to a careless cloud service provider or a disaster, such as a fire, flood, or earthquake. Compounding the challenge, encrypting your data to ward off theft can backfire if you lose your encryption key.

Data loss isn’t only problematic in terms of impacting relationships with customers, the report notes. You could also get into hot water with the feds if you’re legally required to store particular data to remain in compliance with certain laws, such as HIPAA.

The third-greatest cloud computing security risk is account or service traffic hijacking. Cloud computing adds a new threat to this landscape, according to CSA. If an attacker gains access to your credentials, he or she can eavesdrop on your activities and transactions, manipulate data, return falsified information, and redirect your clients to illegitimate sites. "Your account or services instances may become a new base for the attacker. From here, they may leverage the power of your reputation to launch subsequent attacks," according to the report. As an example, CSA pointed to an XSS attack on Amazon in 2010 that let attackers hijack credentials to the site.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-security/9-top-threats-cloud-computing-security-213428

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On-Premise vs. SaaS ERP Software Costs

The Cloud has inspired a new way of thinking about ERP software deployments, with companies having the option to purchase a license or obtain a SaaS solution. When purchasing a license you own the software and have the ability to deploy it in your data center (on-premise). When you purchase a SaaS solution (sometimes called an on-demand solution), you rent a complete turnkey package that includes software and the entire delivery mechanism.

There has been a lot of debate about the merits of on-premise vs. SaaS ERP solutions and many of the arguments have been based on assumptions about how much different solutions would cost.  But what do the numbers say about the cost differences between the two options?   With SaaS ERP solutions your business pays less upfront while on-premise requires you to buy the software outright.  However, there are many of other factors beyond the initial investment that go into evaluating total cost of ownership (TCO).  Based on numbers gathered by averaging quotes provided by 3 different ERP providers, we did a cost comparison between the two options.

Small Businesses

With a very small deployment scenario, we pegged the initial cost of licensing the software on-premise at $20,000 and the cost of one year of SaaS is $16,000. So a SaaS deployment can provide lower costs in year one.  On-premise ERP can also require acquiring additional internal infrastructure and may incur additional staff costs to maintain the solution.  So, for small businesses SaaS may offer better ROI.  Since costs remain rather constant, SaaS is also easier to budget for.  However, in some scenarios an on-premise deployment makes more sense.  For example your business might be running a point-of-sale terminal that needs to connect to your server.  In this situation, you may not want to rely on an external Internet connection.

Mid-Sized Businesses

For mid-sized businesses, we obtained pricing information by comparing specific customer proposals from SaaS and license vendors. We ascertained an increase in the cost of the license to $50,000 and the cost of SaaS to $40,000 per year. In this scenario, in year five, the cost of SaaS comes close to equaling the on-premise costs of a license plus internal infrastructure. The numbers level out because the cost of both the fixed license and recurring SaaS payments increased proportionately while the infrastructure cost remained relatively fixed. However, you must also consider labor costs. We assumed the mid-sized business would have the cost of paying for 1/5 of an IT person to maintain the server, operating system, and software application; these costs may mean that the on-premise deployment would be more expensive.

For mid-sized businesses we computed a break-even point over a seven year deployment. Holding other assumptions steady, the break-even occurred when the cost of the SaaS annual fee is approximately 1/3 of the cost of the license plus one year of annual maintenance. So, if your only concern is out-of-pocket expenses, the option to purchase a $50,000 license + maintenance is roughly equivalent to a $20,000/year SaaS license.

Review of Assumptions and Methodology

The cost of the SaaS annual fee compared to the cost of the software license is critical to this analysis. Based on actual market data provided by SaaS providers and on-premise license providers, we devised a formula to approximate the cost disparities. In both cases, the cost per user (when applicable) is reduced as more users are added at approximately the same rate. Also in both cases, the addition of modules increases the cost.

For purposes of the comparison we assumed that the on-premise and SaaS systems deployed the same software. This means that we are not considering a scenario in which legacy client server software is being used. We also assumed that the software was web-based so client upgrades are not required. Doing this kind of comparison requires making a number of other assumptions:

+ Calculations did not include NPV calculations.

+ Hardware and software costs for an on-premise deployment are similar for small and mid-sized customers. This equals approximately $15,000 for the deployments shown. This does not include off-site backup storage.

+ Maintenance fees are 20% per year of the license costs. In the on-premise scenario the maintenance costs cover the application, OS, and database software.

+ Configuration, training, and data migration fees are equal across all deployment models. We used a 1:1 ratio of license cost to consulting fees for this analysis.

+ Customization fees are not included, but would be equal across all models.

+ Application support is not included, but would be equal across all models.

+ For an on-premise deployment, power and replacement server parts were assumed to cost $1,000/year.

When is SaaS Better?

Businesses benefit from SaaS when they cannot dedicate IT resources to installing and managing applications. We assumed upgrades occur two times per year and require approximately five hours to install. In addition, with SaaS expenses are deferred, so the model becomes more attractive as the cost of capital goes up.

The on-premise model contains the most upfront expenses as well as significant ongoing IT expenses paid over time. As the cost of capital increases, the upfront costs are not impacted, but the impact of the ongoing IT costs is reduced, so that the overall benefit is less than with SaaS.

Also, with ERP software there is a significant amount of upfront analysis, consulting, configuration, testing, and training, so these costs should be figured into the calculations. When these expenses are relatively low, the two approaches are roughly equivalent, but if they reach 15% and higher, the SaaS solution will always be less expensive than an on-premise solution. Because all of these factors are different for every business, the best way to decide between SaaS and on-premise is to perform your own TCO evaluation. That way you can take into consideration your company’s unique needs.

Conclusion

This article addressed costs, but costs are only one part of the deployment equation. Your deployment model should be based on your level of IT expertise, your comfort level with outsourcing, the strength of your internet connection and tolerance for downtime, and the timing of expenses.

As your business changes, your business requirements change. Company size, IT expertise, legislation, risk, programming requirements, and other factors will influence your SaaS versus on-premise deployment over time. You should partner with a provider that offers a choice of license and SaaS deployments so you can switch your deployment if your requirements change.

Source: http://www.mbtmag.com/articles/2013/02/premise-vs-saas-erp-software-costs

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Linux-savvy IT pros are in high demand, low supply

Linux-savvy IT pros are in high demand, low supply

Linux skills are in high demand in the IT world, with 93 percent of hiring managers looking to hire a Linux professional in the next six months. But that’s only if they can find any with sufficient skills, a task that’s proving quite challenging.

In a survey of 850 hiring managers and 2,600 Linux professionals across the globe, Dice and the Linux Foundation discovered that such trends as open cloud development, big data, and increased migrations to Linux are driving businesses and governmental agencies to aggressively woo Linux-savvy IT workers. Salaries for Linux pros jumped 9 percent this year to $90,853, outpacing the 5 percent jump in tech salaries overall. The average tech salary in the United States is currently around $85,619, according to the report.

The Linux job in highest demand is systems administrator: 73 percent of respondents said they seek to fill that position in the near future. Linux professionals who understand embedded development and Linux kernel architecture will also be heavily recruited in 2013, according to the report; 57 percent of respondents said they need Linux developers to create new products, devices, and applications. Twenty-five percent said they’re looking for workers with devops expertise.

The challenge companies face is finding the right talent: Nine out of 10 respondents said that it’s "somewhat difficult" or "very difficult" to find experienced Linux pros, a 4 percent increase over last year. Nearly 25 percent of hiring managers said that they’ve gone so far as to seek training for existing employees to meet their Linux needs when they couldn’t find an adequately skilled candidate.

Linux professionals can attest to the demand for their talent: 75 percent of those surveyed said they’ve received at least one call from a recruiter in the past six months. What’s more, 56 percent said it would be "fairly easy" or "very easy" to find a new job. One-third of respondents said they plan to change employers this year, with higher salary being the No. 1 incentive, followed by a better work-life balance, and a flexible work schedule or telecommuting.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/t/linux/linux-savvy-it-pros-are-in-high-demand-low-supply-213180

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How to Avoid the Hidden Costs of Cloud Computing

We all know the conventional wisdom about cloud computing: it’s cheap, fast and easy. But is it really that much cheaper? Or is it simply optics that make it appear cheaper?

Optics can absolutely change your perception of the cost of something. Just think about your morning jolt of coffee. $3.50 for a no-foam, half-caf, sugar-free vanilla latte doesn’t seem that expensive. It’s a small daily expense when viewed by the drink. It appears even cheaper if you pay for it with a loyalty card where you don’t even have to fork over the dough and the vanilla shot is free. But what if you bought coffee like IT buys technology? You would pay for it on an annual basis. That $3.50 latte would now be about $900/year. For coffee? How many of you would go for that deal? That’s optics and it plays right into the marketing hands of the public cloud services your business is consuming today.

But optics aside, is that $99/month per user SaaS application just another $20,000 per year enterprise application? Is that $0.25 per hour virtual machine just another $85 per year hosted VM? No, it’s not the same. Because the pricing models are not just optics but an indication of the buying pattern that is possible. If you buy it the same way you do traditional IT, then yes, the math says, there’s little difference here. The key to cloud economics is to not buy the cloud service the same way you do traditional IT. The key to taking advantage is to not statically and rotely consume the cloud. Instead, consume only what you need when you need it – and be diligent about turning off when you aren’t.

That said, however, there are cost gotchas for which you need to be watchful. Otherwise you will face the "hidden costs" of the cloud. So what are these gotchas and how to you avoid them? You have to look at this question in two groups: SaaS and cloud platforms.

SaaS services nearly always carry a perpetual, per-user license (you pay monthly on an annual or multi-year term). The hidden costs here fall into 3 areas:

1. Customization – the more you can use the SaaS solution as it was designed the lower your costs. Customizations can quickly lead to development and maintenance costs you didn’t anticipate. this is the most widely made error by enterprises. It is more cost effective to teach your employees to use the SaaS as it is designed than to try to bend it to your processes. This isn’t always possible but should be used as a rule of thumb.

2. Integration – you will inevitably integrate SaaS services with in-house applications, data stores and other SaaS services. These integrations must be built, managed and maintained. Best practice is to define a clear integration architecture via as few means as possible.

3. Sprawl – A SaaS app you bought initially for just 15 employees, sounds like a great investment and low-cost solution until you open up the app to 1500 employees. Suddenly $99 per user could be more than an in-house solution. Be diligent about who you grant access to any SaaS app.

On the cloud platform front, these services tend to have a pay-per-use model that can be positively be affected by application behavior rather than use pattern. Thus the hidden costs to avoid are:

1. Not turning things off – It’s easy to see how pay per use makes your startup costs low and elastic scaling as traffic rises easy. But it is just as easy to not pay attention to application use/load patterns when they go the other way. This is where you can save tremendous money, by turning off resources that are no longer needed.

2. Storage grows, it never shrinks – and on a pay-per-use service you are constantly reminded of this. which means you need to actively manage your storage consumption by moving data to lower cost services when they are no longer in constant use, leveraging caching as much as possible and deleting files or copies of files if you don’t need them.

3. Not activating cloud economics – Not every application is a fit with a pay-per-use platform. The best fit are those that take advantage of the pricing model through either elastic scale or transiency. Elastic scale means the app increases or decreases its resource consumption based on use. Best fit are apps that do this as granularly as possible. Transient apps are those that are not active all the time and can be parked or completely shut off when not in use. Batch work, high performance computing, seasonal or cyclical applications are all good examples. An app that just sits there 24/7 consuming the same resources is usually a bad fit and should be moved either back into your data center or to traditional hosting.

Source: http://www.zdnet.com/how-to-avoid-the-hidden-costs-of-cloud-computing-7000011504/

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Cloud computing the way forward, says researcher

Cloud computing will be the key platform for most applications in the coming decade, according to a senior researcher.

Gordon Bell, principal researcher in the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Laboratory, said training in cloud computing would be ‘super important’ in the coming days.

Cloud computing has not been made use of very well by the computing community, he said.

“Many of the people are not even aware of the fact that they come across many of the cloud computing applications in their activities. Within a short time, cloud will be the platform for most of the applications,” Bell told Gulf Times.

Cloud applications would be used for real monitoring in many areas that would improve the services dramatically.

Highlighting certain services, Bell said traffic and transportation would be one area where cloud computing would have a big impact.

“Cloud will enable traffic sensor data to identify each car as a special entity and will have specific Internet-protocol (IP) addresses. The cloud platform will be the modern equivalent of the traffic infrastructure. Wherever you are, you will be able to connect with the cloud. This will enable traffic and other applications lot more intelligent and smarter.”

Another area of the extensive use of cloud could be in the health sector, Bell said. He said he himself was using many applications on his body to measure the pulse and other body movements, and added: “Cloud computing is the right platform to make use of many of the health applications and devices. It can be used to monitor heartbeat or the amount of sleep of a person and many more at the real time.”

He said the self monitoring health devices would result in huge advancement in human development.

Bell also spoke about various advancements in technology that could revolutionise the world in the coming years. 

He said Google’s effort to produce a ‘video eyeglass’ could become one of the greatest advancements.

“The glass will have a camera, display, microphone and earphone. This can be one of the biggest devices that can happen in the near future,” the expert said.

Regarding the feature of the eyeglass to identify a person with each blink, he said a lot of data needed to be collected and stored about other people to be identified. 

“This data base will be the main part of using such a device. It is estimated that in the near future, there will be almost five terabytes of information about an individual available on the cyber world.”

Referring to the research activities at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMUQ) , Bell said the university was supposed to develop a research agenda and create room for new ideas for local companies.

“This is what is generally done in the universities in the US and CMUQ is also going ahead on those lines. The researches will generate new ideas and will help the country in a big way,” he concluded.

Source: http://www.gulf-times.com/qatar/178/details/342397/cloud-computing-the-way-forward,-says-researcher

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Maximizing the value of cloud-based development and testing environment

Historically, development and testing environments have been built and managed at the project level, and often remain underfunded, under-resourced and underutilized for significant periods of time. The development and testing demand and the IT infrastructure management processes differ in their DNA. Development and testing is unpredictable and has variable demand cycles while the IT managers look at smoother predictable operations, gradual capacity building and higher utilization. Despite being a crucial IT function, the inability to quickly provide the capacity needed by development and testing teams delays the application development life cycle and hampers the delivery of an application quickly and efficiently.

As the pace of change and the level of competition is growing, businesses today need agile IT environment to match the highly dynamic and resource intensive needs of the application development and testing – a business critical function.

According to Gartner, cloud and mobility will drive the worldwide application development market to exceed USD 10 billion in 2013. By leveraging cloud, developers, test engineers, and QA teams can develop and perform extensive scenario testing in shorter cycles. Here’s how:

Cloud provides developers and test engineers with a self-service model for requesting and almost instantly receiving resources from within a pool of secured, shared and scalable infrastructure resources. This capability can shave days or even weeks off of application development project times, speeding time to market. Cloud also enables these teams to build configuration templates and machine snapshots in seconds, run them in parallel, and customize them to meet the needs.

Test engineers can quickly deploy configurations and scale performance on-demand heavy load testing, saving time and operational costs over traditional on-premise development and testing environments.

Benefits of moving development and testing to the cloud include:

• Achieve faster time-to-market and greater flexibility for new products and services.
• Automate approval workflows and reduce the cost of IT infrastructure management.
• Enhance ID & Access control and safeguard data with a private or a hybrid solution.
• Utilize infrastructure capacity efficiently with granular monitoring and management of infrastructure resources.

Considerations for cloud-based development and testing

While development and testing in a cloud-based model addresses the traditional roadblocks of cost, scalability, and lack of process and methodology, it has its own challenges:

Security & Control – Businesses may have applications that need to comply with regulatory and corporate restrictions around security and data privacy for e.g. access control for offshore and sub-contractors or an applicable local law that mandates compliance to data residency and hence restricts usage of a public cloud for data/devices. These may not even move to an off-premise cloud instance for development and testing because of proprietary/legacy systems, as well as intellectual property security considerations. In addition, control & governance mechanism needs to be set for integrating workflows, identity management, usage metering, chargeback, etc. to ensure efficiency and quality.

Interoperability – Businesses may be confronted with issues surrounding legacy systems development & testing on the cloud as connecting to legacy systems from the external cloud may pose interoperability issues. The ability to integrate with existing systems and share data between different platforms may need multi-tier technology architecture.

Performance – As development and testing environment on cloud maybe shared by numerous users, there may be cases where businesses may have to wait for the required bandwidth. Uptime is an important consideration when developing and testing on the cloud to assess the performance characteristics of an application. The IT admins have to ensure that underlying hardware provides adequate performance levels across storage, network and compute in a private cloud, while such tweaking may not be available in a public cloud.

Monitoring – Monitoring of application, which is in a distributed format, one spanning multiple servers, on multi-cloud environment or accessing multiple applications through web services, becomes difficult from a performance, security and availability perspective. A full-featured logging and tracing mechanism for troubleshooting becomes imperative. Measuring the cloud utilization by various teams and business units enables better capacity planning for future.

Management – Servicing and managing development and testing environment has been challenging because of the bursty workloads and the dynamic service requests. The current processes are designed around current IT service delivery models. The processes such as provisioning, procurement, configuration and de-provisioning of the resources are manpower intensive at the transactional levels and automation is limited by the technology. While cloud provides a wide variety of build/integration systems, test harnesses, and development and testing tools, there is still a need to bring all of this together in a turnkey and managed model to reduce the burden of managing development and testing infrastructure on cloud.

Developing for the cloud

– Developing applications to run on cloud is different from developing applications for a traditional or virtualized IT environment. Developers must build applications that consider resource unavailability and is able to recover from such incidences. For e.g. a multi-tier application should be loosely coupled and ready for any other tier failure. The application should be built in a way that allows multiple instances of a component to run concurrently so that in case an instance fails, the components could easily switch to another instance.

Critical Success Factors

A thorough planning and selecting the right technology and cloud service provider must be done in order to maximize the value of the cloud-based development and testing environment.

To understand cloud-ready environments, some key architectural requirements of a cloud-based development and testing environment must be known:

+ What hardware/compute resources will be used and will it be capable of achieving development and testing objective?
+ What resources (wiring and cabling, SAN and storage, rack space etc.) will be needed before any servers or workloads are installed?
+ What networking and data storage capabilities in terms of capacity will be required?
+ What workloads/applications will be placed in the cloud?

Businesses must make sure that the cloud-based development and testing environment is aptly architected for hybrid environment and does not lead to application performance degradation.

Once the development and testing environment in the cloud is established, businesses must take into consideration the following to ensure an agile development and testing life cycle:

+ Template library of ready-to-use VMs, defining server, capacity & storage requirements along with application components, must be created. Such templates allow team members to quickly duplicate environments and streamline provisioning.

+ Services in the cloud should be integrated with the right chargeback/metering processes and tools. This will enable enterprises with the financial thresholds and control of costs in the development and testing cloud.

A comprehensive cloud solution for development and testing provides increased control over projects, speed of deployment, ease of collaboration, and the ability to access environments on demand, enabling efficient and quality application development and testing.

Source: http://www.informationweek.in/cloud_computing/13-02-08/maximizing_the_value_of_cloud-based_development_and_testing_environment.aspx

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