Blog Archives

This is the second post on the topic I have been emphasizing on many different forums. My earlier post, Handful Of Monopoly Infrastructure Players – A Shortsighted Idea, laid out philosophical and economic reasonings against the idea of the emergence of handful of infrastructure providers. This idea is a pet theme for many cloud pundits. As I have argued many times in the past, these pundits are either failing to understand the diversity in this world or trying to ignore diversity completely. In this post, I am going to quote a recent news and argue that such a consolidation cannot happen anytime in the near future.

Little over ten days back, Google shocked the world with an announcement that they are rethinking about their Chinese operations. They quoted an apparent attack on their infrastructure originating from Chinese government. The whole story organically grew into talks about cyber-warfare and its consequences.

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

This is a perfect example of the current world order and should make us think whether such a consolidation of infrastructure players can even happen. Whether we like it or not, such attacks from government agencies are bound to happen pretty soon in the future. It need not be just China, it could be US trying to take down the so called “enemy states” or India and Pakistan fighting it out on the internet or Israel-Palestinian conflict escalating over to the net. With the internet gaining more and more importance in our daily lives as well as enterprise and government operations, the cyber-warfare is becoming a realistic possibility. With so much at stake, governments are going to do everything to protect their interests and their citizens’ interests. This translates into laws imposed by the governments on the cloud infrastructure industry. Such fears and other concerns regarding law enforcement will definitely lead to restrictions that could call for building infrastructure inside their borders.

No, I am not cooking up this scenario. Recently, Indian government was considering regulations that will force all the businesses in India to store their data on the servers inside the country, to avoid tax evasion and other types of fraud.

The concept, known as cloud computing, allows a customer to use distant servers to store and manage data. The service is cost-effective and increasingly becoming popular. However, the Finance Minister has formed a high-level committee to study the Information Technology Act (IT) and suggest amendments that will make it compulsory for firms and individuals to maintain mirror servers in India.

Even though this is not entirely related to the emergence of cloud computing as the article implies and it could have happened in the traditional hosting world too, the movement to cloud has the potential to increase such concerns. It is quite natural that governments will impose inward looking regulations to protect their bases. We should also note that many governments engage in protectionism when it comes to foreign companies doing business in their land. These factors, along with the ones I have highlighted in the previous post, will make sure that new cloud infrastructure players spring up in different parts of the world denying any possibility for the consolidation fantasized by some cloud pundits. Their fantasies can happen only if the country borders vanish in thin air. The last time I heard from people, it is not happening anytime soon. What do you think? 

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Read more

The analyst firm Gartner has made some predictions regarding how IT organizations will shape up in the next few years of this decade. Some of these predictions are about how Cloud Computing will transform IT and I will highlight them here in this post.

One of the most important predictions by Gartner is that 20% of businesses will have absolutely no IT assets (that is one in every 5 businesses). Gartner attributes Cloud Computing as one of the important factors leading to the zero IT asset scenario.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.

In fact, this is a bold prediction considering how traditional IT vendors and companies interested in pushing private cloud offerings are dismissing the proliferation of public clouds. This prediction goes on to confirm what many of us are saying already, the cloud computing is not just here to stay but it is going to transform how we do business.

Another interesting prediction from Gartner is related to how Indian outsourcing industry is going to embrace cloud computing

By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings). Gartner is seeing India-centric IT services companies leveraging established market positions and levels of trust to explore nonlinear revenue growth models (which are not directly correlated to labor-based growth) and working on interesting research and development (R&D) efforts, especially in the area of cloud computing. The collective work from India-centric vendors represents an important segment of the market’s cloud aggregators, which will offer cloud-enabled outsourcing options (also known as cloud services).

This reminds me of a prediction by Mike West of Saugatuck technology at last year’s Gluecon keynote and my apprehension about it.

The day ended with a Keynote by Mike West, an analyst from Saugatuck technology. He gave an overview on where the market is going and the issues that matter. He noted that India Inc. is readying itself to offer IT as a Service in the future. This got me going on my feet and I disputed this notion. My argument was based on the fact that the enterprises are not trusting Cloud providers inside of USA like Amazon.com and there is no way they will trust companies in foreign countries with their IT. Plus, the regulatory issues will definitely prevent such a move. He tried to dismiss my concerns by arguing that his projection was about something down the road and they can use the infrastructure provider in US to take care of these issues. I am still not convinced about it and I would love to have a discussion with him on the topic if an opportunity presents itself.

I still feel that the regulatory issues and the security concerns related to shipping of the control of important data to many different providers (cloud vendors and Indian outsourcing vendors) will make such a large scale adoption difficult. Right now, many of the Indian outsourcing vendors are engaged in cloud washing of their services. Nevertheless, it is important to keep a watch on this segment of the industry.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Read more

Image via Wikipedia

Nick Carr, in his book The Big Switch, used the electricity analogy to explain the nature of Cloud Computing. Initially, this comparison helped people get enthusiastic about cloud computing by connecting the idea with that of electric generation. However, I think this concept has outlived its utility and we need to go beyond this simplistic model. Recently, I had a twitter discussion with Randy Bias of CloudScaling on the topic. He didn’t like the idea of using the term outsourcing while describing Cloud Computing. I thought there is a need for this term because, unlike electricity, we cede lot of control to the cloud provider. However, Randy disagreed and emphasized on the comparison to the electricity model.

@krishnan Whoa. Disagree. You give up control of power generation. You become a self-service consumer. *exactly* like cloud.

Already, James Urquhart has written an eloquent post on the topic. But, at the risk of appearing to be repetitive, I want to address the topic here because the 140 character limit on Twitter is too restrictive for such discussions.

Let us do some comparison between cloud computing and electricity model and see where these two resemble each other.

• Electrical power generation and delivery through electrical grid are similar to the cloud provider taking care of compute power and delivering through internet.
• Pay as you go pricing model.
• Enormous cost savings that accompanies large scale centralized power/compute generation and delivery.

In a way, the comparison ends here. As James clearly highlighted in his post, when you put the all important data into the mix, everything changes. There is no parallel to compute data in the electricity model. The various issues surrounding the data clearly limits the comparison to the electricity model. Even though we let go of the control to manage computing infrastructure much like how we let go the control of power generation, the presence of data inserts the additional outsourcing component to the definition of cloud computing. This is due to various risk factors, security and regulatory issues that come up when we throw the data into the mix. There is no analog in the electricity industry that matches the risk factors introduced with the transfer of control of data in the case of cloud computing.

However, this doesn’t mean the electricity comparison is invalid. On the contrary, it is still the most attractive idea in cloud computing. It also doesn’t mean that we should keep away from cloud computing. Rather, we should embrace cloud computing for the electricity-like benefits but we should consider various issues surrounding the data while planning for the cloud adoption. It is important for us to realize that there is an outsourcing component involved here and we need to use due diligence during the planning stages like any other outsourcing process. The electricity model is a good starting point for understanding the advantages of cloud computing but we need to go far beyond this model to implement it. Feel free to jump in with your take on this topic.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Read more

i365, the Seagate company offering data protection, backup and recovery services, has taken the next step in pursuing their vision for cloud computing by releasing EVault Cloud-Connected Services Platform. i365 is one of the largest cloud service provider in the mid market segment and it was formed by the acquisition of E-Vault and few other companies by Seagate. They have, approximately, 22000 customers and their focus is on cloud storage software, SaaS, managed services and appliances. I have been following them for the past few months and they seem to be executing a cloud strategy that could cement their position in the mid-market, SMBs to SMEs. i365, short for Information, 365 days a year, is clearly focused on the narrow mid market region with an aim to create cloud based storage solutions for their needs. They claim to be the god father of the cloud storage segment.

Selling both through the channels and directly, their vision of cloud storage is a hybrid one. They want to blur the lines between the on-premise and cloud based storage and they do this by adding value at the edge device. Their cloud backup process works as follows. The backup software backs up in a primary vault inside the corporate datacenter. Then, the data is reduced prior to replication. The primary vault then replicates the data to the passive vault present inside the i365 cloud. The same backup history is kept in both vaults. The users can either use the primary vault or the vault inside the i365 cloud for disaster recovery.

i365 is taking a smart route to the cloud game. Instead of insisting on the use of their own software, they have designed their cloud to be application agnostic, thereby, allowing the clients to use the software they are already comfortable with. In November of 2009, they partnered with Microsoft on development of a heterogeneous solution that will allow IT managers to extend Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 across non-Microsoft platforms and into the cloud, using i365’s EVault data protection software and cloud-connected storage solutions infrastructure. This is a smart move on the part of i365 to tap into the existing Microsoft Data Protection Manager clients.

As a part of their vision for cloud connected storage solutions vision, i365 announced about their Cloud Connected Services Platform on Monday. In short, it allows Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to SaaSify their existing enterprise applications by tapping into the i365 cloud. The EVault Cloud-Connected Services Platform extends the i365 Cloud beyond EVault Software and allows ISVs to use i365’s technology, Cloud storage, and SaaS infrastructure for their applications. It is the latest offering to support i365’s Cloud-Connected storage solutions vision, which is focused on helping midmarket organizations manage their storage solutions in an integrated on-premise, edge, and Cloud environment.

Essentially, this Cloud Connected Services Platform consists of

• a cloud interface to integrate the application with the i365 cloud so that business functions such as account provisioning, metering and billing are done using RESTful webservices.
• a service connector that resides on-premises, caching data and efficiently sending it outside the firewall via a secure network connection to the i365 Cloud
• i365 cloud storage with SAS 70 Type II or ISO 9001:2000 certification
• The platform includes SaaS business and support systems that can accommodate a variety of go-to-market strategies, including different pricing and billing models; account and contract management; and levels of customer service and support

Well, this doesn’t lead to enterprise SaaS applications per se but enables ISVs to store the data in the cloud and leverage enormous cost savings along with other benefits. When I spoke to Terry Cunningham, Senior Vice President in November, he was very enthusiastic about their cloud plans and told me to expect more announcements in this year.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Read more