Category: Technology of the Cloud

Cloud and the Future of Business: From Costs to Innovation

Dr Will Venters3 Comments

I have not been updating this blog for a while as I have been busy writing commercial papers on Cloud Computing. The first of these, for Accenture, has just been published and is available here

http://www.outsourcingunit.org/publications/cloudPromise.pdf

The report outlines our” Cloud Desires Framework” in which we aim to explain the technological direction of Cloud in terms of four dimensions of the offerings – Equivalence, Abstraction, Automation and Tailoring.

Equivalence: The desire to provide services which are at least equivalent in quality to that experienced by a locally running service on a PCor server.

Abstraction: The desire to hide unnecessary complexity of the lower levels of the application stack.

Automation: The desire to automatically manage the running of a service.

Tailoring: The desire to tailor the provided service for specific enterprise needs.

(c) Willcocks,Venters,Whitley 2011.

By considering these dimensions to the different types of cloud service (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and Hosted service (often ignored – but crucially Cloud-like)) it is possible to distinguish the different benefits of each away from the “value-add” differences. Crucially the framework allows simple comparison between services offered by different companies by focusing on the important desires and not the unimportant technical differences.

Take a look at the report – and let me know what you think!

CohesiveFT

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This is a company to watch http://www.cohesiveft.com/ – they have two products:

VPN-Cubed provides a virtual network onto the network of a cloud provider. This enables first to keep a standard networking layer which is consistent even if the cloud provided network changes (e.g. IP address changes).

Elastic Server allows real-time assembly and management of software components. This allows the quick creation of easy to use applications which can be easily sent to various cloud services.

However it is the fact that together these services allow virtual machines and cloud services to be moved between cloud IaaS providers without significant real-time work which is important. If their products live up to the promise then users can move to the cheapest cloud provider with ease so driving down costs to commodity supplier levels… and creating the spot market for cloud.

How big is cloud computing?

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For those desperate to understand the market size of Cloud, two articles in the recent news provide interesting insight. The first, from the Economist, demonstrates ClockKick’s attempts to estimate Amazon’s virtual computer provision, and estimates 90000 servers for Amazon – in the USA East-Coast only!

Quote: “Randy Bias, the boss of Cloudscaling, a IT-engineering firm, did not use these results when he put Amazon’s annual cloud-computing revenues at between $500m and $700m in 2010. And in August UBS, an investment bank, predicted that they will total $500m in 2010 and $750m in 2011.” (Economist 29th December 2010).

Information technology goes global: Tanks in the cloud | The Economist.

Another interesting thing to watch is Intel’s profits which have risen “thanks to server sales”. Making profits of $3.4bn in current economic times is tough – as the flat sales of PCs is testament. It is in the sales of servers that this profit has been made. A large proportion of these servers must be going into cloud,  either to replace ageing (and power-hungry expensive data-centers) with virtualised servers (as private clouds in some form) or to provide  public cloud offering (and SaaS services such as FaceBook and Google) within newly developed data centers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12187653

The Outsourcing Enterprise: From Cost Management to Cloud Services

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I am teaching/facilitating  an Executive Summer School this coming summer in which my research on Cloud Computing and on Utility Computing will be presented…  In particular the team believe that Cloud needs to learn the lessons of Outsourcing. At the moment the focus is (as it was with early outsourcing) focused on cost reduction and Capex / Opex transfer. But those who had their fingers burned with the outsourcing craze quickly learned that it is through strategic collaboration rather than cost reduction that value is achieved.  Cloud providers and companies considering the cloud need to learn these lessons if they are to avoid the mistakes of the past.

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This course offers in-depth coverage of the key issues, developments and management challenges in today’s global sourcing marketplace. It provides a learning vehicle and tools, in terms of key frameworks, principles and practices, for those preparing themselves for general management  in major organizational functions or for more specific global sourcing roles, and also for experienced managers who wish to move to the next level. It  focuses on the needs of managers and senior executives working in client companies and service suppliers. It covers global sourcing, strategy, Information Technology outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) including the most recent developments in sourcing and offshoring  for such major areas as HR, Finance and Accounting, Procurement, Legal and Knowledge (KPO) functions.

To find out more click here.

The Outsourcing Enterprise: From Cost Management to Cloud Services

Using rented computing to crack passwords.

Dr Will Venters1 Comment

Cloud computing is open to everyone – good or bad.  Here we see someone renting computing power for a couple of dollars to crack an SHA-1 password. Imagine the potential of a competitor  using a few thousand pounds worth of computing potential to crack your passwords… or a disgruntled employee launching an attack with some of their severance. See the following article from the Register for more information.

German hacker uses rented computing to crack hashing algorithm • The Register.

Why you can’t move a mainframe with a cloud • The Register

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Why you can’t move a mainframe with a cloud • The Register.

 

This is a detailed technical analysis of the market for mainframes – discussing the infrastructure issues of moving Mainframes to cloud, or cloud to mainframes. The issues discussed are somewhat perennial – “greying workforce” shift to cheaper platforms of linux and java. But as the article attests it is the shear reliability and stability of mainframes which keeps them going – something those who proclaim the cloud will prevail must understand and respond to. With such guaranteed uptime of years  for transaction processing we cannot really envisage the Cloud for the core applications which run our information economy.