what to expect from cloud computing

8/6/2019 What to Expect From Cloud Computing

1/12an Networking eBook

What to Expect

from CloudComputing


2/12

What to Expect rom Cloud Computing

2 Cloud Computing: Hot Air or Killer App?

4 The Cloud: Saving Grace or Empty Thunder?

8 Internal vs. External Cloud

10 Three Steps to Secure Cloud Computing

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Contents

This content was adapted from Internet.coms ServerWatch, Datamation, and

CIO Update Web sites. Contributors: Paul Rubens, Pam Baker, Robert McGarvey,

and Jeffrey Kaplan.


3/122 What to Expect from Cloud Computing, an Internet.com Network ing eBook. 2009, WebMediaBrands Inc


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loud computing has become a huge buzz-phrasein the past year, but youd be orgiven or not know-ing what the term really means. Dierent people in-terpret cloud computing in dierent ways. Thatsa problem because computing in the cloud may

be important or you and your organization, but i its not clearwhat it actually means, how will you know?

Cloud vs. GridWhat, or example, is thedierence between cloudcomputing and grid com-puting? Both imply datacenters lled with computingresources available over thenetwork, so are they, in act,the same thing?

Actually, no. Grid computingimplies the provision o com-puting resources as a utility

that can be turned on or oas required. Computing ontap, so to speak. You pay orwhat you consume, withoutworrying about how where itcomes rom or how much isavailable.

A good example o this is Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2) oering. Customers create their own Amazon MachineImages (AMIs) containing an operating system, applicationsand data, and they control how many instances o each AMI

run at any given time. They pay or the instance-hours (andbandwidth) they use, adding computing resources at peaktimes and removing them when they are no longer required.Amazon calls this a cloud, but really its a grid. The costo this utility? 10 cents an hour or 1.7 GB o memory, onevirtual core, and 160 GB o instance storage, plus datatranser costs.

Cloud computing is slightly dierent. It implies the supplyo applications to end users, rather than just computer cy-cles. Cloud-based computing is a type o IT service usually

delivered over the Internet, but the dening characteristic isscale the ability to service millions o users, said MatCain, a research vice president at Gartner. Cloud computingalso implies quick and easy provisioning and a simple cosstructure, generally on a per-user, per-month basis, i it isbilled at all, he said.

Microsots Live Hotmail is a perect example o an application

run in the cloud: It is suppliedover the Internet rom one omore data centers who-knowswhere; it has millions o userseasy sel-provisioning; and avery simple cost structure (ono charge per month).

Is It Really AllThat New?I some o this sounds amiliarits because, apart rom thescale, it is an almost perectdescription o the applicationservice provider (ASP) modethat was in vogue briefy eighor nine years ago. ASPs, youlrecall, were supposed to manage data centers and use theirexpertise to run and maintain

all sorts o applications or customers, who accessed theseapplications down the wire. New applications were writtenor existing applications were ASP-enabled, and these wereeither shared by multiple customers or hosted on a separateserver or each customer.

The problem was that very ew ASPs managed to get manyand in some cases any, customers. Most disappeared asquickly as they arrived. There were a ew successes: HostedExchange was a popular oering, and Salesorce.com successully promoted the idea o sotware as a service a lowcost solution to ll a particular need, a commodity rather thana dierentiator.

So whats the dierence between the ASP model and com-puting in the clouds? You could argue that the cloud is just a

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ancy 21st-century way o talking about back-end systems thatsupply sotware as a service. The dierence is scale, saidCain. ASPs never got millions o customers.

Its interesting to note that just as ASPs discovered hostedExchange was one o the ew things or which customerswere willing to pay, its also an application that runs well inthe cloud. E-mail is the poster child o cloud computing,said Cain.

ASPs had very little luck oering productivity apps like O-ce down the wire to customers. That was partly or techni-cal reasons, and partly because very ew enterprises wantedtheir condential documents and spreadsheets stored osite.Besides, what was the benet o not running Oce on yourown local machine, and who knew whether the ASP would

even be in business in a ew months time?

This hasnt stopped Google oering its Google Docs suiteo productivity and collaboration applications rom the cloud.Companies, including IBM and Microsot, have announcedplans to give the cloud increased attention. Its likely otherlarge organizations, such as Oracle, will join the ray. Cainsuggests hardware vendors like Dell and HP may also belooking to get in on the act.

A New View From the CloudWhats dierent today is that although most o the players in

the ASP market were startups, the companies getting involvedin cloud computing are all very big. They have the resourcesto build enormous data centers with the vast amounts o stor-age and computing capacity required to service millions ocustomers reliably. Cost o entry is high, but it will be worthit to the likes o Google i companies can get their hands ona sizeable proportion o the money enterprises are currentlyspending on mass market applications like Oce.

But they will nd customers only i they can demonstrate realbenets rom taking applications rom the cloud. The questionremains: Why would anyone want Oce (or other applica-tions such as e-mail) as a service rather than simply install-

ing sotware on a computer or getting it rom the corporatedata center?

The answer to this question may also be amiliar. TheASP model promised a much simpler way o accessingapplications, with a very short provisioning time, a predictable

per-user, per-month ee, and lower overall costs due toeconomies o scale and the harnessing o expertise providedby specialists.This is precisely what computing in the cloud oers but withless choice o applications and more economy o scaleGoogle, Dell, Amazon, IBM, and others o similar ilk can builddata centers all over the world, in places that have inexpen-sive and plentiul power supplies. They can oer applicationssuch as productivity tools and e-mail, to millions o end userswith vast economies o scale, so that the cost per-user, permonth is almost nothing. And the customers, or users, arealready there.

Users will likely be more receptive to the idea since the oldknee-jerk worries about security and allowing third parties torun applications are less prevalent these days. And lets aceit Google is not likely to run out o money any time soon andis probably ar more likely to be around in 10 years time thanmany o its potential cloud computing customers.

When put like that, cloud computing starts to make senseAter all, e-mail and productivity apps are commodities every-one uses. They are not strategic apps that give a companya competitive advantage. Thereore, why not let a handul omega-corporations like Google run and maintain them romdata centers built near hydro-electric acilities oering unlimited ree power or a raction o the price now spent to l icenseinstall, maintain, and run them yoursel?

It may not give you a competitive advantage i everyone elseis getting their commodity apps rom the cloud as well, but isure does reduce costs. Or, to paraphrase Yossarian romJoseph Hellers classic novel Catch-22, i everyone else isgetting their apps rom the cloud, youd certainly be a damnedool to get yours any other way ...




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n the groundswell o economic pressures, com-panies big and small are looking to the cloud orrelie. The buzz is everywhere: cloud computingcan cut costs, speed implementations, and scalequickly. The buzz, however, may be slightly o-the

mark -- at least in product pitches.

Just like SOA hype was vendor ueled and thus became morea marketing term than an architecture description, the samewill happen in 2009 with thecloud, said Ross Mason,co-ounder and CTO o opensource SOA provider Mule-Source. Its all about buzzand not as much about prag-matism.

That is not to say, however, thatthe cloud is a total rain-out.

Right now, the cloud is themost over-hyped Web-basedbuzzword when it comes tohow business gets done,said EchoSigns CEO, JasonLemkin. Having said that,I would argue that the cloudis still in act under-hyped be-cause Cloud computing is re-ally shorthand or what third-generation web services can do, and this is something thatradically shits online business dynamics.

Drivers and AnswersThe main driver behind cloud computing is basic econom-ics. It signicantly lowers up-ront capital expenses andallows companies to only pay or what they actually use. Plus,the cloud model dramatically lowers operating expensesover time by increasing standardization and automation anddelivering applications and services more eciently, saidDennis Quan, IBM director o Autonomic Computing.

It is a bit mystiying that while everyone agrees on the benetso cloud computing, many have trouble dening what trulydoes, and does not, t under the cloud umbrella. Perhapsthis explains why Peter Fingars book, Dot.Cloud, was a topseller on Amazon beore it was even published. In act, sev-eral books on cloud computing are selling in record numbersas demand or denitive answers swells. Fingar admits that

denitions o Cloud computing vary widely, but said he haspegged the concept to two parts:

For geeks, he said, cloudcomputing means grid computing, utility computing, sotware as a service (SaaS)virtualization, Internet-basedapplications, autonomic computing, peer-to-peer computing, on-demand and remoteprocessingand variouscombinations o these terms

These are all areas Fingacalls inormation actories.

For non-geeks, cloud computing is simply a platorm whereindividuals and companiesuse the Internet to accessendless hardware, sotwareand data resources or moso their computing needs

leaving the mess to their Cloud Service Providers (CSPs),as Fingar puts it.

In any case, it isnt the geek or non-geek struggling with thecloud issue: its the CIO. The big thrill o the cloud is not havingto care who, where, or how something is being done, said MikoMatsumura, author o SOA Adoption or Dummies and deputyCTO o Sotware AG. Unortunately, that thrill does not extendto the CIO, whose job it is to ensure that its done properly.

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there are some denite characteristics o a cloud that can beidentied now:

Elasticity: Enterprises will take advantage o cloud computingwhen they require a high variability on compute power. Forexample, assume a company requires double the number oWeb and application servers a ew times a month. They do notwant to pay or the capital expense o having dormant serverson the foor most o the time. In the cloud, compute power cangrow and shrink. The enterprise pays on a usage basis.

Ofoading Context: About 80 percent o the IT budget isdedicated to keeping the current inrastructure running. Thisleaves little time or money to work on new, strategic direc-tions. Moving the standard computing environments/tasksto the cloud ofoads the up-ront capital expenses as well as

the operational expenses. For small companies, a cloud canprovide ecient enterprise-class best practices.

Anything as a Service: Imagine, through a Web browser,requesting a set o servers and storage devices to be provi-sioned and congured to run a large-scale application. Thiscan be requested and managed as a set o service requeststhat can be made rom any browser, including a cell phone. Itis this lightweight, service-oriented approach that is the hall-mark o cloud computing.

Parting the Clouds

Lemkin said the number o SaaS services has mushroomedin sync with the Webs growth as the preerred channel todo business. However, he warns that many SaaS servicesare not truly cloud services. While we are seeing the intro-duction o strong SaaS oerings in CRM, nance, contractmanagement and e-signatures, what we are not seeing is theintegration o these services on the Web, he said. Insteado being completely siloed, the cloud enables services to becompletely, 100 percent integrated on the Web, with no in-stall, no IT, and no headaches.

What were called mash-ups in Web 2.0, he said, will swellin signicance as the cloud enables data, applications, and

core business processes to ollow Internet users anywhere,anytime, in any application.The challenges o cloud computing is that only a ew applica-tions are truly built or the Cloud, as Web 2.0 solutions, saidRobert Klotz, vice president o Technology at Akibia. Sot-ware as a service solutions come close, but they are not trulyWeb 2.0.

The proportion of survey respondentswho said they were not considering SaaSdropped from 32 percent in 2007 to only9 percent in 2008. Of that group, 37percent said they were primarily

concerned about the cost-savings SaaSwould bring them.

A recent Gartner opinion piece tried toappeal to this segment of the market byusing the tired old argument that sub-scribing to a SaaS service is akin to leas-

ing a car and would cost users more overan extended period of time. The researchrm suggested that if an organization

plans to use an application for more thanthree years, it isnt cost-effective to sub-scribe to a SaaS solution, just like it isnta good idea to lease a car for more thanthree years.

While Gartners argument is certainlytrue for simple applications that requirelittle effort to deploy and maintain, it

doesnt apply for more complex enter-prise applications that demand consider-

able time and expense to implement andkeep up and running. In these cases, sub-scribing to a SaaS solution isnt the sameas leasing a car.

First of all, leasing a car simply enablesdrivers to reduce their upfront paymentsfor the vehicle itself. When you drive theleased vehicle off the lot it immediatelystarts to depreciate. The dealer and

manufacturer do not provide any up-dates or upgrades, with the exception ofan occasional recall and maybe a free oilchange. And, they certainly dont pick upthe costs of housing the vehicle and mak-ing sure it will be able to start up everytime you need to get somewhere.

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Subscribing to a SaaS solution eliminatesmore than just the upfront perpetual

license fee. The SaaS subscription alsoeliminates additional hardware, staff, fa-cilities and other software costs requiredto deploy, customize, maintain, andmanage the application at optimal levels.So the total cost of ownership (TCO) issubstantially reduced over the entire lifeof the application, as the respondents toTHINKstrategies/Cutters most recentSaaS survey stated.

While there may be additional consult-ing costs to ensure properly deployment,integration, and training for a SaaS solu-tion, these costs are generally offset bythe faster implementation times, higherutilization levels and lower failure rateswhich ensure a quicker time to value andgreater return on investment (ROI).

Dont forget that the best argument

against leasing a car is that you dont

have an asset you can trade in or resellwhen you want to at the end of the term.While the same holds true for a SaaSsolution, when was the last time youheard about an organization trading in orreselling its legacy application.

Dont let bad analysis play to your worstfears if you are still uncomfortable goingdown the SaaS path. Instead, talk to the

growing number of your peers who areadopting and beneting from a widening

array of SaaS solutions.

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Just as some believe the technology isnt quite up to speed,many see the current perormance o the cloud easily matchedon-premise; including scalability. Critics point out that well-

managed company data centers also provide economies oscale, said Paco Nathan, principal scientist at ShareThis,a social network-sharing tool. The dirty little secret is thatcompany data centers rely on purchasing rack space andpower eeds in advance and buying equipment, whichamortizes over years and tends to ail and requires repairand replacement plus large stang and training. The clouddoes not.

Conversely, there are dirty little secrets in the cloud too.Multi-tenancy remains the characteristic that delivers thegreatest economic advantage so caveat emptor: just becausean app. is hosted in the cloud doesnt necessarily mean its

SaaS, explains Bob Moul, CEO o Boomi, an on-demandintegration vendor. How do you know i its true SaaS? Tryto trial and/or implement the application today without humanintervention by the vendor.

At the end o the day, the decision to move to the cloud,stay rmly on the ground, or move to hybrids somewhere inbetween, will be made based on a companys specic needs.For now, its just another set o tools to use or not.

The concept o cloud computing, at its core, representsmajor shits or companies and service providers rom

internally to externally, rom tethered to portable, romphysical security to virtual security, rom siloed to pooled,explains Don Norbeck, director o Product Strategyat SunGard.




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heres no getting away rom it: Cloud comput-ing has many potential benets, but it has anumber o drawbacks as well.

On the positive side, having applications pro-vided rom the cloud oers enterprises the pos-

sibility o low-cost compute resources that are almost innitelyscalable. Theres the ability to pay by the hour or resourcesonly when they are needed, and or sudden surges in demand

or resources to be accommodated very easily. Cloud com-puting also rees up capital that would otherwise be tied up inhardware and data center bricks and mortar, and it rees up ITstaers who would otherwisebe tending to servers so theycan work on more productiveIT endeavors.

But its not all sunshine androses: The drawbacks revolvearound issues about data se-curity and how sensible it isto store it with a third party

(assuming regulatory require-ments permit it); portabilityand the possibility o beinglocked in to one cloud pro-vider; reliability; data logging;speed and the inevitable la-tency when dealing with serv-ers in the cloud hal a conti-nent away; and geo-politicalworries where in the worldis the cloud data center running your apps, and do you wantit there? This last is less o an issue or U.S.-based

enterprises, but it is a very real concern or businesses inmany other countries.

But or some organizations theres one real show stopperwhen it comes to getting the benets o cloud computing:heterogeneity. Many corporate data centers have many dier-ent generations o servers rom a variety o vendors runningdierent operating systems on dierent processors Win-dows, AIX, Solaris, Linux, Intel, PowerPC, SPARC, and soon. In contrast, most cloud services oer a limited choice ooperating systems running on a narrow range o hardware.

This leaves heterogeneous enterprises in a bit o a quandaryIt may be possible to ofoad some applications into thecloud, but the remainder still must be managed and run in-house. I this is the case, then there may be some eciencybenets, but a smaller data center could actually mean thatmany economies o scale are lost. What remains is a hodgepodge o dierent systems that need a great deal o time andmany dierent skill sets to manage, while the easier-to-man-age systems would be gone. Eciency actually goes down.

One solution is to operate a cloud environment in-house: aso-called internal cloud, said Steve Oberlin, chie scientis

at Cassatt, a San Jose, Cali.based IT inrastructure management sotware vendorInternal clouds help you topool your computing resources into a cloud and manageit, applying server resourcesdynamically on the fy in response to demand, he saysWhat you end up with is high

er utilization and eciency.

Many organizations havealready embarked on virtualization programs to boosserver utilization rates andreduce power and spacerequirements in the datacenter, but Oberlin says aninternal cloud goes beyond

this. It enables applications that are not suitable or virtualization (such as those that require the resources o an entire

server at peak times) to run more eciently, and it includesvirtualized servers anyway: virtualization, in other words, ispart o an internal cloud solution, he says.

Which to Choose?But heres an important question: Which is better, implementing an internal cloud or using a public cloud? The answeraccording to James Staten, a principal analyst at Forrester, isthat both have their advantages and disadvantages. Interna

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clouds are good because you can ollow all o your workfowand security guidelines, and ensure that you are running theright code. The trade-o is that you cant reach the economies

o scale that public cloud providers achieve, he said.

On the other hand, i you use a public cloud provider youend up having to do lots o work like license managementand adapting to the processes o the public cloud. You haveto work with what is on oer. But you do get the benets oeconomies o scale.

So what does it mean to run an internal cloud? At the mostbasic level it means using products like Cassatts Active Re-sponse sotware, which simply manages power by monitoringusage and applying policies to shut down servers at non-peaktimes when they are not required, such as on weekends. You

can get pretty dramatic savings on your power bill rom this,said Oberlin. We see signicant energy savings, and an ROIo just nine months.

But this in itsel is not cloud computing in the normal sense othe word. To achieve this, Cassatt uses a database o serverimages, a set o rules that dene the service levels that appli-cations must achieve, and management sotware that controlsthe whole setup. Put simply, the management sotware moni-tors each application, and when necessary it boots appropri-ate servers with the correct image over the network to addresources to the applications.

At less busy periods, unneeded resources are shut down sothey can remain idle or reallocate to other applications thatneed them. There is still some ineciency in heterogeneousenvironments because some hardware can run only some, butnot all, server images; however, resources can still be pooledamong compatible applications. In terms o cost savings, a

typical data center with low double-digit eciency can see 40percent to 50 percent reduction in the number o servers required to provide the same sort o service level, and still have

better headroom and agility, said Oberlin.

In act, enterprises arent necessarily restricted to a singledata center when it comes to running an internal cloud. Cassatt is soon to release an Enterprise Edition o its Active Response sotware, which pools resources across dierent datacenters. And it doesnt end there. The sotware will allow anenterprise to extend its resource pool by including resourcesthat come rom an external cloud provider as well. You couldhave a xed amount o resources available to you locally oat another data center, and deal with unplanned peaks in demand by using resources rom an external cloud provider,Oberlin said.

This practice o using an external public cloud provider orextra capacity will become increasingly common, ForrestersStaten said. At the moment, we are seeing companies usingisolated internal clouds, but we certainly think they will endup adopting a hybrid cloud or cloud bursting approach.IBM demonstrated a system that enables companies to moveapplication processing rom an internal cloud to a public cloudacility, while keeping all data stored within the private cloudThis type o hybrid cloud approach could prove popular withcompanies that cant otherwise use a public cloud or securityor regulatory reasons.

Its still the early days or cloud computing, but i eciencygains in the order o 40 percent to 50 percent are possiblethen enterprises unwilling or unable to use a public cloudprovider will have to give internal clouds a very longhard look.




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ou can close your eyes and pretend it is nothappeningmany CIOs are doing exactlythatbut ace this reality: Cloud comput-ing is with us to stay. Everybody will soon beusing it.

At least this is the prediction o Jim Haskin, CIO at Websense,a San Diego-based data security provider, and others.

A scary thought? For many CIOs, yes. They are panickingabout this, said Kirill Sheynkman, CEO o San Francisco-based Elastra, a developero applications currently de-ployed in association withAmazons cloud computingoering. The panic is well-ounded, isnt it? Becauseo the security concernsthat come with jumping therewall?

Sheynkman snorts: Securityis not the issue. Do you thinkyour IT department knowsmore about data security thanAmazon does?

Reality check: Data secu-rity in the cloud is no dier-ent than data security at a re-mote data center, said JohnLytle, a senior consultant with IT consulting rm Compassin Chicago.

In many cases, data at most companies are more at risk intheir own environment than in a well-managed cloud, saidMike Eaton, CEO o Cloudworks, a Thousand Oaks, Cali.-based provider o cloud-based services, primarily to smalland mid-sized businesses.

Capable Hands?The big cloud playersAmazon, Google, Sun Microsystems,Salesorce.comknow more than a little about maintaining

online security and, considered in that context, worries abououtsiders knocking down the security walls and having theirway with your data indeed seem over-wrought. Theres beena lot o over-reaction, said Sheynkman.

The question should not be about data security in the cloud,elaborates Haskin. We need to be asking other questionsthat probe exactly why we are araid o cloud computing and

certainly, as a group, CIOs are resisting it. But just maybethat has to end because time to dither may be running outor CIOs.

Bill Appleton, chie technical ocer at Mountain ViewCali.-based Dreamactory, adeveloper o cloud-based applications, ominously warnsThe cloud may skip IT andsell directly to end users. Imight simply bypass the com

mand and control systemo IT.

And that may be the legitimateworry. Thats because a CIOnightmare revolves around unauthorized use o public cloudresources by employeeswho may be putting sensitiveinternal data online at Webbased spreadsheets or into

slide shows.

Most CIOs worry a lot about employees putting data thashouldnt be public in public places, said Christopher Daysenior vice president o security services at Terremark Worldwide, a global provider o IT inrastructure. That ear is justi-ed. What would the board o directors say i it discovered thecompanys strategic plan was accessible in a public cloud?But Day also suggests that CIOs can snu out this potentiarestorm simply by taking a direct approach.

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Just put into place clear policies, then educate employeesabout them, said Day.

Pull your head out o sand (or clouds as the case may be) anddirectly attack this concern. That is how to make it vanish. Un-derstand too that employees who upload sensitive data usu-ally mean well. They are just looking or better ways to work.Look or other, more secure ways to let them do exactly that,adds Day. Take those two steps and most likely cloud-basedshadow IT will diminish in your organization.

Securing the LogonAnother, lingering worry about cloud computing is that withmany providers log-ons are too primitive. Large enterprisewill not embrace the cloud until security signicantly improves,fatly predicts John Gunn, general manager at Chicago-basedAladdin, a developer o digital security tools. The worry hereis that when barebones log-ons are in use, old-ashioned so-cial engineering techniques will let hackers learn employeelog-ons and, watch out, data leakage will be at food stage.

But, said Gunn, the solution is simple: enterprises should onlypermit data to migrate to the cloud where two-actor, strongauthentication is in use and, right there, hackers probably arekept at bay. Take just that step, suggests Gunn, and consider-

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able big company opposition to cloud computing would in-stantly evaporate. Most mainstream cloud providers are hanging back on this but, suggests Gunn, when enough users cry

out or saeguards the cloud companies will respond.

Here TodayA last, big worry, particularly in todays unstable economyis how durable is the cloud provider, said Raimund GenesCTO at Trend Micro, the global security company. You needa provider that will be in business three years rom now. Whenyou give up your IT inrastructure, you need a reliable serviceprovider. When a cloud provider goes bankrupt how accessible is your ino, by whom? Better not to deal with such questions at all by instead going with cloud providers that have thewherewithal or a long-haul contest.

Parting advice or CIOs who are still wringing their hands inworry over data in the cloud comes rom Elastras Sheynkmanwho reminds us: Its not all or nothing. It does not have to bePut only the data you are comortable with on the cloud. Thatis what most companies seem to be doing. We are still in anera o experimentation.

Take it in little steps but start taking some steps, thats thesmart way to embrace the cloud.

what to expect from cloud computing

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