The art of listening

One of the first tips I got when entering the workforce was "You have two ears and only one mouth for a reason!", meaning that in conversations with customers you should spend twice as much time listening as you do talking. Point was to avoid becoming like a radio with only one button: "Send".

Over the years I learned that above also applies to "new media" such as email, blogging, tweeting and podcasting. You need to use the receive button at least twice as much as the send button. Although less obvious, I am trying to maintain this ratio also as an analyst. Maybe not in every single conversation - our type of analyst inquiries are not like psycho-analysts calls where the analyst just keeps asking the patient repeatedly "and how do you feel about this?" - but overall it still makes sense to allocate substantially more time to input (also from colleagues, peers and even competitors) than to output.

With modern management techniques increasingly focused on managing a workforce that is increasingly spread out and that maintains work hours outside the traditional nine to five, it may – across many industries - feel increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain this balance of input versus output (as only the latter seems to gets measured and formally acknowledged nowadays).

Luckily there is modern technology - like podcasts and RSS feed readers - to help streamline at least parts of the input process. Funny thing is that some of this technology is not that new at all. My first encounter with Gartner's "podcast avant la lettre" was with the "Talking Technology" series that back then came on “compact cassettes”  (for young readers that may never have seen a cassette - not even in your "my first Sony" -  there is now an iPhone app that emulates the experience). This "Talking Technologies" series still exists (feed here, subscription required), in fact our High Tech and Technology Providers team just participated in the November edition with a segment on  the "4G, the Next frontier for Cellular Networks" special report that describes why 4G matters and what impact it will have on both providers and consumer (Personally I just hope we will use 4G at least as much to receive as to broadcast).

Just like the classic "Talking Technologies" cassette tapes and the subsequent CDs, these podcasts require a subscription. Fairly recently we added to this a series of almost daily Gartner webinars, which are open to all interested parties after a short registration process. You can register for these webinars  here, but to make it even more convenient you can also subscribe to a feed with the upcoming webinars or to a feed with all replays. This Tuesday (November 15th) I will be doing my first contribution to this series. In this webinar, called "The Crowded Cloud", I will talk about  how many different industry players, including Communication Service Providers, are trying to become the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) of choice for their enterprise customers. Would love to welcome you there.

As you gathered by now the above is part of the 1/3th of  my activities focused on output/sending, but I look forward to balancing that out soon with more personal and more two way communications. Meanwhile please feel free to comment below.

Cloud in one hundred days (and nights)

This week the Gartner Symposium visited an unexpectedly sunny Barcelona. This year’s theme for the Gartner Symposium is  "Re-imagine IT" and how the forces of Cloud, Social, Information (incl. big data) and Mobile are forming a nexus (Websters: a connected group or series) of change, see the bottom of this post for a link to the on-line replays. While here I ran into a former colleague who reminded me that this is also around day 100 in my new role as analyst. And although I am all too aware that being an analysts is not even remotely like running a country, this seems as good a point in time as any to have short look back and forward.
Apart from the usual getting acquainted with some new and some familiar (not to say classic) systems, here are some of the things that kept me busy:

• A core activity is off course writing research, in October an Emerging Technology Analysis on  How Self-Service Portals for Cloud Infrastructure Services Impact the Customer Experience published, followed by a European focused Competitive Landscape on  Two CSP Approaches to Cloud Computing  in November.
  Still in the process of peer reviews, fact reviews, editing etc. are a co-authored piece on Cloud Service Brokerage and a Marketing Essentials document describing four strategic options for Cloud Service Providers. Upcoming are also the annual Gartner Predicts for 2012, for which I got to submit a new SPA (Strategic Planning Assumption) and had a look back at an earlier one.
• But analysts also get out on occasion, for example to host a forum during the press day of a cloud datacenter opening at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport (some coverage here). Or to participate in a cloud brainstorm with the lead architects and national CTO’s of a large European communication services provider. And on the end user side: to facilitate  a global cloud strategy workshop for a leading European life sciences organization and to moderate a European vendor day for an international freedom and security alliance.
• In addition there are the inquiries.  I stopped counting at some point, but spoke with numerous banks, governments, manufacturers and many service providers in all shapes and forms (from gaming agencies to health care providers) and from all parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe and the America’s about their cloud computing strategies. Also met in person with several members of our EXP program and had briefings with and/or visited several cloud and communication service providers (CSPs).
• These cloud service providers included traditional (and not so traditional) hardware providers, software companies, hosters, co-locators and a surprisingly large number of cloud providers form other continents that are in the process of setting up European facilities in Amsterdam. Also managed to squeeze in a visit to the European edition of VMworld and spoke with their executives about the (European) market.
• Given the fast growing number of cloud providers in Europe we also set up a continuous survey (see last month’s blog), so if you are providing (or planning to provide) cloud services in Europe it makes sense to have a look, also if you’re interested in the process of setting up a vendor briefing around your offering.
• On the internal research front started to participate in the communities covering IaaS, PaaS, IUS (Infrastructure Utility Service) and ITOM (IT Operations Management incl. private cloud).  Other internal activities included onboarding training, getting a phone, ordering a car and last week I was asked to become the second or backup agenda manager in our team (Our agenda management is not about scheduling or calendars, but about setting and managing the agenda storyline of key trends and key issues that we write to).
• Looking forward: I am hosting a customer roundtable at symposium about  “How private or public should your ideal infrastructure cloud be?” and next Tuesday (15 Nov) I am presenting a Gartner Tech Tuesday webinar called “The Crowded Cloud – Opportunities for CSPs”  (open for viewing after registering here). Going forward I plan to find more time for blogging again and for writing more in depth research on the topics covered in this blog.

Meanwhile you may want watch highlights from this year’s Symposium, like in other years these are open for general viewing (after a short free registration process) at www.gartnereventsondemand.com. In addition to the Gartner keynotes, the special guest keynote interviews and other highlights, you can also watch sessions from the symposium sponsors there, some even adapted their session –like Google – to the keynote from earlier on the day.
Apart from the earlier mentioned nexus, my personal favorite sound bites from the opening keynote were: Spending on cloud currently is already far in the tens of Billions but still only a small percentage (around 3%) of total enterprise IT spend and growing much more rapidly than traditional spend. And: Cloud will do for IT what supply chain models did for manufacturing. Both topics I hope to touch upon further in upcoming research, talks, presentations and blogs.

Using a cloud service to … collect information on European cloud infrastructure services

The public cloud infrastructure as a service market is developing quickly, also in Europe. Over the past months we saw the number of international IaaS providers setting up shop in Europe increase, while also several European based providers launched new or upgraded offerings.

To keep a finger on the pulse of developments we started, as part of the European Cloud IaaS coverage at Gartner, surveying pan-European providers of Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service . We are now extending the invite to participate in that survey more widely (like we recently did for the CIO survey).

Especially in Europe we see cloud IaaS services being offered as an extension to existing services, this survey focuses therefore on how IaaS services fit with the overall service portfolios of providers, so it also includes short questions on adjacent offerings in areas such as PaaS, SaaS, Managed Desktops & VDI, DC Outsourcing, Infrastructure Utility Services, Managed Hosting, Co-location and  IT Professional & Brokerage Services.

If you are providing IaaS services in at least two European regions, then please take some time to fill out this survey. The data received will be used to gauge the overall state of the pan-European Public Cloud IaaS landscape, not to describe individual providers (for these we use other information such as the regular vendor briefing process, see here how to apply for such briefings).

You can take the survey from the Gartner Blog Network (GBN) page here

If you have any questions please send a short email to gregor.petri at gartner.com

Of these 10 most hated jobs, how many did you have?

Earlier this week Yahoo Finance ran an article on the 10 most hated jobs (based on a survey asking hundreds of thousands of employees at a major career site).

What amazed me most - apart from the large number of IT jobs, including the top one,  making the list – was that I personally was employed in no less than five of these . Now you may think: “What a miserable career that must have been!”, but to be honest, it never felt like that.  Sure I can relate to some of dissatisfiers that people listed, such as a lack of direction from upper management (actually described for one of these jobs - guess which one - as “employers are unable to communicate coherently, and lack an understanding of the technology”). But overall I had good fun doing most of my five.

In fact, some of my other jobs – although fun at the time - would have been more logical to make the list. As a student I was a part-time restaurant worker (even though my parents insisted the only job I was doing part-time was studying) and when that restaurant burned down I spend 3 months rebuilding it as a construction worker (hard hat and all).  Both of which did not make the list.

Now this survey is not about IT and does not even mention cloud computing, so why discuss it here?
The reason is that with cloud computing lots of job roles will be changing and there is an opportunity for all of us to think about which aspects of our current roles we like best (and which we hate most). So we have these clear in our mind while venturing into this new world.

On changes at the macro and organizational level –beyond cloud -  Mark McDonald  just published a series around  "Thinking Small" (It is time for IT to ‘THINK small’,  Thinking Small — Creating value rather than controlling costs , Thinking Small — Thinking value) and a piece called Re-Imagine IT, Lead from the Front  (a preview on the CIO experience at Orlando Symposium).

But also at the micro level we can do our share in re-imagining our job roles. Cloud computing - with its “as a service” delivery mechanism – may add some degrees of freedom to what can be imagined. Not that it will eliminate some of the less loved aspects of our jobs by having for example: EaaS for doing our Expenses as a Service, RaaS for doing our weekly Reporting as a Service and MaaS  for attending mandatory Meetings as a Service (although the idea sounds pretty cool). But cloud may enable us - also as individuals -to focus on what we are best at and on where we add the most value (which often seems to equate to having the most fun – or at least to getting the most recognition).

Scale (and particularly large scale) is certainly an important aspect of cloud computing, but let’s hope for (and work hard on) keeping our jobs at a human scale. Just like the way we apply our laptops and tablets is not impacted by having  1 million or 1 trillion transistors inside, the scale of the cloud should not impact how closely we work with people. In fact, the efficiencies of scale that cloud computing brings, may allow us to be even more granular and differentiated (a.k.a.  customer focused) at the local level.

Personally I recently did my evaluation and took the opportunity to make a switch (and yes, am having fun!). Meanwhile I am observing my kids’ early (part-time) exploits into working live. First conclusion they reached is that restaurant work definitely beats a paper route (better hours) and restocking super-market shelves (more degrees of freedom). I am still working on getting them enthusiastic for any jobs involving IT (or clouds, for that matter). Not sure this top 10 will help.

Travelling at the speed of cloud in Europe

First post from my new base blogs.gartner.com. When looking at public cloud infrastructure as a service it is fair to say that, with some notable exceptions, most off the larger scale activities, initiatives and even the majority of excitement and buzz around this phenomena so far originated outside of Europe. Understandable, as both the largest and most visible users of public IaaS – think of organizations such as Facebook, Twitter and Netflix – and the most well known providers of Iaas started their cloud activities on the other site of the Atlantic. Even when looking at government activities it is the US government that seems to be most enthusiastic, both in intend and action, about cloud computing.

Over the last year there are however some encouraging signs that public cloud IaaS is also gaining interest in Europe, both among users, providers, government and the press. Users are asking more questions and starting pilots and projects; Local providers are bringing their first or even second generation offerings to market; Governments are investigating opportunities and the EU even stated it wants Europe to be not only “Cloud-Friendly” but “Cloud-Active”. And in typical European tradition we see market players joining forces in new European associations or adding new chapters to their (many) existing vehicles of national and international collaboration.

A telling sign of cloud IaaS becoming more mainstream in Europe was the press picking up on the recent power outage in Dublin, headlining with how it impacted the European services of cloud IaaS providers. Now this power outage – for which the jury is still out on whether it was caused by lightning or something else – did off course not only impact cloud providers. Also several more traditional datacenters and datacenters services struggled, but the fact the press picked the cloud angle as headlining topic was telling.

So it’s clear there is a lot going on around public cloud IaaS in Europe: places to see, things to do and stuff to write about. And that is exactly what I plan to do from here. After the summer vacation I have started as a Research Director at Gartner covering this area. My colleague Lydia Leong just published a short piece detailing the Gartner teams, people and roles covering public cloud IaaS on her blog. At Gartner all IT-related analysts’ blog posts are first published on the Gartner Blog Network (GBN) at blogs.gartner.com before posting to existing or personal blog pages. If you’re interested in what we write and not write about on these blogs have a look at the Gartner Blog Network Q&A. Although tempted I will not use this post to do a further introduction of myself – with all of today’s social media my history should be an open book anyhow – plus I now have a new profile page here on gartner.com. In a next post I will cover some of the topics we are currently looking at in Europe and ways to brief us on your activities in those areas if you are a provider.

I do want to end with a disclaimer. Although “European cloud” has a nice ring to it, reality is that the idea of a European Cloud is just as “virtual” a concept as European citizen, European market and European tax. If you speak to someone from Europe and you ask where they are from, they will say Germany or Italy or France or the UK. Very few will say “I am from Europe” (unless they expect you to have absolutely no idea where their home country is located). Same for the European market. Although we have free traffic of (most) goods and services, companies have to fight for each individual market and European market share is a construct of adding up shares in individual country markets. Even a European Tax we have (so far) managed to avoid. And despite many consumers using global solutions like Twitter and Facebook all the time, I don’t expect the European cloud IaaS market to be extremely uniform for the foreseeable future. Not just because some regulations still prevent this, but also because local cultures, habits and even things like labor relations, are vastly different across different parts of Europe. This makes Europe such an interesting place to be, also when looking at this area of cloud computing.

Did the global summer of cloud start in NYC?

Having just returned a scorching hot New York (host of CloudExpo East 2011) to a definitely cooler Europe, it makes sense to see whether these differences in temperature also apply to the cloud market.

This 8^th Expo was the third cloud expo I was invited to speak at and it definitely was the biggest so far. If CloudExpo West in November signaled the entry of the large mainstream vendors like Oracle, Dell and Microsoft - not to mention several CA divisions - as major sponsors, then this edition was signified by the larger turn out of end user organizations and even some coverage on mainstream news channel such as CNN. A quick audience poll on the first day revealed that about 90% of the audience is in the orientation phase, getting ready to do some serious spending (you could almost hear the vendors sigh of relieve as it is starting to look their investments will indeed pay off).

Although many of the sessions were vendors explaining their approaches and offerings, there were some notable exceptions featuring real implementations, like the case study session where hamburgers (in fact plastic burger replica’s holding gift certificates) were passed out to the audience.  The “how to get from here to there session by Andi Mann, where he showed two alternative paths to the cloud (an evolutionary and a revolutionary one) was also well received. In fact his subsequent book signing session generated a queue even longer than the one at the lunch buffet.

Looking at the event from a European angle it was refreshing to see several European solutions featured in the expo. I saw a next generation NAS solution from Belgium – addressing MSP’s interested in offering an S3 equivalent without requiring the traditional high NAS upfront investments; a solution from France to automatically build the innard’s  of VM’s based on specific OS and middleware requirements.  And a PaaS solution - originally from Holland - built in the KISS (Keep it Stupidly Simple) tradition of the great 4GLs, but with the scalability and usability that the cloud can bring to application development.

A special mention goes to the Holland Pavilion–located directly opposite the CA stand -  featuring no less than 8 additional Dutch companies and start-up’s on their way to make it big. Now this is not the first time the Dutch picked New York as a good spot to start the move into America (remember New Amsterdam?), but it is refreshing to see a government investing to stimulate economic activities around cloud computing (They did not yet spend the US$ 20B the U.S. government is vowing to put into cloud computing this year, but it’s a start).  The other interesting angle of the mission was to position Amsterdam (in this case old Amsterdam) as digital gateway to Europe. With broadband in almost every home and international bandwidth that matches the proverbial throughput and transit capacity of the Rotterdam harbor this seems a logical proposition.

In my session on Day two I covered several aspects of vendor Lock-In and more importantly, possible approaches to prevent it. We discussed standards, of which most are still too early to tell or too close to call, although the open datacenter alliance - as if on cue - published their first use case proposals on the same day. I also explored the benefits of a software based fabric approach for portability across (hybrid) clouds and revisited the earlier discussed 3D cloud strategy model.

Overall the event showed that cloud is becoming red hot, almost as hot as the pavement outside the Javits convention center (a condition many an attendee sought refuge from at one of the rooftop reception's thrown by the various sponsors). With all this momentum we are likely to see a next edition with even more cloud use cases and success stories, also from Europe. This could be done by every provider session including a real-live implementation story or a separate track dedicated to sharing the experiences of cloud (end-) users. Maybe a bit like our recent cloud leaders initiative, which features online stories from cloud luminaries such as PGI and  DonorsChoose  and cloud accelerators like LayeredTech, ScaleMatrix and DNS Europe (now also available as free Cloud Leaders iPad app). 

Don’t let the cloud creep up on you! (also not at Cloud Expo NYC next week)

In IT we like to use fancy words like architecture, governance and strategy, but is our approach to IT innovations indeed as structured and planned as these terms imply or is IT in many cases just like real life: IT is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans? And if yes, does that also apply to cloud computing?

When I recently published my “to cloud or to compute” column, fellow columnist and IT service management expert Alee Roos submitted the following “confession”(at ITSM portal):

• “… I'll make an embarrassing confession. I had not been much interested in the cloud-thing but finally went to listen to a presentation on cloud and cloud security. It was only then I realized that I had already put most of my business in the cloud without thinking much about it. The point was that I had bought services like web-site, Outlook Exchange, remote backups and a eSurveys, not cloud. I bought them because they solved some immediate business need at a very reasonable price.”

But Alee is not alone; I believe many organizations are in the same predicament and not only for SaaS solutions. When speaking to the European CTO of one of the largest IaaS providers (now part of a large Telco) he explained how many of their customers tend to move to the cloud. At some point a customer may have a need for temporary test or development capacity. Because it is a one-off need and not as strategic as production workloads, they “give it a try”. Often that first try is successful and they are surprised it was that easy. So a few weeks later – when a new need arises - they take the same route again. Often without a lot of due diligence, because by now this is an already used solution from an already accepted vendor. And before they know it they have several critical and/or production systems running in a cloud.

Now this is not the first time this is happening in IT. Many of us were taken by surprise by departmental servers (mini's), then we didn't notice PCs become important and costly (remember one of the first TCO surveys, the one that rocked our world and the one that caused us to run around trying to “implement” ITIL so we could make them as reliable, controlled and efficient as our mainframes had always been?). Next we managed to underestimate that at some point everyone - not just a few exceptions in higher management - needed mobile phones. And just recently some companies discovered that they had spreadsheets running core business logic that had become so large and so complex that to continue running them, they had to buy dedicated servers (yes these Excel-only servers now exist). I can’t imagine that any IT professional would plan for these things to work out like this. And finally how about the “structured and strategic way” we are introducing tablets into the organization? Yes, as mentioned, IT is what happens while you're busy making other plans. And now we risk letting the cloud creep up on us.

With SaaS most people have started to realize this, in fact our former CIO, David Hansen , now general manager of CA Technologies Enterprise Solutions and Cloud Management Business, explained to fellow CIOs at Evanta’s annual CIO Executive Summit how he – to get a feeling for what was being used sorted through the many authentication requests from inside the company to outside services. It was amazing to hear what employees were using, even back then, when cloud was not yet a household name and in a time when everything that was not approved by default was verboten (remember the days you had to leave the office to access Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc.?).

And now as an industry, are we at risk for similar experiences with IaaS, too? Guess it's a case of l’histoire se répète (but a Dutch proverb involving a Donkey also comes to mind).

Of course you could ask: how bad is it if this happens? If users are happy, prices are reasonable and service is good. Why should we care? Well –beside the obvious one: risk management – avoiding vendor lock-in seems to be a pretty good reason. Just be sure it doesn’t creep up on you while you’re busy making other big plans.

By the way, I will be speaking more about this topic in my session at Cloud Expo on Tuesday afternoon at the Javits Center in New York: "Cloud Users of the World, Unite!, How to Remedy Cloud Lock-in.”

To cloud or to compute, that’s the question

The ultimate dream of any marketer is to have its brand become a verb. “Let me quickly Xerox that”, “I Fedexed it to you yesterday”, “I just Googled it”. In cloud computing I do not see that happening any time soon. At least I haven’t heard anyone say they Amazoned their intranet or forced their custom apps yet. But it is also unlikely we will be calling it cloud computing forever.

Cloud computing is not the first new kind of computing. Previously we saw “interactive computing” - indicating that it was no longer processed in an overnight batch – and “client/server computing” –indicating it ran with a graphical user interface and not on a boring green screen terminal. But pretty soon the new way became the norm and we resorted back to simply calling it “computing”.

For cloud computing there are basically two options, we will either call it computing again – meaning it is perceived as a slightly improved version of the same old, slow and expensive service they used to get from the EDP or IT department. Or users may start to use a new name: “Since we cloud our email, the cost has gone down considerably”, “Our new CIO agreed with the CEO to cloud as much as possible, and the results have been amazing”.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating to try and repeat the oldest trick in the IT book of putting a new name or label on old ideas. Like when we started calling everything e-something and we renamed our companies to Something.DOT.com. Some of that is already going on around as cloud washing (companies renaming their existing offerings to be perceived as cloud solutions, even if they have little to do with cloud).

Now it may take some time to get used to clouding as a verb - as I am sure it took some time to get used to texting as a verb. And what does not help is that - till now - the only things people clouded were issues.

For people that grew up in IT this idea of calling it cloud may sound silly. Why on earth would we use a new name for something that basically is computingas we invented it (or at least as we intended it). But it won’t be the IT people deciding what to call it; it will be the next generation of users. The same generation that – at least in Holland – massively adopted the verb computering. “What did you do last night?” “Oh not much, got pizza, watched a movie and computered a bit”. It’s the generation that came up with verbs like texting, computering and gaming. All not very results oriented activities, but that’s not the point.

The point is that if it feels like traditional computing – where you depended on an IT department to get service and decided what you were allowed to do - they will likely simply call it computing again. If it feels completely different, with more freedom, more possibilities and more speed and agility, it deserves to become a verb.

PS Anticipating the popularity of “to cloud” a Dutch vocabulary site is already showing the full conjugation here.

In cloud standards, it's all about survival of the fittest

The Kuppinger Cole European Identity Conference 2011 (EIC), which was held in Munich earlier this month, truly represented a ‘Who's Who' of cloud initiatives and standards.  Representatives from many influential, established and aspiring standards and industry bodies were on hand to showcase progress of the security initiatives currently in the works.

The number of initiatives is overwhelming. For years the joke was that any time two Dutch meet, they are likely to start an association or co-operative initiative, but apparently that is also true for security and cloud experts. I won't bore you with all the clever acronyms (it's a true alphabet soup), but I do want to highlight the more interesting overall findings.


In one of the first forum sessions - called "In Cloud We Trust" - Dr. Laurent Liscia of OASIS gave an interesting perspective on these competing standards. He compared the process of establishing an accepted standard to a Petri dish (no relation).  Multiple cultures in a nutritious environment all trying to do a land grab. A process that is not orchestrated, it's ‘eat or be eaten' and it is hard to predict the outcome because the process takes time.  No amount of pressure  or additional heat can accelerate it and watching a Petri Dish real-time is about as useful and as interesting as watching grass grow. Meaning, it's better to wait for history to run its course.

Having said that, there one initiative from this forum - which had participants from ENISA, The World Economic Forum, TRUSTe and CA Technologies - that I do want to highlight, even though the implementation is still in an incubation phase.

Earlier this year the World Economic Forum IT partnership - in collaboration with Accenture and with input from a steering group including representation from CA Technologies - published "Advancing cloud computing: what to do now?" with eight recommended action areas. 

The reason I mention this particular initiative is because of the enormous influence this organization has on governments. As associations all over the world realize that legislation and government stimulus may determine the success of their regional cloud industry - an industry that is likely to be the next economic engine of prosperity - they are rapidly publishing recommendations on what they feel their local governments should do to facilitate the success of cloud computing. So as not to be drowned out in the aforementioned alphabet soup of initiatives, it makes sense to anchor such local recommendations against the global guidance of the World Economic Forum. 

The recommendations are not earth shattering, but if governments and the cloud ecosystem participants could streamline their efforts around these eight, it would further these efforts in a useful and pragmatic way. For more info read the (very readable) full report, but in a nutshell the recommendations are:

1. Explore and facilitate the realization of the benefits of cloud
2. Advance understanding and management of cloud related risks
3. Promote service transparency
4. Clarify and enhance accountability across all relevant parties
5. Ensure data portability
6. Facilitate interoperability
7. Accelerate adaptation and harmonization of regulatory frameworks
8. Provide sufficient network connectivity to cloud services

P.S. During the event I participated as a forum member in "Cloud Standardization: From Open Systems to Closed Clouds?," and "Identity and Access in the Cloud." I will be speaking more about the topic of lock-in at the upcoming International Cloud Expo in New York (June 6-9), and I will cover cloud computing and risk during the Middle East Financial Technology Conference (MEFTEC) in Abu Dhabi (May 30-31).

April 21, the day the cloud was out!

Some blogs percolate for a while, waiting for a good day to be put to paper. For this one - about the cost of reliable cloud - that day was last Thursday, the day a network mishap caused an outage at Amazon Web Services taking down more than 100 customers, many of which cloud providers themselves, in its aftermath, while at the same time a similar mishap at Sony PlayStation´s network stopped about 70 million gamers from connecting.

A lot has been written about the outage, so I won't repeat that here (if you want to catch up suggest you read: TechCrunch for the PlayStation story, GigaOM for an overview of the Amazon issue, eWeek for some interesting analysis and the DotCloud blog for a very readable explanation of day to day use of a public cloud service like Amazon).
Instead, let's focus on the big picture of the cost of reliable cloud, comparing it - again - with the move from mainframe to distributed computing.  History tends to repeat itself, especially in IT where generations of technology tend to be heavily siloed, and staffed with different generations of people who often do not even sit at the same table in the canteen.

Somewhere during the 1980s, IT pros started to realize they could get the same processing power for significantly less money, when selecting distributed servers - till that time used mainly for scientific work - instead of traditional mainframes.  Soon after, companies began porting existing applications to the new platforms, focusing initially on applications that were more compute than I/O or data intensive (sounds familiar?). And indeed, initially the new departmental platform, not requiring all the resource intensive water cooling, air-conditioning or a heightened floor did seem a lot more cost effective. But, it didn't take long after initial proofs-of-concept to find that for some applications we needed more processors or to set up clusters, or uninterruptable power supplies and other redundant features. On the storage front, we started to use the same - not so cheap - storage solutions as we did on the mainframe. And shortly thereafter, the distributed boxes started to look and cost about the same as the systems they were replacing. Let's not forget that at the same time, smart mainframe developers - pushed by the competition from distributed systems - found ways to abandon water cooling, leverage off the shelf standard components like NICs and RISC processors and even re-examined their licensing cost for specific (Linux) workloads.

What does this all have to do with cloud computing? Likewise, we see that running a certain "compute intensive" workload can be done much faster and cheaper in the new environment. But when replacing these one-off batch jobs with services that have higher availability and reliability needs, the picture changes. We need to have redundant copies and failover machines in the data center, and in many cases a backup data center in another part of the country, preferably located on an alternate power grid and connected to multiple network backbone providers. All of a sudden it sounds a lot like the typical set-up a bank would have - and likely with a similar cost profile. So far cloud seems to offer cost benefits, but will this cost advantage still exist if we need to replicate our whole cloud setup at a second vendor - worst case scenario, doubling the cost.  Now cloud has many other advantages beyond cost (elasticity, scalability, ubiquitous access, pay per use, etc.), so many specific use cases are still ideally suited  for the cloud, but if a certain application has no need for these, then it may be worth (re-)considering the business case for a move to the cloud.

Regarding redundancy, the cloud business case actually has two opposing vectors. On one hand, there is the fact that as a user you have less control (you can't fly there and ‘kick' the server) leads to requiring a secondary backup installation. On the other hand, the cloud - with its pay-as- you-go model - offers much more efficient ways to arrange for a backup configuration for running your applications, than finding your own second location and filling it with shiny new kit.

At the same time you have to take into account the likelihood of the cloud having capacity available at the moment you need it. If your own data center fails, I am sure you could find another cloud provider with some capacity. But in this case, where one of the largest (cloud) data centers in North America had issues, all customers, in principle, could be looking to move their workloads elsewhere, it is not certain that enough excess capacity would be available at alternate providers.

In this specific case there seemed to have been technical issues inside Amazon and Sony's data centers that caused a series of events impacting the services running within, but what if there had been a major physical problem, such as a large fire or accident? With more mission critical applications moving to the cloud, companies need to make contingency planning a top priority.

As a result of last week's incidents, enterprises should take stock to assess what services are truly vital to their customers and/or to their own continuity. Organizations (and the world) seem to be more resilient than you might expect. In the Netherlands we saw Telcos ceasing mobile service in a large part of the country  for periods of up to half a day, with ISPs unable to offer Internet services for as long as a week in certain regions. And yet, these companies did not go under. Each industry, government and organization will have to assess its own priorities and success metrics/criteria and standards. As I mentioned in a past blog post, aiming to continue your on-demand video services after a mayor flood, hurricane or nuclear disaster may be over-shooting what is necessary under those circumstances - survival will be the only concern in a case like that.

Looking at the reactions in the market so far, the responses of the vendors impacted by the Amazon mishap seem to be a lot more benign that the reactions of impacted PlayStation gamers. Maybe because these vendors feel they have a good thing going and the last thing they won't to do is kill it by too much honesty. What is refreshing is that not too many vendors crawled out of the woodwork saying "private cloud, private cloud, private cloud" -- not even my colleagues who recently published a book on the topic. Good!  Nobody loves "I told you so" types and there's no point in kicking your opponent when he is down. But the case for private cloud did get a bit better, or is it just me thinking that?