Posts from ‘Cloud Computing’
iCloud & Apple: Flattening Routes to Market
Yesterday Apple officially announced the availability of its new cloud-based music service. There have been weeks of speculation as industry insiders became aware of payments made to various record companies and labels for the licensing of music to power Apple’s new cloud offering. But there’s a lot more at stake here: the music industry devoid of its past marketing and sales outlets (Apple, Wal-Mart and Best Buy are the dominant sales points) can now count on increased revenue from their users of the iTunes hosted service. What remains to be seen is how this additional revenue filters down to the artist..
Today artists are paid based on units sold and also make money based on the licensing of their works. The licensing of these works are generally managed outside of the record label via ASCAP, BMI and the Harry Fox agency. Apple hosting music in the cloud that has been already “purchased” by iTunes user means that the number of units sold is now in contention. For instance an artist can sell 50,000 copies of her latest album but because of illegal downloads that same artists could be available to 100,000 iCloud users. It can be assumed that Apple will pay the respective record companies for these instances but will the record companies see this instance as units sold? Will they compensate the artists accordingly? And if they do, what stops in the artists from just giving away their product especially if ultimately they get paid from the record companies via Apple?
In the early 2000s advancements in Internet distribution, consumer broadband and storage leveled out the playing field between the brick-and-mortar record labels and the new independence Internet-based independent labels. It’s my contention that what was once a level playing field is no longer as level as some would need it to be. The day before Apple’s announcement I had a reasonable comfort level giving counsel to up-and-coming artists that there were numerous opportunities and routes to market with their product. Today I have a comfort level and telling them they need to strongly consider aligning themselves with one of the brick-and-mortar record labels. Is this the end of the end of the independent record label? No it isn’t there are plenty of people on the planet that do not use Apple products. But when more and more credence is put on iTunes charts, downloads and overall market presence, the independent record label suddenly has a steeper hill to climb.
These are questions that remain as we see more and more of this new product offering coming to market. What’s clear is that the biggest message from Apple is that the traditional buying selling models have changed and the role of the broker or intermediary immediately changes the routes to market.
Ipswitch has been cautioning companies about the dangers of private/confidential information being sent through Google (and other hosted and person-to-person services), both from a security and a responsibility perspective.
Last week’s GMail hack further drives home the point that organizations must proactively manage and have visibility into what information is being shared with service providers and how information is being sent between people.
Don’t let your guard down and simply treat the cloud as just another internal resource…. They need to be properly managed and governed just like any other third-party.
Ipswitch’s Frank Kenney recently concluded a 4-part webcast series on integration. It’s not too late to watch a replay of it. In parts 3 and 4, Frank talks through the issue of relying on cloud providers and provides tips for managing and governing cloud and person-to-person interactions.
Last week I ranted a bit about the importance of governing your cloud vendors. At about the same time, Ipswitch’s Frank Kenney participated in a panel discussion on cloud security at the Interop conference in Las Vegas.
As you know, there is great debate over whether cloud services are secure enough for businesses to use. I believe that the cloud model will quickly evolve and prove itself to a point where security is deemed no riskier than doing business with solely on-premises tools.
I also believe that member-driven organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance – which focus on providing security assurance within Cloud Computing – will help us get there.
At the Interop discussion, Frank Kenney spoke about the safety of the cloud, here’s what he had to say:
“Cloud customers have the obligation to assess the risk of allowing data to be stored in a cloud based on how valuable it is to the customers…. The cloud is as secure as you want it to be.
Cloud services can provide value if performance and service-level agreements align with what customers need. If not, customers shouldn’t buy them. It’s not ‘the sky is falling’. Assign risks appropriately. Security is just one of many things you have to do.”
Take a quick read of Google’s Terms of Service or Amazon EC2’s SLA Exclusions and you’ll see examples of how cloud platform vendors limit their governance and control responsibility.
So what happens when you put your business in the cloud and then the cloud goes down? Just ask Foursquare, Hootsuite, Reddit, Quora and others who endured the recent EC2 outage that hobbled their websites, resulting in lost revenue and strained customer support teams.
Chances are some of your critical business processes have already moved to the cloud. But you still need to know the instant one of them fails.
So how should you treat vendor platforms such as Salesforce.com, Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Files and Microsoft Azure?
As the saying goes, “don’t rely on a fox to guard the chicken coop”. Don’t rely solely on your service providers to alert you of inaccuracies or outages that they themselves have caused…. Service provider dashboards will be of no use when they themselves are responsible for failure. A governed pipe will instantly give you that information.
Our suggestion is to treat cloud platform vendors the same way you would treat any other vendor. Manage all file and data interactions, with visibility, management and enforcement… And carefully craft SLAs that represent end-to-end services and link them to easily trackable key performance indicators. Cloud does not solve all your data issues on its own, but you can and should leverage your Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution to extend and govern the cloud.
Did you know that over 60% of data moving through your organization is batch and flat file based?
Or that Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions impact a much larger data set than any other form of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)?
These are just two of the many reasons why MFT is not only the ideal technology option for EAI, but also the most successful form of application integration (and I promise, it’s not just because MFT is faster to deploy and results in the quickest ROI) .
Register now to attend our upcoming “MFT, EAI and the Cloud – Keeping Control of Your Data” webcast to learn more about the connection between MFT and EAI, and why MFT should be a critical part of not only your IT infrastructure but also a critical part of your SOA platform and enterprise nervous system.
Webinar details:
* Speakers: L. Frank Kenney, VP of Global Strategy at Ipswitch
* Date: Thursday, February 10th at 11:00AM ET
* Time: 11:00am ET
