Posts from ‘Cloud Computing’
Cloud’s-Eye View
More than any other question, customers and prospects are asking me: What is the Ipswitch Cloud story? What are you going to do in the Cloud?
The Cloud has been the topic of discussion in many Product Management and Research & Development meetings and strategy sessions here at Ipswitch. While we may not have all the details sorted out, I want to provide you with a my initial thoughts…and I’d like to encourage you to provide feedback.
Ipswitch looks at the Cloud as having multiple personae. That is, to say, it represents various “things” to us.
In one sense, it’s a destination. When I use a Cloud-based service, my destination is the Cloud and there are attributes about this destination that are pre-configurable, predictable, and static, as far as connectivity goes. The notion of a set of Cloud Streams offered by Ipswitch is a real possibility. With over 10 million active users, we could offer pre-configured, governed connections to common Cloud-based SaaS providers like Salesforce.com or Office 365.
In another sense, the Cloud represents a way to broker information to some other endpoint that may be cloud-based or on-premise. Our Sendable offering is just that. We broker the interactions between people and systems. Brokering includes adding layers of visibility, management, and enforcement. In this case, it’s important to offer multiple ways of connecting and multiple ways of provisioning, from ad-hoc to more formalized adapters and interfaces.
Finally, we look at the Cloud as being half of any domain-to-domain exchange of information, whether it’s people-to-people, system-to-system, application-to-application, or business-to-business. Companies of any size need to seriously consider a hybrid approach to MFT, B2B, and EAI overall.
“I think it’s a pipe dream that small companies are going to really adopt cloud computing. The primary reason is that these companies are typically extremely short-handed in terms of technical talent. They’ve usually got a few overworked super sys admins fighting each day’s fires with absolutely no time to invest in learning new skills.”
Bernard Golden of CIO.com 
In an article titled “Cloud Computing: A Perfect Fit for Midsized Companies“, Bernard Golden, contributor to CIO.com and CEO of the consulting firm HyperStratus, makes the case for why midsized businesses may be “a cloud sweet spot.”
Golden thinks it’s a pipe dream that small companies will embrace and go in for cloud computing. Obviously he feels that midsized companies are a perfect fit, but what about large companies? What’s holding them back from the cloud?
“What holds back large companies is, in a sense, their success with the previous generation of computing. Because they could invest in the old model, they’ve now got an installed base of hardware and a large, top-notch technical staff on hand.”
Golden points out 5 characteristics that midsized companies share that makes them the perfect fit for cloud computing.
I’ve been asked at least a dozen times over the last month “What are the benefits of a cloud-based hosted subscription versus an on-premises software deployment?”.
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” ~ Hamlet
There are many benefits of going SaaS, just like there are benefits of deploying on-premises. It all comes down to the problems you are trying to solve, budgeting preferences, and IT resource availability and expertise. Here are some benefits of going the hosted route.
- Fast and easy deployment: SaaS solutions are often available instantly, providing an amazingly fast time-to-value. You don’t need to install any software/hardware yourself and there are no complicated firewall or security configurations to work through.
- Budgeting flexibility & lower up front cost: Hosted subscriptions are treated as an “operating expense” with no capital investment spent on software/hardware. Pay-as-you-go subscription plans often lead to quicker purchase decisions because there is no need to get CapEx budget sign-off.
- Less taxing on your IT resources: SaaS solutions require significantly less effort to deploy and maintain. There are no ongoing software upgrades, patches or backups for you to worry about, and no complex security/compliance configurations to be responsible for internally. Plus, there is no underlying infrastructure to assemble and maintain.
- Built-in scalability: The elasticity and high bandwidth of SaaS solutions easily handles spikes in usage and grows as organizational needs expand.
- Near perfect uptime: Hosted services are often run in a highly available, load-balanced, automatic failover configuration to ensure even the strictest network and application uptime requirements and SLAs are met.
I’d like to also quickly mention that we’ve had numerous customers initially deploy our MOVEit DMZ Hosted Service as a way to get their Managed File Transfer solution up and running quickly, while they continue to work towards an on-premises deployment.
The growth of SaaS can’t be denied…. The question is, whether ’tis SaaS right for your organization?
Did you kill the web?
Let’s check your alibi. Think of how you spent your morning. Normally, I’d share my morning with you here, what websites I’ve visited and what apps I’ve used, but my boss reads my blog posts, and if she knew how much time I spent on … well, let’s let Chris Anderson illustrate the point I’m trying to make:
“You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.”
Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, in an article on Wired.com titled “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet“, present a compelling argument for the demise of the World Wide Web and how “simpler, sleeker services“, like apps, “are less about the searching and more about the getting.”
Peer to peer file transfers are among the suspects at the crime scene:
“The applications that account for more of the Internet’s traffic include peer-to-peer file transfers, email, company VPNs, the machine-to-machine communications of APIs, Skype calls, World of Warcraft and other online games, Xbox Live, iTunes, voice-over-IP phones, iChat, and Netflix movie streaming. Many of the newer Net applications are closed, often proprietary, networks.”
This is one of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a while, give it a read and feel free to share your thoughts and whether or not you’re placing any yellow crime scene tape over your PC.
“Estimate how many pieces of sensitive files and data your company has … Now multiply that by $204. I’m sure you’ll agree that the ROI on the time and resources spent to protect company data are well worth the investment.”
Hugh Garber – in a July 28th, 2010 blog
Hugh and the rest of the world have been talking about the 2010 Data Breach Report from Verizon Business that was released last week.
One of the many frightening figures given was that “96% of breaches were avoidable through simple or intermediate controls.”
Here’s a bit of a catch 22 though, in a recent article by Stuart Sumner of Computing, he says that “while technological advances can provide more capable security, they can also often provide opportunities to cyber criminals.”
What can we do?
Here’s where things get … interesting, and leaves me thinking that perhaps Cyberdyne Systems isn’t such a fictional company after all (yes, that’s a “Terminator” reference – c’mon “cyborg” is in the title of this post)
Sumner suggests that CIO’s can fight back against these data breaches with enforced encryption, reporting and biometric technology, and that “selecting the correct blend of tools to protect the business is key for CIOs today, and encryption and end point security can help.”
The concept and practice of biometric technology is not new to us, and it seems that the case can be made that biometric technology is truly becoming a necessary solution for all businesses.
The article is a quick read on what CIO’s can do to help fight data breaches and it makes a motivating case for biometric technology.
In writing this blog post I find myself interested in your thoughts on that, is biometric technology something that your company would benefit from?
