AVG: Four Common Myths About the Cloud

May 13, 2013

(This post originally appeared on AVG)

Everyone’s talking about the cloud nowadays so you’ve got to consider it, right?  It enables companies to be more flexible and save on their IT costs.  It allows free and easy access to data for employees from wherever they are, using whatever devices they want to use.    A recent survey by accounting software maker MYOB finds that small businesses that adopt cloud technologies enjoy higher revenues.  Another analysis finds that small businesses are losing money as a result of ineffective IT management that could be much improved by the use of cloud based services.  And another poll of more than 1,200 small businesses by technology reseller CDW found that “…cloud users cite cost savings, increased efficiency and greater innovation as key benefits” and that “…across all industries, storage and conferencing and collaboration are the top cloud services and applications.”

For many companies, particularly startups, small companies, virtual firms and organizations with remote employees, cloud based technologies make a lot of sense.  And it also makes sense that the more popular ones are the ones that provide storage and collaboration –these are easy to setup and not as mission critical. There are a lot of myths about cloud computing in 2013 that just aren’t true.  Here are some of the more common ones I hear from my clients.

 

“It’s cheaper and cost beneficial.”  This may be true if you’re a startup or are migrating to a relatively inexpensive cloud application.  But if you have existing applications and you decide to move your entire organization to a cloud based infrastructure you’ll likely pay about $100 per month per user.  That’s exactly what I’ve been seeing and that’s a lot more expensive than just buying a new server and having an IT guy service it for a few hours a month.  There are many inexpensive cloud based applications but the more robust, the higher the monthly fees. And if you add up the monthly fees over a 5-7 year period and compare it just buying an application you’ll see that you could be likely paying more.  I expect the costs of the cloud to continue to decrease over time, but for now it could be more expensive.

“I can connect anywhere, anytime.”  The reality is you’re not as mobile as you think.  That’s because to use the cloud effectively you need internet access.  And depending on where you are this is easier said than done.  Many places say they offer free Wi-Fi but sometimes it’s so slow it’s almost not worth doing the work.  It’s not uncommon, particularly for a business traveler, to hit dead spots and experience agonizingly slow speeds which can really hurt productivity.  Internet access and speeds continue to improve, but they haven’t caught up with the functionality that a lot of advanced cloud based apps offer.  Many of my clients experience frustration with this.

“My data is less secure.”   If any cloud provider tells you that your data is 100% secure than they’re lying to you.  Nothing is 100%.  But I’m going to bet that your data hosted on their server is way more secure than in your own internal environment.  That’s because successful companies who offer cloud based services and who want to continue being successful build their business models around data connectivity and security.  They will always be using the latest security applications and have more security resources deployed than you could ever hope.  Breaches will happen, but I favor the security of cloud companies over my IT guy.

“My service provider is guaranteeing me a long term, flat, monthly fee.”   True.  For the time being.  But my biggest question about cloud application is how much you will allow your business to become dependent on the cloud provider.  How much are you willing to relinquish control over that “flat monthly fee.”  What if your cloud services provider decides to increase it 10%?  What can you do?  What’s your recourse?  Are you going to move yourself off of their platform and go through the inconvenience of finding another solution?  Or will you opt to self-manage your cloud applications? Nothing ever stands still for long in IT.  Nothing.

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Posted by david ricketts

Citrix VDI and virtual desktop solutions from C24

May 13, 2013

Excellent video from Citrix. C24 are a specialist application hosting and delivery organisation that specialises in the delivery of your business applications at speed. The solutions we deliver enable you to log on, anywhere, on any device and at any time. For further information please visit http://www.c24.co.uk

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Posted by david ricketts

Mass marketing vs personalisation (infographic)

May 9, 2013

85 percent of us know that websites track their online shopping behavior, a new report from ecommerce optimization company Monetate says, and 75 percent of us want retailers to use our personal information to customize our shopping experiences.

That’s going back to the future, according to Monetate: going back to a time when all commerce was personal.

But there is a yin and a yang here.

While we may want personalized experiences, and we want websites to be smart — to know us, essentially, and act as an intelligent, solicitous person might — privacy is part of the picture. A good third of us don’t want our website activity tracked, and a quarter of us don’t want the websites we shop to personalize our experience at all.

Monetate has four tips for online retailers:

  1. Use marketing automation technology and big data to assist with personalization
  2. Target segments with relevant content based on what you know about them
  3. Don’t think of channels, think of customers first
  4. Be in it for the long haul, not the quick win

All the data, in visual form:

Personal-Mass-Marketing-Infographic_FINAL
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/07/mass-marketing-vs-personalization-infographic/#qItF8VoBijgGBY1R.99

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Posted by david ricketts

Data-as-a-Service (DaaS)

March 19, 2013

by Ravi Kalakota (thanks to practical analytics)

CIO request — “I want to build a data as a service offering for my data” to the rest of the organization.

Underutilization and the complexity of managing growing data sprawl have motivated several trends during the last several years. Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) represents an opportunity  improving IT efficiency and performance through centralization of resources. DaaS strategies have increased dramatically in the last few years with the maturation of technologies such as data virtualization, data integration, SOA, BPM  and Platform-as-a-service.

These questions are accelerating the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) trend:  How to deliver the right data to the right place at the right time? How to “virtualize” the data often trapped inside applications? How to support changing business requirements (analytics, reporting, and performance management) in spite of ever changing data volumes and complexity.

Enterprise DaaS strategy & Infrastructure is core focus area for business unit and enterprise CIOs.  

  • Enterprise Datawarehouse (EDW) strategies are increasingly moving to cross enterprise Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) strategies.
  • Structured and unstructured data growth force the evolution to DaaS
  • As Data in app silos moves to a centralized corporate/enterprise asset – DaaS infrastructure becomes critical.
  • To do any form of enterprise analytics you need DaaS in place first.

In the early years of this market, most DaaS was focused primarily on the financial services, telecom, and government sectors. However, in the past 24 months, we have seen a significant increase in adoption in the healthcare, insurance, retail, manufacturing, eCommerce, and media/entertainment sectors.

Data as a Service (DaaS) Use Cases

Data as a Service (DaaS) is based on the concept that the transaction, product, customer data can be provided on demand to the user regardless of geographic or organizational separation of provider and consumer. Additionally, the emergence of PaaS and service-oriented architecture (SOA) has rendered the actual platform on which the data resides also irrelevant.

Data as a Service (DaaS) has many use cases:

  1. providing a single version of the truth;
  2. enabling real-time business intelligence (BI),
  3. high-performance scalable transaction processing;
  4. exposing big-data analytics;
  5. federating views across multiple domains;
  6. improving security and access;
  7. integrating with cloud and partner data and social media;
  8. delivering information to mobile apps
  9. enterprisewide search,

Organizations are looking to solve tough data and process integration challenges as they once again begin to invest in new business capabilities.

What is Data-as-a-Service (DaaS)?

Data as a Service (DaaS) brings the notion that data related services can happen in a centralized place – aggregation, quality, cleansing and enriching data and offering it to different systems, applications or mobile users, irrespective of where they were. As such, DaaS solutions provide the following advantages:

  • Agility (and Time to Market) – Customers can move quickly due to the consolidation of data access and the fact that they don’t need extensive knowledge of the underlying data. If customers require a slightly different data structure or has location specific requirements, the implementation is easy because the changes are minimal.
  • Cost-effectiveness – Providers can build the base with the data experts and outsource the presentation layer, which makes for very cost-effective report and dashboard user interfaces and makes change requests at the presentation layer much more feasible.
  • Data quality – Access to the data is controlled via data services, which tends to improve data quality, as there is a single point for updates. Once those services are tested thoroughly, they only need to be regression tested, if they remain unchanged for the next deployment.
  • Cloud like Efficiency,  High availability and Elastic capacity. These benefits derive from the virtualization foundation —one gets efficiency from the high utilization of sharing physical servers, availability from clustering across multiple physical servers, and elastic capacity from the ability to dynamically resize clusters and/or migrate live cluster nodes to different physical servers.

Agility (and Time to Market) is the important driver for DaaS probably more than cost and data quality is a metric needed to show value to the technology team.

Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Elements

Client need — “I want to build a data as a service offering for my data” to the rest of the organization.

Components to enable this are as follows:

1)      Data acquisition – can come from any source….datawarehouses, emails, portals, third party data sources

2)      Data stewardship and standardization — boil it down to a standard manually or automatically

3)      Data aggregate – Stick build data warehouse for acquisition.  This has a strong service and technology driven quality control mechanism.  Different than let’s write 100 etl programs.

4)      Data servicing:  via web services, extracts, reports etc…  Make it easy to consume for the end user either machine to machine or directly via reporting universe.  It’s probably a while before we move up market to reporting but machine to machine consumption is in our wheelhouse.

All these capabilities come together around the data logistics chain.  The last few decades have seen a dramatic shift  in how data is handled in companies.   Firms are shifting away from from a hierarchical, one-dimensional enterprise data warehouse (EDW) initiative (with fixed data sources) to a fragmented network in favor of strategic partnerships with external data sources. This phenomenon causes ripple effects throughout the old data logistics network.  Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) at its core is way to address this problem of fragmentation.

BigData Use Case - Data Logistics

Summary

Domain Knowledge, Application Knowledge, People/talent, Processes, Technology Platforms are key requirements of DaaS strategy.

Obviously, the market leaders want to position ourselves to become the experts in knowing the underlying data so everyone else in the organization does not have to….domain expertise becomes really important here.

Notes

1) Platform as a Service (PaaS) is being applied to Enterprise Data

2) Data Virtualizaiton is a pre-cursor to DaaS. Vendors include: Composite Software, Denodo Technologies, IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. Other vendors who fill pieces of the DaaS puzzle include Endeca Technologies, Gigaspaces, Ipedo, Memcached, Pentaho, Quest Software, Talend, and Terracotta.

3) A variety of technologies comprise the DaaS category including distributed data caching, search engines, elastic caches,  information lifecycle management (ILM) solutions, data replication, data quality, data transformation, content management, and data modeling.  

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Posted by david ricketts

Cloud or Managed Service : What is the difference?

February 15, 2013

Firstly, cloud computing is not managed hosting. They are two completely different service layers. One refers to a compute resource ie RAM, Chip set and a host, the other to a management resource

The term cloud computing refers to the actual computing layer at a resource level. Cloud computing is generically defined as an elastic and redundant computing resource usually in a multi-tenant environment. Cloud computing and Virtulisation are both very closely related

Managed hosting refers to the managed service layer that sits on top of the computing resource layer. This management layer is generally made up of two and sometimes 3 elements:

  1. Hardware & Network management
  2. OS management including basic service management i.e. Windows, Apache, IIS etc
  3. Application management i.e MS SQL, MS Exchange, MS Dynamics etc

Then there is an additional segment to the term ‘managed hosting’ being ‘complex managed hosting’ Complex managed hosting usually refers to more complex environments that may involve application management, v-lans, load balancing, complex SAN in our case 3PAR configurations and the configurations/management of these in addition to the regular inclusions of managed hosting. Complex managed hosting is typically referring to multiple server (per project) environments rather than single server environments

If you look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good example of cloud computing, they do not provide any Layer 7 management services as standard inclusions. They provide simple compute instance and that’s pretty much it. You need to perform all your own systems administration including OS, services, applications etc.

C24 is a traditionally, managed service providers (MSP) that provides the management layer on top of dedicated servers and virtulisation layers. The recent explosion of ‘cloud computing’ or cloud instances has now seen these MSP’s offer a management layer on top of ‘cloud instances’.

While people require a compute resource they will also require a management resource. Some may perform the management in-house, while others may decide to outsource the management. Most MSP’s provide both the cloud compute layer and management as a combined service.

To put cloud computing into a really simple model, it essentially takes the focus off the physical hardware layer and places the focus on a computing as a resource. Virtulisation works pretty much the same except you still have a host node. The underlying technology that most cloud computing platforms reside on is no different to traditional virtulisation without the focus on the hardware resource. Many cloud compute platforms still use as an example Citrix Xen, VMWare or Parallels as the platform on which to provide their instances, yet the instances are spread over a number of clustered hardware nodes. Cloud computing and Virtulisation still deal with the deployment of instances or virtual machines as a compute resource with zero focus on the hardware.

Many people incorrectly define cloud computing and virtulisation. They are both very similar yet different enough to deserve different definitions. Additionally many refer to items such as SaaS as cloud computing. SaaS (Software As A Service) as an example may or not be delivered via a cloud computing model. A service provider may deliver SaaS via a dedicated hardware resource which would not qualify as a cloud computing service.

C24 is a complex managed service provider as we do the whole piece from design, implementation, network installation, full system monitoring that includes the hardware, software and comms stack and delivers applications at speed globally. We truly are a specialist provider.

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Posted by david ricketts

Understanding the Technology Hype Cycle

September 3, 2012

There are situations in your work life where you are in a meeting – your boss will always talk about cutting edge technologies and throw in few technology jargons like Cloud Computing , Social Media etc and will stress about how the company need to build competency in areas surrounding that.

But the question is how does your boss get to know abt these upcoming trends and start pushing the organisation in a direction so as to plan and leverage these technology in business ?

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C24 invest in 3PAR Technology within Tier IV data centre infrastructure

May 17, 2012

May 2012 -  Birmingham, England – C24 continue to invest in their infrastructure to deliver on a continued desire to offer the very best solutions to their ever growing national and international client base.
“We have recognised that we are facing ever-evolving IT requirements. There is a constant need to consolidate storage assets, support measurable service levels and at the same time deal with the same old problems of mushrooming corporate data and a need to store this data for longer periods” commented Paul Hemming Managing Director C24.
Hemming continued “We didn’t want to invest further in traditional storage as they have not adapted effectively to the new IT requirements that we have witnessed over the last few years. For this and many other reasons the management team at C24 decided to invest heavily in 3PAR technology”.
HP 3PAR Utility Storage is the only virtualized storage platform that delivers 100% of the simplicity, efficiency, and agility demanded by todays virtual and cloud data centres. Designed from the ground up to exceed the economic and operational requirements of today’s most demanding IT environments, HP 3PAR Utility Storage also delivers the performance, scalability, and availability required of Tier 1 Storage along with unique technology benefits not available with traditional platforms.

HP 3PAR Software, with the HP 3PAR InForm Operating System (InForm OS) as its foundation, is the intelligence behind HP 3PAR Utility Storage. The HP 3PAR InForm OS has advanced capabilities that provide:

  • Fine-grained virtualization and “wide striping” capabilities that deliver massively parallel performance levels as well as the flexibility to configure various levels of service
  • Industry-leading, pioneering thin technologies for efficiency and capacity reduction
  • Sophisticated resiliency features to protect against hardware, software, and site failures
  • Storage federation capability to enable seamless migration of data and workloads between arrays without impact to applications, users, or services
  • Uncompromising security, including secure workload segregation to enable multi-tenancy
  • Autonomic management to eliminate manual, repetitive, and error-prone administrative tasks and deliver automatically load-balanced storage

The solution is currently being installed with 3PAR technicians flying in from the US to install the solution into C24’s award winning datacentre infrastructure

Further Information about C24

C24 are an business application and managed service specialist who deliver business applications to over 107 countries across the globe. The organisation has decades of experiencing delivering cloud computing solutions and currently work with some of Europe’s leading businesses.

C24’s product portfolio includes all aspects of data management and delivery, including business intelligence, application acceleration technologies and private and hybrid cloud solutions.

The business growth over the last two years has been significant we multiple client wins, which has seen the company expand its delivery footprint into mainland China. This growth is projected to continue due to a healthy order book and pipeline.

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C24 Sandbox Solutions : Worldwide Application Hosting Specialists

February 13, 2012

The team at C24 have been successfully delivering business applications and solutions from the cloud for many years.

Throughout this time, as with all forms of new technology, initially we were faced with resistance, questioning and caution around delivering applications in this way.

In order to address the concerns, C24 created areas for testing. These areas, commonly known as Sandboxes allowed clients to not only test the Cloud delivery model, but also to test the application before it is implemented. This service is now widely used on new deployments, and has many benefits for the end-user and also the software provider alike, which include:-

End User

• There are no large initial upfront costs, and ongoing costs are insignificant in comparison to purchasing equipment and spending time internally to configure it. This is particular important as and it is estimated that approximately 50% to 70% of the on site technology infrastructure earmarked for testing is underutilised.

• It provides the opportunity to either take the first steps into Cloud computing or to sample the suppliers service levels before a long-term commitment is made.

• The application can be available very quickly, thus allowing a longer period of time to sample the service and test and mould the application to make sure it provides the maximum benefits to a client’s organisation.

Software Provider

• A testing environment is provided quickly in a cost efficient way with minimum distribution in day to-day activities.

• The service is able to deployed quickly and changes can be made simply to meet on going and changing requirements.

• It act’s as an assistance to sales as Customer are able to sample the application quickly and the sales cycle isn’t extended while additional infrastructure is justified, procured and configured to allow a test to be carried out.

In addition to the above:-

• A Monthly payment model and contract period is available

• Standardised environments are used to deploy the systems

• Solutions run on the latest technology

C24 and clients alike have found this solution to be beneficial due to the factors listed above but also due to the fact that studies estimate that 30% of defects and poor deployments are attributed to inaccurate configuration of test environments, so highlighting the need for a simple and quickly available solution, which will then allow the focus to remain on the key testing areas.

C24 have extensive experience of operating such models and have taken countless SME’s from a cap-ex to an op-ex model allowing them to benefit from cost reductions and plugging them into a pool of resource that is usually not available to them from existing staff. We have also worked with numerous software developers that are testing their applications to see if they are cloud ready.

Finally C24 take the following areas very seriously:

Adherence to standards: We endeavour to work to the current best of breed standards including Prince 2

Security in the cloud: As a managed service provider that provides applications to some of the world’s largest IT companies we are totally aware of the security concerns around cloud based solutions. And we address them in a number of ways, which we discuss upon engagement.

SLA’s: We offer full SLA’s based around our sandbox solutions and takes into account numerous areas that are discussed at length during initial engagement.

Infrastructure: We operate out of a tier IV datacentre one of the best in the country and have invested significantly in the latest, physical, virtual, connectivity and storage.

Planning: We deliver a full plan that will enable you to fully understand what is involved in your environment and how this is affecting your solution.

Moving the testing to the cloud is viewed as a strategic initiative and the C24 sandbox solution gives you the confidence to create proof of concepts or to enable you as an organisation to understand fully the benefits of cloud solutions. This is delivered by an organisations that has decades of experience delivering such solutions.

C24 will establish the success criteria for pilots and testing with specific objectives in mind we work around you to give you total confidence of our solutions.

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Posted by david ricketts

Cloud types, Private, Public and Hybrid – team C24

October 7, 2011

Cloud computing comes in three forms: public clouds, private clouds, and hybrids clouds. Depending on the type of data you’re working with, you’ll want to compare public, private, and hybrid clouds in terms of the different levels of security and management required.

Cloud Model

Public Clouds

A public cloud is basically the internet. Service providers use the internet to make resources, such as applications (also known as Software-as-a-service) and storage, available to the general public, or on a ‘public cloud. Examples of public clouds include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine and Windows Azure Services Platform.

For users, these types of clouds will provide the best economies of scale, are inexpensive to set-up because hardware, application and bandwidth costs are covered by the provider. It’s a pay-per-usage model and the only costs incurred are based on the capacity that is used.

There are some limitations, however; the public cloud may not be the right fit for every organization. The model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making it less-than-ideal for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy regulations.

Private Clouds

Private clouds are data center architectures owned by a single company that provides flexibility, scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring. The goal of a private cloud is not sell “as-a-service” offerings to external customers but instead to gain the benefits of cloud architecture without giving up the control of maintaining your own data center.

Private clouds can be expensive with typically modest economies of scale. This is usually not an option for the average Small-to-Medium sized business and is most typically put to use by large enterprises. Private clouds are driven by concerns around security and compliance, and keeping assets within the firewall.

Hybrid Clouds

By using a Hybrid approach, companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud while relying on the public cloud as needed. For instance during peak periods individual applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud. This will also be beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling brown/blackouts.

The ability to maintain an off-premise disaster recovery site for most organizations is impossible due to cost. While there are lower cost solutions and alternatives the lower down the spectrum an organization gets, the capability to recover data quickly reduces. Cloud based Disaster Recovery (DR)/Business Continuity (BC) services allow organizations to contract failover out to a Managed Services Provider that maintains multi-tenant infrastructure for DR/BC, and specializes in getting business back online quickly.

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C24 sets up private cloud for major UK client

May 6, 2011

C24 the application hosting and delivery specialists are pleased to announce that they have completed the build of a ‘private cloud ‘for a major UK wide client. The company which has a deep understanding of server, application delivery, virtualisation, storage, connectivity and security is very pleased with the overall solution.

Paul Hemming Managing Director C24 explains: “There is an amazing amount of noise about cloud technology, however we have created a private cloud where users are segregated securely, one that they can reach through a variety of means, one that can be audited and for which the data centre locations are known, ensuring compliance. It’s a cloud where we offer professional service level agreements and contracts are in place. The client can also decide whether they require virtual or physical hardware. We believe a totally better solution”

If anybody is interested in how C24 can help in the creation of a company wide private cloud please just drop us a line.

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