8 skills for Cloud Computing Success

Cloud computing is new and different ball game. Success in cloud computing era is not automatic but need to obtained with deliberate efforts. Here is a list of essential skill needed in the context of cloud computing world as listed by Joe McKendrick, a Forbes contributor.

1. Business and financial skills: Cloud computing proponents need to be able to make the business case for a cloud deployment, or to nix a cloud project that doesn’t meet these needs. They also need to be able to build a return on investment (ROI) case, and monitor and make judgment calls on metrics based on business performance versus the costs of supporting or subscribing to the cloud.  Cloud computing is very much a powerful business tool, and business-savvy evangelists are needed to make it work for enterprises.

 

1. Technical skills:  While the types and extent of skills required on staff will depend on how much of the cloud will be built and managed in-house, there’s no question that the ability to build applications that can run quickly on the Internet prevail. The knowledge base would need to be heavily focused on Internet capabilities. Java and. NET framework skills may come to the forefront, as well as knowledge of virtualization. Knowledge of open-source tools and languages may also come into play as well.
2. Enterprise architecture and business needs analysis:  Essential for laying out a roadmap of what services – whether they are coming from IT or an outside provider – will be needed. Able to work with the business, speak the language of business, as well as work with IT professionals.  An understanding of the principles of service-oriented architecture would go a long way.
3. Project management skills:  Project management skills have been a necessity for some time with IT projects, which require marshaling people and a variety of resources from across the enterprise to agree on goals, establish timelines, and meet benchmarks in a timely manner. Unfortunately, as any IT veteran knows all too well, user preferences change, more deliverables are added and padded into the project (“scope creep”), and projects end up being delivered behind deadline and over budget.  Since cloud computing offers end-users the potential to run wild with new requests for services, effective project management skills are needed to keep cloud projects from eventually costing far more than the on-premises systems they were designed to replace.
4. Contract and vendor negotiation: Working with cloud providers, able to negotiate service-level agreements, availability. Able to read the fine print in vendors’ contracts and call them on the carpet when things aren’t performing as planned.  Who will step up to the plate and make the right noise when a cloud service goes down or is habitually underperforming? Cloud makes vendors omnipresent in day-to-day operations, so individuals with training or savvy with vendor negotiating skills will be a must.
5. Security and compliance:  An understanding of security protocols is essential, no matter what type of cloud is being deployed. Related to this is an understanding of mandates and regulations – such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPAA, and the myriad of data-handling laws from the European Union to states within the United States.
6. Data integration and analysis skills: Data is more valuable than oil in today’s economy. But having actionable information on which to base business decision requires consistency and timeliness. Will data generated through cloud-based systems mesh seamlessly with on-premises ERP, data warehouse or other systems? Data professionals are in strong demand, and those who can design systems that can ingest Big Data from the cloud, or use the cloud to provide analytical environments.
7. Mobile app development and management: The rise of mobile devices in the workplace is part and parcel of the cloud phenomenon.  In many cases, the move to cloud computing is being driven by the need to provide services that can be accessed by any and all devices, be they laptops or smartphones. There is strong demand for professionals who can build and deliver apps that can reside in the cloud and reach employees, partners and customers anywhere and anytime

Do You Need Cloud Computing?

Are you wondering whether you need cloud computing or not. Here is an answer from http://cloudtweaks.com  

Cloud computing, often referred to as cloud storage, is a service that allows users to access and store information on a server that is hosted over the internet. All of the storage is considered self-service and the user is responsible for updating, downloading and managing their own storage. Rather than installing these storage solutions on a device, users can access their cloud storage online through their web browser using the provider’s site.

Versatility

Cloud computing allows a user to perform a multitude of tasks online from any device and all items are updated in real time. Users likely already utilize some form of cloud service – only they do not realize it. For example, small businesses that use QuickBooks Online are already using a form of cloud service for their bookkeeping. Cloud applications are part of the cloud computing family since they operate entirely online and the user must log-in to a web browser and be connected to the internet in order to access, download and update their files. For complete story read here 

Finding Blue-Sky Success In The Cloud- CornerStoneOndemand

Making a dent in the Internet and generally doing stuff before everyone else makes you a pioneer. A term often reserved for the curious prospectors and miners, who settled the West.

Cornerstone On Demand provides workplace solutions and talent management software (essentially software that helps companies with training, recruiting, and performance). They began doing this far before the term “talent management” became common.

Though the company launched on November 8, 1999 — at a time when they could have become a CD-rom-based business, CEO Adam Miller projected that building software “across the Web” would be a savvier choice.

He was right. “We started the company in one-bedroom apartment,” he said. “Back then, there was no such thing as ‘cloud computing.’ There was no such thing as ‘software as a service.’ Back then we just called it ‘stuff over the Internet.’” Here is complete success

Cloud Computing and the Law for Senior Management and Policy Makers

Cloud computing involves few special legal considerations beyond those involved in traditional computing provision. Hence some reassessment of the legal risks in necessary in the light of changes that cloud computing introduces. Cloud computing may not be appropriate for all users, for all occasions- particularly where security of data and personal data are involved. This may require the institution to to adopt suitable policies and guidance in order to define in what circumstances and for what purposes the cloud computing services are appropriate.

Here is a reference on the same

Cloud Computing and The Law for senior management and Policy makers 

Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Board level Executive

Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Board level Executive 

This paper published in 2009  examines the issues around cloud computing in its true sense of the meaning i.e the public cloud. However, many of the points can be applied to applied to private cloud. Regardless of which route you end up following ( private, public or hybrid) business expectations of what you should be getting for your investment remain the same. Here is the complete paper

Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Board level Executive 

A pulse check on enterprise cloud computing's net effect on IT jobs

"Whether they're just buying travel insurance or filing a medical claim or they're a provider trying to get paid or someone in deep trouble, they need to be able to reach us immediately," Reed said.

Leveraging cloud computing was Reed's answer to providing instant service. Seven Corners also found that this shift to cloud for mission critical applications -- from building thecloud-based applications its many customers and partners use, to managing security, to processing chargeback to business users -- required a reordering of IT skills.

"It has completely changed the way we have to staff and manage all this stuff," Reed said. "My guys who used to be just desktop jockeys, they're not desktop jockeys anymore. We have a lot less guys running around carrying broken hardware and more guys looking at screens and analyzing what's going on." For complete story here 

TCS buys Cloud-based start-up Computational Research Lab for Rs 188 cr

Tata Consultancy Services, the country’s largest software exporter, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Pune-based start-up Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) for Rs 188 crore ($34 million).

CRL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata group’s holding company Tata Sons, is into high performance computing (HPC) solutions. TCS would acquire the entire stake, the IT major said in a statement.

“CRL’s core capabilities in designing and building high-performance environments, coupled with our strong focus on cloud-based, domain-rich industry platforms makes TCS very relevant to address the customers’ growing requirement of HPC applications,” TCS Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer N. Chandrasekaran said.

CRL, which had developed Tata group’s supercomputer Eka, has about 80 employees who will be inducted into TCS after the acquisition, a company official said. However, the time frame for the completion of the acquisition was not disclosed. for complete story see here 

100% Cloud Based Companies? Yes, It’s Possible!

Everyone is talking about the cloud. Business applications are moving to the cloud. The shift from traditional software models to Internet based solutions has steadily gained momentum over the last 10 years. The next decade promises new ways ofcollaboration, via cloud computing and mobile devices.

Life before cloud computing for traditional business applications was always quite complicated, not to mention expensive. The amount and variety of hardware and software required to run them was daunting. You needed a whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure, and update them.

The single most important benefit of becoming a 100% cloud based company is for us to focus on our core competency. Cloud computing has eliminated the management of traditional software and hardware headaches, that now becomes the responsibility of an experienced SaaS vendor like Salesforce.com. IaaS now lets us leverage industry specific experts that manage a highly scalable, redundant and secure cloud computing platform and we pay for only what we use.  Now, we can focus on what’s most important for our company: creating the best software in the education industry. For complete story see here 

Google CIO: Cloud Will Dictate Business Processes

Google’s CIO Ben Fried said the cloud is slowly dictating how small businesses are going to growand whether or not they can transition to become a big company. Speaking at the Bloomberg Link Enterprise Technology Summit, he said that it is a difficult idea to wrap one’s head around but it doesn’t make it less true.

According to Fried, workers back then were already used to simple and free tools like Skype, iTunes, and Flickr for their personal affairs, but soon they also started wanting to employ said cloud-based applications for work. On the other end, CIOs and executives are seeing the benefit and have started to allow employees to experiment with said cloud-based services.

The massive adoption of cloud computing is further boosted by enterprise-focused cloud services such as Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services), which leveraged lower costs and allowed startups and small companies to run their businesses via cloud for a fraction of what it would cost in the past, leading to a flood of high quality apps from a wide variety of vendors, in an industry that used to be the sole domain of large enterprises.  More details here 

Cloud Foundry Open Tour 2012 to India

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, has announced its Could Foundry Open Tour in India. The Cloud Foundry Open Tour is a Developer Day for enterprise and web developers to learn about Open Source Platform-as-a-Service in the cloud. The event will be held on September 7, 2012 in Bangalore and on September 10, 2012 in Pune.

 With the Cloud Foundry Open Tour, VMware provides a forum for developers across the country to interact and learn from expert technologists and other cutting edge developers behind the leading open source cloud platform for enterprise applications. The event will feature in-depth technical sessions, followed by a coding competition and Code Lab.

Launched by VMware in April 2011, with source code available under the Apache 2.0 license, Cloud Foundry is a cloud-era application platform built to simplify and speed the development, deployment and operation of applications. More details here

Google Venture: Building the search engine of the future, one baby step at a time

Google Search is already pretty impressive on its own and this can be gauged by performance metrics and market share. The company is working to make search an all encompassing product which can be your window to all the information. The Google search until the launch of Knowledge graph was intelligent but not intelligent enough to make sense of all the keywords you threw at it. Knowledge graph attempts to change that. Google is building a system which understands words and their context for everyday scenarios. This is basically a very intelligent system and a big step ahead in machine learning. more here

Larry Page once described the perfect search engine as understanding exactly what you mean and giving you back exactly what you want. It’s very much like the computer I dreamt about as a child growing up in India, glued to our black-and-white TV for every episode of Star Trek. I imagined a future where a starship computer would be able to answer any question I might ask, instantly. Today, we’re closer to that dream than I ever thought possible during my working life—and here are some of the latest steps we’re taking today to make search even more intelligent:

1. Understanding the world
In May  Google  launched the Knowledge Graph, our database of more than 500 million real-world people, places and things with 3.5 billion attributes and connections among them. The feedback has been phenomenally positive and we want to extend this feature to people outside the U.S. So starting today, you’ll see Knowledge Graph results across every English-speaking country in the world. If you’re in Australia and search for [chiefs], you’ll get the rugby team—its players, results and history.  More on here

Cloud Computing for Learning and Teaching

Cloud Computing for Learning and Teaching

Recently cloud computing has offered attractive solutions for academic and research institutions due to several reasons. In this chapter, the authors present a study of how cloud computing can be used for research and teaching activities in higher educational and research institutions in developing countries. Instead of focusing on cloud computing offering for basic IT infrastructures used in daily work of these institutions, the authors concentrate on the use of cloud computing for satisfying ad hoc needs of computing resources in research and teaching activities. 

 

Thorough analyses of research and teaching activities, requirements for cloud computing, benefits of utilizing cloud computing, and adoption barriers for these activities are also included. The authors then present the selected challenges in tackling these barriers and discuss possible approaches for solving these challenges and report lessons learned and experiences in utilizing and developing cloud computing solutions for teaching and research activities in Vietnam . The complete information on the book is available here 

Thinking Smartly About Cloud Computing

While everybody is very interested in the kind of economy the cloud provides, the kind of cost savings the cloud can give us, people are proceeding carefully and incrementally, Visner, vice president and cyber lead executive at the IT and business solutions provider, says in analyzing Information Security Media Group's 2012 Cloud Computing Security Survey, which CSC sponsored. 

 

"They're prepared to put some things in the cloud, but they're not prepared to put everything into the cloud, quite yet. For if they are prepared, they're going to be looking for third-party attestation and they're going to move in a very deliberate way." more details here

Consumer Cloud Computing: The New Battleground

Despite all the hype in the last few months around consumer “Cloud Computing” services, blueocean’s new study has found that consumer awareness and understanding of “Cloud Computing” is still at a very `nascent stage. This combined with concerns around security and privacy stand in the way of the projected boom in “Cloud Computing” services.

blueocean, a services organization with a deep focus on market intelligence, social media and data analytics, has revealed interesting insights relating to consumer’s understanding of cloud computing, this according to a new study conducted in India, The United Stated of America and Germany.

While there is a lot of literature available on the overall “Cloud Computing” space, very limited research and data is available on the “Consumer Cloud” space. There are a range of questions on Consumer Cloud related to awareness, perception, usage and monetization opportunities, for which the stakeholders are looking for answers. It is to answer these questions that blueocean market intelligence has launched the consumer cloud tracking program. The results of the first wave of this half yearly study, is being published now. blueocean’s unique 3600 approach to market intelligence is applied to this tracker program. This included online primary research amongst consumers (900 + interviews across USA, Germany and India), in-depth interviews of cloud vendors by our analysts, continuous market and vendor tracking, and social media analysis. Interviews were conducted during the period of March to April 2012. Here is a detailed info

The Transforming Power of Virtualization

Virtualization is a very useful tool. Unfortunately, many mistakenly equate virtual machine technology with virtualization itself. In reality, virtualization is a well-established group of technologies with a long track record of success. Using them together is where the real benefits may be found.

Virtualization - from mainframes to industry standard systems

Virtualization is a very useful tool that allows system resources to be utilized in new ways. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly equate virtual machine technology, technology that can encapsulate all of the software that runs on a physical system and allows that capsule to run along side of others on a single host system, with virtualization itself. In reality, virtualization is a well-established group of technologies with a long track record of success in data centers around the world. Suppliers, such as HP, IBM, Intel, and Oracle, have been involved with all levels of virtualization technology for a very long time. IBM, for example has been offering virtualization technology since the late 1960s.

The narrow view of virtualization as being merely virtual machine software used to support virtual desktops and virtual servers has begun to get in the way of pushing the use of this set of technologies forward. I believe it is about time to think of virtualization much more broadly. To be truly efficient, a workload is likely to need access, application, processing, network, and storage virtualization. Here is the complete story 

Additional reference is here 

Cloud Security – Implementing a Secure Cloud Backup Case Study

Secure cloud backup is a scenario which increasingly gains traction. It allows organizations to implement an off-site backup while maintaining costs at a minimum. In this blog post I would like to focus on a specific use case of secure cloud backup. The system we describe is comprised of an on-premise replication server, Porticor Cloud Security, and Amazon S3 as the final backup destination, all integrated by one of our fine cloud integrators.

Secure Cloud Backup – The Business Need
In this use case, an enterprise organization was struggling with an inefficient and costly offsite backup infrastructure that was meant to manage an incrementally expanding database.  An offsite server farm was costly to operate and maintain and the tape backup and recovery methods used were time consuming. Furthermore, the company failed to meet regulatory requirements with regard to data availability. To eliminate the complexity and cost associated with this backup methodology, one of our integrators, Emind Systems implemented an onsite dedicated server which mirrored directories and volumes on the local network and replicated data to an Amazon Web Services S3. But a critical requirement was cloud data security and encryption; this is wherePorticor comes in. Complete story by Gilad Parann-Nissany is viewed here. 

Data is Money: Data records are the currency and cloud-based data stores are the bank vault

A response to the question "why do you rob banks?" is often attributed to Willie Sutton, a historic and prolific bank robber, his purported answer""because that is where money is". In many ways  data records are the currency of the current cloud computing environment and cloud-based data stores are the bank vault, making them an increasingly preferred target due to the collective value concentrated there. Just as economies of scale exists in robbing banks instead of individuals, a high payoff also exists for successfully 

Data Stored in a public cloud typically resides in a shared environment collocated with data from other customers. Organizations placing sensitive and regulated data into a public  cloud , therefore, must account for the means by which access to the data is controlled and the data is kept secure. Similar concerns exists for data migrated within or between cloud

Source: Guidelines on Security and Privacy in Public Cloud Computing  

Solutions for : 5 Hidden Dangers of Cloud Computing

Here an interesting reply by Fred Luchetti  based on practical experience for my post : 5 Hidden Dangers of Cloud Computing

I would like to address those 5 issues and reveal how Jumpto has dealt with them:

1) the cost of being forced off the cloud due to a regulatory change such as stricter data privacy laws

The cloud structures that we have created are within our servers. They are there to mitigate the laws restricting exportation of high security protocols to some countries. The tether to the cloud is a hybrid of SSL and openly exportable and usable. Should any country erect a law that would compromise our proprietary security protocols then we would dumb down the servers in that specific country and alert our user community. Nobody would be forced off their cloud when using Jumpto.

2) the cost of implementing and operating countermeasures to mitigate risk

When our system will be fully operational the risk management issues will be controlled within the system. Redundancies will be built in by design. The effect to the end user will not be noticeable but by design, Jumpto's system will reduce a users risk to zero, no need to spend extra dollars on countermeasures.

3) unexpected expenses involved in initial migration of systems

There are always costs associated with moving to any system. At Jumpto, there are no hardware or software systems to purchase or install or configure. Jumpto does all the work for you. The only cost that a customer site would probably see is the retraining of their staff to the new security protocols.

4) loss of internal IT knowledge

Okay, this is going to be an unpopular response. What loss? IT people are a pretty smart crowd and they can wrap their brains around any new technology and explain it to everyone else. WIth Jumpto there is nothing new to learn. All the work is done behind the scenes. We created Jumpto to be so easy to configure and use that a child could do it. I would say that with Jumpto on your side the need for a dedicated security person may not be there any more. (that was the unpopular part)

5) lock-in with a specific cloud provider or proprietary service model, which may slow down future adoption of open standards-based services.

The beauty of Jumpto is that the initial investment is nil. The configuration of the installation is nil and the operation of the system will cost a small amount in training and ongoing bandwidth consumption. Moving to another provider will be a simple operation as well. Back up existing files in the cloud to your local machine and send us an email asking for deletion of your account and files. We do all the work. Jumpto was created to be SIMPLE. Simple yet the most powerful security cloud that money can't buy. Even though we would hate to see you go, we understand the concept that "the grass is always greener on the other side" and we would always welcome you back with open arms anyway. 

Database- as- a Service

Because of a shortage of expertise, many organizations opt to invoke databases as a service in the cloud.  Source

Relational databases tend not to scale very well, either inside or outside the cloud. Developers can’t be sure how big those applications will grow, or how many people will end up accessing them.

Many a cloud-application developer will end up performing an unnatural act known as “sharding” to either get the database to scale or deploy more databases. In either case, the cost of managing the overall environment increases in direct proportion to the complexity of the environment.

To get around this issue, cloud developers have increasingly turned to databases not based on relational architectures. Some of those database architectures support SQL, but just as many promote a NoSQL agenda using platforms such as Hadoop, CouchDB, MongoDB or proprietary object-oriented databases. Because of a shortage of expertise with these platforms, many organizations opt to invoke these databases as a service in the cloud, rather than deploying and managing the databases on their own.  For more details visit here 

5 Hidden Dangers of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing gets a lot of hype, so some may not consider the hidden costs associated with a move to the cloud. There are five hidden dangers associated with cloud technology that IT managers should consider, according to a white paper released by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA).

The paper, which offers a detailed analysis of potential benefits and costs associated with the technology, suggests not buying into the hype before looking at the hidden costs and making a detailed economic plan first. “Users who have been in IT for a long time know that, no matter what new innovation comes along, the challenges of managing IT (e.g., security, cost, complexity) never go away — they just take on new (and sometimes dangerous) forms,” the paper reads.

The five hidden dangers of cloud computing are:

• the cost of being forced off the cloud due to a regulatory change such as stricter data privacy laws;
• the cost of implementing and operating countermeasures to mitigate risk;
• unexpected expenses involved in initial migration of systems;
• loss of internal IT knowledge; and
• lock-in with a specific cloud provider or proprietary service model, which may slow down future adoption of open standards-based services.

For complete story here 

Cloud Computing by 2020: Predictions and Barriers

Cloud computing is going to stay and become bigger by the day. There are predictions that cloud computing will make computing invisible - by that we mean users will be consuming computing the way they breath in air. Here are two interesting articles predicting the possible scenario in 2020.  

Cloud Computing 2020


Cloud Computing: what can prevent its spread or adoption