Archive for the ‘Cloud’ Category

Virtualization and Cloud Computing: Better Together

Posted: May 20, 2013, 11:37 am

By , VP of Global Cloud Product Management

Virtualization and cloud computing

Virtualization and cloud computing: 1+1 = 3?

There are a million articles and blog posts out there about virtualization and cloud computing and their respective benefits, but here’s the reason you should read this one: to find out why virtualization provides even MORE benefits when delivered in the cloud.

More and more data centers are virtualized

Obviously, by now you’ve embraced virtualization within your data centers. At the end of 2012, about 70 percent of all companies were running at least some application workloads as virtual instances. Confidence in virtualization has grown over the last several years as more resiliency features were built into hypervisors and virtual machine (VM) management platforms and companies have increasingly moved more of their workloads and more of their critical applications to virtualized environments. I found this one industry study that showed that the percent of workload instances of SAP, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL that were virtualized roughly doubled from 2010 to 2012.

Let me review the benefits of virtualization

I’m not even sure why I’m bothering to recap the benefits of virtualization. I guess it’s for the Rip Van Winkles among us. If, by chance, you’ve been sleeping for the last century, virtualization allows you to consolidate and run applications onto fewer physical servers, which drives up your server utilization rates and cuts down on your operational costs. Additionally, virtualization enables quick provisioning and deployment, improved workload balancing, and enhanced resiliency and availability by giving you the ability to dynamically move VMs from server to server.

What we are now figuring out (and some of you are more ahead than others) is that virtualization and cloud computing are a match made in heaven.

Vitualization’s benefits can be enhanced when VMs are run on a cloud service. More specifically, a managed cloud service.

For example, one of virtualization’s key benefits is that companies can make more efficient use of their IT resources. This benefit is compounded when using a cloud infrastructure service. That’s because cloud infrastructure services let you optimize capacity based on needs. Basically, you only have to pay for the resources required to satisfy the performance characteristics of your VMs. If you need more capacity or compute power, i.e., more of your users need access to the same application or your database doubles in size, you can leverage the cloud provider’s infrastructure to meet these new demands rather than build your own.

Also, virtualization gives you a way to easily migrate and balance workloads based on performance requirements. This is particularly useful when your workloads are unpredictable or vary greatly. An extreme example of this is the workload an e-commerce site might experience on Cyber Monday or after a major advertising campaign launches. With an on-premises solution, you would need to pre-plan and provision spare capacity in order to balance the spike in workloads. With a cloud service, you could ask your cloud provider to proactively add more capacity in anticipation of a spike in the workload. And once your activity has returned to normal levels and that spare capacity is no longer needed, you can reduce your requirements with the provider.

A few points for you to consider when migrating virtualized applications from an on-premises infrastructure to a cloud service…

The most important thing is that you need to carefully evaluate the mission-critical nature of your various applications and their needs against the available cloud service provider offerings. Not all applications are treated equally, nor should they be. As a result, some will be a good fit for cloud and others a good fit for managed hosting services. Your personnel, customers, and partners today demand 24/7 access to mission-critical and business-critical applications. At the same time, you need to ensure the security and stability of those applications.

Because downtime leads to lost productivity, lost revenue, and perhaps the permanent loss of customers and clients, you need high availability and a reliable and predictable way to recover your VMs. That means your cloud provider must have the expertise and automation solutions to ensure that your availability and recovery time objectives (RTOs) are met.

If you have requirements for data protection or the need to meet regulatory obligations, you might want to pick a secure, managed cloud service or a private cloud solution. The bottom line is, you will want to review your workloads and determine which are best-suited for a cloud treatment and which may need to remain in a more traditional virtualized environment.

Related posts:

1. The advantages of cloud computing: blah blah blah
2. Cloud: Build vs. Buy?
3. Virtualization makes DR easier, except when it makes it harder, Part 1
4. Virtualization makes DR easier, except when it makes it harder, Part 2
5. Virtualization makes DR easier, except when it makes it harder, Part 3

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Cloud Disaster Recovery = More IT Staff Time to Focus on Your Business

Posted: May 13, 2013, 11:38 am

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Cloud disaster recovery provider

3 things you will want to pay attention to when choosing a cloud disaster recovery provider.

Let’s face it. We are always online in one form or another. If I am not watching television, checking mail, or using one of the 44 apps I have on my smartphone, then I am probably sleeping. Because of these use patterns, the demands on application availability are on the rise, and data is exploding. So let’s think about these two forces and how they impact disaster recovery (DR) planning for your businesses. These forces increase the DR workload for IT staff. As a result, your IT staff may be spending more time on DR instead of supporting strategic and revenue-generating projects. In other words, IT is only helping to maintain the business, not grow the business.

Cloud disaster recovery may be the answer

How do you overcome tight budgets and leaner IT staff when you are constantly being asked to do more with less? Well, you might consider “out-tasking” DR management by using cloud-based disaster recovery services.

Cloud disaster recovery services are being recognized for their ability to overcome limitations that affect some of the more traditional DR approaches. In recent years, for example, large-scale natural disasters such as Hurricanes Irene and Sandy in the US exposed flaws in infrastructure availability for many companies, as well as gaps in their DR plans. However, cloud DR services helped many companies recover during these disasters by providing off-site data storage, replication, and mirrored facilities.

Benefits of cloud disaster recovery

One benefit of using the technological capabilities of cloud DR services is that the cloud DR provider is responsible for the management of all backup equipment and storage systems. Since companies are constantly adding more devices (secondary site hot spares and storage devices) due to the increasing need for data, IT resources are being disproportionately impacted. Using a cloud DR service, however, the administration, management, and maintenance of the equipment in your recovery site is handled by the provider, not your IT staff. This eliminates the burden and overhead to your business.

A qualified cloud disaster recovery provider can reduce the time and drive down the costs of carrying out such management chores compared to doing the same work internally. What’s more, service providers will utilize documented best practices, dedicated and trained professionals, and invest in recovery automation tools. Unless you’re in the business of disaster recovery, there’s almost zero chance that you would invest in any of these tools yourself.

Don’t forget about change management

Another area where a provider could free up IT staff time involves change management. With today’s highly virtualized environments, and constant stream of patches, updates, and OS upgrades, keeping a backup site in sync with a production environment adds to an IT staff’s workload. Here again, a suitably chosen cloud DR service provider would be able to help. For example, a provider might institute change management procedures to ensure all modifications in a production environment are carried over to the backup environment.

One theme that I keep noticing after both major disasters and everyday outages is that many companies simply do not have the time or the staffing power to update DR plans and conduct tests on a regular basis. The results of one recent study found that 90 percent of IT decision makers believe their data is vulnerable in a disaster.

Consider a cloud disaster recovery provider

A suitable cloud disaster recovery provider could provide the workers and expertise to help evaluate risks, conduct a business impact analysis, and develop a DR plan. The provider’s staff could then help with putting recovery processes into place, testing the plans, and ensuring services can be restored in the timeframes needed. Out-tasking these items to a cloud DR provider frees up your IT staff for other work.

Considering these factors, cloud-based DR services offer an alternative to legacy DR approaches and are ideal for some organizations that could not previously afford to implement disaster recovery or found it to be too time-consuming a task.

To make sure your company can ride out the next disaster or outage, download a free Business Continuity Toolkit now.

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The Advantages of Cloud Computing: Blah, Blah, Blah

Posted: May 9, 2013, 11:41 am

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Cloud is not that new

advantages of cloud computing

Advantages of cloud computing: blah blah blah

If you’re like me and have been in the industry for some time (more than some would admit to), then you know cloud really isn’t that new. In the 90s, it was called “Utility Computing” and the topic du jour was your hypervisor and how you maximized operational efficiency and pay as you go….don’t these sound familiar as the often-touted advantages of cloud computing?

Advantages of cloud computing are well understood

The challenge today is not the understanding the advantages of cloud itself. We get that already, it’s the best thing since the iPhone (sorry, Steve), yada yada yada, blah blah blah. Your business challenge is still the same as it was in the 90s, though: how do I affect bottom line growth? How do I scale fast to address unpredictable growth? How do I deal with a transformational event? How do I manage the IT chaos with a static or non-existent budget? Your CEOs worry about growth, you worry about the projects you have that can improve that growth.

So why do we all still care about cloud?

Because the promise of cloud is so…well, promising. We can leverage cloud to get out of the CapEx nightmare – it’s always better to use someone else’s money rather than your own. You don’t have to be as prescriptive about growth targets when planning since you can utilize a service provider’s infrastructure and scale as necessary. And, all of that gives you agility – reach more markets, reach existing markets faster, and be more efficient while you’re doing it. In another words, you can grow.

What’s the catch?

Well, sometimes cloud is a little too good to be true. What about your applications that you can’t put on a public cloud? Those that need security, have performance requirements, need high availability, etc. How about those legacy environments? Can anyone say “mainframe?” Despite rumors to the contrary, mainframe is NOT dead. There are a variety of reasons enterprises aren’t packing up all their applications and moving them wholesale into the public cloud. It might be controversial but, “it’s not all cloud all the time.”

A video describing the potential pitfalls on the road to harnessing the advantages of cloud computing:

So what are people doing?

Well, they’re evaluating their options. It starts with having a fundamental understanding of your business challenge. What are you trying to do? (For those of you who are confused on this see paragraph two above). Businesses face the same fundamental challenges – grow, be profitable, or die.

You need to understand that your IT environment will most likely be a hybrid IT environment. Notice I didn’t say, “Hybrid Cloud.” Most enterprises will have to maintain mixed infrastructures of heterogenous environments. For those that need the translation: at least one of these things is not like the other.

(het·ero·ge·neous. adjective \ˌhe-tə-rə-ˈjē-nē-əs, ˌhe-trə-, -nyəs\: consisting of dissimilar or diverse ingredients or constituents ). Meaning that you will have a lot of old stuff that is stable, that you’ve already paid for, works well, has the security you need AND you’ll have some new stuff like cloud and hosted private cloud that you will need to incorporate. Oh, and they’ll all need to play well together.

The good news is you can have it all

So think about your business challenge and make sure you are asking the right questions when considering cloud – is it the right fit for your application? If not, what is?

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Cloud SLA’s: The “Put-Up or Shut-Up” Conversation

Posted: May 6, 2013, 7:21 pm

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Cloud SLAs

Cloud SLAs: one of the many potential pitfalls in your road to the cloud.

In this blog post, I am eventually going to get around to talking about cloud SLAs, but first, let me give a little background. A couple weeks ago, I had a fascinating discussion with a CIO regarding system criticality and what Tier 0 means to him. He said, “A Tier 0 system means that without this system, everything shuts down, and we cannot move a single article until the system is restored.” I won’t name names in order to protect the innocent, but the company I am writing about is currently virtualized on their own hardware in their own data center (like many others I talk to daily).

They are looking for a partner to help them achieve their company’s goal of ZERO impact to the business based on any outage. They are also looking for ways to reduce spending for hardware, maintenance, and administrative server functions. This line of discussion, of course, led us to what I call the “put up or shut up” conversation. You know, the one about cloud Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

I’m not going to bore you with the ins and outs of cloud SLAs. I just want to make one point about the various ways that vendors APPLY their SLA rules. Some providers offer a 99.5% (edited from 99.95% – thanks for the catch in the comments below, Dana French) uptime against the environment, which means your critical systems can be down for 1.8 days per year and your provider does not incur a financial penalty. But a separate consideration that many don’t think about are partial outages, which affect performance but do not cause a failure to access data. Did you know that partial outages are not even considered in most cloud SLAs? Considering that most critical systems are load-balanced or clustered, a site outage is unlikely, BUT…performance can be unbearable as you experience reduced capacity (because portions of the environment are out of service).

Our SunGard AS cloud SLA is on a per virtual machine (VM) per month basis, meaning that any one VM can only be down for about 3.6 hours. This commitment to individual VM uptime provides our customers with a greater sense of partnership knowing that we are putting our finances behind keeping each VM operational, and not just the majority of the site. When looking at cloud SLA’s, therefore, I urge you to look beyond the number of 9’s in the guaranteed uptime percentage and really delve into what event starts the timer, and what will be the overall impact to your business.

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Cloud computing solutions vs. Colocation services: Which one do I pick?

Posted: April 30, 2013, 9:48 pm

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cloud computing solutions, cloud alternativesIt’s not about doing more with less anymore. It’s about doing even more, with even less. We hear from our customers all the time that their IT departments are under intense pressure these days to deliver more services, in faster timeframes, with smaller budgets and leaner staff. Most face the challenge of data center transformation, which is changing the way they think about their business. A driving force in the transformation is the need to get out from under the burden of aging infrastructure, which is causing many companies to look at alternatives to traditional on-premises data center approaches, i.e., colocation and cloud-based infrastructure services.

But how do you know which one is best for you? The answer is, it depends on what your needs are. Colocation and cloud offer some comparable benefits, but each is best suited to satisfy different scenarios. For example, both help cut some costs through the use of shared facilities, but the choice of one versus the other should be based on your specific requirements.

What’s colocation?

With colocation, companies own, use, and maintain their own equipment, but share the cost of power, cooling, communications, and data center floor space with other tenants. Colocation is a good choice for you if you need complete control over your equipment. This might be the case if you must have that level of control to satisfy regulatory or data protection requirements based on your industry, for example.

Another common reason to use colocation is to address the limitations of an existing data center. One industry survey found that 36 percent of data center facilities will soon run out of space, power, or cooling capacity. Rather than building a new data center, therefore, you can augment your current center by using space in a colocation facility. Additionally, some of our customers use colocation to have a secondary site for disaster recovery purposes, avoiding the need to build an entire second data center.

Two points to keep in mind with colocation

First, colocation still requires you to purchase your own servers, storage, switches, and software. Second, your IT staff’s time will still be taken up by monitoring and managing the equipment and conducting backups and maintenance. However, many providers also offer managed services that can be leveraged to monitor and manage your infrastructure. Look for a provider that offers a la carte options so you can choose what functions you want a third party to manage and which you want to maintain control over.

How are cloud services different?

There are some distinct differences with a cloud-based infrastructure service. Like colocation, cloud-based infrastructure services offer cost savings through the use of a shared facility. But there the resemblance ends. With cloud services, the cloud provider supplies and manages your full hardware infrastructure, including servers, storage, and network elements. This eliminates your CAPEX costs and cuts OPEX costs, since the provider’s staff, not your IT staff, are responsible for day-to-day administration, routine maintenance, troubleshooting, and problem resolution.

Why cloud services?

You might turn to cloud services for a number of reasons. Many of our customers simply want to offload infrastructure management chores to us to free up their IT staff to work on projects that would help grow the business. Some companies select a cloud provider because they like the flexibility of being able to rapidly scale capacity up or down based on business needs.

Three points to keep in mind with cloud services

That said, there are three points to consider when selecting cloud services providers. If your company is subject to data privacy and protection regulations such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, or financial mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley, you will want your cloud provider to be able to demonstrate compliance, have appropriate certifications, maintain a high level of physical and cyber security, and follow mandated procedures to pass an audit. Ultimately, the thing to remember is that the burden of compliance still lies with YOU.

A second point to consider is availability. Running a critical business application on a service that is prone to outages will not be acceptable. You will need a cloud provider that offers services with availability guarantees based on service level agreements, as well as an understanding of how the provider controls access into the environment, manages infrastructure resources, and addresses change management.

One final point to consider is how your cloud provider resolves problems. Is their staff available 24/7? What processes does your service provider follow to resolve issues and mitigate human error?

Cloud vs. Colo: The Bottom Line

Colocation and cloud services offer you alternatives to traditional in-house data center approaches. Based on the specific requirements of your particular deployment, each offers unique benefits and each has its own points to consider. You will want to weigh your compliance and privacy needs, your need for direct control, as well as your need for always-on availability and uptime when deciding between colocation and cloud.

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Cloud is Only as Good as You Make it

Posted: January 14, 2013, 4:54 pm

By SunGard Availability Services Cloud Consulting

A reminder from the NetFlix Christmas Eve outage…

Cloud SecurityIt seems to be human nature to look for “silver bullets”.  With each new advance, technologists hold out hope that the challenges of the past can be put behind us. “This time it will be different!”  But more often than not each advance brings with it a new set of challenges in exchange for ones it solves.  This is certainly true of cloud.  It can reduce your risk, or increase your risk – all depending on how you approach it.

We must always anticipate service interruptions no matter what the platform or provider. They are going to occur, just as the sun is going to keep rising.  Whether simple human error, code bugs, the next hundred-year storm or an errant backhoe up the street ripping out your fiber, something is going to happen, and often at the worst possible time.  For many organizations, cloud services will provide immediate gains in agility and scalability.  On the other hand, very few organizations are going to find instant adequate fulfillment of their availability or resiliency needs by simply placing resources in a private cloud or with a public cloud provider.

The good news is that when done right, cloud solutions absolutely have a place in meeting or beating availability needs along with providing desired agility and economic improvements.  BIA’s, risk assessments, enterprise architecture and the other disciplines that have served us well for all these years in producing quality technology estates are as relevant to cloud as they have been to all of the platform and operating models that came before.  The leading cloud providers and solutions all offer a broad set of enabling services and capabilities to facilitate meeting the availability requirements that those disciplines help us enumerate.

The more mature platforms even offer a reasonably comprehensive set of features and options to build platforms that can run in multiple places as needed to ensure the ability to work around a problem in one of them.  Zones within regions within geographies, underlying snapshot and replication of storage resources, workload management tools for mobility within and across cloud providers, and experts who specialize in putting it all together; these capabilities and more are on the table.

There is always an uproar when a name provider experiences an outage of any kind. We often hold them to a higher standard after all.  But as unfortunate as their outages are, the end-user service disruption is really the responsibility of the cloud consumer.  It is up to each individual client to work with their organization, its partners, and their solution providers to put it all together creating and ensuring a comprehensive approach to meeting the full scope of relevant business requirements.  Equally important is that we are learning iteratively when we encounter an unexpected error, getting better every time.  Outages are a good reminder that cloud is only as good as you make it.  And that is where the fun begins…

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Cloud: Build vs. Buy

Posted: January 14, 2013, 4:30 pm

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The great appeal of cloud technology is that it shifts the economics of IT. However, the benefits must be weighed against the technical complexities and adoption hurdles. This is leading many organizations to evaluate their build vs. buy options, where the choice comes down to installing an IT infrastructure for a cloud effort or leveraging the cloud services or infrastructure of a third-party provider.

When making the choice between build vs. buy, both approaches offer similar benefits. Cloud technology lets organizations make more efficient use of IT resources, allows for the automation of many routine tasks, and easily scales to accommodate new IT service demands and business growth.

Where the build vs. buy approaches diverge is when organizations look at operational costs and the economies of scale.

Consider the cost of power. Electricity cost has become one of the largest elements of the total cost of running a data center. In 2010, it accounted for 12 percent of overall data center expenditure, and was growing. Today’s 24/7 nature of business, the explosion in the volumes of data that must be stored, and other business drivers require more servers, network capacity, and storage, all running and available all the time. This is driving up power and cooling demands to a point where electricity costs are now estimated to be about 15 percent to 20 percent of the total cost of running a data center.

To that point, one industry report noted that data centers around the world were expected to use 19 percent more electricity this year, than last. That represents a significant cost increase on its own. Worse, about 30 percent of companies say they expect at least one of their data centers to run out of power, cooling, or space within the next year.

Cloud providers can offer some help in this regard. They typically pay lower rates for their electricity since they are making bulk purchases. And since a provider’s cloud is geographically independent of the client’s business locations, providers also can locate their data centers in regions (country versus city, for example) where electricity costs are lower.

Compare infrastructure labor costs. Labor costs can account for as much as 40 percent of the annual costs of running a traditional data center. Certainly the adoption of virtualization is helping reduce these costs by allowing organizations to consolidate applications onto fewer servers. And cloud’s automation capabilities offload some chores that IT would normally handle. However, the complexity of today’s highly virtualized IT environments adds to the management burden.

Cloud providers offer help in several ways. First, they typically standardize equipment, thus reducing management costs versus managing today’s on-premises heterogeneous environments. Second, providers typically employee best practices and more automation tools to further drive down the time required to perform common tasks. And third, providers bring the expertise needed to implement new technologies. In contrast, an organization would need to hire, train, and retain personnel to embark on some new projects.

Additionally, there is an economy of scale factor. Since many cloud services are hosted on shared servers, a provider can spread the cost of labor over a greater number of clients.

Factor in security and reliability. Implementing a cloud solution for Enterprise applications requires expertise in security and availability. Security today involves the use of multiple solutions including antivirus, email and URL filtering, firewall, and IDS/IPS point products that must be managed individually, yet integrated to leverage their synergies. Many companies simply do not have the resources to deploy and maintain this plethora of solutions.

On the availability side, a private cloud approach similarly requires the use of a broad range of solutions and incurs the CAPEX costs to have spare hardware available in case of an outage, crash, routine service, or other event that takes a system out of service or when additional capacity is needed.

Service providers are often able to bring better expertise to security and high availability. And because of their larger infrastructure resources, they can more economically build-in the spare capacity needed to ensure continued access to applications. In addition, companies that leverage public clouds can turn up and down capacity as needed versus over-provisioning to accommodate for future growth.

Think about buying power. Here, it is all an economy of scale issue. Service providers can get discounts on hardware purchases of up to 30 percent over smaller buyers.

The bottom line is that while organizations can reap the benefits of cloud technology by building their own infrastructure, service providers can deliver economies of scale when it comes to cloud infrastructure, operating costs, managed security, and high availability.

 

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Why Virtual Machine Recovery is no Piece of Cake, Part 2

Posted: December 7, 2012, 3:18 pm

By Madhu Reddy, Director of Product Management, Recovery Services

If your company is like many of SunGard’s customers, your workforce needs 24×7 access to mission- and business-critical applications, many of which now run as virtual machines (VMs). Therefore, in order to keep business operations going, it is essential that you rapidly recover these VMs in the event of an outage.

In part 1 of this blog, I talked about the strategies for protecting VMs at an offsite location. To summarize, I noted that maintaining a replicated infrastructure at a secondary site is too cost prohibitive for most companies, while manual recovery using an on-demand hot-site is economically more appealing, but can be too time-consuming. So what’s a savvy IT Director to do to set him/herself up for the successful recovery of VMs? Well, this is an area where cloud-based recovery services can help.

Specifically, I would suggest looking into offerings that fall under the category of Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS). In fact, more than two-thirds of IT professionals are either actively adopting or at least interested in implementing cloud-based Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS), according to Forrester. RaaS can help reduce restoration times of VMs AND lower the cost of managing recovery operations, and I’d like to take a moment here to shamelessly give you a preview of a new SunGard service offering, Recover2Cloud: SRM (“R2C: SRM”) for VMware environments.

We are partnering with VMware and using their vCenter SRM 5.0 (VMware’s Site Recovery Manager) tool as the basis for our VM recovery-as-a-service offering for several reasons. First of all, for VM recovery, it is essential that the tool we, as a DR service provider, use is one that our customers are already familiar with and commonly use. Secondly, in addition to being able to manage failover between two sites with active workloads, SRM can also take charge of failover from production datacenters to disaster recovery sites. Thirdly, SRM comes with built-in recovery blueprints to make many of the DR processes and steps (discussed in part 1 of this blog) easier and quicker, helping to shorten RTOs, reduce errors, and enforce the use of best practices.

Now that I’ve given props to VMware and SRM, let me tell you what I’m most excited about in our new offering. As part of SunGard R2C: SRM, we fully manage the replication and recovery of your virtual machines, monitoring your environment on a daily basis. On top of that, we offer you a choice of Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) – from 4 to 14 hours, take your pick – like a good DR service provider should. This service comes in two flavors (“Always On” and “On-Demand,”), and what I am most excited about is the way our customers have ingeniously managed to use the “Always-On” model (where we at SunGard dedicate infrastructure to the customer). Those customers who have chosen this model have been innovatively using VMs at their SunGard second site for a variety of use cases, from user acceptance testing to QA testing, all without interrupting VM replication processes. Isn’t that cool? (Obviously, I think so.)

It goes without saying, of course, that using the cloud for recovery effectively transfers your capex expenditures on a second site infrastructure into opex, and buys you and your IT staff time to focus on value creation programs – instead of worrying about DR, an admittedly high-risk, but low-reward function of IT. SunGard’s R2C: SRM offering is no different, and I’m thankful to be able to contradict the title of my own blog post and announce that “Recovering VMs is now a piece of cake with SunGard’s R2C SRM!”

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Fine-tuning Network Security

Posted: November 20, 2012, 4:10 pm

By JP Blaho

Network SecurityThe way workers conduct business is rapidly changing, and as a result, there are new demands on network security.

To start, users increasingly are relying on Internet-based software applications to conduct business. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) use is up, resulting in an 18 percent increase in worldwide revenues from last year to this year. Facebook use more than tripled (in terms of percent of corporate network bandwidth consumed) and Twitter use on company networks grew 700 percent year-to-year from 2010 to 2011, according to one study. And browser-based file-sharing is now found on 92 percent of company networks.

Further, there is a blurring between work and personal life. The 24/7 nature of business and the increased connectivity and availability to business applications via the web has blurred the distinction between work and personal life. With little distinction, workers frequently use company-issued desktops, laptops, smartphones, and other devices for personal use and vice versa.

Add to that the consumerization of IT, which has taken hold in most companies. Employees, accustom to the simplicity and usefulness of their own smartphones and tablets, are using these devices for work. Increasingly, companies are even sanctioning such activities through formal Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) initiatives. To put the BYOD movement into perspective, consider that one industry study found that 44 percent of firms had a BYOD policy in place in early 2012 and 94 percent plan to implement BYOD by 2013.

These trends make it difficult for IT to weed out the good network traffic from the bad. For example, is a worker’s Facebook use for business or is it of a personal nature that might put the company at risk? Similarly, does a spreadsheet being shared contain information needed in an authorized transaction with a business partner or is it a collection of customer credit card numbers, accessed by an unauthorized employee, and being shipped to an accomplice for identity theft and fraud?

Traditional firewalls and network edge protection solutions such as Intrusion Detection and Protection Systems (IDS/IPS) have not been much help with these matters. They simply have not had the granularity to be able to segment traffic based on the application and the user.

However, with the introduction of newer UTM solutions and Next Generation Firewalls, network and user awareness has take a huge leap forward in being able to secure at the user level, as opposed to the port or the group level.

Such solutions help organizations in a couple of ways. First, they offer the granularity needed in today’s business environment. With a traditional solution, IT would be able to block everyone’s access to a social networking site or file sharing service such as Dropbox. However, business needs today may dictate that certain users have access to some of these sites or service. For instance, as social networking becomes a critical business tool, the marketing department would certainly need access. Similarly, a creative agency within the company might need access to a file sharing service to send advertising material out for review and approval.

The newer security solutions allow IT to designate which users or groups of users have access to specific Internet applications and services. The solutions also allow control at a more granular level. For instance, IT might let users access a chat function of a service, but not file sharing.

Most importantly, the newer solutions offer the flexibility to match the dynamic nature of today’s business environment. Specifically, using the newer security applications, organizations can quickly react to the needs of the users, proving selective access to needed sites and services, while still securing the network.

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Stepping up to the Cloud [infographic]

Posted: November 15, 2012, 4:15 pm

Migrating to the cloud should be considered as part of an overall business strategy and have a defined business objective addressed. One company might want to leverage cloud services to reduce operating costs and free up IT staff, another might need the ability to rapidly scale capacity, and yet another might need to speed application development.

Keeping the business objective in mind will serve you well as you make the move to the cloud. At each step along the way, you will need to evaluate a provider’s processes, procedures, and abilities to see if they fit your needs. Your choices must be based on how well a provider can support and meet your ultimate objective. With this in mind, there are seven steps to take to ensure success.


Every cloud effort must start by defining the business reason for evaluating and leveraging cloud services. Do you want to avoid large upfront (CAPEX) costs for a new project? Do you need a more agile environment to speed application test and development? Must you scale on demand to be poised to enter a new market? Specifying the business motivator for the move helps determine what capabilities and features you will need from a cloud provider.
The next step is to assess your cloud readiness. In this part of your planning, you need to provide management with information to determine which applications and elements of your operations can make the best use of a cloud environment. When evaluating providers, you will find there are technology differences, as well as variations in operational procedures, responses to problems, governance issues, and the way security is handled.  You need to consider your availability and security requirements for each application.

Once you have decided to transition to the cloud, you need a roadmap to get there. Some applications might be ready for an easy migration. For instance, if you are already running an application in a highly virtualized environment, you might be able to simply move the virtual instances of those applications running on your servers to a cloud provider’s infrastructure. Other applications, such as custom code that is tied to a particular hardware platform, will require more effort. For those applications, you will need to develop a plan of action to get them to the cloud.

Next is the actual migration. As with any major IT undertaking, planning and testing are critical. You need to consider the impact on users. A web commerce site might have a very limited or no time window for disruption. With an internal application you might have the luxury of taking it out of service for a weekend, if users are given proper warning. Once the applications are ported over to a provider’s hardware, you will need to run tests to be sure everything is working and application performance criteria are met.

Over time, you will have the opportunity to fine-tune and optimize your cloud operations. For example, you might leverage a provider’s services that automate provisioning to improve the way you deploy your IT services.

Going hand-in-hand with optimization, you should look at the operational aspects of running your applications in the cloud. After all, cloud is a disruptive technology, and as such, requires new approaches to management and operations. Here, you should work with your provider to develop improved operations management capabilities.

Finally, clouds are not immune to outages. You must work with your provider to plan, execute, implement, and test Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. These plans need to be documented, communicated and most importantly, tested at least once a year.

Taking these steps, your organization should be able to take advantage of the benefits a cloud approach offers, while helping meet the business goals of the organization.

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Posted in Cloud, Cloud Adoption, Cloud Consulting, IT and the Cloud

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