This is the email which Google Apps customers wuill be recieving in the near future. Google has levelled it’s Google Message Service features with that of Postini and is deprecating the latter. Users are advised to move their Postini rules over to GMS as this won’t happen automatically.

Subject: Change to Postini Message Security for Google Apps

This message affects only customers who have activated the Postini Message Security as part of their Google Apps service. If you aren’t sure whether you are using Postini, please contact us.

What Changing?
The Google Apps team recently added key features of Postini Message Security directly into the Google Apps control panel. The email features– including compliance footers, restricted email delivery, attachment controls, and more — are comparable to those offered with Google Message Security, and simpler to manage.

As a result, Google is deprecating the Postini Message Security service that is integrated with your Google Apps account.

What’s Next?
Google is asking all Google Apps customers with integrated Postini Message Security to consolidate their email management settings in Google Apps and to remove Postini from their mail flow.

In the coming months, you will receive notifications from Google with instructions and a deadline for completing this transition for the domains on your account. We can work with you on making those changes and answer any questions you may have.

We also expect see lower false positive rates for messages sent within your organization by using only Gmail’s spam filtering capabilities.

• FAQ: Postini to Google Apps Transition
• User’s step-by-step Transition Guide (you will receive an email when your account is ready to transition)
• New email filters in Google Apps: Blog post and setup article

1. The first acquisition of the year? IBM has bought up cloud-based software testing platform Green Hat for an undisclosed sum. This continues IBM’s resurgence as a serious Cloud Services provider and shows how a solid long-term strategy can work. Remember when folks were ringing the death-knell of the former server giant when they made the decision to start dropping their hardware lines? Expect more from them this year too. http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/ibm-buys-cloud-based-software-testing-platform-green-hat/
2. It’s always interesting to speculate who is going to be ‘moving and shaking’ in this months ahead. GigaOm (http://gigaom.com/cloud/10-cloud-startups-to-watch-in-2012/) have put together their top-ten for the year ahead. Certainly some of these will fall by the wayside, but it’s interesting to take a look at the technologies and direction these new ventures are using and taking as they serve as a barometer for the market generally. In short, mobility and Cloud-based app development are tops with speedier infrastructure coming next on the list. It looks like were starting to turn a corner and looking beyond the basics of infrastructures towards streamlining those infrastructures for specific use cases.
3. Box also believe that mobile is the key to Enterprise Cloud adoption in an article over at Tech Crunch (http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/08/box-mobile-adoption-is-the-gateway-drug-to-the-cloud-in-the-enterprise/) Quote time! “one of the big drivers we see for mobile adoption – and one of the big reasons why mobile deployment growth was actually higher than the user growth – has to do with the fact that enterprises are adopting cloud services because of mobile.Mobile adoption is actually driving cloud adoption,” says Matthew Self VP for Mobile at Box, “which isn’t totally obvious. But when you get to mobile, it isn’t about Microsoft anymore. Less than half of the computing endpoints in the world are Microsoft now…They’ve forced CIO’s to defect from Microsoft’s own entrenched postion, which is sort of bizarre. But it’s not like a CIO can say, ‘oh, I’ll just wait a year or two on mobile.’ ”   Of course he makes a valid point, more and more we’re seeing Microsoft NOT being the end-point for consumed services and that’s something we need to be increasingly aware of when we’re talking about Cloud Services adoption.
4. Finally, an interesting article which talks about how existing IT Outsourcing contracts could be reviewed and re-examined to take Cloud Services into consideration, rather than simply waiting them out to take advantage of new solutions. The process here is of interest as it potentially opens some opportunities which would seem to be tied off for the next year or so. http://gigaom.com/cloud/bils-it-outsourcing-contract-cloud/

Cheers for now!

I was writing up a review of the year and my thoughts looking forward to 2012 and thought I’d have a little fun creating a word-cloud from my scribblings, it seemed apt.

So here it is, an email about Cloud becomes a Cloud about an email. Poetic, no?

Email about Cloud becomes Cloud about Email

One last roundup of the interesting bits of Cloud news before the holidays commence.

1. Banging a message home. – I know I sounds little like a stuck record on this but it keeps coming up and we have to make sure we address it. The adoption of Cloud services affects more than just the IT side of things. There’s an article at Federal Times which uses the adoption of online services by the US Department of Labour and shows that:

“Labor has experienced challenges with its move to a cloud environment. In addition to going from a legacy, batch system to a “real time” system, issues related to training and process changes arose. These changes ran the spectrum of financial management activities, to include human resources, travel, procurement and invoicing.”

If you’re having a technology conversation about adoption, it’s important to ask questions about their processes and whether an impact analysis has been thought about beyond the confines of the IT domain.

2. Talking about workloads – building on the nontechnical approach I mentioned above, we’ve been proposing the ‘workload’ view of things for a long time in the workshops and it seems so have IBM. In an article at Thoughts On Cloud, Luis Aguilar Mateo has put together a nice article which is useful reference reading and has a good graphic at the end which is worth .. Erm remembering or else copying and providing the correct attribution!

3. New Office365 security and compliance news! Office 365 now meets EU data protection standards through support for the European Commisions “Model Clauses” safeguarding data even if it’s held outside of Europe. There’s also a new web site which you should all bookmark and remember – http://trust.office365.com which provides a whole slew of good solid information which should be used in those Microsoft vs conversations. Quote time:

“Microsoft will begin to include Model Clauses by default to all customers all over the world. I think we are the only cloud provider of any scale that’s offering this service, and it differentiates Office 365.” says Stephen McGibbon, chief technology officer for Microsoft EMEA

NOTE: This still doesn’t protect against access to data through FISA or Patriot act which could still be a sticking point for a lot of orgs.. Always tempering the hype – that’s me!

4. LAPD says NO! I’ve used them as an example for a long time now, but it seems that the LAPD has finally said no to using Google for it’s email. This is a pretty significant knock-back for the big-G. Of course they’ll spin it saying that the rest of the city has moved over, but LAPD represents 13,000 users, the rest of the city is 17,000. By my count that’s 43% of the user base which are no not going to be moving to the Apps solution, a big hit! The city council came to the conclusion that “… the company’s technology could not meet the security needs of crucial departments including police and the city attorney’s office.”
The LA times has the article I found.

5. Office 365 – Cloud app of the year! Finishing of a high note, CRN have voted Office 365 their Cloud App of the year saying it was “the real deal and blows away Google Apps”.  That’s it.. Job done.

Have a good one!

John

Microsoft's PaaS getting easier to adopt

In a recent mailing, Microsoft have outlined the changes they’ve made to the process of signing up for Azure and a more flexible way of managing your usage of the PaaS solution.

Here’s the text:

• Simplified Sign-up Process:

• Create new subscriptions in 3 simple steps
• Take advantage of the new spending limit feature to sign up for a new 3-Month Free Trial and/or one of our MSDN subscriptions without fear of overage charges

• Flexible Subscription Management:

• Quickly add or update your subscriptions
• More easily switch between offers
• Cancel un-needed subscriptions directly from the Windows Azure Management portal

• Streamlined Billing Experience:

• Access real-time usage and billing details directly in the Windows Azure Management portal
• Billing will occur at the same time each month, regardless of the number of subscriptions
• Simpler, summarized invoice

There have been mutterings in the past that the Microaoft PaaS has been less than simple to get onto, with luck this will set aside some of those concerns.

I’ve decided that it’s about time for a change around here, so I’m going to be updating the look and feel of Hosting Thoughts to reflect the more news-oriented focus I now have here.

That’s not to say that you won’t still be getting my ramblings and thoughts too, they’ll just be in a better structure. The Blog format has worked until now, but it’s time for a change so if you’re getting weirdness on the screen, please refresh and try again, I may be tinkering!

Thanks

John

Happy Monday!

A freshly-baked batch of Cloud News for you to savour, devour and feel slightly guilty about afterwards…

*
Coding in the cloud with an iPad. It might not work for developers everywhere, but Mark O’Connor, a Munich-based programmer, has moved to working exclusively online using an iPad and BlueTooth keyboard. He’s using a Linux virtual environment from Linode and the iSSH app from Zingersoft for the iPad / iPhone to access the system and he writes his code in VIM. In his blog post Mark describes a typical day and how liberated he feels being able to use different devices to attach to his system to check on compilations and builds etc. Now Mark isn’t writing lightweight stuff either, he’s writing C++ which runs on systems like the 200,000+ core Jaguar platform at ORNL so he’s not messing around here. Is this type of working for everyone? No of course not, if you’re a big Visual Studio user or you’re writing for OSX with Xcode then this probably isn’t for you, but Mark’s experiment has proved that for some workflows, the tools are there today to release developers from the desktop. Is the PC era truly drawing to a close? For Mark it certainly seems to be and we should be looking at the workflows of our clients to make sure that we are recommending the best solutions and not remaining hide-bound to older, and perhaps outdated, paradigms.

*
Rackspace advises Enterprises to hold off the Cloud… for now. It was a strange message to hear from the CTO of one of the worlds biggest providers, but John Engates basically told his audience at Cloud Expo that cloud, specifically SaaS, wasn’t ready to replace Enterprise applications yet. Rather he advised organisation to hold off of upgrading and getting into multi-year contracts until SaaS was ready and they could make a clean move over. Engates’ presentation took particular pains to swipe at Oracle painting the software giant and Cloud wannabe as synonymous with old-fashioned, non-cloud, shrink-wrapped, legacy software. Of Oracles Public Cloud offering his response was that Cloud should be about metered services rather than tiered subscriptions and multi-year contracts. Original article at Wired
The point? Rackspace offer IaaS and are hoping that OpenStack will attract the SaaS vendors and developers so pitching IaaS as a ‘bridge’ between in-house and SaaS application delivery makes sense for them. For the larger view that positioning is still sound, but needs to be tempered with the realities of enterprise business and budgeting. I’ve seen a number of discussions around Cloud definitions where service providers are offering 1 or 2 year fixed fee deals – effectively destroying the “Cloud” delivery model by definition – not because they want the revenue stream, although that’s nice, but because that’s what their customers wanted. Last week I talked about NIST and the focus of definitions, perhaps this is a case in point, the market will drive the services being delivered and it really doesn’t matter what pretty words we use to try to define the concept, the reality will always evolve based on demand.

*
Email and collaboration now available on AWS GovCloud. Amazon have teamed up with HyperOffice to deliver email and collaboration solutions on the GovCloud application marketplace. The desirable elements here are that the solutions are compliant with things like FISMA, HIPPA SAS-70, FIPS 140-2 etc etc.
Although there are no Office-like applications in the suite, it does offer a compelling solution for any Government organisations or agencies who are pursuing email and collaboration as SaaS solutions. There are some videos over at http://hyperoffice.com/demos and the public-sector specifics are at http://www.hyperoffice.com/public-sector/
Is this another bloody-nose for Microsoft? Office365 is very good for the most part, but doesn’t seem to have the profile as a Federal solution in the market generally and Amazon are keen to press their advantage of both GovCloud and their certifications as hard and as far as possible. Is HyperOffice the vehicle for this? Time will tell.

*
The news gets worse for Microsoft watchers too as HP formally adopts VMware Cloud Foundry atop of OpenStack for it’s Cloud Services solutions. As the exclusive article over at Wired points out, the rumour was that HP were originally planning to implement a solution based on in-house tech developed at their labs, but new boss Zorawar Singh turned that around in a few months  to adopt the Openstack platform and now confirms Cloud Foundry as the application delivery engine. HP were promising a solution based on Azure over a year ago (as were a few others) but these have yet to appear and the more egalitarian approach of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry – both open source and both able to be deployed anywhere by anyone – shows HPs Cloud Services group have the aim of hybrid delivery and open solutions providing the portability of services that is deemed important for Cloud adoption. Could it be that, in this instance, HP have actually got the direction right?

That it for this week, see you next time.

*
OpenStack adds a further dimension with Riverbed. One of the challenges we still see with Cloud adoption is the bandwidth available to remote users and/or locations. Riverbed have made a very successful business out of optimising WAN connectivity over the years and having them team up with OpenStack provides that solution with a significant advantage over other solution for those organisations who may be otherwise challenged by networking constraints. The quote is this :

“As a member of OpenStack, Riverbedwill help with the design, specification and development of this open source cloud stack to deliver integrations of cloud optimization technologies for the needs of tomorrow’s applications. Joining OpenStack strengthens Riverbed’s commitment to global organizations that strive to deliver applications in public, private and hybrid cloud environments without compromising performance.”

That’s quite a mouthful but as we know “Today’s applications in the cloud are expected to consistently deliver an excellent user experience, regardless of connectivity and location.” and Riverbed are already delivering that into Service Providers and Enterprises worldwide. Open Stack is at openstack.com and information on the Riverbed solutions, such as the coolly-named Steelhead appliances, can be found at riverbed.com

*
NIST have had a busy few weeks, producing not only the final version of their Definition of Cloud Computing but also a 3-volume Technology Roadmap designed to defines high-priority requirements for standards, official guidance and technology developments that need to be met in order for agencies to accelerate their migration of existing IT systems to the cloud computing model.
The definition document – with the snappy name of SP800-145 – is final now having gone through 15 revisions since it’s first draft, the final version has some minor amendments over v15 and should be obtained and any references older definitions updated as appropriate. The Technology Roadmap however is open for public comment and discussion until December 2nd after which a further draft will be created.
Already though there are voices saying that the Technology Roadmap is really nothing more than a glorified wish list and that NIST should move away from trying to define “The Cloud” and actually  look to define the delivery of identifiable services instead. Jon Stokes over at Wired  put this point across very clearly when he quoted the roadmap as follows:

“In the technology vision of Federal Cloud Computing Strategy success, [U.S. government] agencies will be able to easily locate desired IT services in a mature and competitive marketplace, rapidly procure access to these services, and use them to deliver innovative mission solutions. Cloud services will be secure, interoperable, and reliable. Agencies will be able to switch between providers easily and with minimal cost, and receive equal or superior services.”

His addition to that statement was “And every child should have a pony.”!

Does he have a point though, should we be spending less time defining concepts and more time defining how email services, or collaboration, or document management or citizen support services should be delivered for Government organisations? I have to admit that even as a definition purist, I have a certain level of sympathy for Jon’s position, perhaps if we did put more effort into specifics and less into concepts we’d be making more progress and spending less time checking off boxes. His article is well worth a read.

*
New security options from established names. RSA and McAfee have both announced options for securing access to Cloud services. RSA, working with Microsoft, announced that ADFS 2.0 now supports SecurID token authentication and users using such a method could extend that identiy assertion through to any Cloud service supporting ADFS in a federated way. Azure and Office 365 spring to mind immediately but there are a bunch of other platforms out there who could be taking advantage of this. Networkworld are carrying the story, but it’s been almost impossible to find anything on the Microsoft sites about this, which is a little frustrating!

McAfee on the other hand announced enhancements to it’s Cloud Security Platform including Cloud Identity Manager, which is – amongst other things SAML compatible and allows for the creation of a single sign–on portal for centralised accesss to cloud services and supports a number of hard and soft token services to provide 2 factor authentication too. Details their offerings can be found over at http://mcafee.com/cloudsecurity

My word count says that that’s probably enough for now… until next week, TTFN.
 

Here’s  my pick of the interesting news from the last week. If you’d rather watch then read, the video version will be online at hosting-thoughts.com later today.

• Creative Destruction is one of the new management buzz-phrases floating around at the moment, along with gameification which I still don’t really understand, anyway Larry Dignan over at ZDNet (http://zd.net/w333Tt)  is using it to describe what he believes is going to happen to the IT departments and workforce within organisations as they move to Cloud Services adoption for their application and compute requirements. He picks out a couple of phrases used in a recent ‘maverick’  Gartner presentation at their recent symposium in Orlando, the most telling one being “The long-run value proposition of IT is not to support the human workforce – it is to replace it,”. Strong words and also true, but only to a point. We’ve been formally talking about the operational impacts of Cloud Services adoption in our workshops for well over a year now and saying that the smart IT guy follows the organisational data, not the servers in order to deliver his value to the business. The timescale given for the collapse of IT jobs was around 2020 but there’s no real science behind that time-frame, hence the presentation being given the ‘maverick’ tag. But it’s not unreasonable to draw parallels between manufacturing and the introduction of automation in that industry and IT and the automation of the processes around datacenter management and support.  Is there going to be a rocky time ahead? Well if you’d set you mind on being a DC support engineer, I’d suggest that that particular job market may not be expanding too much over the next few years, but if you’ve worked in IT for long enough you know by now that if you stand still the world moves on around you. In our business you need to be on the move, all of the time simply to stay in the game and this is another change which creates opportunity if approached in the right way. Helpdesk support, yeah I’m not sure about those guys though..

• Citrix announced the release of Cloud Portal, a “comprehensive portal for provisioning hosted apps, desktops, services and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) from the cloud.”. The product comes in two flavours, Service Manager for the delivery and management of the products being put out there and Business Manager for the, well for the business side if things including workflows for account provisioning and management and automation for metering and billing processes. Now then let’s get down to details. Cloud Portal is actually the evolution of EMS-Cortex which Citrix acquired back in February of this year. I’ve always liked the Cortex solution and knowing that it’s being moved forward in this way is a good thing, a very good thing, in my opinion. The support for the delivery of Hosted Messaging and Collaboration using the Microsoft products in a post-HMC world provides service providers with a solid solution for Exchange Lync, SharePoint and CRM solutions which is tough to match from anywhere else. When we align this with the other announcement from Citrix, that being version 3 of CloudStack – again the first release under the Citrix brand following acquisition – the Cloud Infrastructure management environment, which remains hypervisor agnostic, although v3 will come with XenServer bundled. I’m liking the way Citrix are moving at the moment and I expect we’ll see a decent number of implementations being enhanced and supported with these products of the next 12 to 18 months.  CloudPortal and CloudStack details can be found over at citrix.com

• Amazon’s security was called into question by a team of German researchers in a paper published last week – according to Technology Review: http://bit.ly/sTGXgc -  They claim to have found vulnerabilities in the AWS messaging system used to automate the creation and deletion of VM’s on demand. The problems identified have been fixed by Amazon who’ve also disputed claims that there was user information at risk. The attack surface – that being the interface used to manage the environments – is a vulnerable point in any solution as it provides the entry point needed to change the customers environment by design. Of course authentication and encryption should be layered up to prevent unauthorised access to such an interface, but our vendors need to ensure that they are spending enough time evaluating – and evaluating honestly – this aspect of their platforms to make sure that they are as secure as possible. Scale always introduces elements of risk, as the statistical universes grow, so the likelihood of issues arising becomes not just a probability but a certainty. That’s why work to mitigate must be ongoing and the attention given to vulnerable areas maintained.

• We spend a lot of time belting on about organisations moving their workloads to Cloud-based services so it’s always interesting to hear examples where the solutions actually DONT work and they’re interesting because of what we can learn from the reasons why. Mixpanel have documented (http://code.mixpanel.com/2011/10/27/)  the reasons they’ve moved away from an IaaS solution to a dedicated server environment in some detail and there’s some good stuff in there which we can use and extract to support the decisions made by our clients in the future. The principal reason for Mixpanel to move to a dedicated server solution was the rapid variability in their workload which wasn’t matched by the availability of their chosen provider, but they also point out some other limitations which they’ve seen and found using ‘Cloud’ solutions. The conclusion we can draw from this is that it’s vital to establish what the customers actually want to achieve and what the critical areas are in terms of achieving those targets or goals. After that the best solutions can be identified or architected and the business case created. Could Mixpanel’s requirements be delivered using Cloud solutions? Yes, I’m convinced that they could, could they be done in a more cost effective way at the moment than a dedicated server solution? Possibly not, but that’s the point really isn’t it, it’s about having the right business solution, not running headlong at new technologies just because ‘everyone says so’  even if we are part of that ‘everyone’ Food for though here.

1. HP finally deliver Solutions for Microsoft virtualisation. After far too long, the VirtualSystem solution is now available for Hyper-V and includes the server hardware, storage and the Hyper-V hypervisor of course. HP have created 2 packages, VS1 and VS2 with the VS1 suitable to up to 750 VMs and VS2 up to 2500. Quite how these numbers were derived we aren’t sure, but I’m sure that there are a bunch of average assumptions used. From a purely personal perspective, I can remember producing specs remarkably similar to the VS1 a few months ago for a project here in the UK so I’m going to take this as some kind of vindication that what we did was pretty good! The solutions prices don’t include Microsoft licensing of course and with a starting price of $175,000 there’s a fairly hefty investment here, but for a pre-designed solution from HP – which some organisations like to have – it’s not a bad starting point and it’s certainly a decent jump-off point for implementation of the Hyper-V stack. Full article at ComputerWorld: http://bit.ly/nsyWzE
2. I’m not of a development bent, but I did once upon a time write a database-driven web site in PHP and that language always catches my eye. So when a story about those Zend folks providing a cloud-based development platform for devs to use so they can concentrate of devving rather than running an environment. Zend say that  App Fabric – sounds familiar – along with the Zend Framework and Zend Studio enable web devs to create and publish onto an array or other vendors platforms including, in the near future, Azure.  The importance of PHP as an underpinning for the web-services we’re seeing today can’t be under-estimated and we need to ensure that it’s not just the virtualisation, the management and the hardware we keep abreast of, but the development side too. Check out this article at The Register for more details: http://bit.ly/p0b3aw
3. It’s easy to become distracted and focus on the technologies but one of the things I talk about during the workshops and presentations we do is that we can’t loose sight of the customer in all of this. I came across a post by Mark Thiele over at DataCenterPulse: http://bit.ly/r4ugFb which talks about Cloud SLA’s and how they should / could be built and maintained. We talk about SLA’s being constructed based on the requirements of the customer and not on the capabilities of the service provider and that still seems to be the right overall approach to me, but they have to work on both levels and the agreement they create does need to be under regular review to ensure that the changes in technologies, the changes in the services being delivered and the changes in the customer’s requirements are all still covered effectively. This understanding is as important as any architecture we can build in our discussions with both providers and end consumers of Cloud Services.