Two articles caught my eye over the last couple of days, for different reasons.

Cloud Is More Secure

Denis Martin wrote a very good article about how it is possible, using layered techniques, to build an enviroment using Cloud technologies which is more secure that would be possible in-house. Here’s the summary:

Cloud Is More Secure
— Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides compelling cost and strategic benefits. These include scalability with reduced capital expenditure, more efficient use of IT resources, and the ability for an organization to focus on their enterprise’s core competency. Despite fears to the contrary, many well-established security technologies and procedures can be applied cloud computing and provide enterprise-class security. In many cases the cloud vendor may even provide better security in a virtualized environment than the individual enterprise can achieve in a purely physical architecture.[1]
The most effective security is a comprehensive, layered defense based on a framework. A cloud platform can leverage specialized tools to protect the integrity of virtual machines and Internet communications. Virtualization creates logical abstraction layers that allow for multi-tier security policies in order to provide true defense in depth. Enterprises with limited IT resources may not be able to afford the same security measures as a cloud provider and remain competitive. Deploying cloud-based IaaS represents an opportunity for the enterprise to build in security from the ground up.

Carbon Neutral On-line Service Provider

One of the ways I’ve been talking to hosters about how to position their On-live Services (“Cloud”) platforms is the reduction in energy costs to run a virtualised platform over physical ‘room heaters’ running at 5-10% capacity. Last week, CloudSigma announced that it was “Carbon neutral” as an organisation and was therefore offering the most environmentally friendly services available claiming that it’s “carbon neutral cloud services are the first of their kind in the industry.”

Of course running a datacenter isn’t the only aspect which consumed energy and leaves the dreaded ‘Carbon footprint’ but the independent organisation which evaluated CloudSigma, myclimate, have concluded that the organisations approach of “avoid, reduce and offset” has worked. OK, Switzerland does have one of the ‘greenest’ electricity supplies in the world available to it so they had a bit of a head-stert there, but it shows that this IS something to be taken seriously and it will become a factor in the decision =making processes of environmentally aware businesses and organisations.

It used to be the case that hosters and providers of online services provided their products in neatly defined buckets. They called them “Product options” but in reality it was simply a way of defining price points and keeping up with (or overtaking) the competition who were all doing the same thing.

With “Cloud” or online service consumption becoming more mainstream and business focused, this approach is now coming to be seen as a limitation to customer adoption. If someone needs a RAM heavy but CPU light environment, the chances are that the ‘bucket shops’ don’t offer such a beast, again in history this would have been a “bespoke build” and a premium charge would have been applied for the privilege.
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“Must have good long term prospects, be flexible and able to cope with reasonable demands. Ability to to grow to suit demand is a must, as is a stable and reliable environment for my application. A solid SLA is a must”

I’m not expecting to see ad’s in the dating pages just yet, but there is a significant growth in developers looking to put their applications ‘out there’ for consumption at scale and as a Service. Now that Microsoft’s Azure has formally been launched we’re going to start seeing some real shift in how both application developer and web-service solution providers are offering their products. Google’s I/O is also starting to hit a significant mark with dev’s looking at size the potential audience for their work with glee!

But oranges are not the only fruit and there are devs out there who will be looking for a provider who is able to work with them on a more personal level, one who will understand their specific requirements and who may have a slightly different, but more accessible way of providing the right service. Hosters should now, more than ever, be looking at the developer community and really asking what services can be provided and how. The paradigm is also shifting in terms of the relationship too, no longer are hosters simply selling space and power for devs, with SaaS offerings there is a n opportunity for true partnership and for applications and services to be offered out as revenue share, referral or reseller.

The days of the “Web Hoster” are almost done. Get flexible, get dynamic and get “Service” oriented, then you’ll get the business.

The reported ‘battle’ between Microsoft and Google for the delivery of on-line services saw Microsoft chalk up another win this week, as the university of Arizona chose the Microsoft On-Line services solution for it’s 18,000 seats.

This is a significant ‘win’ and shows that when the decisions are made it’s not only about pricing – Microsoft’s BPOS stack is typically around the $120 per user per year mark, compared to Google’s $50 – but also about integration, migration, security and risk mitigation. I’m sure that there was also a decent dollop of “I’d just feel better with Microsoft” in there too.

I’m involved with a couple of incipient projects which are also of the magnitude of the University and the decision processes are protracted as the risks of moving core services on-line are identified, discussed, addressed and re-addressed. The costs are very much secondary in these discussions as long as the mitigation is not overly significant.

The Microsoft announcement of the deal said “In addition to updating the university’s numerous and antiquated e-mail and calendaring programs to one centralized system, employees will get 10 GB mailboxes and new features such as instant messaging, presence and online meetings with the ability to share their desktop, audio or video with other users on or off campus,”. And this shows where the adoption of on-line services is really going to take root.

Many, many organisations – not just educational ones – have either old, legacy systems or a whole clutch of systems inherited though mergers and acquisition activity. The capital costs of replacing these systems in-house is usually significant and the benefits are often difficult to put a value on when building a business case. Moving the services on-line becomes THE viable solution in these circumstances as there’s little capital costs (the engagement of an SI for migration activity being the only significant, but potentially vital, one) and the ongoing costs are directly related to usage. The on-line services will usually provide a greater SLA than an in-house solution and will probably also deliver more storage and other functionality that would be implemented in-house too.

Microsoft, Google, or someone else. The decision soon will be not IF they move is to on-line, but WHO will be chosen to deliver the service.