Let us breathe, then, and draw in some of the new language this upheaval has brought into our revised realities.

Cloud Computing: Here, computer users share resources, business processes, applications and information as a utility service over a network. This shift takes an organization’s management of its own data from traditional software models to the Internet. Its existence traces back to large companies’ realization that their computing infrastructures weren’t exploiting their capacity consistently—in spite of a consistent cost.

Cloud Provider: An organization that makes a cloud-based infrastructure available to others to use and pay for.

Cloud Application: A software application that’s never installed on a local desktop computer, but is always available exclusively via the Internet.

Cloudware: The various bits of software that enable the provisioning, deployment, operation and management of applications in a cloud-computing environment.

Cloudburst: In its most negative sense, this term refers to a cloud-computing environment’s breakdown due to its inability to cope with a spike in demand, rendering the data it keeps inaccessible to their users. On a more positive note, the same word denotes the dynamic operation of whatever internally deployed software application works against just such a potential failure.

Vertical Cloud: A public cloud-computing infrastructure that’s designed to service the particular requirements of a single industry.

Hybrid Cloud: A combo of both private and public clouds, where users dip into one or the other, as needed.

External Cloud: A cloud-computing environment that’s outside the boundaries of a particular organization. It’s set up for use by select external parties, though not the general public.

Public Cloud: A cloud-computing infrastructure that’s open for use by anyone in the general public, including individuals and professional organizations.

Private Cloud: A cloud infrastructure that’s dedicated to the needs of a single organization for its exclusive usage.

Community Cloud: A cloud infrastructure that’s shared by multiple users (though not as many as share a public cloud) who possess common approaches to such issues as security, business continuity, privacy, availability and security.

Cloudstorming: Those instances in which multiple cloud environments are connected in a single, unified, virtual cloud. This is also referred to as a “cloud network.”

Cloud Portability The ability to easily move applications (and, often, their attendant parcels of data) across cloud-computing environments from discreet cloud providers, whether they be private or public clouds.

Cloud Enabler This term describes vendors who are not bona-fide cloud providers, but who facilitate users with the cloud-computing technology—along with its associated advantages—through such tools as cloudware.

Cloudwashing The arguably deceptive act of attaching the magical word “cloud” on existing products and services in order to capitalize on the spilloff effects of its power.

We’ve said it before and we will again. Cloud computing is a saviour of sorts—and for more than just your bottom line and overtaxed systems. No, cloud computing has a larger calling than that. One might even say that cloud computing is poised to deliver the world to a finer place, one in which waste and excess are recalled as sins of a more reckless age. With this communal data-storage marvel, the carbon emissions that would otherwise be sent heavenward from a churning-away corporate entity can be slashed meaningfully, and the world thus scores a significant reduction to its reliance on carbon. 

This news comes by way of the Carbon Disclosure Project, an AT&T-funded European study whose just-released results suggest that large companies in the UK and France who migrate their data to shared data networks in the cloud could cut their emissions by a full 50% by 2020.

The savings, quite simply, are a result of the decreased call for energy consumption of the new over the old. The cloud’s responsive flexibility means customers only use what they need, sidestepping the wastefulness and redundancy of yesteryear.

Money Savings, Carbon Savings

The study, which focused its attention on large IT companies in Great Britain and France, found that big UK organizations that move to cloud computing could enjoy carbon reductions that are equivalent to the annual emissions of over four million passenger vehicles. Oh, and they’ll also save in energy costs, to the tune of about £1.2 billion—findings that underscore a recent announcement by a British cabinet minister that the UK government’s cloud strategy could save British taxpayers as much as £460 million a year—so it’s not all selfless stuff on offer here.

The figures were understandably somewhat lower in France, where nuclear power reigns supreme in the business of electricity delivery, but blue-chip French companies are also poised to exploit some pretty noteworthy savings, too. And, say the study’s authors, the exploitation will be on a grand scale, as almost 70% of these organizations’ IT resources will reside in the cloud by 2020. That’s up markedly from the 10% at which the services are currently used.

Closer to Home

Closer to home, the report concludes that a large North American company that made the switch to the cloud now could be sitting on top of $12.3 billion in yearly savings, and annual carbon reductions that are equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil, by 2020.

Considering that neither of these diminutions—energy or cost—serve as the most persuasive reason to switch over to the cloud (that distinction remains a function of speed, and the accelerated pace at which all corporate activities can take place in the cloud), the argument is more compelling still. Where developers used to take 45 days to get new servers, one pundit remarked, the much more responsive-to-demand internal cloud has shrunk that lag to just a couple of minutes.

Send your stuff up into the cloud, it seems, and you just might save the world.

In fact, the looming cloud heralding the next stage of corporate computing, the same one that’s sent nervous naysayers into all manner of anxious fits, has a broad silver lining that these fretful types probably haven’t considered.

The Silver Lining

In a blessedly optimistic editorial published in late October, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman makes the point that the oppressive economic climate currently shrouding the United States is actually conducive to bursts of creativity like no other time in recent memory. And this advancement will unfold, in large part, courtesy of the supremely affordable and eminently functional resource that is cloud computing.

The latest phase in the IT revolution, he says, is being driven by the convergence of social media with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones—all of it operating under the facilitating miracle that is the cloud. The thousands of software applications stored in this cyber cell transform our handhelds into extraordinarily powerful devices that confer on their users the potential for unprecedented innovation. The cloud has lowered the barriers to entry like nothing else.

Startups to the Rescue

Specifically, goes the argument, this technology shift will clear the way for new companies of all stripes, from insurance brokerages to medical labs, to dip into a nominally priced technological asset and borrow its overarching infrastructure to create from within. With this exceedingly useful tool, entrepreneurs can find their feet more cheaply and easily than they could even five years ago. Where previous eras required serious commitments of capital toward promotion, real estate, labour and technology to establish an operation, the cloud has removed a substantial chunk from the imperatives. The savings to be realized from employing a cloud solution rather than the traditional means and their attendant call for application servers, database servers, various on-premise applications and a slew of expensive IT personnel are genuinely meaningful for a startup. The cloud’s arrival in our midst has delivered supercomputing powers to the masses and, said Friedman in an earlier column, produced a “DIY economy.”

S.O.C.I.A.L

As Friedman describes in this editorial, Marc Benioff, the founder of cloud-based software provider Salesforce.com, this phase of the IT revolution might be summed up with the acronym SOCIAL: S for “speed,” O for “open,” C for “collaboration, I for “individuals,” A for “alignment” and L for “leadership.”

“The emergence of the cloud,” goes the piece, “means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour. This is speeding up everything—innovation, product cycles and competition.”

Apples recent public release of IOS5 and iCloud has been widely anticipated for quite some time. Yes…I know; “it’s not iPhone5″ you might say, but it is still a move forward in the Apple world and worth investigating. Up until now, there have been; let’s call them ‘deficiencies’ in mobility management for small or medium businesses. As with all things cloud, we are now one step closer to the technology utopia that we are all secretly dreaming about.

Utopia may not be attainable, but I am tired of being plagued with evil thoughts when it comes to any sentence containing the words ‘iPhone’, ‘backup’, or ‘centralized’. Even now ‘iCringe’.

The Answer Every Business has been Waiting For…or Not?

Apple has now put the ‘up’ in ‘backup’, taking us one step closer to IT bliss. Allowing users to backup their devices over Wi-Fi to iTunes or into the iCloud directly, provides a lot more flexibility when it comes to making sure your data doesn’t fall in the toilet along with your iPhone (I’m sure there are a few red faces right now). With your data stored in the cloud, recovery becomes one less worry for IT administrators. From a high level, it’ll back up virtually everything on your device except for music not purchased through iTunes (At least not yet).

Do You See What I See?

The next undisputed benefit to iCloud is that it has become device agnostic. Get access to your iTunes music, photos, documents, books, and apps from any Apple device or through your PC using icloud.com. Since many of us already have a combination of PC’s, Mac’s, iPhone’s, or iPad’s, the iCloud makes your content accessible when you want on whatever device you prefer.

Document Management

Apple carries this idea of synchronization to the next level with shared documents. iCloud enabled apps include; Pages, Keynote, Numbers (Apples version of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) which allow you to make changes to your doc’s. Harnessing the power of cloud based storage, enables you to access the changes from other devices in your arsenal.

There’s That Word Again…Productivity

If my calculations are right, we should now be so productive that tasks are completed before we even start! A few productivity features introduced with the iPhone navigation include; the ability to Tweet something from many different applications, and tabbed browsing for the internet. Also, those pesky notifications are better managed through the notification centre so you are not interrupted when you’re in the middle of an important email or text.

I’m interested in hearing how you see IOS5 and iCloud changing your business, if at all. Like it or hate it, Innovation Happens!

By Jason Meilleur
Infrastructure Team member

With more and more organizations opting to store their data on cloud computing systems rather than under their own roofs, outsourcing data centres are springing up like mushrooms to answer the demand. That development, say the folks at this Colorado-based thinktank, spins off into all kinds of good stuff, including savings in manpower, savings in money and—here’s where the world’s interests kick in—savings in energy. Indeed, say the analysts behind the research, this cloud business could help reduce the world’s energy costs by almost a third over the next decade.

First up, the stuff that lines the pockets.

Revenue from these proliferating data centres, predicts the new research, will inflate to a compound annual growth rate over the next decade of 29%. In hard numbers, that means a revenue climb from $46 billion in 2009 to $210.3 billion in 2015. More than that, says the report—titled “Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency”—new investments in the stuff will continue to spur greater efficiency for those dollars spent.

Indeed, Pike Research’s analysis suggests that, absent the cloud, only the very largest commercial or governmental organizations would have the capital and expertise required to achieve the same kind of efficiency at a comparable cost.

Green Shoots

But it’s the trending transformation of another kind of green, says Pike’s senior analyst Eric Woods, that’s even more impressive.

“Cloud computing revenue will grow strongly over the next decade,” Woods says. “But the reduction in energy consumption will be even more significant.”

Pike forecasts that, if the world continues along its current cloud-computing adoption curve, overall data centre energy consumption will be slashed by a dramatic 31% in the period between 2010 and 2020.

This news comes on the heels of other publicly stated initiatives that acknowledge the wasteful footprint of the globe’s infinite IT goings on. Facebook, for one, recently announced that it intends to make public the details of its data centres such that others might benefit from this massive operation’s evolving understanding of energy efficiency. According to the social media giant, the servers in its refurbished data house—which apparently took two years and tens of millions of dollars to complete—run 38% more efficiently, and 24% less expensively, than those in their comparable peers.

One Centre, Less Energy

Simply put, goes the report, clouds are better utilized and less expensive to operate than traditional, siloed data repositories are. The more disparate operations they take in under their generous eaves, the more efficiently is this channel of energy expended.

And all signs point to a continued drift in this direction. As increasingly more of the work that was conventionally performed in internal data centres is consigned to the cloud, the world’s basket of energy consumption, associated energy expenses and greenhouse gas emissions suffers ever fewer hands dipping into its bounty.

Consider, too, the very prickly subject of cloud security, heretofore much maligned for its apparently inherently contained contradiction but, in a recent show of enlightenment, perhaps rewritten as saviour rather than villain.

Big Picture Author

In this Wall Street Journal article, a big-picture pundit introduces the extraordinary idea that the cloud may in fact be the safest place to store our data, the deafening cries that have long argued the opposite notwithstanding.

The article’s author, John Bussey, submits that data consigned to the cloud actually enjoys an abundance of sophisticated security-enhancing features that an organization, particularly one in the small-to-mid-sized category, simply couldn’t access on its own.

“The sheer size of cloud businesses like Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services,” the piece goes, “allows significantly more investment in security policing and countermeasures than almost any company, large or small, could afford themselves.”

Go Big to Stay Secure

More than that, Bussey points out, the average computer user is not as attentive to even the most routine security imperatives as he needs to be. But sign on with just a “plain-vanilla” cloud package provider and you automatically score security basics such as updated antivirus runs and as-needed software patch applications. Any upgrade from there improves your lot further with enhanced security features like data firewalls, high-end encryption and 24-hour tech support.

“Small and medium businesses are insane not to leverage the advantages of cloud computing,” Jim Reavis, of the industry group Cloud Security Alliance, told Bussey. “It ends up being almost in all cases a security upgrade, because they can’t otherwise afford the practices.”

A Lone Voice in the Wilderness

Of course, this voice in the wilderness is still powerfully eclipsed by the hue and cry of the status quo. And it’s a position endlessly reinforced by the studies that continue to pour in with findings that tell stories of organizations’ enduring wariness of the idea of entrusting their data with an off-site third party. And this is the scene even in spite of an ongoing flurry of initiatives undertaken by IT security vendors, cloud providers and industry evangelists themselves to redress this issue.

Still Talking to Ghosts

Just this week, a study unveiled at the V3 Virtual Cloud Summit in Great Britain reported that a full 87% of enterprises remain concerned about security in the cloud.

And some 72% of small (fewer than 100 employees), and 63% of mid-sized (100 to 999 employees) companies told technology research firm IDC, in 2008, that security was their most pressing concern when it came to the notion of transferring their operations to the cloud. That those numbers had contracted to 50% and 47%, respectively, when the same survey was conducted three years later, is a thundering step in the right direction.

Because revolution, after all, is a slow business. Remember how long it took to come around to that broccoli?

We are living in a world full of unique businesses, all fighting to establish their niche in the marketplace.  Whether you’re a small start-up with a handful of employees, or an established organization of several hundred, technology decisions are often made on a best-effort basis.  Many businesses have developed their own “culture” – if you will, of how they consume technology.  This creates a growing challenge for IT decision makers who are faced with a myriad of questions regarding their available options. With the technology landscape in constant motion, IT Managers are left with the time consuming and often daunting task of researching and downloading evaluations, to determine which products or technologies will accomplish their goals.

To Cloud, or Not To Cloud

Cloud computing seems to be taking a front seat in the hearts and minds of the masses. The idea of leveraging someone else’s massive infrastructure investment, for a fraction of the cost, is too good to pass up.  Almost every day at least one person asks me about my thoughts on this topic, hoping to glean some new information on whether or not it would be right for them.  Some IT Managers have come right out and told me they’ve made a decision and are starting the process of moving into the cloud.  After asking them a few basic questions, they quickly realize they’ve bought into a solution without understanding how it will impact other technologies within their organization.

To Partner, or Not To Partner

Leveraging an outsourced pool of resources is not only a service that is provided by the cloud, it’s also available through technology partners.  As with any small or medium business, many rely on a single person with strong IT Kung Fu to make all of their technology decisions.  Combining forces with the right partners can provide low-cost access to a large network of highly skilled professionals. Thus enabling, proper solution development and minimal surprises (a.k.a. downtime or sinking money into the wrong technologies) all based on industry best practices, learned through experience with past implementations. In a recent meeting at Microsoft Canada Mike Ryan, SMB Server and Cloud Specialist cited a particularly telling statistic; over 80% of small and medium businesses who attempt a migration into the cloud fail unless they are working with a partner who has navigated the process in the past.  If you see the value that cloud computing brings to the table, the benefits of establishing a relationship with a trusted partner for technology should go hand in hand.

Jason Meilleur is the Infrastructure Team Lead at 360 Visibility. As a Microsoft Certified IT Professional and Cisco Certified Network Associate Jason combines his technical and business development backgrounds to help customers overcome business challenges by utilizing innovative technology solutions. For more information, contact Jason at jmeilleur@360visibility.com or (905) 907-3606.