Let’s take a temperature reading.

Public Cloud

The public cloud is the model that’s been getting most of the press. This communal environment, in which IT systems are shared by multiple users, is accessible to anyone, applauded for its easy access and cost-effectiveness.

But data protection is sketchy here, given that any number of people and enterprises are sharing the IT systems on which your stuff sits, and that its exact location is unknown.

Trusted Cloud

Trusted clouds offer the next level of security — with limitations imposed on the number of users drawing from the same cloud — while maintaining the economies of scale that are among cloud computing’s greatest virtues. Virtual LANs provide the only access to the virtual servers and storage systems in play here; each enterprise enjoys its own.

Private Cloud

With the private cloud—the equivalent of public cloud computing on a private network — entitlement increases again, with each enterprise aligning itself with a single, dedicated cloud to which it alone can gain entry.

Unlike in the public model, the data and processes that take place in a private cloud environment are located separately from those of other businesses, whether in a third-party datacentre or an organization’s own infrastructure.

Accenture’s High Performance Institute recently released a study that reported that the instances of corporations developing private clouds for their own use, whether or not in conjunction with public clouds, is on the climb. Particularly in situations where organizations possess a large number of servers.

Some 60% of the executives Accenture surveyed already use a private cloud and, the report predicts, by the end of 2012 private cloud use will permeate 77% of enterprises.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud is a combination of private and trusted or public architectures, with associated data and applications organized according to well-defined parameters. Internal and external IT services are at play in this version, and its offer of integrating a company’s existing IT environment into the skies makes it an attractive entrée to the concept overall.

Among other benefits, hybrid clouds come with a feature that reallocates resources from an overloaded public cloud to another, if need be. This model, in which private enterprises essentially extend their resources to public clouds, is the current darling of cloud watchers.

Enterprise Cloud

Finally, the enterprise cloud is a closed shop. Housed in an organization’s own data centre, this cloud is the property of the enterprise in question alone. Indeed, it’s only a cloud at all in terms of its divided configuration for internal workers in discreet departments.

Workbook Simplifies the Cloud

All of this cloud business can be busted into sense by the likes of 360 Visibility. Professional services organizations are well-served by this provider, thanks in no small part to its recent alignment with a comprehensive project management and financial management software solution, at www.workbook.net.

360 just became the North American distributor for this miraculous bit of software, which delivers a complete and rapid implementation template. It provides a detailed account of all business activity within a market segment via an intuitive web interface built in Microsoft Silverlight and based on the Microsoft SQL Server.

360 will be building a partner channel shortly and the company will make sure that the easy availability of WorkBook for professional services firms is a prominent feature of it.

The Wheel In The Sky Keep On Turning

It’s an extraordinary statement, but so too is the idea Microsoft is pitching. Cloud computing is nothing short of a revolution in the sky, and the company has taken it to the masses with a heavyweight of an advertising campaign designed to pique the interest of consumers and small business operators alike with its dead-simple promise of life-altering renewal.

But there is a middle step here, before the world at large can meaningfully occupy this cloud — and it’s got opportunity written all over it.

It is one thing, after all, to be intrigued by a catchy television ad in which good looking people make swift and effective use of some nifty new idea in their own edited-for-public-consumption lives. But it’s quite another to find practical application for the stuff in your own technologically beleaguered existence.

VARS are the Real Superheroes

Enter the clever VARs (Value-Added Resellers), with their hot air balloons, jet packs and telescopic ladders to bridge the gap; the knowledge and powers of explanation that will facilitate customers’ ascension to this next level of productivity and deliver to them the same ease of use their picture-perfect TV counterparts apparently enjoy.

With the suppliers having introduced the promise then, our job as VARs is to help the consumer realize its potential, to offer a hand up to the cloud and an introduction to the myriad possibilities that await her there.

Microsoft Has Their Head in The Cloud

Microsoft released another “To the Cloud” commercial last week, this one featuring a Christmas scenario in which a grandfather is allowed easy access to a video resident on his grandkids’ remote computer. This is the fourth such cozy, mass-media-powered assault in which Microsoft takes direct aim at a television audience that is presumably intrigued, but somewhat confused by what is apparently yet another layer of complexity requiring its mastery in this computer-driven world.

The software giant’s multipronged advertising campaign, which follows the introduction of its Office 365 service, also employs print, outdoor, online and radio initiatives. Throughout, the message sings of the triple threat that is public cloud, private cloud and cloud productivity.

VARs Take Flight to Deliver The Cloud

But the impressive and apparently expensive initiative (it’s expected to cost Microsoft several hundred million dollars), which will feature three of Microsoft’s core cloud computing technologies—Office 365, Windows Azure and Windows Server Hyper-V—hovers in a state of potential incompletion without VARs’ meaningful participation in driving the point home.

To these middle folks falls the job of exposition, explanation, erudition. Ever mindful of the kneejerk assumption of many consumers that “cloud computing” is just one more buzz phrase, VARS must take under wing these would-be customers with dedicated counsel on this notion of web-based computing that promises much to the enhancement of their lives.

In other words, without a flock of VARs taking committed flight now, on the downdraft of the advertising campaign Microsoft has so masterfully given wings, consumers will be denied full ascendency into the clouds. 

Progress, it turns out, does not always make the world better. In some cases, it just makes it more bloody complicated.

Complexity Breeds Disaster

Such is the apparent case, says Symantec—a security, storage and systems management solutions firm—in today’s disaster recovery scene. Many organizations are struggling to sustain the effectiveness of their security efforts in the face of an ever-more-complex technological landscape, reports Symantec in their recently released Disaster Recovery Study.

The report—Symantec’s sixth annual, undertaken to highlight business trends regarding disaster-recovery planning and preparedness—explains that disparate virtual, physical and cloud resources create an environment in which mission-critical applications and the data they house are in peril of becoming damaged, delayed or irretrievably lost. With nearly 60% of respondents using multiple tools to manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments today, it’s no surprise that security problems are rampant or that organizations are struggling, quite simply, with system overload.

Failing to Have a Back Up

Users, says the report, which polled IT managers of 1,700 large enterprises in 18 countries, are failing to back up a full 44% of data housed on virtual systems. Similarly, only 20% of respondents report employing replication and failover technologies to protect their virtual environments.

Respondents say that they conduct 82% of their backups on a weekly—at best—rate of frequency. And three-fifths of virtualized servers out there are not covered in respondents’ current disaster-recovery plans, up significantly from 45% in 2009.

Virtual Applications Causing Real Problems

In parsing its findings, the study uncovered a state of sincere confusion among data centre managers, suddenly charged with responsibility for managing and protecting a whole new slew of virtual applications and data. Some 58% of respondents cited protecting mission-critical applications in virtual and physical environments as a significant challenge their organization faces.

And so, while virtualizing servers and storage arrays are serious forces in today’s IT world, the means to adequately protect this new universe has not bloomed at the same pace. For the myriad of benefits virtualization and cloud offer the data centre organization, there’s no denying the heap of new concerns in whose company they travel.

Mastering the Cloud

The trick, then, is to master the management of this complex new reality responsibly, and with confidence. A better appreciation for the nuances of becoming a virtualized shop, a dedicated commitment to cloud computing and all that this brave new world entails, and an enhanced stream of information regarding how to properly back up data are critical to today’s companies, as they make the bridge into tomorrow.

Simply and Standardize

In the recommendations section of the study, Symantec’s director of its storage and availability management group, Dan Lamorena, says, “Data centre managers should simplify and standardize so they can focus on fundamental best practices that help reduce downtime.”

To that end, businesses need to review their data recovery plans with IT professionals, like those on offer through 360 Visibility. With these experts’ help, organizations can take the pains necessary to ensure the continuation of all their business-critical, IT-related systems—whether they be virtual, cloud or physical.

According to the Journal, and Gartner Inc.’s technology conference in Orlando, Fla., upon which the story was reporting, virtualization is enjoying attention from the business world for the way it offers managers the means to stretch their dollars further by employing existing resources more profitably. Our studies demonstrate that companies that virtualized increased the utilization of their existing hardware to 80%, a remarkable spike from 10-15%.

Virtualization, strictly speaking, describes the creation of a virtual (rather than an actual) version of something like, say, an operating system or a server. In computerspeak, we’re talking about a layer of software providing the illusion of an actual machine, where none in fact exists.

The technology first made a splash decades ago in the mainframe game, furnishing administrators with new command over their costly processing power. Today, virtualization is making serious inroads in the network, storage and server virtualization realms.

Virtualization can help companies to reduce their IT management expenses and shrink their dependence on the human resources that would otherwise have been tied up with the administration of multiple applications and operating systems on multiple servers.

With virtualization, users can tap a single phantom server to run multiple applications and operating systems independently. On top of that, administrators can use virtualization to shift workloads from one virtual workstation to another.

It’s also a boon to a company’s ability to prioritize its business activities and maximize server resources by facilitating the fluid transfer of tasks from one virtual workstation to another.

But above all, virtualization aids business owners to do more with less.

Network virtualization is probably the biggest site of activity in this field. Just as adding a partition to your hard drive effectively gives you two discrete hard drives, network virtualization splits the network’s available bandwidth into independent channels, each of which is affiliated with a particular server or device.

With storage virtualization, multiple network storage devices join forces (or at least appear to), and offer a central point of control.

And server virtualization just means performing a clever bit of trompe l’oeil on all your servers to make them appear a single, simple one.

At 360, we’ve helped countless businesses clients take lucrative control of their IT infrastructure and reach their full potential with virtualization. We’ve showed them how to streamline those businesses processes that are adjacent but often disconnected, and to reduce the downtime that plagues systems marked by a tangle of different inputs. And, more than that, we’ve slashed company hardware and operating costs by up to 50% and saved more than $3,000 annually for every server workload virtualized.

The Journal article reports that, last year, there were 5.8 million virtualized servers in the United States; Gartner predicts that number to rise ten-fold by 2012. As for us at 360 and our readiness to service this onslaught, well, we’re already there. Virtually.