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Posts from the ‘Cloud Security’ Category

Aug 3

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Gartner Releases Their Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012

Enterprises are beginning to change their buying behaviors based on the deployment speed, economics and customization that cloud-based technologies provide.  Gartner cautions however that enterprises are far from abandoning their on-premise models and applications entirely for the cloud.

Based on an analysis of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012, the best results are being attained by enterprises that focus on a very specific strategy and look to cloud-based technologies to accelerate their performance.  Leading with a strategic framework of goals and objectives increases the probability of cloud-based platform success. Those enterprises that look to cloud platforms only for cost reduction miss out on their full potential.

The Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012 is shown below:

Cloudwashing and Inflated Enterprise Expectations

While the hype surrounding cloud computing may have peaked, cloudwashing continues to cause confusion and inflated expectations with enterprise buyers.  This just slows down sales cycles, when more straightforward selling could lead to more pilots, sales and a potentially larger market. Cloud vendors who have the expertise gained from delivering cloud platforms on time, under budget, with customer references showing results are starting to overtake those that using cloudwashing as part of their selling strategies.

Additional take-aways from the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing include the following:

  • Cloud Email is expected to have a 10% adoption rate in enterprises by 2014, down from the 20% Gartner had forecasted in previous Hype Cycles.  This represents modest growth as the adoption rate of this category had been between 5 and 6% in 2011.
  • Big Data will deliver transformational benefits to enterprises within 2 to 5 years, and by 2015 will enable enterprises adopting this technology to outperform competitors by 20% in every available financial metric.  Gartner defines Big Data as including large volumes processed in streams, in addition to batch.  Integral to Big Data is an extensible services framework that can deploy processing to the data or bring data to the process workflow itself. Gartner also includes more than one asset type of data in their definition, including structured and unstructured content.  The Priority Matrix for Cloud Computing, 2012 is shown below:

  • Master Data Management (MDM) Solutions in the Cloud and Hybrid IT are included in this hype cycle for the first time in 2012.  Gartner reports that MDM Solutions in the Cloud is getting additional interest from Enterprise buyers as part of a continual upward trend of interest in MDM overall.  Dominant vendors in this emerging area include Cognizant, Data Scout, IBM, Informatica, Oracle and Orchestra Networks, are among those with MDM-in-the-cloud solutions.
  • PaaS continues to be one of the most misunderstood aspects of cloud platforms.  The widening gap between enterprise expectations and experiences is most prevalent in this market.  Gartner claims this is attributable to the relatively narrow middleware functions delivered and the consolidation fo vendors and service providers in this market.
  • By 2014 the Personal Cloud will have replaced the personal computer as the center of user’s digital lives.
  • Private Cloud Computing is among the highest interest areas across all cloud computing according to Gartner, with 75% of respondents in Gartner polls saying they plan to pursue a strategy in this area by 2014.  Pilot and production deployments are in process across many different enterprises today, with one of the major goals being the evaluation of virtualization-driven value and benefits.
  • SaaS is rapidly gaining adoption in enterprises, leading Gartner to forecast more than 50% of enterprises will have some form of SaaS-based application strategy by 2015.  Factors driving this adoption are the high priority enterprises are putting on customer relationships, gaining greater insights through analytics, overcoming IT- and capital budget-based limitations, and aligning IT more efficiently to strategic goals.
  • More than 50% of all virtualization workloads are based on the x86 architecture. This is expected to increase to 75% by 2015.  Gartner reports this is a disruptive innovation which is changing the relationship between IT and enterprise where service levels and usage can be tracked.

Bottom line: Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing  shows that when cloud-based platforms are aligned with well-defined strategic initiatives and line-of-business objectives, they deliver valuable contributions to an enterprise.  It also shows how Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are the catalysts of long-term market growth.  The following slide from the presentation  High-Tech Tuesday Webinar: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast, 2Q12 Update: Cloud Is the Silver Lining (free for download) also makes this point.

Sep 25

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How Analytics and Business Intelligence Are Accelerating Enterprise Cloud Adoption

During the last few weeks of completing a research project on buyer personas, a key finding of of just how quickly enterprises are switching out legacy reporting apps for SaaS-based analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) is emerging.

I’ve been interviewing sales VPs, sales operations directors, contract managers and CIOs. Of all these groups, the CIOs are providing valuable insight into the transition SaaS is going through in their enterprises.

Throughout this post I’ll correlate the interviewed CIOs’ comments back to a recent report Forrester published titled Understanding The Business Intelligence Growth Opportunity by Holger Kisker, Ph.D.  Dr. Kisker’s findings support many of the insights gained from the research on personas completed to date.

Key Points from Persona Interviews and Forrester Study

  • Forrester predicts the market for BI SaaS software will be $529M in 2011 growing to $2.4B in 2014.  The report mentions that by 2012, up to 30% of companies will have some SaaS-based BI services.  From the conversations with CIOs, I think this is actually low.  The urgency to get off of legacy reporting systems and onto a unified reporting platform is quickly changing this market.
  • 80% of enterprises will complement on-premise analytics and BI systems with SaaS-based applications by 2014 according to Forrester.  From the persona study I am working on, the cut-over is going to be much more abrupt.  50% or less of companies will most likely have on-premise applications in place by 2014, as SaaS-based analytics and BI applications provide business users with the information they need when they need it.
  • iPads running analytics and BI apps with lenders’ data in real-time are the new bling in financial services.  One CIO who recently was recruited to a financial services firm told me he quickly picked out the other C-level execs in the room – they all had iPads running analytics apps with live customer data.  One of his first projects: make that happen for the sales teams with a policy app.  Everyone I’ve spoken with on this research study tells me being able to get to their analytics data on an Android or Apple iOS device is critical for their build-out plans.
  • The greatest concerns the CIOs continue to have with SaaS are data integration to legacy systems and lack of security standards.  Despite these concerns one CIO summed it up well and said “We really don’t have a choice, the legacy reporting apps are too high maintenance, don’t integrate to our new workflows well – we need a new reporting platform, so we are piloting a SaaS-based analytics app right now.”
  • The high cost of maintaining legacy reporting applications, integrating them to the latest Microsoft, Oracle or SAP databases, and preserving tribal knowledge are factors pushing CIOs to adopt SaaS-based analytics and BI apps.  One of the CIOs is with a government subcontractor who has Airbus, Boeing, Sikrosky Aircraft as their largest clients explained how dashboards are manually generated in Excel, taking weeks and often being inaccurate.  To comply with contracts they must move to a faster reporting process.  Using SaaS-based analytics in pilots have trimmed the time for creating dashboards from weeks to hours.
  • Cloud integration and security are the skill sets these CIOs are hiring for right now.  A quick analysis from Google Insights shows the rapid ascent of cloud integration as a search term. While Insights doesn’t provide demographics, the persona interviews underscore this trend.
  • Analytics and BI data integration wins are setting the foundation for more complex system migrations in the future.  Bank of America, Citibank and other financial institutions have client-side systems that are outpacing legacy systems’ ability to analyze and make use of the massive amount of inbound data they provide.  Implementing cloud integration projects successfully, in conjunction the successful launch of more scalable SaaS-based analytics and BI applications sets the foundation for migrating even more complex systems.  The Forrester Report Understanding The Business Intelligence Growth Opportunity included the following graphic with further underscores this point.

Bottom line: The lessons learned from migrating analytics and reporting from legacy to SaaS-based analytics and BI applications, combined with the need to have customer and market intelligence on mobile devices, is leading to rapid changes in this market.

Apr 5

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Cloud’s Impact On The Future Of Open Source


Red Hat’s CTO Brian Stevens sits down with Kym McNicholas of the Forbes Network and discusses the current and future potential impact of open source on cloud computing.  Brian paints a realistic and pragmatic picture of where cloud is today and where it is going.  At just under 5 minutes, this is a video worth watching.

Jan 1

Google Insights Cloud Computing
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Roundup of Cloud Computing Forecasts and Market Estimates, 2011

During the last four months of 2010 the pace of published forecasts on cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS forecasts quickened, yielding an eclectic and at times conflicting view of this emerging market. From the daily Google Alerts, RSS feeds, e-mail subscriptions and offers to buy research reports on cloud computing received, the pace is being matched by the variety of research being completed.


I did a quick review of the term “cloud computing” on Google Insights for Search, which produced the following graphic.  Google Insights for Search is an excellent analytical tool, as it will render a forecast based on previous results and show geographic concentrations.  Please click on the image to expand it for easier viewing.

Cloud Computing Was Gartner’s Most Popular Inquiry Topic Last Year

Gartner analyst Ben Pring sums it all up when he writes in the report, The Influence of Cloud in Outsourcing, 2010-2011 that cloud computing was the #1 area of inquiry for the advisory firm in 2010. The Google Insights analysis and the proliferation of reports underscore that point.

Before reviewing all these forecasts, it’s good to also take a look at the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2010.  Back in October 2010, Intel started offering it on their website for free.  You can get a copy of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2010 by clicking here.

2011: When Cloud Computing Customer Results Became King

You can debate which area of the hype cycle the industry is on, yet after reviewing all these forecasts and projections the urgent need for real-world results is clear. As 2011 begins, any software company who has measurable results from customers, not just projections, of their cloud and SaaS-based strategies will be much further ahead of the mainstream.

Hopefully this year the research firms will cite more users than ever before an anchor these forecasts, as varied as they are, back to customer results.  That said, the energy and intensity going into forecasting the cloud computing and SaaS markets is impressive.

Here is the roundup of cloud computing forecasts and predictions for 2011:

  • Experton Group is forecasting that the German cloud computing market is forecast to grow from EUR 1.14 billion in 2010 to EUR 8.2 billion in 2015. This is equal to average annual growth of 48 percent. In 2015, cloud computing will account for around 10 percent of total IT expenditure in Germany. Around half of revenue in 2015 will be generated from cloud services, with a third coming from investment in cloud infrastructure, mainly data centres. The use of so-called ‘private clouds’ by businesses will account for EUR 2.6 billion in revenues by 2015, up from EUR 400 million in 2010. Source: http://professional.wsj.com/article/TPDMEUR00020101007e6a700061.html
  • Gartner analysts write in the report Predicts 2011: New Relationships Will Change BI and Analytics, that by 2013, 33% of business intelligence functionality will be consumed via handheld devices, and 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments. By 2014, 30% of analytic applications will use in-memory functions to add scale and computational speed. In addition, 30% of analytic applications will use proactive, predictive and forecasting capabilities and 40% of spending on business analytics will go to system integrators, not software vendors.  All of this is predicated on the security and scalability of cloud-based analytics.
    Source:  Predicts 2011: New Relationships Will Change BI and Analytics
  • TechMarketView predicts the value of the UK cloud computing market will more than double between now and 2014 from £2.4bn to £6.1bn according to the study UK Software and IT Services Market Forecast published in December by the firm.
  • MarketsandMarkets.com in their report, Cloud Computing Market – Global Forecast (2010 -2015) predicts that the global cloud computing market is expected to grow from $37.8 billion in 2010 to $121.1 billion in 2015 at a CAGR of 26.2% from 2010 to 2015. SaaS is the largest contributor in the cloud computing services market, accounting for 73% of the market’s revenues 2010. Source: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cloud-computing-234.html
  • Renub Research has made the following predictions in their latest report titled Cloud Computing – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS Market, Mobile Cloud Computing, M&A, Investments, and Future Forecast, Worldwide.Here are the key take-aways from the summary sent to me of the study:
    • Worldwide Cloud Computing market is growing at a rapid rate and it is expected to cross $25 Billion by the end of 2013
    • Renub predicts the Platform as a Service (PaaS) market size will reach US$ 400 Million by the year 2013
    • Renub also predicts that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market will increase at a CAGR value of 52.53% for the period spanning 2010 – 2013
    • US Federal IT budget devoted to Cloud Computing Spending will reach nearly US$ 1 Billion by 2014

Source: http://www.reportlinker.com/p0293136/Cloud-Computing-SaaS-PaaS-IaaS-Market-Mobile-Cloud-Computing-M-A-Investments-and-Future-Forecast-Worldwide.html

You can also find additional market forecasts in my post from July 19, 2010 titled Sizing the Cloud Computing Market and IDC Predicts SaaS Will Re-Order Software Landscape by 2012.

Happy New Year and I hope you find these links useful.  I’ve been tracking this activity a while and thought this would be a good time to publish the list.

Best Regards

Louis

Nov 16

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Key Research Challenges in Cloud Computing

Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente leads the The DSA (Distributed Systems Architecture) Research Group at Complutense de Madrid and is one of the world’s leading lecturers and thought leaders in advanced distributed computing and virtualization technologies, architecture of large-scale distributed infrastructures and resource provisioning platforms.  His thoughts and observations on the key research challenges on cloud computing are fascinating to read over.

Oct 24

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Overview of Amazon Web Services Security Processes

AWS’ Chief Information Security Officer Stephen Schmidt released this presentation last week on slideshare.net.  At 27 pages, this presentation is packed full of excellent content and great information on the direction AWS is going on for ensuring security and compliance.  He discusses certifications, SAS70 Type II security, physical security, Amazon EC2, network, S3, Simple DB, and SQS security topics as well.  He also covers CloudFront and Elastic MapReduce security initiatives and plans.

It is a great tutorial to the strategies and initiates AWS is pursuing to make their platforms scalable, secure and reliable.   Be sure to check out this page on the AWS site for more information on security: http://aws.amazon.com/security.

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