Clouded judgment, slip in the rain

He was one proud adopter of cloud technologies and had moved almost all applications to the public cloud. It was a case study written about and discussed in forums and publications. He was hosted, flown across cities by the provider to talk about his experience and give advice on why everyone should consider the cloud. His stature had grown and he advocated the use of clouds for scalability, lower TCO, variability of cost, almost like the poster boy that the industry was looking for and had found one in him.

I met the CEO of that company last week and engaged him in some small talk on the business and how my cloudy CIO friend was doing ? The CIO had reverted all applications back to the on-premise data centre in a hurry. One fine day the cloud provider declared an outage and it just happened to be the day when the load was high; the revenue impact was substantial. The CEO had then warned the CIO to take care of such eventualities. Then of all things the hosted gate pass application stopped working.

Last week was one with unseasonal rain which surprised everyone with every falling drop. Across multiple discussions with different groups in formal and informal settings, adoption of cloud was omnipresent. How many of you have adopted the cloud for your workloads ? Which apps would you move to the cloud in the future ? Why is manufacturing so averse to adopting the cloud ? Even ERP is now available on the cloud ! Vendors in some discussions offered to conduct a “Cloud readiness assessment”.

On the table were many views on all kinds of cloud: highly virtualized data centres masquerading as private clouds, to Infrastructure, Platform and Applications as a service. All flavours of solutions and orchestration engines including a couple which promised to manage hybrid clouds. Voices raised incidents of hybrids not working effectively or seamlessly, leading to clouds not working with random and frequent outages, leaving the CIO smarting with no real recovery option except to wait it out.

In a discussion, taking examples from Sales Force Automation and some ecommerce applications doing well, CIOs from manufacturing were challenged to find business cases within their industries and organizations. None forthcoming, the vendors provoked the group to stop hugging servers and let go. Chastened the group retaliated and one CIO raised a question to a hardware vendor: “Have you move your ERP that runs your factory and supply chain to your Cloud ?” Sheepishly the answer came “no”.

Many vendors will sell the cloud with financial metrics that belie any rational thought; cost of variable fractional CPU saved and hundreds of MB of storage across 17 applications adds up to some cost, or the additional hour spent by the engineer over a weekend to ensure that the full backup was successful. Do we really pay that way such that we can apply microeconomics to calculate real savings ? I have yet to come across anyone who did and saved big bucks. Decision between capital investment and operating expense is a CFO call.

Coming back to the gate pass application, why is it such a critical application ? Entry and exit of every person, vehicle and goods from the factory premises depends on it. It was the most innocuous and the most critical application for continued operation of the factory. Amidst the lot of hue and cry, the CIO had no option but to come down to terra firma. He admitted that he should have been pragmatic in his approach and not moved everything to the cloud. DR to the cloud was not envisaged and there too laid his folly.

Everyone is experimenting and exploring the cloud in some shape, form or avatar. Many have moved non-critical workloads or external apps; not many references of other kinds of legacy or ERP type apps for largely centralized enterprises. Hybrids remain experimental for now while start-ups are enjoying the benefit of no upfront investments. Pure play technology companies find clouds viable, the rest of the old and large businesses continue to tread cautiously and take a step-by-step approach to the cloud.

You don’t slip in the rain that way !

IT is windy and cloudy

The last fortnight could be classified as the official cloud period of the year with multiple conferences vying for attention; it also saw business newspapers and magazines write about clouds. A couple of television channels aired hyperbolic programs with the usual set of vendors and spokespersons talking about why enterprises have to adopt the cloud for survival. One of these had an interesting open and candid discussion between two senior CIOs on clouds which kept the organizers on their toes and the audience regaled.

A brave move by the organizers, in an unstructured dialogue with no moderator, their bantering got off to a good start with sharing of experiences on how they had used various technology solutions to create purported private clouds as well as engaged with third party service providers to leverage varied cloud offerings. They unanimously admonished the vendors for creating hype more than they could deliver in reality. The hysteria parallels the dotcom era in its fervor with everything being tagged to the cloud.

The senior retired CIO used his sharp wit and tongue challenging the audience if they had different experiences. He demolished a few hypotheses and claims as myths with no evidence apart from anecdotal references. He sought to differentiate between public cloud solutions for consumers from ones available for enterprise users. The clouds are drifting with the wind created by a lot of hot air in the room, so let’s be practical and realistic in promises to customers on cloud solutions.

We all know that cloud for the consumer has been a big hit connecting mobile devices to ubiquitous cloud solutions offering multiple for purpose apps. Almost all the content is uploaded or downloaded to or from the cloud with seamless access across multitude of devices. Try for free, if you like it, buy it; micropayments allow easy download and upgrades, and if you don’t like it, you don’t feel the pinch. From tweens, teenagers to grandfathers and grandmothers everyone is hooked on in varying degrees.

The corporate journey started with sales applications gradually moving on to full-scale sales force automation solutions; employee self-service and customer facing portals (B2B or B2C) kind of rounded off the foray on the public cloud. Test & Development, archiving, and experimentation of new solutions were the other deployment cases. None of the core applications moved to the cloud; small and medium enterprises, and start-ups though did find the cloud offering quick solutions at affordable costs.

All As-A-Service models worked on the assumption that enterprises are desperate to move their capital investments to operating expense; in reality all of them were not excited. The variability of expenses that clouds promised was rarely delivered with rigid contracts and time to (re)provision. ROI remained elusive in the public and hybrid cloud models, the private cloud (which was created as a term to appease the CIOs who did not embrace the real cloud) did provide some benefit with agility and higher utilization.

Re-purposing a consumer offering to the enterprise (read the micro-app nemesis) has many challenges which I guess will eventually get resolved; the reverse may to the consumer as I know is not been ideated; the boundaries are blurring between the two. While the transactional need fulfilled by enterprise applications will rarely move to the cloud or onto the mobile, information consumption and field data gathering will become key processes working off the same personal mobiles on the public cloud.

With the boundaries between consumer and corporate devices no longer tenable and enterprises adopting BYOD, the next disruption will be the convergence and unification of the consumer and enterprise device, and applications. Until that happens, the debate will continue on where the cloud has a promise for the CIO and where it impacts the person the CIO is. Stock tickers, games, utilities and what have you gratify the individual and are perceived as a distraction and risk by the enterprise.

Coming back to the chat, a vendor in the audience challenged the duo that the vendor had customers who have successfully deployed the cloud but meekly backed off when challenged to verbalize the business case and benefit. The hot air was indeed clouding a normal discussion; so the CIOs agreed to wind up the discussion with the conclusion: clouds are here to stay, they are/will be a part of the IT setup, don’t go gaga over it, be pragmatic, practical and deploy only if it fulfills a business need. Sound advice if there was one !

Making hybrids work

When the phenomenon called Cloud made appearance on the IT landscape, it promised to disrupt many existing paradigms. You don’t need to buy any server hardware and storage, capacity is available on demand and you pay for what you use. Applications with licencing models that can adapt to business cycles, Everything-As-A-Service (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and many more), no capital investments, only operating expense. It was touted to be the silver bullet to solve all the budgeting challenges of the CIO including getting rid of the CIO.

Evolution brought competition and a hysterical wave that caught every Vendor, System Integrator, Research Analyst, and the CIO alike. New terms were coined to depict the key attributes that the cloud promised: agility, flexibility, resilience, scalability, and on-demand. Alliances of hardware, software and networking vendors vied for attention; everything was cloud-enabled or ready. When corporate data centres could not be classified, the term “Private Cloud” came to rescue.

It brought some comfort to the CIO that s/he was not seen as “not doing the in thing”; almost everyone now had a cloud, private or public. From there rose the challenge of making them work together. After all if some apps are on the public cloud while the transactional systems or other apps are still in the corporate data center  they need to inter-operate  Tools and technology solutions attempted to bridge the chasm; everyone had a variant that did something better than the other confusing the heck out of IT teams.

Someone christened the new reality of the coexistence as “Hybrid Cloud” and the term has stuck on. For simpler solutions, applications and processes like collaboration, sales force automation and the likes of Human Capital Management, the challenge was easily overcome by most. Pervasive challenges of security, data residue, service levels, interoperability between different clouds, or difficulty in migrating from one service provider to another, cut across every offering.

Evolution of the services and technology has not been uniform; a few still struggle to offer a consistent experience straddling between the data center and the public cloud. A CIO narrated a harrowing story of his journey towards making a hybrid cloud work to offer a consistent and uniform experience to his users. The vendor in question either due to ignorance or over-enthusiasm promised everything to be possible and the delivery team struggled to get even the basics working.

Step by step through the early stages of making things work, they did not just lose time, the arduous journey had the IT team struggling to explain to the CIO why the project was running totally off target. Most were not technology challenges but oversell to the CIO on what would work and how it would. Straddling the physical and cloud world to offer a seamless and uniform experience to users did pose a few challenges. I guess all clouds are not created equal as competing solutions did offer to expectation.

The CIO called for a review and experts from all over the world joined in to rescue the situation. It was a one-sided affair with no real solution emerging to the problem at hand. The CIO concluded with the pilot being disbanded. The resultant credibility loss alienated the vendor in no small measure undoing a lot of the good work that they had delivered in the past. It was almost like the nursery rhyme in real world “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put the vendor back on track again”.

I guess when it comes to hybrid, cars work and have achieved a maturity level that brings consumer confidence; with clouds I guess there are still challenges to overcome and technology to reach stability and interoperability. Until then stay cautious and don’t bet on everything to work the way it did in a pure cloud or in-house model. The user experience with hybrids can be a dampener on the enthusiasm that vendors and system integrators want you to feel while they experiment at your cost.

P.S. it would appear that the next wave promises Autonomic Computing, anyone game ?

Do Clouds really save money ?

The beginning of the monsoon season in Mumbai inspired me to push the boundaries again in quest of the silver lining in the Cloud. Recent events around outages and security across multiple global Cloud pioneers poses doubts on the movement of even non-mission critical applications outside of the corporate data centres. We are not just talking about Infrastructure or Platform as a service, but everything that is the manifestation of the Public Cloud.

Over the last couple of years every offering saw two shifts, first it had to have a Cloud flavour and second around social networking (that is another story); some termed this new euphoria as bubble 2.0 tinted by valuations achieved in recent IPOs. So everyone justified how this time it is different and why it is sustainable. Many large and small enterprise found efficiencies (at least short term), in moving field functions like sales and service, and collaboration on the move, to the Cloud.

 

Leaving aside the debate between public, hybrid and private clouds, the real issue is about the promise of the Cloud irrespective of the vendor, type of cloud offering, or engagement model. The big benefit that every type of Cloud offered was savings, real quantifiable savings or better Total Cost of Ownership. CFOs would agree that TCO is always a good measure for any financial model if all other dimensions remain unchanged.

 

Cloud service providers financial models are contingent on multiple customers adopting their base solutions which give them the efficiency of scale and repeatability. As the number increased, beyond a threshold they start making money. Non-concurrency improves yields, but prices remain the same for customers. So the financial models attempted to capture some efficiency based gains making them look attractive to the prospects.

 

Most discussions got off to a good start with worksheets providing easy decisions. The newness of the paradigm left some questions unanswered, but during the slowdown, these were brushed aside. Some of these were 

1. What happens if the SLA is not met ?
2. Is my data as secure as it is in my current state ?
3. Can I move off to another Cloud if I don’t like something ? How easy is the transition going to be ?
4. As I upgrade internal systems, how do I ensure integration with the external systems does not break ?
5. What recourse do I have if the Cloud Service Provider goes bust ? ...

I will stop here, the list is a bit longer, but you get the point.

 

Business impact due to recent outages and security breaches for some of the smaller customers was significant. Some of them just had to wait and watch with no option. A few had spread the risk across and thus the impact was limited. The big enterprise shrugged and moved on. How does one balance the adverse business impact against the cost savings ? To me this is a bad compromise as everything is subservient to business interest.

 

It's monsoon time again and raining clouds

Yes, it’s raining, and the country is covered with rain clouds for which everyone is thankful; after a year when everyone was worried. It’s as if the economy’s slowdown and lower budgets had a link with the reduced rainfall. You must be now wondering about the relevance of monsoon for a CIO. Please have a bit of patience for the ‘Oh I See’.

Someone is launching a book on the support models and delivery on a specific cloud (amongst the oldest service offerings globally before the term ‘cloud computing’ was coined). This book is derived out of thousands of support threads from customers, analysis of response times, efficacy of the model, and the pitfalls in putting your business on the cloud. No, the book is not about cloud bashing, but more about the reality of what customers faced—either in their ignorance, or due to lack of definitions and omissions.

With enough being said about why everyone (CEO and CFO included) should go cloud watching or about CIOs being beaten to death about adoption of cloud computing, the proponents of this disruptive technology are growing. This often leaves the CIO wondering about why he doesn’t get it and looks up for insight from Almighty—only to see some more clouds!

Recently, I met up with a cloud evangelist from the world’s largest cloud company. He was patiently explaining to the CIOs in a step-by-step way—on how to get started, where to get started from, and what to realistically expect. Now that made everyone sit up and listen with attention! Following the discourse getting into a debate with selected CIOs, the reality dawned on everyone that various XaaS models (where X = application, platform, and infrastructure, for now) do have limitations and challenges for any large enterprise to function in a hybrid model using cloud and internal capability.

Almost everyone who has adopted the cloud has used it for non-critical applications, test and development environments. In many cases, organizations use the cloud on fringes to connect road warriors or partners. Concerns remain around security, manageability, data retention, geographical statutes, service levels, and the evolving experience around how clouds behave. One point that had me jumping out of the chair after reading the above mentioned book’s synopsis was the gap between perception (and reality) around turnaround times for issues, patching and security management in an IaaS model. With 20+ hours to resolve issues and no patch management service, I would not even bet my test or development environments to the cloud.

Every industry evolution goes through the hype curve, and for now, cloud is still on the rising edge. With the number of companies announcing cloud based services (which do require large investments), I wonder if the future will see a cloud burst akin to the dotcom bubble burst that we experienced a decade ago.

I would stay cautiously optimistic until then, and learn to live in the rain !

Clouds bring hazy weather and El Nino is a worry

Over the last few months, I have been asked to participate in many surveys and discussions on Cloud Computing. Everyone is attempting to find when will enterprise customers start adopting this new technology which promises to change the world of IT. There have been debates about public clouds and private cloud infrastructure, as more recently heterogeneous clouds. The first time I gained some insight about Cloud Computing, it was when I read the wonderful book "Big Switch" by Nicholas Carr. I thought I understood what he talked about, and then I met so many vendors and consultants. Every time I look at the sky, see the Clouds, but the picture remains hazy.

The term itself has become a kind of misnomer with vendors and consultants twisting it around to suit their reality and service/product offering. Based on various reports and anecdotal references across the web, it would appear that tapping the wonderful world of Cloud Computing is as simple as buying a subscription to a public cloud service and your computing woes will disappear before you could utter (what else) "Cloud Computing" ! Software vendors want you to believe that their SaaS offerings are an offering of cloud infrastructure. Almost all the big IT vendors, be it red, blue or any other color have announced investments into clouds. PE funds are asking startups to create services around clouds. Optimism over understanding and reality ?

In my context which is validated with many other peers in the industry, the reality for every enterprise is the heterogeneous nature of the current computing fabric comprising many operating environments, databases and middleware running across all types of hardware. Bandwidth is as yet pricey in the Indian context and not yet ubiquitous. Data privacy concerns as yet remain unaddressed. So the context of leveraging public clouds as yet remains challenged not to forget the paranoia about the data being hosted on shared infrastructure.

What does this mean for the CIO ? Simply put, listen to every view and opinion on how your enterprise can leverage the wonderful world of Cloud Computing. Look at your current reality and then set forth to leverage what you have with a mix of the standard and now maturing technologies like virtualization and clustering (or grid) to create your own "private cloud" which will definitely bring you efficiency within your existing investments.

As the marketplace matures and vendors begin to understand how enterprises consume computing power, the traction is likely to improve and we will start seeing real life scenarios of how this technology can start driving efficiencies within IT organizations as well as deliver better TCO and ROI.