Archive for the ‘cloud computing’ Category

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3 Questions That Every CIO Should Be Asking About Clouds

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
Image Credit Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Cloud computing has almost become a part of the definition of information technology. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how a CIO can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

How Much Will This Save Me?

A lot of the excitement about cloud computing comes from the simple fact that most CIOs view the cloud as a way to reduce the cost of running an IT department. However, before visions of cash savings start dancing in your head, you need to answer some questions first.

Roger Cheng over at the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at where the expenses in running an IT department come from. What he’s discovered is that servers run about $2000 – $6,000. This capital expense can be avoided if instead of buying more servers a CIO simply subscribes to more cloud computing resources when it’s time to expand the company’s IT infrastructure.

In addition to saving on buying more servers, there are potentially other savings that a CIO can realize by moving to the cloud. Buying more servers would require more IT staff to act as systems administrators – no servers means no hiring of additional administrators.

Are Cloud Services Reliable Enough?

It seems as though every other month or so there is another story in the paper about some cloud provider having an outage. One time it’s Amazon, the next it’s Google. Given the importance of information technology, as a CIO you need to be asking yourself if this cloud computing stuff is really reliable enough for you to be trusting your company’s IT infrastructure to.

It turns out that the analysts have taken a look at the overall reliability of the clouds that are being provided and they are as, if not more, reliable than most company’s IT infrastructure. One reason for this is that providing a cloud is all that the providers do and so they hire and staff in order to ensure the reliability of their product.

What Don’t I Know About Clouds?

The wise CIO knows to ask “what don’t I know enough to ask about?” One key issue has to do with your company’s most precious asset – its corporate data. When you move this data to a cloud, you are asking another company to take care of it. Are you comfortable doing this?

Is your company really going to save money by moving to the cloud? Not every company will – it all depends on how your IT department is set up now and what it’s going to look like in the future. You have other options for saving money – virtualizing the servers that you have today is one way to accomplish this.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing is all the rage these days in the IT sector. CIOs are getting more and more pressure to introduce cloud computing into their IT departments. Before they take this step, they need to get some questions answered.

The promise of cloud computing is that it will save the IT department money. Do you know where these savings will come from? How does the reliability of the cloud compare to your IT department’s current level of reliability? Finally, what other options besides cloud computing do you have for boosting your IT department’s performance?

Cloud computing appears to be here to stay. However, that doesn’t mean that every CIO should race out and jump into the cloud today. Take your time and get the answers to the important questions and your next step will become clear to you.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that the company’s finance department should be involved in determining if the savings of moving into the cloud would be worth the effort?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Cloud Computing 101: Just Exactly What Is A Cloud?

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
Image Credit CIOs need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

CIOs need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

So there I was the other day talking with one of my CIO customers and I was going on and on about how they could introduce cloud computing into their IT department. I had been working with this client for several years and we know each other very well so he felt comfortable in stopping me in mid-sentence.

He said “Jim, I’ve been hearing a lot about this cloud computing stuff and I sorta know what is it, but I’m not sure that I fully understand it. ” Oops, I hadn’t realized that there were still folks out there that hadn’t “drunk the cloud Kool-Aid”. Ok, so now we’re going to take care of this.

Say Hello To Cloud Services

So why are CIOs (and everyone else) struggling to get their hands around just exactly what cloud computing is? I believe that the cause of the confusion is simply that there are a bunch of different things that have been lumped together and are now being called “cloud computing”.

Let’s start with the most basic form: subscription services. In the old days, when an IT department purchased some software disks would arrive in the mail, get installed on servers, and you’d be up and running. That’s not the way that it works when you are using the cloud.

When you are using cloud computing, instead of having to physically touch hardware and software in order use an application, now all you have to do is to subscribe to it and you can access it over the Internet. No disks, no servers. Great examples of these types of subscription services include Google’s Gmail email service and Salesforce.com’s CRM application.

This is where things can start to get confusing. There’s more to cloud computing than just subscribing to someone else’s application. The company applications that are currently running on servers located in your data center can be moved “into the cloud”. What this means is that you can use servers and storage systems that are remotely located in a cloud provider’s data center to run your company’s applications. You would access your applications and data via your Internet connection.

How Much Is All Of This Going To Cost Me?

The fact that cloud computing is even an option is pretty cool. However, just being a shiny new technology is not enough – there has to be a solid business reason for moving your IT operations into the cloud.

Let’s take a look at costs. First, if you choose to not take advantage of cloud computing then you are still going to have IT costs — these costs come along with the very definition of information technology. In order to stand up new IT applications (and expand what you already have in order to meet growing user demand) you are going to have to buy and install more servers. As long as you are getting more servers, you’ll also have to get more storage. All of these new boxes will need to be maintained and so you’ll need to hire more staff to administer them.

In order to avoid these upfront IT costs, CIOs can make use of the cloud. If you are going to make use of cloud computing’s application subscription services, you need to be ready to pay per user, per month. Salesforce.com charges between $5-$25 per user per month. Google’s office suite of applications costs $50/user per year.

If you choose to run your existing IT applications in the cloud, then you’ll end up paying for how much computing horsepower and storage you use. One cloud computing firm charges six cents per processor per hour of usage.

Oh, and one more item. The way that you’ll connect to your applications in the cloud will be via your Internet connection. Given the importance of information technology, this connection that used to be important will have just become vital. This means that you’ll need to get a larger bandwidth connection and you’ll probably need to invest in a redundant connection in case your primary connection goes down.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing seems to have shown up almost overnight. CIOs might have initially thought that it was another one of the seemingly countless IT fads that have come along in the past few years and shrugged it off. However, for some compelling financial reasons, it’s starting to look like it’s taken hold in the IT sector and is here to stay.

Some of the reasons that cloud computing has caused so much confusion among CIOs is because it is so many different things. In its simplest form, cloud computing is a subscription service where software is delivered over the web. One step beyond this is using remotely located computing power (servers and storage) to execute company IT applications which are then accessed via the web.

All of this functionality comes at a cost, of course. CIOs can avoid the upfront costs of having to purchase IT hardware in order to launch a new application by using the same resources located in a cloud. However, they need to do some investigations in order to make sure that they’ll be comfortable with having their data and applications being stored someplace else.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that CIOs should insist that their applications and data be stored in their own country?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It seems as though at least once a year CIOs get a bee in their bonnet and decide that the company’s IT department needs to knuckle down and improve its processes. This means that it’s time to implement one of those far-reaching process improvement programs. Oh, oh. No matter if it’s Six Sigma or some other flavor-of-the-week program, they all seem to end up the same way – having no lasting impact. Let’s take a look and see why this happens…

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Do You Know How To Lock Down A Cloud?

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011
Image Credit
A Cloud Is No Good If You Can't Lock It…

A Cloud Is No Good If You Can't Lock It…

Everybody loves the cloud. Or at least that’s pretty much how it seems if you’ve pick up any of the IT trade rags in the past 18 months. They are filled with articles talking about how the cloud is going to save IT departments tons of money and how it’s the next great thing. Well, not all CIOs are convinced of this and considering some of the humongous security issues that are popping up, you might want to rethink some of your cloudy thoughts…

That Darn Security Thing Wrecks Everything

Cloud computing is currently the NST in IT (that’s “New Shiny Thing”) and because of that a lot of organizations are making the leap and moving their mission critical applications into the cloud as fast as possible. Their motivation for doing this is because of the proven cost savings that cloud computing can offer to an IT department.

A study by Mimecast shows that 70% of CIOs who are already using clouds are planning on moving additional applications into the cloud during the upcoming year. The problem with this plan is that another study, this one by Cenzic, shows that 75% of cyber attacks are targeting internet applications. These attacks work just as well against a cloud based IT infrastructure as they do against today’s dedicated IT infrastructure.

How To Lock Down Your Cloud

This, of course, leads to the question of just exactly what a CIO should do. Clearly we’re all going to move into the cloud over time; however, what should we be doing to prepare for this move into an unsecured land?

The very first thing that a CIO needs to be doing is to be ensuring that all applications that are coming out of the IT department are being developed to security standards that are being enforced. This can include performing penetration testing and doing code scanning for known vulnerabilities.

Additionally, since your applications will be running in somebody else’s IT environment, you need to take the time to make sure that that environment is going to be secure. This means that you need to work wording into your service level agreements (SLAs) with your cloud providers that will ensure that they will do everything possible to protect your applications while they are running in the cloud.

What All Of This Means For You

Every CIO has to face reality: cloud computing is upon us. The financial benefits of switching from a dedicated IT infrastructure to a cloud-based infrastructure are so incredibly obvious that you won’t be keeping your CIO job for long if you don’t come up with a transition plan.

What too many CIOs appear to be overlooking is that the switch to cloud computing does not make your existing security problems go away. In fact it may actually add to your IT security challenges. To deal with this you need to implement secure coding standards and ensure that you have solid service-level agreements with your cloud vendors.

By itself, a cloud is not a bad thing. The problem is that it is a fat, juicy target for those people who want to do harm to your IT infrastructure. This means that as CIO you need to be sure to look before you leap and make sure that you’ve locked down your cloud before you make the big switch.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that the benefits of cloud computing can be achieved if you use a private cloud?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

‘Tis the time of year that my CIO customers are starting to get itchy to try new things. The kids are out of school and greener pastures beckon. They keep asking me where they should be looking for their next CIO job. Is there any industry that will truly appreciate the value that a skilled CIO can bring to the job? It turns out that the answer is yes and right now I’m recommending one industry in particular: energy companies.

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Planning For The Cloud: What Does A CIO Need To Know?

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
Image Credit Soon We'll All Be In The Cloud, But Will CIOs Be Ready?

Soon We'll All Be In The Cloud, But Will CIOs Be Ready?

Let’s face facts shall we? Cloud computing appears to be the real deal. It can no longer be considered just yet another IT fad. It sure looks like every company will be using cloud based computing resources eventually. Since this appears to be inevitable, what should CIOs be thinking about right now?

Planning For The Cloud

CIOs need to realize that even though moving some or all of the company’s IT infrastructure into the cloud is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point in time, it’s not going to happen overnight. Instead, it will happen piece-by-piece. An example of how an IT department could get started with a cloud would be starting to use cloud computing for help documentation software and wiki platforms that can grow/shrink at fast rates.

This means that as new projects are presented to you as the CIO, you need to start to ask some cloud-based questions. Specifically, you need to quiz the teams that are presenting the requests for funding exactly how they have considered using cloud computing as a part of their project.

Every company has surges in the IT computing resources that it requires. It could at the end of a quarter or it could be during the busy holiday season. As CIO you need to stop approving the purchase of additional servers just to handle peak loads. This type of IT need is better dealt with by cloud computing and after the surge is over, you won’t have additional hardware that you have to pay to support throughout the rest of the year.

Entering The Cloud

Where to start is one of the biggest questions that CIOs have to face when considering how they are going to incorporate the cloud into their operations. An easy place to start is with the company’s test-and-development environments. Since these systems are not used except during preproduction testing, they are ideally suited to being housed in the cloud.

Which cloud-based computing vendor a company should go with is another key question that CIOs need to answer. It turns out that there is probably not a single answer to this question. Rather, since the possibility of an outage or other failure is always a possibility, a firm should choose at least two and perhaps more cloud vendors.

When cloud vendors are finally selected, instead of just jumping into the cloud, the CIO should ease into using the cloud by using the cloud to create initial prototypes of new services. Using the cloud to create demos of new systems and services allows multiple versions to be quickly tested and for end user feedback to be collected in ways that were never possible before.

Living With The Cloud

Although within IT the focus always seems to be on the details surrounding the cloud: what applications move into the cloud, how to secure them, what cloud providers to use, it turns out that there is an even bigger issue that CIOs need to be worrying about. What to do with your employees.

When your company’s applications live in the cloud, you don’t need a lot of the hardware and networking skills that you currently probably already have in your IT department. However, at the same time you do need a lot of new skills. These include managing service-level agreements with cloud vendors and service management.

Once you’ve selected the cloud vendors that you want to move forward with, your next step: worrying about your company’s data. This means that you’re going to have to sit down with your cloud vendors and have a very long talk about where your company’s data is going to live within their cloud. What this means is that you need to ensure that you know what country your data is in at all times. Your company may be subject to regulations that prohibit your customer data from leaving the country and your cloud vendor needs to make sure that this never happens.

What All Of This Means For You

Every company will eventually be making use of the cloud in order to get the biggest bang for their limited IT budgets. This means that CIOs need to be planning now for how they are going to make the best use of cloud-based resources.

This planning needs to include understanding exactly how the company is going to move from today’s data centers to tomorrow’s cloud. Each company is going to have to come up with a process for selecting the cloud vendors that they want to work with. What IT staff actually does during a given day will change with the arrival of clouds and CIOs are going to have to make adjustments.

We should not fear the cloud. Instead CIOs need to add cloud planning to their already overloaded schedules and make sure that before the need to move to a cloud arrives, that they’ve spent the up-front time preparing for it and know what to do.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How many different cloud vendors do you think a company should use: 1,2, 3, or more?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You would think that since all of these computers, networks, and software things have been around for so long that most companies would be just about even in how they make use of them, right? A recent study reveals that this is not the case: some of us are using IT to move the company forward and some of us are slipping behind because of IT. Want to know more?

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CIOs Are Learning That Clouds Aren’t Free

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
Image Credit It Turns Out That Both Public And Private Clouds Have A Cost

It Turns Out That Both Public And Private Clouds Have A Cost

CIOs are currently being faced with making a decision that will impact their IT departments for years to come: should they move their IT operations into the cloud and if so, should it be a public cloud or a private cloud? There are a number of technical issues that can help drive this decision; however, the one factor that too many CIOs overlook is cost…

The Difference Between Public & Private Clouds

I thought that the whole “cloud” thing was supposed to make IT simpler – why are CIOs now being faced with a decision? It turns out that all clouds are not created the same – there are two very different types of clouds.

Public clouds are what is getting all of the press right now. Cloud providers such as Amazon, IBM, Salesforce.com, etc. are offering IT shops a new way of doing business. Companies that move their applications off of their internal IT infrastructure and onto a 3ed party’s boxes will see significant cost savings. No longer will they have to worry about paying for (or supporting) hardware, software or IT staff.

It turns out that there is another way to go about using clouds: private clouds. If the company invests in building out its internal server farm then it can take advantage of all that cloud computing offers: fast application setup, the ability to scale both up an down as conditions require, and an internal pay-as-you-go way of tracking costs.

The concept of private clouds is still relatively new. However, it is catching on fast. The folks over at Gartner are forecasting that through 2012 the top 1,000 global companies will end up spending more on developing their own private clouds than they will spend on buying public cloud services.

What’s Cost Got To Do With It?

You might think that CIOs are going to have to knuckle down and so some serious technical investigations in order to determine if public or private clouds are the right solution for their company. You’d be half-right.

Certainly there is a technical side to this important decision. However, there is a much bigger question that needs to be answered first: how much is all of this going to cost?

All things being equal, it turns out that using a private cloud to serve as your IT infrastructure will provide you with about 60%-80% of the savings that your company can get if you went with using a public cloud. This should make making your decision easier, right?

As with all things in life, nothing is ever that easy. It turns out which type of cloud your company should go with may depend on how far along you are with your internal server virtualization program. A company that has already virtualized most of their servers won’t see very much of a savings by moving their IT operations into a public cloud. However, a company that has barely started to virtualize their servers could see a significant savings and would avoid the cost and effort of building their own private cloud.

In the end, it comes down to doing a careful ROI analysis for the company. CIOs need to understand that the decision to change over to using a cloud based IT infrastructure involves more than just technical decision making.

What All Of This Means For You

It’s all too easy for CIOs to get caught up in what everyone is talking about when it comes to cloud-based computing. However, it turns out that there is another decision that needs to be made regarding clouds: should I go public or should I go private? It turns out that on top of all of the technical issues that need to be considered, there is a very big financial one that may be even more important.

The choice between using a public cloud or building your own private cloud comes down to a question of costs. Companies that have already heavily invested in virtualizing their servers won’t see much of a benefit to moving into a public cloud. Likewise, companies that have not yet made the move to virtualized servers may want to bypass building their own private cloud and instead use public cloud resources.

CIOs are responsible for making the best decisions for their IT departments. What makes the job of being a CIO so challenging is clearly shown in the current era of moving to cloud computing. Technical IT knowledge is required in order to decide what type of cloud a company should choose to use, but business savvy is also required. Now that you know what to look for, go out there and choose the right cloud for your company.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think a company should complete a server virtualization project or just start to use a public cloud instead?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Companies are all asking themselves one question: what’s it going to take to be successful? It turns out that a lot of the techniques that worked in the past won’t work anymore – lowering prices, etc. Going forward, the only thing that a modern company can complete on is their business processes. It turns out that the CIO plays a very big role in making a company’s processes the best that they can be…

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