Dr. Jim Anderson tackles the question that all CIO’s are asking: just exactly what is “cloud computing”?
Dr. Anderson identifies the 4 different flavors of cloud computing that are available and points out how a CIO would go about using each one of them.
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By Dr. Jim Anderson
CIOs Need To Make Sure That Cloud Computing Is Not Just A Fad
Does anyone besides me remember the big Furby craze that swept the U.S. in the early ’90′s? People went crazy for these little plush dolls and they started collecting them in hopes that they would one day be valuable. Well, that never happened and a lot of people got stuck with expensive toys that they couldn’t get rid of. Is is possible that the current cloud computing craze in IT could be another Furby fad that will fade away?
If a CIO can move beyond the hype, he/she needs to spend some time doing their homework in order to find out what kind of services a cloud could offer that their company could make use of. Neal Leavitt has spent some time studying cloud computing and has boiled cloud services down into four types of services:
The Forrester research company has done some investigating and they now claim that most company’s data centers are using less than 50% of their total capacity. Despite the hype that is currently surrounding cloud computing, Leavitt has uncovered three very good reasons for looking into having your firm start to use cloud computing:
It is all too easy for CIOs who are adverse to change to look at the current excitement over cloud computing and decide that it is yet another fad that will fade away in time. The reality is that cloud computing provides several different types of services that are useful to any IT department. This can’t be ignored.
Additionally, successfully adding cloud computing resources to the company’s existing IT infrastructure will mean that a CIOs will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.
How much of your existing IT infrastructure do you think that your firm is currently using – more or less than 50%? Which of the four types of cloud computing services would have the most immediate value to your company? Why? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
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Cloud computing is all the rage these days and everyone who is anyone is making plans to implement at least some flavor of it as soon as possible. It turns out that the decision to go with a cloud computing solution for your IT department might not be as simple as some would lead you to believe. There are challenges to successfully using a cloud and we need to talk about them…
CIOs Need To Understand Cloud Computing
One of the great things about working in the IT field is that whenever things start to get boring, we have the ability to create new buzzwords and make things interesting all over again. The arrival of “Cloud Computing” on the scene a couple of years ago showed that this cycle has not gone away. Maybe it would be worthwhile to take a step back and make sure that we’re all on the same page here – what is cloud computing and why should anyone care?
Neal Leavitt has spent some time studying cloud computing and has some thoughts for us. A quick definition of just what cloud computing is might be a good place for us to start. In olden days (3 years ago), if you wanted to run an application you pretty much had to go out, buy a server, plug it in, load up the software, connect it to a network and then you were in business. Cloud computing changes all of that.
Now all you have to do is set up an account with a company who has already done all of the above steps. You can then load your application onto their server(s) using the Internet to reach these servers and ta-da you are in business.
There are three main “flavors” of cloud computing that users are employing currently:
The list of cloud computing service providers is long and seems to be getting longer every day. Here’s a partial list with a number of names that you’ll probably recognize…
Ok, so clearly this is not the final thought on Cloud Computing. I’ve got a lot more to cover with you, but this is a good place to quit for now. Cloud Computing was treated as a bit of a novelty when it first showed up. I mean, who would trust unreliable links to remote computers to run critical corporate apps?
Times have changed and the economics of Cloud Computing have also changed to make this a more attractive option. Every CIO needs to be thinking about how his / her IT shop is using computing resources right now and what role Cloud Computing could play in the future. Addressing this issue this will mean that CIOs will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.
Have you spent any time thinking about using Cloud Computing yet? How long until you run out of room to add more servers to your company’s infrastructure? Have you calculated the total cost of ownership for the servers that you do have? Are your applications too critical to trust to a cloud? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
Does anyone besides me remember the big Furby craze that swept the U.S. in the early ’90′s? People went crazy for these little plush dolls and they started collecting them in hopes that they would one day be valuable. Well, that never happened and a lot of people got stuck with expensive toys that they couldn’t get rid of. Is is possible that the current cloud computing craze in IT could be another Furby fad that will fade away?
HP's IT Department Made Some BIG Mistakes During Their Transformation
If you made three costly IT mistakes would you admit it? I think that most of us would probably say “no” – we’d run and hide our mistakes under a rock somewhere. However, thankfully over at HP they’ve decided to come clean about a few of the mistakes that they’ve made during their multi-year IT transformation project. We can all learn from their mistakes.
HP’s CIO Randy Mott decided to remake HP’s IT department when he came on board a few years ago. In order to kick the project off, they needed to make some assumptions about how things were operating and move forward.
Chris Murphy over at InformationWeek had a chance to sit down with Randy and ask some questions about where HP’s assumptions were just flat out wrong. What he’s learned holds a lot of information for all of us. Here are the big three:
In the end, HP was successful with their IT transformation and they ended up reducing those 6,000 applications down to about 1,500, reducing those 400 data centers down to 6, etc. However, because of the three mistakes that they made, this difficult job was made just that much harder. Now you know – don’t repeat this mistakes!
Have you ever been surprised to discover that there is a whole “shadow IT” department operating in your business that nobody has ever counted? Has a merger or acquisition ever screwed up one of you IT project’s schedule? Has your IT department ever been surprised by unexpected growth? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking?
Citigroup's IT department is NOT doing a good job of keeping basic applications up and running.
The news is always filled with IT departments that are winning awards for being innovative, reducing costs, or saving the day. That’s why a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about how the Citi group’s IT department is blowing it was so interesting…
The article was titled “Computer Glitch Slows Citi” (if you worked in Citi’s IT department, you’d know that this couldn’t be a good thing). It turns out that the retail bank part of the huge Citigroup corporation had computer problems on this past Tuesday. These computer problems ended up leaving lots of customers and employees in a bind – they couldn’t access information about bank accounts and mortgages.
It’s bad enough to have problems like this; however, this problem lingered until Wednesday morning. Now in all fairness to Citi, it appears as though customers were still able to deposit, withdraw, and transfer funds during this period.
So in many other businesses, this type of outage would be no big deal. However, when you are one of the largest consumer banks in the country, this is most definatly a no-no.
Just to make a bad thing worse, in the acticle Citigroup employees stated that their company seems especially plagued by crashes.
So who’s to blame for this IT mess? It turns out that Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit has stepped up. He has promised to upgrade and integrate the company’s computer systems. This effort is going to take several years and will probably end up costing billions of dollars.
What’s missing from all of this is any word from Kevin Kessinger who is Citi’s Chief Operations & Technology Officer. This is a fancy title for someone who has CIO responsibilities. At the end of the day, this mess is Kevin’s responsibility.
The ability to keep a firm’s basic applications up and running is so fundamental that we often refer to it as “blocking and tacking”. This is an American football term that simply means that you need to play good defense before you spend anytime focusing on offense.
There is NO WAY that the Citi IT department should be working on anything else if their apps are not staying up. I’m sure that many of us spend time throwing rocks at our own IT departments for not being innovative enough; however, hopefully most of us do a good job of taking care of the basics.
Kevin has been in his job since 2005 and so he really does not have any excuse for not having already taken care of this problem. It’s easy to throw stones at Kevin for not doing his job. However, perhaps it would be more valuable to take a look at what he should be doing right now to fix this issue:
Kevin probably needs to do a lot more than just these basic steps, but this is how he needs to start. The CIO is responsible for how the digital side of the company operates. Let’s see if Kevin ends up doing the right thing…
Have you ever had a problem where a production application was not staying up? Who was responsible for fixing this problem? How did they go about fixing the problem? In the end, were they able fix the problem(s)? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
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