The Superbowl is watched every year by over 90 million viewers, making it the most viewed sporting event in America and an extremely attractive venue for launching advertising campaigns.  A single thirty-second advertisement during Superbowl XLIV cost about $3.01 million, or $100,000 per second!  That’s a huge investment for most companies, so it’s crucial that everything goes smoothly.  During the second quarter, Dockers ran an ad showing grown men strolling around a prairie in their underwear singing “I wear no pants!”  to announce that they’re giving away thousands of free pants and directed viewers to dockers.com/freepants to participate. 

As you can imagine hoards of viewers who wanted free pants, myself included, immediately bombarded the website.  It went down within ten seconds.   I searched twitter to see what people were saying about Dockers and saw 50 or so tweets mentioning the website’s downtime.  A few minutes later it was 50,000 tweets!  The site was back up a few minutes later, but in those minutes, tens of thousands more users tweeted negative comments like, “Dockers.com is still down. Fail.” and “Very disappointed..SB Commercial 4 Dockers…site was down. Did they prepare for all the traffic?” 

Lesson learned for Dockers: make sure your website can handle the traffic you paid $3.01 million for.  Imagine the millions of pants-loving leads that gave up trying to access dockers.com/freepants moments after that ad.  And the many thousands that got a negative impression of Dockers. 

This could have been avoided by doing a simple and affordable load-test with Monitis.  During a load-test, virtual users are generated on cloud servers to bombard your site.  Your site’s response time is recorded periodically during the test, so you can see how it reacts to various amounts of traffic.  It’s easy and affordable for companies of every size.  You can get started with Monitis’ load testing in just a minute at webloadtester.com. 

Also check out our 100% cloud-based external, internal and transaction-flow monitoring services at Monitis.com. 

Ever get that sense of déjà vu – you know, where you think you’ve been somewhere before, seen something before… but can’t place it?

Well, that’s what CNET Blog Network writer James Urquhart must have felt about his predictions for cloud businesses to watch in 2010: he forecast them already in 2008, and it seems many of the business opportunities haven’t changed, including:

• Enterprise data conversion for SaaS. The prediction here in 2008 was that businesses would be spending lots of money converting data from existing enterprise applications to SaaS, and that they may have to keep spending to convert data yet again if it turns out they aren’t satisfied with their vendors. Two years later, as most SaaS are built on proprietary database schemes, “I still believe that this will be a major portion of systems integrator revenue around SaaS adoption, especially for “commodity” functions like HR and finance,” said Urquhart.
• Enterprise Integration as a Service. This is the year that enterprise-class integration services from the likes of Microsoft and IBM will make it onto the cloud, as it’s too important to ignore. Guess it’s a given that there was still a need back in 2008. “Integration will always be necessary, but where/how will it be delivered?” said Urquhart back then.
• SaaS meter consolidation. In 2008, there was a stated need for consolidation of multiple bills from SaaS vendors to a single invoice – with analytics to break down where the costs came from – so that IT folks at companies running apps on Google, data analysis on Amazon and business logic on Force.com could be more efficient and centrally review services used. Don’t bet on this for 2010, either. “This is probably the offering I am least sure will appear in 2010, but there are some signs that people understand the challenge,” said Urquhart.
• Cloud customer litigation services.
  Two years ago, a Facebook user, Robert Scoble, ran an automated script to collect his social network data. Facebook shut him down. There were a lot of questions back then about who owns what kind of data on public clouds. Not much has changed…there are still unanswered questions. Urquhart adds that cloud malpractice litigators are probably needed today, too.
• SaaS data ownership rights lobbyist. This could be a lucrative business for those representing either the provider or customer side. So said Urquhart back in 2008, and he believes that 2010 will be the year that cloud providers beef up their lobbying forces. Perhaps the consumer side will get representation, too.
• System Administrator re-training. In 2008, the cloud was to have put system administrators out of work (or at least give them less to do), and so it was thought that they needed to be retrained to monitor SLAs and to “get good at waiting on hold for customer service representatives,” said Urquhart. Well, that’s happening now, and Urquhart predicts that technology that makes the cloud easy to handle for administrators will design and offer courses in advanced apps.

I’ll add my own penny’s worth of comment to the last item. IT departments can easily use technology to monitor SLAs so that they can re-train their administrators to shoulder some of the more strategic stuff. Goodness knows, I’m sure every overworked IT manager would agree that we could all use some extra help these days.

For example, Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework automates the configuration of external monitoring and server monitoring tools every time a new installation is called for – saving IT managers and system administrators around the world enormous time and hassles.

If you’ve been living under a rock lately, I guess you haven’t heard the news about U.S. President Barack Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget – along with a post-WWII record deficit of $1.6 trillion for the current fiscal year.

But what hasn’t been discussed much is that government IT spending will account for $79.4 billion of Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget. That’s just over a one percent increase from the spending planned for this year. And much of the boost will go to the implementation of cloud computing systems – across the government.

According to edlconsulting.com, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is a champion of cloud computing, and he believes that it’ll solve many of the government’s data center problems.

Right now, the government has over 1,000 data centers, nearly triple the number in 1998. It wants to reverse that trend, and expects to save billions over the next several years, edlconsulting quotes Newsweek as saying.

The U.S. government launched Apps.gov, a platform for federal agencies to access cloud applications, in late 2009, and it is expected to be a major cost-cutter and encourage innovation.

Yes, the numbers are big and represent significant costs for U.S. taxpayers. But government cloud computing is the savvy way for governments around the world to cut IT costs and improve service. Just consider the results of a recent survey of 159 enterprises by Enterprise Management Associates. The survey found that six in 10 cloud computing users have been able to reduce their IT capital costs. And 25% lowered their capital expenditures and operational expenditures, particularly staff, power, rent and maintenance.

Even if it contributes to the deficit, this is a good investment, Obama! Future ROI will definitely cover the investment – and more.

Let’s face it, up until now it seems that cloud providers haven’t been doing such a sterling job guaranteeing the fine print in service level agreements (SLAs) with their customers – given all the recent outages and downtime.

But that could all change with CA’s recent acquisition of Oblicore, the service level management innovator. Oblicore specializes in taking technical information about what’s going on in your IT environment and correlating it with the business-level information held in your SLAs. That business-level information is a way for companies to get an accurate view of what cloud and other service providers are truly delivering. Oblicore’s software is integrated with various third party tools that provide detailed input needed for comparison.

Not only will cloud providers’ ability to deliver the goods on SLAs further promote and solidify development of the cloud, but, according to Data Center Dialog, it will also allow IT executives to play a more strategic role in growing their businesses. At the Gartner Data Center Conference keynote address last December in Las Vegas, VPs Ronni Colville and Donna Scott offered this bit of advice: “Until you become a driver in the alignment with the business, you are not going to be critical to the business – nor to the CEO,” according to the blog. Said Scott: “You have to know what you have and what’s effective” in order to “figure out whether they are the appropriate investments.”

In the CA-Oblicore press release, Lisa Erickson-Harris, research director at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), was quoted on the merger of technologies and had this to say:

“EMA believes cloud computing trends will further increase the demand for service-based management – including service level and service value management. Customers are demanding solutions like Oblicore that can offer business-oriented service management, including details related to the service contract, collaboration during the negotiation process, and analytics” on service delivery results in a dashboard format. Oblicore’s strengths are well-suited to bridge the IT/business gap by capitalizing on existing management data, business-driven service definition and analytics to demonstrate service delivery results at each service lifecycle phase.”

From my standpoint, it looks like companies who are cloud-bound are seeing past the hype and convenience factor and starting to get more serious about demanding guarantees of service and security. This is a trend I’ve been aware of for quite some time, and it’ll become more pronounced as more and more firms seek out third-party services to measure and audit SLAs.

Another dose of reality for the Cloud industry!

A new survey by Forrester says that just 3% of companies use cloud storage. Worse, the vast majority of firms don’t plan to put data in the cloud. This is the latest shot of poor showings for the cloud, and I have a theory about it. But first, read on:

Forrester interviewed more than 1,200 IT decision makers at enterprises and small and mid-size businesses in North America and Europe. The research company asked IT decision makers if they had plans to adopt cloud storage services such as those offered by Amazon S3, EMC Atmos, Nirvanix, The Planet, or AT&T. 

·       43% said they’re not interested in cloud storage;

·       An equal proportion were interested but have no plans to adopt;

·       3% plan to implement a cloud storage platform in the next year;

·       5% plan on it a year from now or later;

·       And, while 3% have already switched to cloud storage, only 1% are expanding an existing implementation.

To me, this reflects issues and concerns that just won’t go away on the part of IT folks and end users, chief among them the need for assurances of guaranteed service levels and security.  Forrester agrees, according to a story about the survey in SF Gate:

Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman writes in the report that “there is long-term potential for storage-as-a-service, but Forrester sees issues with guaranteed service levels, security, chain of custody, shared tenancy, and long-term pricing as significant barriers that still need to be addressed before it takes off in any meaningful way.”

One interesting finding of the survey is that companies are more interested in the cloud for back-up storage rather than general purpose storage. Why is that?

“First, it’s s a complete service offering, not just CPU or storage capacity,” Reichman writes. “You get the backup software intelligence and storage capacity in a fully managed service. Second, it’s solving a very specific pain point – the pain of bringing a costly and error-prone, but very necessary, IT function under control. This is in contrast to storage-as-a-service offerings where the user has to figure out how to put it all together.”

I’ll put my theory about this finding out there, too.  I think that companies probably feel they’re taking less of a chance backing up data on the cloud – data they own and also have access to on internal servers. Perhaps this doesn’t require such a leap of faith as it does to migrate all your data to the cloud…with a fear that you can’t recoup any information that gets lost.

This is why companies that do use cloud data storage also take safeguards to ensure their data remains safe and accessible – such as cloud monitoring services.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. Basically, it says that law enforcement needs a court-ordered warrant – provided there’s probably cause – to make a search. Today, one of the biggest questions for enterprises considering moving data to the cloud is, under the Fourth Amendment, what kind of data protection they’re entitled to when in the hands of a third party.

Now, however, there’s a new legal opinion of the application of the Fourth to the cloud. cnet has taken a look and reports that it’s not only right on the mark but that the courts sorely need to adopt it in deciding cases arising from cloud data privacy issues.

The paper is written by David A. Couillard, a student at the University of Minnesota Law School, and it is published in the June 2009 issue of the Minnesota Law Review.

The story reports that Couillard points out that both the security and opacity of a container used to store something determine the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test. He theorizes that even if the police or some other government body comes across a locked briefcase, they have a right to try and guess its combination until they opened it. However, its opacity – designed to keep its contents private – means its owner had a reasonable expectation for it to remain private.

So, are you still with me? And are you wondering how this applies to the cloud?

Couillard says: “In the context of virtual containers in the cloud…encryption is not simply a virtual lock and key; it is virtual opacity.” So, by signing up with a cloud provider to store your data, you’re guaranteed privacy, right?

Er; not so fast.  We still need a legal framework – like the Constitution itself – to protect data on the cloud and any other Internet service.  Couillard suggests we treat digital cloud data as we would the locked contents of a briefcase or an apartment:

” [T]he service provider has a copy of the keys to a user’s cloud storage unit, much like a landlord or storage locker owner has keys to a tenant’s space, a bank has the keys to a safe deposit box, and a postal carrier has the keys to a mailbox,” he writes. “Yet that does not give law enforcement the authority to use those third parties as a means to enter a private space.

“The same rationale should apply to the cloud. In some circumstances, such as search engine queries, the third party is clearly an interested party to the communication,” Couillard continues. “But when content data, passwords, or URLs are maintained by a service provider in a relationship more akin to that of landlord-tenant, such as private Google accounts, any such data that the provider is not directly interested in should not be understood to be open to search via consent or a waiver of Fourth Amendment protection.”

Cnet blogger James Urquhart, after having read the paper on this crucial Fourth Amendment issue for cloud services, calls for the courts to begin applying its reasoning to Internet-based computing cases “immediately,” and calls on Congress, too, to create laws on the data rights of users.

I agree completely.

Working with companies and IT managers daily to provide them with protection in the way of cloud monitoring services, I know their concerns. Data privacy is one of them. And legislation and court decisions will go a long way to providing assurances and confidence in the cloud.

Google and a group of DNS and content providers, such as Sterling, VA-b ased Neustar/UltraDNS, want to extend the DNS protocol and speed up browsing. DNS, short for domain name server, translates URLs (e.g., mywebsite.com) into numeric IP addresses used by computers to communicate with one another on the web.

What Google’s proposing is that more information be sent during these machine/network communications “to optimize browsing speed” by creating connections with topologically linked servers, according to an account of Google’s proposal that I read. But Google also says that the volume of information sent should be limited so that it doesn’t violate users’ privacy. The story I read put it perfectly: by gathering enough data about a user’s location in a network, the system can then make the most of the connection to eliminate as much separation as possible between the user and the host.

“Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers,” according to the writers on Google’s code blog. “Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy.”

Google hopes to get its proposal accepted as “an official Internet standard,” the blog says.

I can understand why Google is taking this initiative. I mean, aside from speed, which Google has been working to, well, speed up (launched officially as a goal in 2009), the company is uber (to use a German word) sensitive to data privacy violations now due to the recent cyber attacks against the company’s Gmail cloud app.

Even though this is more about extending the DNS protocol, I’m glad to see that Google is proposing privacy safeguards, too, in the initiative.

To take advantage of the rising number of companies embracing virtual data centers, Cisco, NetApp and VMware are ramping up their collaboration with new design architectures to help customers make virtualized data centers more efficient, dynamic and secure. 

The three technology companies have unveiled an end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that enhances security in the cloud. How does that work, you might ask? The architecture isolates the IT resources and applications of different clients, business units or departments that share a common IT infrastructure.  The three companies are also offering dedicated support to help customers quickly build a unified, virtual infrastructure.

In a CNN article, Tom Georgens, president and CEO of NetApp, said: “Our visions are aligned around the concept of a dynamic data center that will be the foundation of cloud computing and that will enable enterprises, integrators and service providers to deliver IT as a service [ITaaS]. In this scenario, IT becomes a dynamic asset that is more efficient and can better adapt to changing business needs. This new era of IT has stringent infrastructure requirements that our companies are ready to meet today — together.”

So what is Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture anyway? Well, in plain language, it’s an end-to-end system architecture that isolates IT resources for greater security in virtual and enterprise cloud environments used by more than one department in a company or by multiple companies. Specifically, the design helps customers, systems integrators and service providers develop internal and external cloud services that isolate clients, business units, departments or security zones for beefed-up security across computing, networking, storage and management layers. The companies’ new Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture offers details about implementing and configuring the architecture, and it provides best practices for building and managing best-in-class solutions.

Bottom line: IT administrators have a new way to establish the right quality of service for each resource layer and to deliver consistent service levels for applications in each of those layers.

Support is Key

As part of their announcement, Cisco, NetApp and VMware also unveiled worldwide 24/7 support, which enables customers to get quick answers identifying and solving “potential issues” related to solutions used in the new architecture.

Support is one key concern that IT folks and end users have around cloud computing, along with security. So, I think that this feature, combined with the new ability to provide a more secure virtual computing environment, will add shine to the companies’ overall offering.

It’s good to see that cloud and virtualization solution providers are investing more in support and security features for their products. When I talk with current and prospective clients, these themes are very important.

Indeed, that’s why many of them turn to cloud-based services such as transaction, server, network and website monitoring.

 As part of this collaboration, also introduced a global 24-hour cooperative support model. This model offers customers a more streamlined response from Cisco, NetApp and VMware to identify and solve potential issues related to the solutions used in the Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture. This saves customers’ time and resources when they request product and technology support.

I really enjoyed reading author Ken Hess and his assessment of the top 10 server technologies for the new decade. It was a great read, not only because he’s a good writer with the ability to speak (that is, write) plainly, but also because it covered just about every IT trend that will save money for companies, promote green computing, and make life easier for IT folks and end users. Here are a few:

- Virtualization technology – which will touch every data center in the world. Virtualization promises that companies can save on IT costs by converting their infrastructures to virtual hosts and guests or moving to an entirely hosted virtual infrastructure. The migration to virtualization will in turn put pressure on computer manufacturers to “deliver greener hardware for less green.”

- Cloud computing – Hess predicts that “savvy technology companies” will use cloud computing to market their products and services to a global audience at a fraction of the cost of current offerings. (This doesn’t just mean platform providers like Amazon and Azure but also companies that offer such services as website transaction monitoring.) And, despite some pretty high-profile outages this year, cloud computing providers will increasingly move closer to offering an “always on” philosophy. Hess says “entire business infrastructures will migrate to the cloud during this decade.”

- Mobile computing – Any available web connection is what’s needed here for a rapidly expanding army of mobile workers, plus hardware that’s lightweight and easy to use (meaning no complex set-up) and that can pull data, apps, even your computing environment (or operating system) from the cloud.

- Virtual Desktops – Virtual desktops have been in the news lately with the development of fully functional cloud-based desktops and other neat gadgetry, for example, USB-enabled virtual desktops.  It’s all about leaving behind resource-needy local desktop operating systems and migrating to virtual ones housed in data centers. Hess predicts that desktops will be based in PCs, data centers and the cloud for the next few years, but eventually will all be non-local by 2020. He rightly points out that virtual desktops will help companies lower maintenance bills and help eliminate errors associated with desktop operating systems.

- Digital Libraries – Personally speaking, I like my books on paper (In one day, I look at the computer screen for more than is good for my eyes.) But Hess predicts that by the end of this decade “printed material will all but disappear” and that, someday, libraries will function more as museums to house historic and valuable volumes and to show kids how people used to read.

Of course, Hess writes a lot more about technology, including the advance of open-source migration, online storage and web-based apps.  To read more, check out his article.

Symantec ’s cloud survey was conducted by Applied Research and polled 1,780 globally with at least 1,000 employees.

Some interesting points about cloud computing were made in Symantec’s recent 2010 State of the Data Center survey. Basically, the report offers a lot of statistics that say companies think cloud computing is an important priority but that actual deployments and activity remain pretty low.

For example, more than half surveyed said cloud computing was an important priority for this year, according to a report I read about the survey.  Among them, 57% said private cloud computing is either somewhat or absolutely important; 54% had the same assessment about hybrid cloud computing; and 53% said the same about public cloud computing.

But who’s actually got some form of cloud solution working for them? Only about 20%, apparently – using it as a cost-containment strategy. Of those, just under one-quarter used private cloud computing last year to cut or tighten costs, while 22% relied on a hybrid cloud solution and only one in five used public cloud computing.

In the story that I read, optimism remains high for the growth of the Cloud in 2010, though. 

The CTO of a data center consulting and solutions provider that was interviewed said “the main priority for most companies in 2010 is to reduce costs in the data center, an area where cloud computing can help.” But he said his firm has a lot of discussions with customers around cloud computing, but said that it’s still a relatively small part of the company’s overall business. Yet he expects activity to grow as the year progresses.

What’ll drive cloud growth is IT’s huge incentive to cut costs.

“To me, the real issue is dissatisfaction with IT being business as usual,” said the CTO. That’s what is “driving interest in the cloud. The current approach can’t be sustained into the future and has to change. I think 2010 will be a significant year moving forward.”

I’m curious about your cloud initiatives in 2009 and what they will be this year. Are you using a private, hybrid or public cloud solution? And why? Do you see it as a strategy to cut IT costs? What about cloud-based services, like transaction or cloud platform monitoring? If not, is it on your radar screen at all?