IDC, the tech industry analysts, have come out with their predictions for 2010 – and it’s a model that heavily involves the development and growth of the Cloud.

First some general IT industry forecasts:


- growth is expected to return to the IT industry, and IDC is forecasting a more than 3% expansion for the year; the industry will see spending levels rise once again (but to 2008 levels) to $1.5 trillion;

- emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil will lead IT recovery, growing 8-13%, while mature markets like the U.S. and Europe are to remain relatively weak and vulnerable to risk factors;

- small and medium-sized businesses, another important form of “emerging market” for the IT industry, declined by about 3.5% this year…but expect this sector to grow in 2010 by 3.5%. Growth among SMBs will be higher than large enterprises.

What role the cloud will play:

- For the IT industry, 2010 will be a huge year for the continuing build-up and maturing of cloud services delivery and consumption, according to IDC. Look for “enterprise grade” cloud services to emerge in order to support the “more demanding security, availability, and manageability requirements of traditional IT” in cloud services.

- The year will be marked by seven distinct cloud trends:

Platform battles will accelerate. The field will get more crowded, and IDC expects IBM and Oracle to play new roles. And Google will make its own platform more attractive to large enterprises. Watch, too, for Amazon, to develop an application platform.

The next wave of hot public IT cloud services will rise and be centered around data/content (storage, distribution, and analytics), business applications (as adoption broadens for SaaS versions of enterprise applications), and personal productivity applications. These differ from today’s model of web hosting and collaboration services, for example, blogs, web conferencing and Twitter. Microsoft and IBM will play prominent roles in challenging today’s dominant player, Google Apps.

Security concerns will give rise to more private clouds – and from all major IT providers.
Along with private clouds, there will be an explosion of “cloud appliances” as a “very simple-to-adopt” packaging approach. IT companies like Dell, IBM, HP, Sun, Fujitsu, Hitachi — and chipmakers Intel and AMD — will partner with software vendors to create cloud appliance versions of traditional versions of software.

Hybrid solutions will grow. IT product and service suppliers will develop tools to help customers “more cohesively and dynamically” manage their IT assets across internal servers, private clouds and their appliances, as well as public clouds.

Just as there’s a hot market for accessories for the iPod (cases, headphones), expect a hot market for cloud accessories to develop. These will focus on overcoming adoption barriers and will deliver predictable network quality of service and security. Later, other functions such as data indexing and cloud asset management will be introduced. All will aim to make public and private cloud services faster, safer, more reliable, and more useful.

Cloud players – in infrastructure, platform, application, and management/optimization cloud services categories – will develop API-based partner/solution ecosystems. API partners will add value to cloud providers’ offerings.

From my perspective as an observer and service provider in the cloud industry, IDC is right on the mark with some of these predictions, especially the one that predicts the growth of private clouds due to security concerns among today’s businesses that are considering making a move to the cloud.

As the appeal of the cloud grows in 2010, companies will be seeking all kinds of assurances that their computing is safe and reliable. And I predict that, just as a homeowner would install an alarm system in their house to warn of intruders, more and more companies will seek an extra measure of security in cloud-based monitoring services.

I’m really loving a phrase that I read recently about cloud computing. It came from the CIO of Avago Technologies, a San Jose, CA-based semiconductor maker, which is gradually migrating its data and apps to the cloud from its internal servers – including recruiting, human resources, e-mail and web security.

According to Bob Rudy, CIO at Avago, migration has saved the company millions of dollars by eliminating hardware needs and software licenses and improving security, speed and storage. Moving to the cloud has also freed up employees from annoying and trivial tasks like managing their e-mail, enabling them to focus more on their core jobs.

But Bob phrased a simple description about the pull of cloud computing that I’d like to share: “The days of owning software are coming to an end.”

Bob was featured in a recent story in the San Francisco Gate about the rise of cloud computing, which called Bob’s statement “an increasingly common sentiment.

“As 2009 draws to a close, cloud computing is floating past that threshold between curiosity and convention, or as Gartner Research put it, `beyond the pure hype stage and into the beginning of mainstream adoption.’ Mainstream like Comcast Corp., Genentech Inc., Kaiser Permanente and the Obama administration, which formally embraced the approach in September as a means of cutting government waste. They’re among the millions of new business customers, organizations and consumers demanding software that runs and stores data on the Internet rather than on the desktops or servers in their building.”

I liked, too, what the story said about why the Cloud has such particular relevance today. The savings angle of the Cloud has long been praised, as in the “pay as you go” approach. But what’s different today is that conditions are ripe for mass adoption:

a) the growth of devices that continually connect to the web, such as smart phones and netbooks,

b) the emergence of newer, better and safer tools,

c) success stories of early adopters,

d) and the new frugality born from the economic downturn.

Yet, as the article says, not all express uncontrolled optimism. There are legitimate concerns about cloud security and reliability of cloud service – spawned by failures like Gmail outages several times in 2009, and the recent downtime at Rackspace.

Overall, I think Bob Rudy’s assessment is right on the mark, however. Businesses will overcome their hesitancies about putting – if not all – at least some of their apps on the cloud, and cloud providers will get better at mitigating risk and ensuring more reliable service.

To quote Dave Girouard, Google’s president of enterprise, from the story: “There was a time when people thought it wasn’t safe to do business over the telephone.”

In the meantime, don’t underestimate the power of independent monitoring of cloud providers to help you manage your applications and data on the cloud.

Think giants of commerce and names like Amazon, Walmart and Expedia come up. Now, think how much those giants depend on the huge cloud computing infrastructure to be secure and reliable to keep their businesses running and in shape.

So, if you’re an IT person, you can imagine how serious a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is to online commerce. Now, add the fact that it happened on the day before Christmas eve to those giants of commerce.

It appears that the attack was aimed at the servers of Neustar, which offers DNS services to many major companies under the name UltraDNS.

The attack started at 4:45 p.m. PST and lasted for about an hour. It was compounded by the fact that it also affected Amazon’s S3 and EC2 cloud services. A lot of web services rely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

To Neustar’s credit, it reacted quickly and contained the damage to the Northern California area.

But again, here’s another instance of a breach in security resulting in cloud downtime. Needless to say, this latest instance isn’t a real confidence booster for companies considering switching data and applications to the cloud from internal systems.

Luckily, there are resources, such as monitoring services that website owners can turn to that will warn them of outages and other end-user issues. As our monitoring snapshots above show, Monitis’ cloud-based monitoring technology picked up the outage on both Walmart and Amazon. We quickly notified our customers of the problem, and they were able to notify their own customers and/or use alternate resources to give their customers access.

I predict that, in 2010, as demand grows for cloud computing, so will the need for 24/7 cloud-based monitoring of those systems. I’m already seeing evidence of it from my customers. 

Uh, oh!

Rackspace, a major cloud-computing provider, experienced a connectivity loss at its Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, data center for more than a half hour on the afternoon of Dec. 18^th. During that time, customers could not access business services at the data center.

Among the first to notice the outage was cloud-based monitoring service, Monitis, which also monitors the performance of such providers as Amazon, Google and GoGrid on behalf of clients.

Again, as I’ve said many times in this blog, I can’t stress the importance of having an independent means to monitor and verify your cloud services provider. I believe that we’ll get to a point in the not too distant future when downtime will be a rare occurrence – rarer than it is now.

But until then, if you’re a business on the web, you owe it to yourself to protect it via a monitoring system that can be done from anywhere in the world and round the clock – via the cloud – and then warn you when things start to go wrong (from the end-user experience).

Listen to what one company said upon learning of the Rackspace outage from its monitoring service: “I was very impressed with the alerting when Rackspace (our hosting provider) went down,” said Nigel Hanson of Trimble, a company that provides positioning solutions such as GPS and lasers to companies to be more productive. “Monitis told us exactly when the servers went offline, and exactly when the world could see them again. Thanks for making such a great product.”

Don’t let downtime and the resulting bad experiences that consumers and users encounter take you by surprise! Check out how 24/7 cloud-based monitoring of cloud providers can bring you peace of mind!

Ever wonder how cloud-based transaction monitoring works?

A good transaction monitoring service should ensure fast application performance and good user experience for visitors from anywhere around the globe. And it should guarantee complete business functionality of applications 24 hours, seven days per week.

Here’s a detailed description of what the services entail for one company – the world’s largest package delivery firm and a leading global provider of specialized transportation and logistics. They use transaction monitoring to make sure the billing and reporting modules on its website are available continuously.

The independent monitoring service follows activities on their site every five minutes – all day long. Among tasks, the monitoring service:

1. Opens the website
2. Logs into the system, using a “test” user account
2. Goes to the payments page and searches for available invoices
3. Finds the latest invoice and goes to the details page and checks certain content
4. Checks the history of all invoices
5. Goes to the report generation page
6. Generates report of payments and checks the content
7. Downloads the report
8. Signs out from the system

Reports from the monitoring service summarizes the end-user customer experience for the company – offering information on peak, mid-point and low activity periods.

The company was able to investigate low-activity periods by studying a detailed transaction report provided by the monitoring service. It soon discovered that its Sign In/Sign Out and Invoice History pages were slow.

As a result, the company was able to pinpoint operational issues, optimize its database and, in the end, improve the user experience for its visitors and customers.

Read more information on how this company is benefitting from transaction and website monitoring.

There must be heads rolling at Toys R Us – that is, IT heads.

On Friday, December 11th, the mammoth toy retailer’s UK site went down for a brief period (about one hour). Think of it, 14 days before Christmas, perhaps the most popular place to buy toys for your kids, goes down. Not good for business – especially these days.

In a story I read about the crash of the Toys R Us site, a spokesperson for the company said the retailer was investigating what happened.

Shoppers logging on saw this message:

I wonder how many proceeded directly to one of the company’s competitors? Given the famously short attention span of today’s website users, I think it’s highly likely they just Googled “toys” and immediately clicked on one of the many results.

In the story, the Toys R Us spokesperson said that the down period was not due to the site being unable to handle the traffic. And the site was back up after 60 minutes.

Yet, this whole episode, as brief as it was, highlights the critical need for companies doing business on the web to adopt event and transaction monitoring as a safeguard. Not only is it important for dealing with spikes in traffic all year round, but it’s crucial for times like Christmas when literally most of the world with web access is doing at least some of its shopping online.

If you’re a website business owner, you want to enlist the services of a monitoring company that not only checks up- and down-time, but also tracks visitor activity with:

Real time website visitors tracking

Comprehensive statistics: unique visitors, page views, referrers, browsers, OS, geography

Customizable dashboard views

You also want a comprehensive, highly scalable solution that is web-based and has the bandwidth and performance management capability to give you broad visibility.

Your monitoring service should also be able to do its job from anywhere in the world from the cloud, as well as send you instant alerts about incidents – or issues that may put your site in danger of going down.

If you’re a website owner, can you afford a Toys R Us scenario? Do yourself a favor, investigate and invest in a good monitoring service.

Sun Microsystems has unveiled what is being called the first fully functional cloud-based Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for grammar schools and community colleges. The new product is in line with Sun’s vision to build and deploy public and private clouds that are open and interoperable.

In a venture with another tech firm, Ashbourne Technology Group, in Southampton, PA, Sun is offering a secure, cost-effective computing solution delivered anytime, anywhere via the cloud. It’s a virtual desktop, and it works with all leading OSs, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris to just about any client device, including Sun Ray thin clients and other platforms with Java-based browsers.

According to a Sun press release, the device’s zero-maintenance and very minimal 4-5 watt power draw makes it “one of the greenest desktop solutions on the market today.”

Addressing today’s very common security concerns about cloud computing, Sun said the technology has built-in VPN security so that parents, teachers and administrators needn’t worry about the privacy of students on the network. And, like true cloud-computing apps, the Sun DaaS, part of Sun’s education solutions portfolio, is subscription-based. Users can pay as little as $1.00 per day.

The product comes at an opportune time for cash-strapped school districts. And it also promises hassle-free maintenance and virtual user access. Hmm…classic benefits of the cloud: savings, low maintenance and 24/7 access.

“Schools can escape from the desktop replacement cycle saving thousands of dollars per year while providing better access to need-to-know information,” said Ivan Segal, CEO of Ashbourne, Sun’s partner and service provider. “Plus, there are benefits to preserving the equipment you already have and keeping the familiar desktop environment, but now delivering it anytime and to anywhere”. The Sun Desktop as a Service solution makes a lot of sense from a business and manageability standpoint.”

I’m happy to see another example of more varied uses of cloud computing technology being developed for an ever-widening audience. And, as I said in a previous post, I believe it’s crucial for schools and universities transacting and running databases on the web, to use monitoring services to ensure that their cloud-computing remains reliable, stable and secure.

This week, as storms engulfed the East Coast, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing giant, lost power for six hours in one of its four availability zones – due to connectivity issues.

I read though that a monitoring firm – which both uses AWS and provides monitoring services to its customers using AWS – measured the outage more accurately than Amazon disclosed from multiple locations across the country (at 44 minutes and 42 or 44 seconds), depending on location.

Despite the downtime, observers gave Amazon points for its fast response. Maybe they were more forgiving due to the ‘act of God’ nature of the incident.

Interestingly, the monitoring service that tracked the outage said that since its customers were using Amazon and Rackspace and their own hardware so much more interchangeably, the risk of more failures was higher. Another point is the basic fact that interrupted Internet access is a far more common problem than AWS going down. So, cloud providers are in the same spot as when enterprises shifted from frame relay connections to Internet-based connectivity between sites.

That’s a good analogy.

I can certainly understand the fickle nature of weather – especially given the snows and storms of winter on the east coast of the U.S – and how that can affect service. But again, I have to say that cloud providers have to do a better job of making service uninterrupted and more stable if they want to convince more businesses to move from internal servers.

I was glad to see, too, that a cloud-based monitoring service tracked AWS’ downtime for its customers – and more accurately than AWS. That’s just one reason, among many, in which monitoring proves its value.

A new survey has found that about one-third of IT staff spend their time on server management tasks.

Nearly 60% of 441 IT managers polled cited the “hassle of managing servers” as a challenge in their organization. Meanwhile, another 61% found it difficult to find “time to drive innovation,” according to the Rackspace-commissioned survey of IT managers at U.S. and U.K. midsize enterprises.

If you’re an IT manager, news of the daily challenges you face controlling your environment should not be a surprise. And to me, it’s plain that these hurdles are what drive companies to consider managed hosting and cloud computing alternatives. But the survey tells us more about why they don’t than about why they do.

In the survey, IT teams said they spent 60% of their time troubleshooting and managing servers. But only 27% said they spent their time on “strategic and value-add activities.” Respondents noted that they were stressed by on-site server management, and some of the issues included “the need to be available 24×7, hardware issues and maintenance, and after-hours calls and issues.”

As a former IT executive, I’m quite familiar with all these concerns. My personal big issue: after-hours calls and issues.

Another issue is capacity planning. More than half said they have made mistakes in forecasting for their servers, while 15% bought too many servers and 36% didn’t buy what was needed.

So what’s going to relieve all this stress for these folks? The alternative: managed hosting or cloud computing. In the survey, about one-third of respondents have plans to outsource their servers in the next two to five years. Yet IT managers have clear reservations about hosted or cloud computing services.

Nearly 30% were skittish because they felt there wasn’t enough proof of cost savings or ROI, and another 29% felt reliability was a hurdle to adoption of hosted or cloud services. Meanwhile, 27% had concerns with “assurances regarding security.”

These concerns are pretty routinely voiced in our industry, so they don’t surprise me.

But what I think a lot of businesses and IT managers fail to remember is the availability of cloud-based services themselves that can help put their fears to rest – for instance 24/7 server monitoring.

Listen to this: Did you know that modern cells phones have more processing power than a giant, old-style mainframe. And of course, that cell phone’s cost and electricity consumption is infinitely leaner.

I ask this because when you look at it this way, it so easy to see the value of cloud computing. And every time I read about another advance to make the cloud easier for businesses and enterprises to accept, trust and go for, I rejoice.

Here’s the news – Intel this week introduced a computer chip (48-core) that “could crunch the size of data centres down in a similar way,” according to a story in the Financial Times. (Somehow, I can’t believe the Financial Times is writing about the cloud!). Intel, according to the story, describes its invention as a “‘single-chip cloud computer’ that rethinks many of the approaches used in today’s designs for laptops, PCs and servers.”

The new chip will have 10 to 20 times the processing engines inside the current core line-up of processors, and it will consume as much power as two standard household light bulbs. Wow!

In the story, Justin Rattner, Intel ‘s chief technology officer, that computing is moving into a “many-core era.

“The notion we have is: Could you replace potentially a rackful of equipment today with one or a very small number of these high core-count processors?” he said.

Intel’s new processor is not a product; nor does it have a name. It will be a limited edition of 100 or more that will be made available in 2010. And it will be used by researchers who will develop new software applications and programming models.

Hear that – all you naysayers out there who worry about cloud providers offering enough bandwidth!