I’m worried about end users. I’m worried about their trust in the Internet and thus in the future of IT – the cloud.

I’m worried because of the latest fallout from the cyberattacks on Google, and that company’s decision that it might resort to pulling out altogether from China – believed to be the source of the attacks. The latest fallout is that the governments of France and Germany. They’re telling their citizens to drop use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, after it was revealed that the attacks were made possible by a vulnerability or weakness in IE (version 6 or older).

The French and German government agencies, according to a story I read, recommended that their citizens switch to Firefox or Google Chrome.

As you can imagine, Microsoft isn’t looking too kindly on these government proclamations. “Switching away will get away from this particular problem,” he told BBC News. “But all browsers have security flaws.” As I write this, Microsoft is working on a patch, and is stressing that IE 8, the latest version of its browser, is the most secure browser.

Concerns have mounted since details of the attack are now available online, and hackers could soon change the code to target other versions of the browser.

What worries me about these warnings is that I think it leads to unnecessary fears about the web and – by association – sharing information and storing data on the cloud. Yes, I think it’s good to inform people of security failings and potential threats, but it seems to me that an all out government alert to switch technologies is a bit drastic – especially when the damage is limited to old versions of IE. I fear this is going to scare away businesses, especially small or mid-size companies who may consider using the cloud infrastructure for its computing needs.

Again, let me emphasize, though, that IT organizations can find protection in services that help monitor websites, transactions and the user experience. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, said Ben Franklin.

Chipmaker Intel Corp. says that a corporate IT spending wave is about to hit, and much of it will come from the cloud. Intel’s interest in the cloud stems from its recognition that cloud computing will require a whole new kind of chip — cheaper and more energy efficient. And the company believes it’s well-suited to take up the challenge.

I’m ecstatic that the industry is talking about spending — and therefore recovery — again. “We remain in an excellent position to benefit from the build out of
cloud infrastructure as well as the reconfiguration of existing data
centers for power performance efficiency improvements,” CEO Paul Otellini told analysts on January 14th, when the company posted a huge earnings jump during the fourth quarter ($2.3 billion during Q4 2009 versus $234 million in the same quarter last year). Included in those stellar numbers was a strong jump in sales for the company’s data center business group, which makes chips for
servers, workstations and data storage systems.

In a story that I read on The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, several financial ndustry analysts predicted some pretty positive trends for both cloud computing and virtualization. For instance, an analyst with JMP Securities gave the thumbs up for Intel “towards the higher end of guidance” because he was confident that cloud
computing and virtualization trends “will drive increasing data center
upgrade cycle demand across the balance of the year.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that Intel is well positioned as an influential player in the cloud infrastructure, after all, most cloud providers get their chips from the giant. And the trends toward smaller budgets and more computing power are here to stay, and will grow. While Intel is only expecting modest pick up in spend for corporate PCs, the company is seeing potentially robust growth in the market for chips for server computers.

Hold on, though. Let’s not get too carried away. I like that one analyst quoted in the piece acknowledged that cloud computing is in its early stages — stating that the infrastructure is just being built in Asia and Europe.

Yet it was odd that no one in the piece mentioned the concerns that companies and end users have with cloud security and reliability issues.

Mental note: get a hold of those MarketWatch reporters to give them my take on this trend and the resulting demand for cloud-based services such as website monitoring and cloud provider monitoring.

Clearly influenced by the feverish growth of cloud computing, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft this week announced a $250 million deal (over three years) to develop both hardware and software focused on management and virtualization solutions for data centers, pre-packaged solutions for data warehousing technology and the Windows Azure platform.

In a conference call with reporters, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, “The cloud is the driving force behind this deal.”

The relationship will work this way: software maker Microsoft will use hardware technology developed by HP in data centers run on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud. And for its part, HP will develop data centers that will be sold and pre-loaded with the Azure infrastructure.

In a BusinessWeek
article, I read that by 2011 companies are projected to spend $95 billion on cloud computing, or about 60% of the deal’s total, according to Merrill Lynch estimates.

HP says its “smart bundles” of products will help companies lower IT-related energy consumption, and they’ll be designed so they can be managed remotely – all positive aspects of cloud computing.

I’m struck by this deal’s financial price tag and the heat generated – in this very cold winter – by the competition in the cloud industry. (Remember Oracle’s announcement to buy Sun Microsystems, a move designed to bolster Oracle’s cloud offensive? And then there was the recent Cisco partnership with storage vendor EMC and software vendor VMware that’s supposed to produce packages of servers, networking equipment, storage, and virtualization software.)

Another thing I’m impressed by: in a huge nod to concerns that cloud customers have about SLAs, the two companies said they’ll put 11,000 service reps to work testing, loading, and providing services for products sold by the partnership.

As we start the New Year, I want to take a quick look back to review some of the incredible milestones we’ve witnessed and orchestrated here at Monitis. We’ve watched the cloud industry expand and grow – with new cloud providers launching their platforms and a variety of new service providers bringing their brands and tools to the cloud.

Last year was an incredibly successful year for Monitis, as more and more companies making the move to the cloud relied upon our monitoring services (such as external monitoring, back-end monitoring, web traffic monitoring, transaction monitoring and EC2/S3 cloud monitoring.

We grew our customer base by 400% and our revenue by 500% last year. As you might guess, I’m ecstatic about those numbers, not just because it means we’re doing better, but because it represents growth for the whole industry, too. And I think it proves growing recognition by companies that accessing services, information and apps via the cloud – but safely – is the future of IT.

One of our biggest thrills this past year happened in November, at The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Conference in Boston. We competed with a group of other technology companies in the event’s “Innovators Showcase,” and we gave a presentation called “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere.” We won! and we were named “Most Innovative Start-Up of 2009.”

2009 was also a year of continuous enhancements and innovations to our services. I’ll list them below, and as you read through these developments and click on the links to learn more detail, you’ll be able to chart just how far we’ve come in delivering state-of-the-art, cloud-based network and systems monitoring .

I’m very proud, and I’m grateful beyond words to you, our customers. I sincerely hope you’ll help us usher in a new year of enhancements and services that, I am certain, will help you grow and expand your own businesses. We’ve got some exciting things planned!

Our 2009 Milestones:

- Launch of ‘Top 10′ service – providing network and systems engineers with a holistic view of processes and applications that are consuming the most resources, enabling them to quickly diagnose or prevent problems and properly match IT infrastructure capacity to business needs.

- Launch of asset management as a service, which automatically creates inventory of software, logs usage patterns and proactively suggests optimization to help companies reduce IT cost.

- Announcement of remote monitoring of system events.

- Launch of performance testing as a service, enabling companies to instantly run site performance tests, as well as keep historical records and manage performance scripts.

- Launch of public reporting and widgets, features that enabled our customers to make their websites’ uptime statistics publicly available – for the benefit of their own customers.

- Launch of our cloud monitoring service

- The addition of a monitoring location in China – expanding our global coverage

- The addition of a new external monitoring location within Amazon EC2 cloud network, allowing customers of the cloud provider to check their users’ web experience locally.

- Tweet alerts for network failures on Twitter

- Management Information Base (MIB) browsing for MonitorSNMP. A MIB is a type of database used to manage the devices in a communications network and comprises a collection of objects in a virtual database used to manage a network’s routers and switches.

- Introduction of remote monitoring to work on the Sun’s Solaris platform

- A free links checker service to detect broken and dead-end website links and alert users

- An interface for command-line tools to help make IT folks more productive and efficient

- A web ecosystem visualization service called WebMap, which helps IT engineers and managers understand their networks better in terms of status, health and manageability.

- Monitis S3 Monitoring, an on-demand cloud storage and usage service, enabling customers to independently monitor Amazon S3, notifying them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

- Database performance management and load testing from the cloud.

- User-friendly enhancements, such as the ability to manage all external monitors from a single, central location, enabling customers to edit network settings, monitor timeouts, change monitoring locations, schedule maintenance, and schedule and set up notification rules for all monitors from a single place.

- A new scheduling feature for our on-demand load testing

- Special holiday pricing for e-commerce monitoring – to help prevent site downtime

- MonitorSNMP, an enterprise-grade SNMP network monitoring service available via the cloud

- A time-saving universal cloud monitoring framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all cloud-hosting providers including Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and GoGrid.

- The ability for customers to create custom, end-to-end locations for server monitoring locations

- A free service to instantly check website response times from different locations

- Enterprise-class options for system failure and performance outage notification management

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, virtual computing just got a bit greener.

NComputing, the virtual desktop makers, unveiled a low-cost, first-ever virtual desktop accessible via a USB. The company, which already claims about 2 million users of its line of Ethernet-based and PCI- based virtual desktops, said its new U170 model will sell for under $100.

NComputing says that its virtual desktops use as little as 1 watt of electricity (compared to 110 watts for a regular PC), helping companies save 90% on electricity bills. They also drastically reduce e-waste because they are tiny (access devices only weigh 150 grams, compared to 9.6 kilograms for a PC), and because they last much longer than PCs.

Here’s how a USB-enabled virtual desktop works:

- It plugs into a standard PC’s USB port

- NComputing’s virtualization software (included) enables another user (actually, up to nine other users) to share that PC

- The U170 has connections for additional users’ peripherals, including keyboard, monitor, and mouse.

Saving Money, Too

For many companies, virtual desktops save money because it allows them to avoiding buying more PCs and spending money on per-PC software licenses. Virtual computing also lowers operating expenses, not only in electricity costs but also because it eliminates the problem of PC obsolescence by reducing the number of PCs that need to be replaced regularly.

Along with the development of virtual desktops, the IT industry has also recently seen a new cloud-based desktop – where apps and data are stored in the cloud.

While both users and their companies still have a lot of adoption issues when it comes to virtual machines, due mostly out of concern for privacy of data and security, it’s great to see that corporate IT continues to strive for efficiencies and “greenness” via these tools.

We’ve all heard and read about the enormous pace of growth of the cloud – being experienced now and for the future. And I think that what will drive growth, most powerfully, will be the ever expanding need for data storage.

A recent piece in the San Francisco Gate quoted a study done by analysts IDC last year about enterprise storage needs. The study said that, over the next five years, structured data (the traditional row-and-column information contained in relational databases), will grow more than 20%. Meanwhile, unstructured data will rise at an astounding 60% compounded rate. That means structured data storage requirements will double, while unstructured data storage requirements will increase seven times. So application scale is dramatically growing.

So what does this mean for the future of IT? Basically, a big skill for IT folks will revolve around being able to stay on top of load variation. “The ability to respond to dynamic app load by rapidly altering application topology will be a fundamental IT skill,” says the article, written by Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus.

This is called dynamic scaling, and the demand for it will outstrip what most IT organizations do today – keeping application environments stable and occasional modifying topology through manual intervention by sys administrators.

Cloud providers offer orchestration (defining computing capacity in a single transaction, with the underlying infrastructure of the orchestration software obtaining the necessary individual resources to produce that capacity). But what will be needed for the volume of tomorrow’s applications is dynamism – the ability to rapidly, seamlessly, and transparently adjust resource consumption, all without human intervention, notes the story.

Without it, you’ve got a “buggy whip processes in a motorized world.” There is no way, in my mind, that I can see masses of IT admins on the job 24/7 adjusting computing resource levels.

I think the cloud is the answer here, and so does the author: “There’s no question that cloud computing, whether a public or private/internal variant, is the future of computing. ” But there are and will be challenges dealing with the demands of infinite scalability and highly variable demand.

“We can expect to see massive stress in IT operations as it grapples with how to respond to workloads that are orders of magnitude larger,” according to the story. ” And, just as many mourned the passing of the friendly, service-with-a-smile telephone operator, many people, both inside and outside of IT, will grieve for the old days of smart, hands-on sys admins.”

Golden says that what’s expected for this new world of bid data and ever-increasing computing demand is:

1. A need for highly-automated operations tools that require little initial configuration and subsequent “tuning” because they operate on AI-based rules

2. A huge amount of turmoil as sunk investment in outmoded tools must be written off in favor of new offerings better suited to the new computing environment

3. A change in the necessary skill sets of operations personnel from individual system management to automated system monitoring and inventory management

4. A new generation of applications designed to take advantage of new computing capabilities and respond to the needs of huge data.

As we’re transforming the way companies compute and changing the infrastructure that’ll be needed for the days of big data, I believe it’ll be more essential than ever for companies to employ assistance in measuring database capacity usage. Indeed, that’s why we’re seeing such an explosion of growth for cloud monitoring services that can measure usage and alert companies when they’re approaching their thresholds.

Does this sound familiar? You’re a website owner, and you’ve been subscribing to a free service that monitors your site and checks for all kinds of things that can go wrong from the end-user experience, for example, denial of service, slow ISP, error messages. You get the picture.It’s been working great, but all of a sudden, you get a notification from them that they’re going to start charging you. Well, depending on how much revenue you’re pulling in, and how many sites they actually monitor for you, this could be rather unwelcome news.

That’s exactly what happened to Joe Rawlinson, an e-Commerce strategist and owner of 12 websites. Rawlinson got a notice from his monitoring service that his longtime free service would now begin charging for all but three of his sites. Joe writes about what it’s like to be a customer on his blog, and, if you read this post, you’ll see that he’s less than complimentary about this particular marketing tactic.

As I’ve said many times in this space, reliable monitoring of websites, transactions, servers, networks, etc., is extremely important these days. And it goes a long way toward assuring hesitant businesses to migrate their apps and data to the cloud.

And I think that using a free monitoring service is a good way to get your feet wet and experience limited aspects of full-featured monitoring – which, down the line, you may want to sign up for.

In the meantime, to protect yourself, it’s important to check whether the free monitoring service you’re currently using is only offered for a limited time before you’re required to start paying. The best monitoring services will offer you both free and fee options. In other words, they could provide a free service that’s community-based and community–driven – and that’s good for analytics, individuals and low-budget organizations. Alternatively, they could also offer you a professional version – for mission-critical monitoring.

Mon.itor.us offers a free hosted service, which means you don’t need to maintain an in-house server, install and configure complex software, or spend time on maintenance. All you need is a web browser and an internet connection. But we also offer more full-featured versions for larger, more complex monitoring – providing a professional, premium all-in-one monitoring service that integrates application performance with backend infrastructure with cloud-based monitoring.

If you think I’m tooting my own horn here, think again. Guess who Joe turned to when his limited-time free monitoring service expired? You guessed it — Mon.itor.us.

“Instead of paying, which I assume was their plan, I jumped to another service which is still free,” says Joe, in his blog post. “This alternative service, Mon.itor.us, makes money by showing ads and having a premium service to support their free accounts….”

Thanks for your business, Joe, and your plug! More importantly, thanks for writing about how end-users feel when a supposedly free service suddenly goes fee.

We’ve just got another “plug” within the IT industry.

This time it comes from prolific plug-in makers collectd – a daemon that collects system performance statistics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD files. collectd also has over 90 plugins which range from standard cases to very specialized and advanced topics.

Well, it seems that collectd has just released version 4.9 of their open source tool for collecting, transferring and storing system performance statistics, and within that new version they’ve created a special Perl-based, plug-in for our free, fully hosted and cloud-based web monitoring service, Mon.itor.us – called, aptly so, MonitorUs.

The plug-in queries statistics that Mon.itor.us produces, for example, on system usage or any end-user difficulties that may arise.

Now, you can add the plug-in to your admin area of your site, desktop or laptop.

Thanks, collectd, for joining us in our quest to make it easier for website owners to operate more safely and with more confidence!