It’s a move that’s a bit of a setback to cloud computing, especially as governments around the world adopt cloud computing platforms to save money and institute efficiencies. The move I’m talking about is the Irish government’s recent warning to all government departments and public sector agencies that they shouldn’t buy cloud computing services without legal advice, according to a story I read.

But while it’s a setback, I think it’s a move I can certainly understand.

It was the Irish Department of Finance that sent out the e-mail warning, and the agency cited concerns over such issues as data protection, confidentiality and security and liability.

The warning seems to go against Ireland’s intention to migrate to the cloud, as one of six key tech strategies to support a “smart” economy.

The email seems, too, to be at odds with the new cloud computing centers that both IBM and Hewlett Packard have established in the country, which has created 190 jobs. Microsoft, which is identified in the e-mail as a cloud computing supplier, invested $500 million (about 366 million euros) building a data centre in Dublin that it opened last year. That center will provide these cloud services.

The story quoted Ed Byrne, general manager of Hosting 365, a cloud services provider, described the Irish government e-mail as “damaging” and showed a “lack of knowledge” of what the technology involves.

As much as I think a government edict to refrain from buying cloud services is a bit drastic, I can see how Ireland is concerned about security and reliability issues. I would advise the government there to meet with Microsoft and HP, and if those cloud computing companies are smart, they’ll help assure Ireland of the cloud’s safety and educate it on the promise and potential of the cloud.

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.