Here’s an interesting analogy on cloud computing for you! In the Christian Science Monitor’s Reformed Broker blog, the writer reports on the recent RSA Conference on computer security held earlier this month in San Francisco, and he quotes an observation from an attendee that appeared originally in The Economist.

At the meeting, Art Coviello, president of EMC’s security division, likened the cloud to the virtualization of money. Once upon a time, people carried chickens under their arms and led cows around to market in order to barter for the goods they needed – maybe a nice bed (stuffed with some luxurious fresh straw). Then, along came money, first coins, and then paper. And people could carry their wealth more easily – maybe even higher someone to tote that bed home for them.

I can see how that relates to the cloud. First you had to buy expensive applications to install in your own in-house servers – investing enormous sums to house those servers and build networks for sharing data (kind of like those ancient folks who built barns and chicken coops to house their wealth).

Now, along comes the cloud. And suddenly you don’t need to buy an app, run a building full of servers and keep an army of IT people on staff to keep your business running. Indeed, if you wanted to, you could turn the barn into a condo, or at least move the servers you want to hold onto into a smaller room (with less cooling required).

Another good thing about virtual money: the invention of financial instruments like securities, mutual funds and the like. They are ways of sharing wealth. When you’re not using them, or owning them, someone else is. How is this like cloud computing? Well, the infrastructure is there, and what you don’t use to store data, you don’t pay for. Someone else is using what you don’t.

One thing I thought of after reading this insightful analogy, though, was that security, or the need for it, is another thing the story of money and cloud computing have in common. When we got past spending our chickens and cows to buy what we want, or to store up our wealth, we invented security guards and banks and lockboxes and alarms to protect our coin and paper.

With the cloud, we’re still developing reliable hack-proof security systems to prevent data theft or spying, such as the recent invasion of Google, allegedly by the Chinese government to spy on dissidents. We’re working on agreeing on industry standards for security, but in the meantime, there are cloud-based monitoring alarms to make you feel a bit safer about vitalizing your computing needs.

Remember when the exciting thing about virtualization of computing was all about cost savings – via consolidation of servers, applications and bandwidths into on-demand virtual equivalents? Well, now, the real exciting stuff is all about portability – made possible by the cloud.

That’s the view of Collean Healy, general manager of financial services for Microsoft, who spoke at TradeTech in New York in late February.

Think about it…virtualization has been around for a few decades, where operating systems and applications are separated from the devices that use them. But now, that separation happens on banks of blade servers. Master images of OSs and apps are kept there and then copies are made when individual users or project managers need them. So, you wind up with portability of OSs and apps “regardless of where you are,” said Healy, as reported in an article that I read. She added: this produces “a lot of productivity and innovation,” as well as access to information anywhere 24/7 from any device.

And this is where the cloud figures in, for instance, companies that use the cloud to handle peak or overload risk evaluation work. And with the enormous resources of cloud out there, from the likes of Amazon and Google, utilizing the cloud to use and manage excess capacity is cheap.

Yet you should be choosy about what kind of work you try to put into virtual capacity because it’s not road-tested as much as a company’s own data centers and networks. But if you do decide to take advantage of cloud resources, it’s comforting to know that there are services such as data and network monitoring, all done from the cloud, which will alert you to potential security breaches or failures.

Is your website available to end users 99.8% or more of the time? If not, then count yourself in the “laggard” category, according to standards set by The Aberdeen Group, in its 2008 report “The Performance of Web Applications: Customers are Won or Lost in One Second.” In that study, laggards had web application availability only 86.3% of the time.

If 99.8% of the time seems a little unrealistic to you, consider the title of Aberdeen’s study – and that you can lose a customer in one second (to a competitor) if any part of their online experience goes sour.

You may even be thinking to yourself, ‘Do I even know what my web availability percentage is?’ If you’re a laggard or, worse, you don’t know how often your site – or some part of it – is up or down or unavailable, then it’s more important than ever to consider using website and cloud platform monitoring. It’s like having an official watchdog that barks and makes a big fuss when trouble comes.

It’s kind of hard not to notice a common set of best practices that exist when you work with IT executives everyday who use cloud services – whether they be private, hybrid or public clouds And so I thought I’d pass them on. Successful cloud users:

• Know why they’re in the cloud to begin with. Some use it for streamlining IT management, while others for handling excess storage needs. So, if you’re going to monitor your cloud use, keep these goals in mind so that you’re monitoring what’s important to you. With that information, you’ll be able to properly score your cloud provider.
• Know how their customers use the web. Successful cloud users know where their customers are located, when most of them visit, when peak traffic times occur every season, which ISPs and browser/OS combinations they use. How could this information lead to best practices? Knowing which customers are using dial-up and which are on broadband will help you address their needs.
• Always think from their customer’s viewpoint when it comes to monitoring and testing. Once they know how their customers use the web and what kind of technology they’re using. They also think from the customer viewpoint when evaluating and contracting with cloud service providers or building applications. They contract with monitoring companies to continually test an application throughout its lifetime – in order to enhance end users’ experiences, improve the apps and avoid availability problems.
• Understand what they want and need in terms of capacity. Successful cloud users want testing to ensure that capacity meets the real-world ups and downs of demand.
• Ask for guarantees based on their needs – with teeth. They demand web performance SLAs, for example, guarantees on capacity and velocity.

   

For more information about a variety of cloud monitoring services, visit Monitis.

San Jose, CA – March 11, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of affordable, easy-to-use, 100% Cloud-based, network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced that it has launched a totally new and completely revamped website.

This addition caps a 12 month period in which Monitis has doubled its user base, won the 451 Group’s prestigious “Most Innovative Start-up” award for 2009, and driven a development schedule and roll out of one game-changing product after another.

According to Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, “Our Cloud-based, SaaS-driven, all-in-one suite internal and external monitoring tools is so far ahead of the game, that likely for the last 12 months and certainly for the last 6 months, there has been absolutely no comparison between the value and difference-making features we offer and the rest of the competition. Yet, until now our website didn’t reflect our radical advantages. As of today, this is no longer the case. We finally have a site worthy of our offering.”

The core of the new Monitis site is already live and a bevy of new features and additions will be streamed on-line in the weeks to come.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service which provides Cloud Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Monitis consolidates backend monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud. 

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. Recently, because it’s Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures, Monitis was named the Most Innovative Start-up for 2009 by The 451 Group at their annual Client Conference.  

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

Contact:

Monitis Inc.

Sales & Marketing Department

info@monitis.com

http://www.monitis.com

US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949

UK + International: +44-845-527-3346

France + International: +33-48-607-9035

2880 Zanker Road Suite 203

San Jose, CA-95134

USA

OK; I’m not skipping or anything, but I am happy. CA Inc., obviously on the path to acquire more and more cloud technology providers in order to build up its own capabilities for cloud computing, is joining the ever-louder chorus of those in our industry recognizing that enterprises want, no, they demand, better monitoring of cloud providers.

CA this week announced it has agreed to buy a company called Nimsoft, Inc., a Redwood City, CA-based provider of IT performance and availability monitoring solutions for small and mid-sized companies and managed service providers (MSPs). It’s supposedly all for cash, a transaction valued at $350 million.

This latest announcement follows CA’s recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore, as well as the planned acquisition of 3Tera.

What does this mean for CA? Chiefly that it will greatly extend CA’s ability to meet the IT management needs of emerging enterprises and MSPs. These companies are lead players in cloud computing, and the move will give CA an entirely new set of customers (Its base is historically mostly large enterprises.), and those companies will make up about 25% of software spending in CA’s market space by 2013.

It’s also important for CA’s growth globally. “With our planned acquisition of Nimsoft, CA will be equipped to capture several important growth market segments–including emerging enterprises, emerging national economies, and the MSPs who are providing these customers with IT management services via the cloud,” said Chris O’Malley, CA’s executive vice president, Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line, in a press release. “Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers.”

Alright; so this is great for CA (and Nimsoft), but what I’m most excited about is the huge recognition (well, $350 million worth of recognition) by a company like CA about the importance of cloud monitoring solutions.

Some of the most important aspects of monitoring services include:

• the ability to monitor both internal and external servers
• 24/7 global monitoring – and frequently (e.g. 1 minute intervals)
• no maintenance and low costs (pay-as-you-use) for customers
• timely reporting of problems, such as downtime, via multiple tools (e.g., email, SMS, instant messenger, RSS)
• SLA monitoring

I could go on with an exhaustive list. But the point I’m making here is hooray that at least the concept of monitoring is becoming more important to huge IT companies, and I predict that demand will keep growing.

CA, the IT management software maker, is becoming an aggressive player in the cloud computing arena.

Observers are noting that the company’s third cloud-related acquisition, of a firm called 3Tera, which developed cloud computing technology AppLogic, will help CA make it easier for customers to move to cloud environments. (CA announced its intended purchase last week.)

And interestingly enough, a story I read said that the purchase will “put the company in a good position to later sell its management products designed to monitor and control services in the cloud.”

“The most interesting thing about 3Tera is their ability to give both service providers and enterprises a way to take existing applications and bring them to private and public cloud environments via an elegant interface,” said Jay Fry, vice president of business unit strategy for CA, in the piece. “The process used to be done very manually, but AppLogic automates it and smoothes that transition.”

This is the third cloud-based acquisition by CA, which bought automation vendor Cassatt last summer and Oblicore earlier this year.

Industry observers generally think that the Oblicore purchase means that CA is more committed to bringing the cloud into more mainstream service management disciplines, for example, SLMs. And CA’s purchase of Cassatt boosted CA’s own data center management and automation products, applicable for cloud management services.

What do I think? It certainly looks like CA is gearing up to become a full-service cloud computing company, especially after creating its Cloud Products and Solutions business unit. This new level of aggressiveness is increasing the level of competition among cloud services providers of all kinds.

Generally, competition is a good thing! It leads to lower prices and better services – at least according to Capitalism 101 textbooks. But we’ll have to wait and see how well CA takes up tasks such as cloud monitoring – considering the growing capabilities of its competitors.

Hewlett-Packard on February 24^th opened an advanced collaborative research lab in Singapore to support its growing cloud business – what it calls its “Everything as a Service” vision.

“Our new lab in Singapore is a key component of the transformation strategy put in motion less than three years ago to accelerate our pace of technology transfer and bring a variety of advancements to market,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, Research, and director, HP Labs, in a press release. “HP Labs Singapore aligns very closely with HP’s strategic growth areas and significantly expands the resources we bring to bear on our customers’ biggest opportunities and challenges.”

Officially known as HP Labs Singapore, the facility will focus on a range of projects that aim to re-examine data center and application design principles in order to explore how future cloud computing needs will be met, said the release.

HP plans for the lab to work closely with customers, partners, HP business divisions and schools to generate advancements that will drive research for cloud development. And HP expects its customers to capitalize on this shift to a service-based infrastructure model using developments from HP Labs Singapore.

The new lab will collaborate with other key cloud initiatives already underway at other HP Labs sites, including the Service Automation and Integration Lab (SAIL) in Palo Alto, CA., and the Automated Infrastructure Lab (AIL) in Bristol, UK.

HP’s intention is that, together, the three labs will work on its vision for creating an enterprise cloud software platform – dubbed Cirious. As part of that project, HP has partnered with:

– Intel, Yahoo! and the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore to create a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. IDA houses one of nine test bed locations worldwide.

– SingTel – to form Singapore’s largest commercial grid services platform. It’s called Alatum, and it offers a variety of computing power, storage and software applications on a pay-per-use, on-demand and online basis.

HP Labs Singapore is the company’s third research facility in the Asia/Pacific region and its seventh worldwide

Of course, HP isn’t the only one building data centers and research facilities around the world dedicated to cloud computing and development. It’s good to see that healthy competition in this area is further driving hunger and interest for cloud computing – and that, in turn, lifts all the cloud service provider boats in this giant industry.

If you’re familiar with Citrix Online, you know they’ve got a suite of SaaS and cloud-based applications that enable companies to do things like arrange on-the-spot meetings online (GoToMeeting). Another example: Consumers and business travelers can use Citrix Online to access their home or office computers (GoToMyPC).

Now, it looks like Citrix has a new service, GoToManage. In January, it bought Menlo Park, CA-based IT management vendor Paglo Labs, which offers a cloud search engine for IT and logs. This enables users and managed service providers to capture and store logs and search and analyze them in the cloud by collecting data from networked devices.

While I don’t usually write about competitors (Paglo lets businesses monitor servers and applications in real time and manage network usage and track configuration changes), I think it’s interesting that Citrix Online continues to recognize the growing need among companies to monitor and manage their cloud databases, apps, servers and networks.

Citrix Online introduced GoToAssist, Web-based remote support, about 10 years ago. To cater to individuals and small businesses, it created GoToAssist Express last year. But GoToManage gives GoToAssist customers new capabilities.

“This is exactly what is needed if you have distributed infrastructure,” said Brian de Haaff, Paglo’s CEO, in a story about the new service. With GoToManage, “MSPs and IT consultants can get a unified view of multiple companies’ IT infrastructures and offer proactive monitoring and alerting, while also offering remote access, file transfer capabilities and customer branding and reports.”

I also found it interesting that Citrix Online surveyed its customers and more than 60% wanted some form of monitoring solution.

Good news for the cloud. Profits were way up in Q4 2009 for Salesforce.com. And that positive news would seem to answer the lingering question that many in the business world have about the cloud: Can I trust a third party to store my proprietary business data on the web?

According to a report in a tech stock publication that I read, the cloud computing pioneer posted a 48% surge in profits, to $20.4 million, or 16 cents per share. Revenues climbed 22%, to $354 million. Apparently that performance beat what Wall Street was expecting: 15 cents per share and $342.3 million in revenues.

And incredibly, Salesforce.com attracted 4,600 new customers during the quarter, for a total of 72,500.

While this is yet another example of how well cloud services companies are faring (such as our own good fortune here at Monitis during 2009), there’s some bitter-sweetness in Salesforce’s good fortune. It’s going to get harder to pump out strong growth, as the company’s revenue base increases. That’s why Salesforce feels it necessary to keep enhancing with features such as social media capabilities.

I’ve no doubt we’ll see more growth from this amazing company, and from cloud industries, in general.

Some good news on the issue of security in the cloud.

First, CA, Inc., has just joined the Cloud Security Alliance as a corporate member to help establish and promote best practices for security in cloud computing. The CSA is a non-profit organization formed to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and to provide education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

In a release from the company, CA said it will work “with enterprise customers and cloud service providers to securely adopt and deliver cloud services.” The company offers several products to maintain security for customers, including a menu of identity and access management technologies.

CA’s long-standing involvement in developing security computing features should be a great asset to the CSA, and I congratulate the company on its involvement in CSA.

On another front, there’s a study that I found that shows that small- and medium-sized companies can increase their security by using cloud services, despite some risks. The study exploring the security risks of cloud computing comes from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT). It not only gives an overview of prices and functions offered by major cloud providers, but it also lays out in detail the risk assessments for various use cases.

The study asks such questions as:

• What happens when a cloud service fails?
• Who guarantees that company secrets are secure on the external servers used in cloud computing?
• Which security risks evolve when a cloud service subcontractor accesses the cloud systems?
• Is a company’s data truly destroyed after deletion?

“Almost every large cloud service provider had an incident in the past in the areas of availability or security,” says Werner Streitberger, one of the study’s authors. “The current offerings in cloud services show that, especially in the area of infrastructure, a number of security technologies have been applied already.” But Streitberger says that “cloud providers have not yet advanced the support of security technologies as much in the areas of architecture, management and compliance.”

Small and mid-sized companies are at an advantage here because “they can obtain security solutions as a service from a specialized provider and, thus, benefit from the provider’s experience in the implementation and running of secure services,” says Streitberger.

Indeed, companies can protect themselves with advanced solutions running 24/7 from anywhere in the world that monitor their data safety, the performance of cloud providers, even customers’ experiences on their websites.

The study also recommends that companies, especially large firms, look over SLAs microscopically – to ensure that the rights and duties between the cloud provider and user are clearly spelled out. “The current customary agreements only provide minimal warranty for the quality of service for the cloud. Security guarantees exist rudimentarily and the functions necessary for the guarantees are insufficiently documented by the cloud provider,” says the study.