The year’s not over yet, but 2010 has so far been a year for cloud computing advances. To name a few trends: more companies migrated from internal apps and databases. Service providers grew.

CIOs get serious about the Cloud

And, according to a new survey, CIOs around the world finally “got it” about the Cloud. CIOs are now better informed about the Cloud market and have become more ready to start making commitments in the cloud space, versus a year ago. What’s more, the new survey says that CIOs are now adding both public and private cloud models to their services sourcing portfolio, just as they’ve done in the past with outsourced and managed services.

What’s really interesting, however, is the changing attitude about the cloud among CIOs. IDC’s annual APEJ Cloud Computing end-user survey revealed that more CIOs now think of the Cloud as an extension of their sourcing strategies — rather than a collection of new web-based technologies.

I wish I could share some numbers from this survey with you, but the article I came across about the survey didn’t mention any. That’s okay, though, because what IDC has officially measured with a poll, I can confirm in my dealings every day with clients. CIOs are rapidly maturing in their attitudes toward and knowledge of the cloud — and the trend has only been hastened by economic necessities to pare IT costs.

How do I know this? I’m having more CIOs come up to me and say, “We’ve finally made the switch, but now we want to make sure our decision was the right one.” That’s why they’re following up cloud computing moves with decisions to monitor their cloud providers. Enterprises want to know when a cloud platform is down. And, if it’s up, they want to know how it’s performing. I can’t give you any stats yet on our customer growth rate…but I can tell you that I’m smiling writing this, rather than worrying.

I’m sure that CIOs will continue to “get it” about the Cloud. But more importantly, they’ll continue to realize the seriousness of their investment and protect that investment with good, cloud-based monitoring services.

Since we at Monitis monitor websites and traffic, as well as provide services like web load-testing, I’m always on the lookout for news or stories on the state of web hosting these days.

Well, I found some, and I thought I’d share; these three pieces of advice come from some promo material from a web-hosting company in Australia.

1. Don’t take others’ recommendations for a good web-hosting company. The best strategy is to search for web hosts online; read reviews from actual users. And, if you like, you can contact us, and we at Monitis will give you some good recommendations based on our experience monitoring them.

2. You should be worried if your site, and even the host’s site, goes down for more than 24 hours. What should concern you even more is if you haven’t received a prior warning that your site is down. This is why it’s so important to choose a service to actually watch over the hosting company — an objective party, if you will — who can provide you with notifications, preferably via a wide range of methods (e.g. phone, email, MSM) in the event of an outage. A side note: there’s no good reason for frequent or lengthy outages. Consider instead that the company might just not be doing a professional job managing their servers.

3. Don’t even consider web hosting outfits that don’t have the ability to automate or correctly administer your billing and payments. If you’ve got one already that can’t do this, get rid of them. Often, hosting companies deduct the monthly billing amount from your PayPal or bank account without breaking out charge information to display extra charges. Even if your web hosting company does provide this level of detail, keep close tabs on their billing methods.

Choose carefully when picking website hosts. The last thing you want is to aggravate your end-users and/or lose customers to a competitor who’s just a click away.

I came across an article about cloud computing and virtualization that was like a shot in the arm, and should be a sharp message to enterprises considering adopting cloud computing — or virtualization…but not necessarily both.

If that sounds confusing, so is the perception among many about what virtualization and cloud computing actually mean, according to the blog writer.

R Chandras

In a recent news story from Reuters, a major media outlet, virtualization and cloud computing are linked together. The story said: “International Business Machines Corp has been expanding its services business, as have other rivals like Hewlett-Packard Co and Oracle Corp. Such companies have also been stepping up investment in cloud computing, or “virtualization,” a technology that enables users to access data and software over the Internet and corporate networks.”

Yes, virtualization and cloud computing are related — but they’re entirely different concepts. There’s a word to explain virtualization, and that is: simulation. Virtualization — whether it be of memory, storage, OS services or anything else — is request fulfillment simulated to behave like real. Since the premier benefit of virtualization is to do more yet save on costs, “several make-believes can be produced from one “real,” according to the piece I read.

I like the way that was put.

But cloud computing is entirely a different animal. It’s literally computing over the Internet. Whether you’re talking about apps, databases, data feeds or anything else, they’re typically dispersed across the web and made available in the form of services. Those services can then be virtualized. I also like the notion that the cloud enables us to do more (not just with fewer resources, but more just by the very nature of the technology).

Despite the differences, one of the great things out there for companies using both virtualization and the cloud is that there are miracle services, such as 24/7 monitoring, that can help enterprises manage both. For example, Monitis’s independent cloud platform monitoring can keep you notified when your provider is falling back on your service level agreement. Perhaps your provider isn’t quite objective enough to give you accurate reports on uptime and downtime?

For companies using virtualized services, Monitis offers automation such as continual monitoring of virtualized servers.

Check us out at Monitis.

I read in a new survey of small business owners that they’re not very confident about an economic recovery and that considerable numbers are going to be exercising fiscally conservative strategies to get through expected tough times. For example, 62% see the current state of the U.S. economy as “poor,” while an equal number believe the economy is getting worse.  What’s more, over half are experiencing cash flow issues and about the same number expect to decrease business development spending over the next six months.

Source: Discover Card

What struck me most when reading these survey results was how small businesses are stuck between that proverbial rock and hard place. Yeah, they want to grow and be prosperous, but the resources just aren’t there to fund the growth.

Well, in at least one area of small business operations, IT, the beautiful thing about the cloud is that it allows you to avoid spending tons of internal resources for computing needs because, if it’s a public cloud,  there are multiple tenants to share costs.  And small businesses pay for whatever data storage or app usage they use — nothing more. And when it comes to monitoring the website that you put on the cloud, there are very low-cost solutions, too. Take the free tools offered by Mon.itor.us. To name a few, there’s external monitoring (websites and network devices), internal monitoring (CPU, memory, hard disk, and Intranet) and web load testing (making sure your site can handle an attack before it happens).

If you’re a small business and funds are tight, you can still make sure your public face, meaning your website, is running smoothly and, if not, learn about it quickly via notifications — in time to take action.  It doesn’t have to cost much.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about schools taking up cloud computing and virtual technology to save money, produce new efficiencies and boost services to students.  It’s remarkable to me how the pace of migration is picking up, and so I thought I’d add another note to the list of schools migrating.

Seems the University of North Texas Dallas — with some ambitious 10-year growth plans in mind (It wants to educate 30,000 students by then from the current 3,000) — has begun investing in the development of a data center to support a virtual desktop environment running Pano Logic gear.

Without getting into too much detail, the devices, which resemble small boxes, work like this: they connect peripheral devices operated by the user–such as the keyboard, mouse, display, and audio–to a virtualized Windows desktop that runs on a server in the school’s data center. A hypervisor hosts drivers and the operating system for those users, and that taps into the server’s memory, processors, and storage.

It costs the university about $1,000 each for new computers, and the school’s decision to move to virtual desktops has allowed IT there to redirect funds to bolster the data center. With the money it would have spent on desktops, the school deployed a storage area network and licensed 300 Pano Logic seats at $300 each for an equal number of virtual desktops.

One neat thing about the new setup that I read about is that the school will build digital kiosks running virtual desktops around campus and sees itself outfitting small collaboration rooms with the software and other hardware for team projects.

As I’ve said many times in this blog, virtualization and/or the cloud is a blessing for organizations, especially schools, looking to grow — yet save.  But you’ve got to have the right tool in place, such as 100% cloud-based monitoring of servers, to keep an eye on performance, track issues and then receive good information via notifications that will help you prevent disasters. Then you can pretty much guarantee better service to students and faculty and save money, too.

Another week, another Monitis video, only this time it’s not really a tutorial but a demo of our dashboard features. It starts out by showing the basics. You can make multiple tabs and place different information on each, so it’s not unlike a browser within a browser. Data for a specific monitor is placed into a widget you can easilyy resize or drag and drop. In these widgets you can see a table or chart of monitoring data. Clicking the edit button opens a drop down menu containing all settings, allowing you to change all the settings of a monitor without navigating away.

The toolbar at the bottom right of the page contains some useful features. First there’s the Share Page button, which allows you to share a read-only version of any tab on your dashboard with the outside world via a link. You can place your company logo on these shared pages. Next, the column button lets you change the number of columns on a tab to see information in a more or less condensed fashion. There is a Flash button which lets you taggle between Flash and non-Flash charts, but since we are almost completely HTML5 now, this will soon be phased out. There is a button that lets you collapse and expand all widgets at once on a page, useful for finding things fast. There’s a calendar which lets you go back in time and see historical data just by clicking a past date. There are also links to Support and News.

In My Account>Options, you can change your default language (English, Russian, French and German are supported), skin colors(Blue, Grey, Pink, Blackberry), and date format(US and UK). Under My Account you can also add Notes and a Task List to your dashboard, and access your Affiliate link. All users have their own affiliate link which rewards them with 10% of all first year revenues of signups through that link. As always, you can view this and other tutorials on our Tutorials page or our Youtube page.

Pro-Clouders to Debate with Skeptics

Know any cloud skeptics in your circle of friends and professional associates that would be okay with sharing their views with the world?

Cloud expert and fellow blogger Phil Wainewright is staging something called the “Summer Slam 2010,” a webcast in which organizer Appirio, a cloud integrator, Wainewright and others will debate  the future of the public cloud. Some questions they’ll consider: “Will companies move 100% to the public cloud?  How will companies handle SaaS silos? Are hybrid cloud environments the end game? What is the public cloud’s biggest limitation to widespread adoption?”

This event is a follow-up to Waineright’s Forecasting Fisticuffs webinar that was held last January and was apparently a huge success, as 2,000 people either attended or listened to the webinar replay. But what Waineright and his buddies are looking for is someone who is a complete skeptic on the promise of the cloud and what it can deliver in terms of revolutionary efficiencies and savings to businesses of all sizes. Do you know someone like that? Well, they’re invited to participate in the webinar debate — which will take place Thursday, Aug. 19th at 10 am Pacific time. Hurry, though, nominations for the biggest cloud skeptic in your life will only be accepted until this Friday, August 8th. Send your nomination via Twitter (Tweet about it using the hashtag #SSLAM2010 or post to Appirio’s Facebook page.

You can also use this link to register for the webinar.

Personally, I’m definitely going to try to attend this, or at least watch the replay. Because, as you can probably guess what I’m about to say: I am surely a cloud enthusiast…not a skeptic, having seen my cloud-based monitoring business take off in leaps and bounds, and listening to the growing din of enthusiasm of my client base for moving apps and data onto the cloud — not just to save money but also (for smaller clients) to gain greater IT resources than they could ever leverage themselves. So, I’m anxious to hear the latest negative viewpoints and dark visions.

Frankly, this optimism among my client base is one of the reasons we keep innovating and enhancing our monitoring tools.  For example, Monitis just now this week is rolling out new video tutorials to guide users through setting up each type of monitor. The videos are located under the Resources tab of our homepage.  One of the videos is for Full Page Load monitoring, which has been a huge hit since we added it to our services a few weeks ago. It allows users to analyze how objects in their webpage are loading in real browsers in different parts of the world and identify bottlenecks. This is an extremely important measure for understanding user experience, as studies have shown that even a slight lag in load time can cause a noticeable drop in viewership and sales.

So, if cloud-based services, such as full-page load monitoring, can help companies reduce leakage in viewership and sales, and we can prove it, I find it hard to swallow skepticism about that!

Perhaps some people see cloud computing in terms that are too simplistic, e.g., you adopt or don’t, it’s one kind or nothing. Not ING Americas, the U.S. division of the Dutch banking firm.

I recently read in a banking magazine that ING was first attracted to the concept of cloud computing when it began estimating the current and future cost and time required to run certain applications, according to Alan Boehme, SVP, IT strategy and enterprise architecture, at ING Americas, who was quoted in the story. “We looked at: Can we run the jobs faster and give our analysts and others more time to make business decisions, and can we do that at a cost that’s equal to or less than it is today?” he said.

Guess that they found out: A projection that the bank could cut processing time and costs by as much as 50% by using cloud services.

But that savings discovery is just part of the story. After testing cloud computing last year, it applied one of its core applications across several key providers, including Rackspace, Amazon and Salesforce.com. In doing so, the bank moved beyond the simple notion that you have to put all your eggs (data or apps) in one basket (a provider).

And the bank understands that “different parts of ING will be able to take advantage of cloud computing at different rates,” said Boehme, in the article, who estimated that some of the financial institution’s business units will be able to move 50% to 60% of their processing to the cloud depending on the platform, while others may only migrate about 10% of apps and data.

All this is very interesting to read and indicates to me that enterprises — often due to economic necessity — are becoming more and more sophisticated in their understanding of and approach to the cloud. And that is why we at Monitis are seeing heightened interest in third-party monitoring solutions that measure things like cloud platform up time and provide warnings when apps are down.

Monitoring your site’s uptime is important, but it’s just as important to know the cause of downtime. That’s why Monitis offers internal monitoring, so you can know which processes on your server crashed before your site went down. Traffic monitoring also gives you insight into your website’s performance by allowing you to correlate the number of website visitors to response time. There are lots of tools available for monitoring traffic, but it’s harder to see their numbers side by side with monitoring data. Our new tutorial shows how to set up and view a traffic monitor. To view this and other tutorials or request a live demo, check our Demo page, and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

To get started, simply go to Add Monitor>Traffic Monitor, enter the URL you’d like to track visits for, and a bit of javascript code will appear. Cut and paste this code at the end of the body section of your HTML source code. Now Monitis will record the number of visits you get each hour. You can see this data on your dashboard in a table or bar chart. You can also create a report to analyze daily, weekly, or monthly trends.

A heavy book!

What would you rather carry on your back — textbooks or lighter than air apps and data?

When I went to school (six miles each way in the snow and rain, LOL), every year the books got heavier. Now, students can look forward to easy trips home with courses online — brought to them by the cloud. I recently read a commentary that said textbooks met the needs of 19th and 2oth century students, but that they fall short of the needs of today’s interactive students. “They are old-school delivery that supports old-school pedagogy,” the author stated. ” (OK, I must admit, I had to go to Wikipedia to find out what “pedagogy” means.)

Instead, cloud computing is much more appropriate for both students and faculty and staff.  The more schools that adopt the cloud, the more they can replace books — which by the way, have a tendency to get rather stale and outdated fast and cost a lot to replace — with cloud-based content delivery.

We at Monitis have been working with more more schools to help them ensure reliability of content-as-a-service.  But they are going beyond course content. The cloud is settling into ivy-covered walls with such resources as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, data visualization and analysis applications, teacher and administrator tools, and voice/video communications.  Often, much of that is provided online by the likes of Google and Amazon and Rackspace, and that’s why we are seeing big demand from schools for cloud platform monitoring, too.

When I think of all the schools I’ve worked with that are trimming IT budgets and making way for future scalability, boosting services to students, ensuring updated and current course content and making administration more efficient, I am impressed by their faith in the cloud movement. Faith is one thing, but I think that they are also good business moves, and the drivers within institutions–whether they be educators, IT folks or students themselves — are far-sighted and good decision makers.

Everybody wants to improve education and our educational system, but sometimes it takes a little thinking out of the box to make forward strides.