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.

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.

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.

I can tell you this from talking day to day with companies looking to give their web businesses an edge: they are not happy with the technology that’s supporting their sites during all-important peak traffic periods, for instance during the holiday season or a special promotion.

How unhappy? I read about a recent survey that said nearly three-quarters of online shoppers experienced poor performance during peak periods compared to other times. And of those:

• 72% reported slower websites
• 58% reported errors on web pages
• and more than half said they couldn’t complete their transactions

Whether you’re selling widgets to other businesses or lipstick to consumers, these numbers aren’t good. You want your site to run smoothly especially during peak traffic periods. It’s a given that’ll run like clockwork during normal or slow traffic periods.

What’s worse, the survey said that more than three-quarters who had problems abandoned a site for a competitor, and then most (88%) wouldn’t return, after a bad experience. And what’s even more worrisome, given how powerful social media tools can make or break a product, service or company these days, look at these findings:

After a poor experience…

• Nearly half left feeling negative about the company
• 42% discussed it either with friends or online

My advice to website owners is to be prepared for peak times to avoid losing customers, and use available tools to test performance, such as load testing. Monitis’ WebLoadTester uses cloud computing power for instant web applications and network testing. At your request, WebLoadTester is able to simulate a large number of virtual visitors, each with their own unique user name/login and task.  On Demand WebLoadTester helps ensure that your site’s web pages will continue to work at peak performance when many visitors come. 

Heavy user traffic is never a bad thing, unless your web system is under too much stress.  WebLoadTester will help you determine how your system responds to that traffic.  You can use the service at any time, day or night, to ensure that your websites and applications are ready for an army of visitors – whenever they arrive.

I read in BusinessWeek that Microsoft business software president Stephen Elop expects the giant’s launch of Office 2010 in June, which will include a cloud-based version, to pump up revenue and profit.

I quote: “In that cloud environment, we are not only selling them [cutomers] software but we are also saying, ‘We’ll take care of your networking, your hardware, your operations, your customer support.’ “We’re doing much more work for the customer. What that does is increases revenue and allows us to participate in more profit.”

But Bob Evans of InformationWeek raises some important questions and injects a bit of doubt into Elop’s sunny scenario. Bob says: “Rational? Absolutely. Likely to happen? Maybe, and maybe not.

His theory is that, of course, it could happen if Microsoft can package enough value and flexibility into its cloud pricing model so that its huge base of Office users “decides that the transition costs for switching to Google Apps are prohibitive.”

So Microsoft’s big challenge is to set its prices not so much to grow revenue at a remarkable rate, but instead to allow customers to lower their cost of IT. But if Google continues to aggressively innovate with new products and price them competitively, that could put a serious crimp in the number of large clients that Microsoft is hoping to be the boosters of its cloud-based revenue.

Plus, who knows what kind of business collaborations that offer enhanced cloud services, such as transaction and platform monitoring services, will form in the future? That could add a bit of complexity to Microsoft’s business plan – and Google’s, too, for that matter.

Says Bob: “As we’ve seen repeatedly during other tectonic shifts in the technology business, the status quo rarely survives and it’s pretty much impossible to project a steady-state future. So while Elop’s expectation that more work for enterprise customers will logically mean more revenue and profit for Microsoft, I contend that his plan looks a whole lot better on paper here in February than it will when the cloud version of Office 2010 hits the market in four months.”

Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Microsoft’s new suite looks like, and how businesses and end-users take to it, too. Will it be more robust, more dependable and easier to use than Google’s apps? And will it be strong enough to withstand potential new competition from constantly evolving and innovating cloud players?

Last week San Antonio-TX-based Rackspace introduced a new cloud computing program for its 1,500 global partners.

The new cloud partner program will be different from other Rackspace partner programs – managed hosting and Email & Apps – as there will be a different compensation structure offered to partners.

Rackspace’s cloud partner program is for two types of partners: affiliates and resellers. Affiliates will earn 5% of customers’ monthly spend on cloud computing for three years and commissions start during the first month of active billing. Meanwhile, Rackspace reseller partners buy cloud hosting services and resell them to customers and generate profits from customer fees.

“Initially, we’re treating this as a separate partner program,” Fuller said, in a story. Rackspace e-mailed current partners information on the cloud partner program on February 18th, containing a link to sign up and to access additional details.

It looks like Rackspace was motivated to create the new partner cloud platform due to rising revenue from the technology. In the fourth quarter, Rackspace reported overall revenue of $169.5 million, an increase of more than 4% from the previous quarter and up more than 18% from fourth-quarter 2009.

In particular, cloud computing generated great business for Rackspace. In the fourth quarter, computing revenue rose to $17.1 million, up from $15.3 million in the third quarter. For the whole year, cloud revenue skyrocketed nearly 125% — to $56.4 million, according to the company.

Glad to see expanding choices for companies that want to offer customers cloud services, and even more pleased to read that Rackspace’s revenue is derived more and more from cloud computing. That’s a trend we’ve been experiencing here at Monitis, too, as more and more firms migrate to the cloud and look for independent services to monitor performance and reliability of hosting services.

Don’t forget to have a service level agreement (SLA) in place, as well as an exit strategy when dealing with cloud providers. That’s the message of a recent article that I read on how to protect your company’s investment in the cloud. Great, timely advice, as companies globally gear up to make 2010 the year of the cloud.

CEOs keep reading about the cloud and inquiring how their CIOs are making plans for the future. So there are a few things that CIOs can do to ensure their companies take advantage of cloud savings and efficiencies, while mitigating risk, too.

One sound piece of advice is to avoid being “dismissive” of cloud trends, advises the article, as business units will go elsewhere for guidance. Second, CIOs should advise business leaders on cloud risks and their strategies to mitigate issues such as security, stability and data privacy issues. Lastly, CIOs need to establish realistic and balanced service-level agreements after deciding to use a cloud service.

Going beyond establishing an SLA, CIOs should create a step-by-step plan that covers assessment to implementation in order to help business managers balance risk, fiscal impact, and flexibility. Good management demands that there be a plan on how to proceed once a decision is made to adopt a cloud approach for software as a service, platform as a service, or infrastructure as a service. Not only that, the plan should spell out what to do if and when things go wrong.

“SLAs are all about recourse and what you can do to protect yourself when bad things happen with your cloud service provider, but SLAs aren’t the only recourse,” says the article. Switching service providers or using internal resources are other possibilities.

Another good move is to keep a close watch on whether your provider is keeping up with their part of the contract. That’s where SLA monitoring comes in. You can hire an independent company that can monitor from the web, and that’s important because even when Cloud computing providers offer some sort of monitoring, there is an inherent conflict of interest – as they are keen to show higher uptime.

On the other hand, monitoring services by independent firms, such as Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework, increases the credibility of cloud computing providers’ claims, which benefits both users and the industry, as a whole.