Cloud computing is coming of age in large enterprises, according to a new study of North American and European IT professionals. Enterprises are active in the cloud, and their virtualization efforts are contributing to broader interest in cloud computing. The results also indicate a shift toward approaching IT using "cloud thinking," accelerating the uses of cloud computing and helping to align IT decision makers and implementers around common goals of efficiency, flexibility and scalability.
Key findings:
-- More than 80 percent of enterprises and 92 percent of the largest enterprises have at least one cloud service; 53 percent of IT implementers indicate having more than six cloud services.
-- The primary incentives for organizations exploring the cloud are to save money (44 percent) and gain greater cost control (35 percent). IT staff are incented by increasing efficiency (35 percent) and a desire to work with the latest technologies (34 percent).
-- Security and control remain perceived barriers to the cloud. Executives are primarily concerned about security (68 percent) and poor service quality (40 percent), while roughly half of all respondents consider risk of job loss and loss of control as top deterrents.
-- Virtualization maturity leads to more optimistic attitudes toward cloud: Virtualization-intensive organizations are four times more likely to move as many services as possible to both public and private clouds.
-- Attitudes toward public and private clouds align. Respondents cite cost savings, resource efficiencies, flexibility and servicing global users as drivers for public clouds; similarly, cost, scalability, flexibility and manageability are drivers for private clouds. Security is noted as both a driver and deterrent for public and private clouds.
-- Collaboration tools lead cloud deployments at 75 percent, with hosted email, antivirus/spam filters and web conferencing noted as the most common applications being deployed in the cloud by large enterprises.
-- Infrastructure and development platforms in the cloud (Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service) appear to be poised for growth with 58 percent of large organizations already using these services, and 43 percent considering them. Such use and consideration sets up infrastructure clouds as the next wave of cloud adoption.
-- On average, roughly one-third of x86 servers are virtualized within the enterprise today. Nearly half of these companies (46 percent) indicate a "managed" stage of virtualization, with the ability to move virtual machines and manage them for high availability. As enterprises move along the virtualization maturity lifecycle from basic (unmanaged virtual servers), to managed, to advanced (dynamic resource scheduling and consolidated back-up), and on to "cloud-like" (advanced virtual automation, full disaster recovery via virtualization), the applications they earmark for the cloud also begin to shift.
-- Email leads in the managed stage (53 percent); desktop virtualization and databases peak during the advanced stage (30 percent); and industry-specific applications top all others in the cloud-like stage (32 percent).
-- In addition, respondents indicate plans to continue to move mission-critical applications from non-virtualized infrastructure to virtual machines over the next couple of years. Enterprises are running nearly half (47 percent) of these applications on non-virtualized infrastructure today, which will drop by 17 percent in the next two years. Of that 17 percent, 10 percent will shift to public and private clouds.
-- As IT reorganizes itself for more dynamic virtualized environments, the tendency to embrace the cloud rises. Virtualization-intensive organizations are roughly four times more likely to move as many services as possible into both public and private clouds. Overall, the perceptions of cloud computing take on a more optimistic tone as organizations advance their technical infrastructure to support more dynamic environments.
-- When asked to share their viewpoints on drivers and barriers to the adoption of public and private clouds, respondents cite cost as a driver and barrier, suggesting the true impact and relevance of "cost savings" is still unresolved.
-- Drivers of public cloud adoption also cite resource efficiencies, flexibility and servicing global users as key drivers. Deterrents include security, compliance, internal resistance and the perception that public clouds are not suitable for some business applications.
-- Cost and security also confound private cloud adoption, with respondents citing them as both drivers and barriers. Additional drivers include scalability, flexibility and manageability, while complexity, availability and reliability, and slow adoption of new technology are seen as deterrents.
-- Survey participants also provided input on advocates and opponents of cloud computing within their organizations. Senior management (C-level and senior IT executives) are the primary advocates for public clouds, while those with more day-to-day responsibilities over virtualization and servers are seen as the leading private cloud advocates (32 percent of directors of IT operations or senior data center management, 31 percent of virtualization team, 30 percent of server management team). Not surprisingly, the security team topped the list as the primary opponent for both public and private clouds (44 percent and 27 percent respectively), with business unit leaders/managers sharing that attitude (23 percent and 18 percent respectively).
-- Overall, the study confirms large organizations are embracing both public and private clouds. Enterprises are already active in cloud computing. Virtualization is fostering the confidence and skills needed to encourage further adoption among large organizations to build private clouds. Ultimately, living in this duopoly of public and private cloud environments will require enterprises to adapt their integration tools and management philosophies to provide end-user services across both types of clouds.
Comment from Adam Famularo, general manager, Cloud Computing Business, CA Technologies: This study confirms that large enterprises are exploring the benefits of the cloud, and are looking to expand from basic services like collaboration to more complex Infrastructure and Platform cloud services. It validates a trend we predicted, that IT executives are rapidly becoming orchestrators of an IT supply chain made up of internal and external services. With this shift comes a growing need for sophisticated management and security, allowing enterprises to change how they think about IT to reap the full rewards that cloud computing offers - agility, efficiency and scalability.
About the study: This Management Insight Technologies study was executed as a web-based study. The sample was collected in September 2010 and is comprised of 434 IT professionals across two regions - North America (273) and Europe (161). Respondents working for companies that produce cloud computing software were excluded. Qualified respondents had to be sufficiently knowledgeable about their company's IT environments. The screener and sample frame were developed to target a fairly even representation of IT decision makers and IT implementers and of the three company sizes within each region.
Contact: For more details and to learn more about the survey, download a copy of "The Arrival of 'Cloud Thinking': How and Why Cloud Computing Has Come of Age In Large Enterprises" here.
Contact: http://www.ca.com/cloud
Friday, December 17, 2010
Companies More Likely To Virtualize Applications Than Move To Cloud In 2011
Today's enterprise applications continue to grow in number and complexity, and are increasingly business and revenue critical. Recent trends in application development and management, such as the increasing use of service-oriented architecture (SOA), Agile development and the move toward virtualization, are adding to this complexity. In an attempt to wrestle with these new environments, companies are beginning to adopt a collaborative "DevOps" approach to managing mission-critical applications.
According to the survey:
-- Yes to Virtualization, still unsure about Cloud: Respondents indicated greater interest in proceeding with virtualization projects than migrating applications to the cloud, with 54 percent saying they have virtualization projects on dock for 2011. A resounding 67 percent of respondents said they have no plans to migrate their applications to the cloud next year.
-- Rise of "DevOps" approach: Nearly a third of respondents report that they have adopted a management approach where Development and Operations share the same reporting structure and are jointly responsible for the performance mission-critical applications.
-- Agile and SOA continue to grow in 2011: The vast majority of respondents release new capabilities multiple times per year and operate applications built with SOA architectures. In 2011, 49 percent of respondents say they expect to ramp up agile development, and 66 percent expect to leverage additional SOA initiatives for mission-critical apps.
-- Application outages and performance failures may be due to improper app management: In 2010, 88 percent of respondents reported they experienced at least one Severity 1 problem in regards to mission-critical apps, and nearly 50 percent had experienced five or more such problems. This may be due to the lack of performance management tools. The survey found that 37 percent of respondents "fly blind" and use no APM tool to manage their mission-critical applications, while 30 percent use a homegrown tool.
Comment from Jyoti Bansal, CEO of AppDynamics: Application environments are evolving at a rapid pace, and we see enterprises grappling with a continued state of change and complexity as they adopt SOA and agile development practices and make strides toward virtualization and cloud computing. It's heartening to see companies adopt a DevOps mentality to address application performance management, rather than try to manage this complexity from silos within their organization. We've seen many IT teams succeed with this approach. Applications are at the heart of almost every business today and are mission-critical to most. Making sure that enterprise applications perform as expected and that issues can be identified and remedied quickly - regardless the environment - is crucial to the success of any business.
About the survey: AppDynamics conducted the 2011 Application Performance Management Survey, "Apps on the Move," polling 140 IT professionals who oversee application performance in Java or .NET environments. The survey provides a snapshot of application performance practices in 2010 and how these will evolve in 2011.
Contact: http://www.appdynamics.com
According to the survey:
-- Yes to Virtualization, still unsure about Cloud: Respondents indicated greater interest in proceeding with virtualization projects than migrating applications to the cloud, with 54 percent saying they have virtualization projects on dock for 2011. A resounding 67 percent of respondents said they have no plans to migrate their applications to the cloud next year.
-- Rise of "DevOps" approach: Nearly a third of respondents report that they have adopted a management approach where Development and Operations share the same reporting structure and are jointly responsible for the performance mission-critical applications.
-- Agile and SOA continue to grow in 2011: The vast majority of respondents release new capabilities multiple times per year and operate applications built with SOA architectures. In 2011, 49 percent of respondents say they expect to ramp up agile development, and 66 percent expect to leverage additional SOA initiatives for mission-critical apps.
-- Application outages and performance failures may be due to improper app management: In 2010, 88 percent of respondents reported they experienced at least one Severity 1 problem in regards to mission-critical apps, and nearly 50 percent had experienced five or more such problems. This may be due to the lack of performance management tools. The survey found that 37 percent of respondents "fly blind" and use no APM tool to manage their mission-critical applications, while 30 percent use a homegrown tool.
Comment from Jyoti Bansal, CEO of AppDynamics: Application environments are evolving at a rapid pace, and we see enterprises grappling with a continued state of change and complexity as they adopt SOA and agile development practices and make strides toward virtualization and cloud computing. It's heartening to see companies adopt a DevOps mentality to address application performance management, rather than try to manage this complexity from silos within their organization. We've seen many IT teams succeed with this approach. Applications are at the heart of almost every business today and are mission-critical to most. Making sure that enterprise applications perform as expected and that issues can be identified and remedied quickly - regardless the environment - is crucial to the success of any business.
About the survey: AppDynamics conducted the 2011 Application Performance Management Survey, "Apps on the Move," polling 140 IT professionals who oversee application performance in Java or .NET environments. The survey provides a snapshot of application performance practices in 2010 and how these will evolve in 2011.
Contact: http://www.appdynamics.com
Thursday, December 9, 2010
IT Managers See Widespread Private And Public Cloud Adoption
Global IT professionals are creating new job opportunities by increasing collaboration among teams in the data center, and adopting new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing, but they are also struggling to maintain security and data governance as employees demand more off-site access to networks and information, a study has found.
For example, across the 13 countries in the global study, 52 percent of the IT professionals stated they use or plan to use cloud computing, while much higher cloud adoption rates are predicted in Brazil (70 percent), China (69 percent) and India (76 percent). Across the world, respondents rated the following as their top data center priorities for the next three years: improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 percent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 percent), increase data center resilience (19 percent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 percent).
Workers want flexible access to corporate information from any mobile device, anywhere, anytime, and to the results released in November, which revealed disconnects in worker expectations around information access, IT policies and employee awareness of policies.
Key highlights of the study:
1) Cloud Computing Trends
-- Cloud use today: Across the study's 13 countries, only an average of 18 percent of respondents are using cloud computing today, while an additional 34 percent plan to use the cloud.
-- Top cloud users today: Brazil (27 percent), Germany (27 percent), India (26 percent), U.S. (23 percent) and Mexico (22 percent) top the list of countries that are already taking advantage of cloud computing, exceeding the average (18 percent) across all countries.
-- Future cloud use: A large majority (88 percent) of IT respondents predict that they will be storing some percentage of their company's data and applications in private or public clouds within the next three years.
-- Private clouds: One in three IT professionals said more than half of their company's data and applications will be in private clouds within the next three years. Private cloud adoption was predicted to be higher in Mexico (71 percent), Brazil (53 percent) and the U.S. (46 percent).
-- Timing for public clouds: Of those respondents that will use public clouds, one of every three (34 percent) plan to deploy within one year, and 44 percent predicted their companies would use public clouds within the next two years; 21 percent are expected to do so within two to three years.
2)Virtualization Trends
-- Server virtualization is not yet widespread in production and non-production environments. Only 29 percent of the respondents worldwide have more than half their production servers virtualized, and only 28 percent have more than half of non-production servers virtualized.
-- Top reasons to deploy virtualization: IT professionals cited an increase in IT agility (30 percent) as the top reason, followed by the ability to optimize resources to reduce costs (24 percent) and by faster application provisioning (18 percent).
-- Virtualization inhibitors: The greatest hurdles to virtualization included Security (20 percent), stability concerns (18 percent), difficulty in building operational processes for a virtualized environment (16 percent) and management (16 percent).
-- Virtualization on the rise: The picture changes over the next three years. Almost half of the IT respondents (46 percent) expect that 50 to 100 percent of their production environment servers will be virtualized.
-- IT professionals see big savings from virtualization: Two of five (40 percent) respondents expect a data center cost reduction of between 25 and 49 percent, and another 30 percent expect up to 24 percent in cost savings.
3) Data Center Trends, Concerns, Priorities
-- Top data center concerns: IT managers rated their top data center concerns as security, performance, reliability, and budget for maintenance and management.
-- Top technologies and trends: One out of three IT managers cited mobile access to information as the trend that would most affect the data center, especially in China (47 percent), Brazil (40 percent) and Germany (39 percent). Rated nearly as high were virtualization (32 percent), unified data center fabric (29 percent), desktop virtualization (27 percent) and cloud computing (17 percent).
-- Business trends that will most impact their data centers: IT managers were asked to select all those business trends that would most impact their data center over the next three years. Two out of five (40 percent) stated that increases in applications and data will be the top business trend for the next three years, followed closely by security and risk management (39 percent) and cost reduction (34 percent). Also high on the list were support for a distributed mobile or remote workforce, and a greater use of video and collaboration technologies.
-- Role of the network: About seven of every 10 IT respondents (69 percent) predict an increasing role for the network due to its central position in the data center and its ability to unite and manage resources.
-- Top data center priorities: Worldwide, the top data center priorities for the next three years were to improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 percent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 percent), increase data center resilience (19 percent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 percent).
-- Primary data center strategy: More than one in four IT respondents (28 percent) named a unified data center fabric to unite storage and local area network data traffic as the top technology strategy in their data centers, with 23 percent naming data center virtualization, followed by cloud computing (18 percent), unified computing (17 percent) and desktop virtualization (13 percent).
-- Unified computing: Although unified computing is a very new technology, about one of five (19 percent) IT professionals had already tested or deployed it, while another 41 percent plan to test or deploy a unified computing solution in the next 12 months.
-- Average number of data centers: IT managers indicate that the server capacity of their company is housed at an average of 14 data centers.
4) Data Center Career Opportunities: New Job Roles and Team Collaboration
-- Top career benefits: The trend toward unified data center infrastructure has fostered greater collaboration among formerly separated IT teams and given rise to new training programs, new certifications and new job roles and titles.
-- IT career opportunities: Approximately 50 percent of IT professionals predicted the development of new IT career opportunities over the next three years as a result of cross-training and collaboration among formerly separate teams. More than a quarter (27 percent) cited greater efficiency as the reason for collaboration among IT teams, and 25 percent rated the deployment of new technologies as necessitating closer IT team integration.
-- Career growth: Countries that predicted the greatest development of new IT careers due to cross-training and collaboration were India (59 percent), China (56 percent), Spain (53 percent) and Mexico (53 percent).
-- Job opportunities: Across all countries, 43 percent expect new IT job opportunities opening up due to the latest training and certification programs for data center managers. This was the case especially in China (64 percent) and the U.S. (52 percent).
-- Overall, 41 percent see new career opportunities opening up, with job descriptions and titles such as data center architect and data center manager; leading this trend are China (75 percent) and India (51 percent).
About the study: The study was commissioned by Cisco and conducted by InsightExpress, a third-party market-research firm based in the United States. The study includes two surveys: one on employees, the other on IT professionals. Each survey included 100 respondents in each of the 13 countries, resulting in a survey pool of 2,600 people. The 13 countries were Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States.
Comment from Lew Tucker, Cisco's chief technology officer, cloud computing: The data center is evolving to meet employee expectations for accessing networks, applications and information anywhere at any time with any device. IT professionals worldwide are embracing new technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, desktop virtualization, and unified data center infrastructure to meet employee expectations while helping their companies meet their businesses goals.
Contact: http://www.cisco.com
For example, across the 13 countries in the global study, 52 percent of the IT professionals stated they use or plan to use cloud computing, while much higher cloud adoption rates are predicted in Brazil (70 percent), China (69 percent) and India (76 percent). Across the world, respondents rated the following as their top data center priorities for the next three years: improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 percent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 percent), increase data center resilience (19 percent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 percent).
Workers want flexible access to corporate information from any mobile device, anywhere, anytime, and to the results released in November, which revealed disconnects in worker expectations around information access, IT policies and employee awareness of policies.
Key highlights of the study:
1) Cloud Computing Trends
-- Cloud use today: Across the study's 13 countries, only an average of 18 percent of respondents are using cloud computing today, while an additional 34 percent plan to use the cloud.
-- Top cloud users today: Brazil (27 percent), Germany (27 percent), India (26 percent), U.S. (23 percent) and Mexico (22 percent) top the list of countries that are already taking advantage of cloud computing, exceeding the average (18 percent) across all countries.
-- Future cloud use: A large majority (88 percent) of IT respondents predict that they will be storing some percentage of their company's data and applications in private or public clouds within the next three years.
-- Private clouds: One in three IT professionals said more than half of their company's data and applications will be in private clouds within the next three years. Private cloud adoption was predicted to be higher in Mexico (71 percent), Brazil (53 percent) and the U.S. (46 percent).
-- Timing for public clouds: Of those respondents that will use public clouds, one of every three (34 percent) plan to deploy within one year, and 44 percent predicted their companies would use public clouds within the next two years; 21 percent are expected to do so within two to three years.
2)Virtualization Trends
-- Server virtualization is not yet widespread in production and non-production environments. Only 29 percent of the respondents worldwide have more than half their production servers virtualized, and only 28 percent have more than half of non-production servers virtualized.
-- Top reasons to deploy virtualization: IT professionals cited an increase in IT agility (30 percent) as the top reason, followed by the ability to optimize resources to reduce costs (24 percent) and by faster application provisioning (18 percent).
-- Virtualization inhibitors: The greatest hurdles to virtualization included Security (20 percent), stability concerns (18 percent), difficulty in building operational processes for a virtualized environment (16 percent) and management (16 percent).
-- Virtualization on the rise: The picture changes over the next three years. Almost half of the IT respondents (46 percent) expect that 50 to 100 percent of their production environment servers will be virtualized.
-- IT professionals see big savings from virtualization: Two of five (40 percent) respondents expect a data center cost reduction of between 25 and 49 percent, and another 30 percent expect up to 24 percent in cost savings.
3) Data Center Trends, Concerns, Priorities
-- Top data center concerns: IT managers rated their top data center concerns as security, performance, reliability, and budget for maintenance and management.
-- Top technologies and trends: One out of three IT managers cited mobile access to information as the trend that would most affect the data center, especially in China (47 percent), Brazil (40 percent) and Germany (39 percent). Rated nearly as high were virtualization (32 percent), unified data center fabric (29 percent), desktop virtualization (27 percent) and cloud computing (17 percent).
-- Business trends that will most impact their data centers: IT managers were asked to select all those business trends that would most impact their data center over the next three years. Two out of five (40 percent) stated that increases in applications and data will be the top business trend for the next three years, followed closely by security and risk management (39 percent) and cost reduction (34 percent). Also high on the list were support for a distributed mobile or remote workforce, and a greater use of video and collaboration technologies.
-- Role of the network: About seven of every 10 IT respondents (69 percent) predict an increasing role for the network due to its central position in the data center and its ability to unite and manage resources.
-- Top data center priorities: Worldwide, the top data center priorities for the next three years were to improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 percent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 percent), increase data center resilience (19 percent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 percent).
-- Primary data center strategy: More than one in four IT respondents (28 percent) named a unified data center fabric to unite storage and local area network data traffic as the top technology strategy in their data centers, with 23 percent naming data center virtualization, followed by cloud computing (18 percent), unified computing (17 percent) and desktop virtualization (13 percent).
-- Unified computing: Although unified computing is a very new technology, about one of five (19 percent) IT professionals had already tested or deployed it, while another 41 percent plan to test or deploy a unified computing solution in the next 12 months.
-- Average number of data centers: IT managers indicate that the server capacity of their company is housed at an average of 14 data centers.
4) Data Center Career Opportunities: New Job Roles and Team Collaboration
-- Top career benefits: The trend toward unified data center infrastructure has fostered greater collaboration among formerly separated IT teams and given rise to new training programs, new certifications and new job roles and titles.
-- IT career opportunities: Approximately 50 percent of IT professionals predicted the development of new IT career opportunities over the next three years as a result of cross-training and collaboration among formerly separate teams. More than a quarter (27 percent) cited greater efficiency as the reason for collaboration among IT teams, and 25 percent rated the deployment of new technologies as necessitating closer IT team integration.
-- Career growth: Countries that predicted the greatest development of new IT careers due to cross-training and collaboration were India (59 percent), China (56 percent), Spain (53 percent) and Mexico (53 percent).
-- Job opportunities: Across all countries, 43 percent expect new IT job opportunities opening up due to the latest training and certification programs for data center managers. This was the case especially in China (64 percent) and the U.S. (52 percent).
-- Overall, 41 percent see new career opportunities opening up, with job descriptions and titles such as data center architect and data center manager; leading this trend are China (75 percent) and India (51 percent).
About the study: The study was commissioned by Cisco and conducted by InsightExpress, a third-party market-research firm based in the United States. The study includes two surveys: one on employees, the other on IT professionals. Each survey included 100 respondents in each of the 13 countries, resulting in a survey pool of 2,600 people. The 13 countries were Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States.
Comment from Lew Tucker, Cisco's chief technology officer, cloud computing: The data center is evolving to meet employee expectations for accessing networks, applications and information anywhere at any time with any device. IT professionals worldwide are embracing new technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, desktop virtualization, and unified data center infrastructure to meet employee expectations while helping their companies meet their businesses goals.
Contact: http://www.cisco.com
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Hunger for Higher Application Availability Runs Into Cost Concerns
IT groups want uptime assurance and know they need high availability (HA) solutions, but are stymied in their search by a short-sighted view of price and an inadequate accounting of downtime costs, according to a survey.
The survey reveal a consistent ramp up in demand for high availability solutions. Almost 80 percent of responses -- from industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, high-tech and financial services -- have seen a steady increase in applications that demand high availability over the last two years. Forty-one percent consider half or all of their applications to be business critical.
However, when it comes to buying resilient technology to support those needs, those same IT people balk at what they perceive as high availability products' cost and complexity. More than half -- 54 percent -- said HA products are too expensive, require special skill sets, or don't deliver on their promises. Worse, the survey shows the cost of downtime -- a crucial piece of the total cost of ownership calculation -- is often omitted from the high availability discussion. A full 51 percent of the respondents haven't calculated the cost of one hour of downtime. That leaves them no way to establish a cost-benefit ratio to determine if high availability technology is a solid investment. Those who say they measure downtime costs usually cannot actually cite or will underestimate the cost of critical applications going offline.
The virtualization boom still looms over all of these developments. Eighty-one percent run business-critical applications on virtual machines today, and 84 percent expect the number of virtualized critical applications to increase over the next 12 months. Eighty-five percent believe that virtualization can provide adequate uptime for mission-critical applications. However, if the application requires interruption-free processing, virtualization alone can't provide it.
The other hot IT topic of the moment, cloud computing, didn't resonate with the survey audience. Only 15 percent are planning internal cloud projects over the next year. Fifty-one percent aren't planning any kind of cloud implementation through third party providers, and of the remainder only 17 percent are sure about an implementation in the near future.
Comment from ITIC Principal Laura DiDio: There's a lot of misplaced faith in virtualization's high availability potential. Virtualization is not an availability solution. It gives IT a lot of flexibility to use virtual machines to back each other up, but it takes time to bring a new virtual machine online, and any data not written to disk is lost in that time. That doesn't work for highly demanding applications that rely on uninterrupted processing delivered by fault tolerant server platforms.
Comment from Roy Sanford, Stratus Technologies chief marketing officer: Affordable products for uptime assurance are readily available. Many IT organizations' perceptions of high availability solutions are stuck in the conventional cluster era. What may seem cost-justifiable up front quickly escalates in price with more software licensing, code modification, failover scripting, protracted testing, and on-going management complexity. At best, clusters are a failure-recovery technology with marginal availability, and not failure-prevention technology or true uptime assurance.
About the survey: The survey consisted of a Web questionnaire that recorded 367 responses and two dozen in-person interviews from companies in 22 countries. The subjects were small and medium-sized businesses, mid-sized and large enterprises with anywhere from 10 to 1,000 servers and desktops.
Contact: http://www.stratus.com
The survey reveal a consistent ramp up in demand for high availability solutions. Almost 80 percent of responses -- from industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, high-tech and financial services -- have seen a steady increase in applications that demand high availability over the last two years. Forty-one percent consider half or all of their applications to be business critical.
However, when it comes to buying resilient technology to support those needs, those same IT people balk at what they perceive as high availability products' cost and complexity. More than half -- 54 percent -- said HA products are too expensive, require special skill sets, or don't deliver on their promises. Worse, the survey shows the cost of downtime -- a crucial piece of the total cost of ownership calculation -- is often omitted from the high availability discussion. A full 51 percent of the respondents haven't calculated the cost of one hour of downtime. That leaves them no way to establish a cost-benefit ratio to determine if high availability technology is a solid investment. Those who say they measure downtime costs usually cannot actually cite or will underestimate the cost of critical applications going offline.
The virtualization boom still looms over all of these developments. Eighty-one percent run business-critical applications on virtual machines today, and 84 percent expect the number of virtualized critical applications to increase over the next 12 months. Eighty-five percent believe that virtualization can provide adequate uptime for mission-critical applications. However, if the application requires interruption-free processing, virtualization alone can't provide it.
The other hot IT topic of the moment, cloud computing, didn't resonate with the survey audience. Only 15 percent are planning internal cloud projects over the next year. Fifty-one percent aren't planning any kind of cloud implementation through third party providers, and of the remainder only 17 percent are sure about an implementation in the near future.
Comment from ITIC Principal Laura DiDio: There's a lot of misplaced faith in virtualization's high availability potential. Virtualization is not an availability solution. It gives IT a lot of flexibility to use virtual machines to back each other up, but it takes time to bring a new virtual machine online, and any data not written to disk is lost in that time. That doesn't work for highly demanding applications that rely on uninterrupted processing delivered by fault tolerant server platforms.
Comment from Roy Sanford, Stratus Technologies chief marketing officer: Affordable products for uptime assurance are readily available. Many IT organizations' perceptions of high availability solutions are stuck in the conventional cluster era. What may seem cost-justifiable up front quickly escalates in price with more software licensing, code modification, failover scripting, protracted testing, and on-going management complexity. At best, clusters are a failure-recovery technology with marginal availability, and not failure-prevention technology or true uptime assurance.
About the survey: The survey consisted of a Web questionnaire that recorded 367 responses and two dozen in-person interviews from companies in 22 countries. The subjects were small and medium-sized businesses, mid-sized and large enterprises with anywhere from 10 to 1,000 servers and desktops.
Contact: http://www.stratus.com
Rapid Growth Opportunities for Open Source Solutions At Federal Agencies To Consolidate Data Centers
As federal agencies follow their mandate to consolidate their datacenters, both government IT managers and commercial systems integrators (SIs) are focusing on the abilities of open source solutions and open software stacks to help ease this transition, according to a report.
Three of today's major solutions providers are Oracle, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. The report reviews examples of solutions stacks and potential stack components, including the open source LAMP stack, a system used by government currently that consists of the Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySQL database, and tools such as Perl, PHP, and Python.
Government IT offices should leverage a two- to three-year window of opportunity to help influence the evolution of open source solution stacks chosen by large IT systems integrators (SIs).
The U.S. Federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is giving IT vendors more flexibility with the types of software they choose to integrate into their solutions, and IT systems integrators sometimes can bid lower if they eliminate licensing costs. Opportunities exist for systems integrators and IT services companies to select and customize robust enterprise-wide open source solutions to penetrate the government market and capitalize.
Comment from Shawn P. McCarthy, research director for IDC Government Insights: Datacenter consolidation is about much more than just consolidation. It's also about migrating to new platforms, improving IT economics, eliminating unnecessary software licensing fees, and reducing associated management costs. Our research indicates that with federal investment, centralized open source solution stacks have already emerged at government sites. Because of this investment, and because SIs are heavily involved in the consolidation effort, we expect to see rapid growth for some of these open solution stacks.
About the report: IDC Government Insights' report, Technology Selection: Open Source Solutions Will Drive Datacenter Consolidation and Cloud Growth (Document # GI225382), examines how open source solutions are influencing government datacenter consolidation.
Contact: http://www.idc-gi.com
Three of today's major solutions providers are Oracle, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. The report reviews examples of solutions stacks and potential stack components, including the open source LAMP stack, a system used by government currently that consists of the Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySQL database, and tools such as Perl, PHP, and Python.
Government IT offices should leverage a two- to three-year window of opportunity to help influence the evolution of open source solution stacks chosen by large IT systems integrators (SIs).
The U.S. Federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is giving IT vendors more flexibility with the types of software they choose to integrate into their solutions, and IT systems integrators sometimes can bid lower if they eliminate licensing costs. Opportunities exist for systems integrators and IT services companies to select and customize robust enterprise-wide open source solutions to penetrate the government market and capitalize.
Comment from Shawn P. McCarthy, research director for IDC Government Insights: Datacenter consolidation is about much more than just consolidation. It's also about migrating to new platforms, improving IT economics, eliminating unnecessary software licensing fees, and reducing associated management costs. Our research indicates that with federal investment, centralized open source solution stacks have already emerged at government sites. Because of this investment, and because SIs are heavily involved in the consolidation effort, we expect to see rapid growth for some of these open solution stacks.
About the report: IDC Government Insights' report, Technology Selection: Open Source Solutions Will Drive Datacenter Consolidation and Cloud Growth (Document # GI225382), examines how open source solutions are influencing government datacenter consolidation.
Contact: http://www.idc-gi.com
Service Providers Top The List As Cloud-Computing Providers
Service providers have an opportunity to differentiate themselves and add new revenue-generating services by providing public cloud-computing services, a survey has found.
Nearly 12 percent of enterprise workloads will run in the public cloud by the end of 2013. Furthermore, the study found that desktop applications, email, collaboration, and enterprise resources planning are most likely to shift to the cloud. This, in turn, will yield a market for public, cloud-computing services of approximately US$44 billion.
Key facts/highlights
-- Enterprises across many sectors -- including manufacturing, financial services, retail, healthcare, and professional services systems integrators, IT service outsourcers, technical consulting, and public sector organizations -- are seriously considering cloud computing.
-- Cloud-migration decisions are being made at the application level. Most decision makers envision a staged migration to cloud-computing services, beginning with noncritical applications. Enterprise executives believe that no applications should be automatically excluded from migration to cloud.
-- For enterprises, the decision about moving to a private or public cloud is not binary. It hinges on executives' perceptions around security and control, data-center overcapacity and scale, and access to skilled IT personnel. Enterprises will potentially use private and public cloud-computing to manage their IT resources.
-- The study identified a set of target applications for cloud that spans various verticals. Targets for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) include application development and testing, disaster recovery, simulations, data warehousing, and analysis. Targets for software-as-a-service (SaaS) are customer-relationship management (CRM), email, unified communications, web applications and desktop environments.
-- An organizational convergence is taking place across the IT and networking departments within enterprises. A total of 80 percent of the enterprises surveyed have converged, or are in the process of converging, these departments into one organizational structure.
About the study: The study, conducted by Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), investigates the "public cloud" and the desire of enterprises to use external, on-demand infrastructure and applications. Cisco IBSG conducted in-depth, one-on-one interviews with more than 80 enterprise information technology (IT) decision makers from 43 enterprises and public-sector organizations in the United States, the European Union, and India. Additionally, Cisco IBSG interviewed 20 subject matter experts.
Contact: The complete white paper ("Network Service Providers as Cloud Providers: Survey Shows Cloud Provision Is a Bright Option") can be downloaded here.
Contact: http://www.cisco.com
Nearly 12 percent of enterprise workloads will run in the public cloud by the end of 2013. Furthermore, the study found that desktop applications, email, collaboration, and enterprise resources planning are most likely to shift to the cloud. This, in turn, will yield a market for public, cloud-computing services of approximately US$44 billion.
Key facts/highlights
-- Enterprises across many sectors -- including manufacturing, financial services, retail, healthcare, and professional services systems integrators, IT service outsourcers, technical consulting, and public sector organizations -- are seriously considering cloud computing.
-- Cloud-migration decisions are being made at the application level. Most decision makers envision a staged migration to cloud-computing services, beginning with noncritical applications. Enterprise executives believe that no applications should be automatically excluded from migration to cloud.
-- For enterprises, the decision about moving to a private or public cloud is not binary. It hinges on executives' perceptions around security and control, data-center overcapacity and scale, and access to skilled IT personnel. Enterprises will potentially use private and public cloud-computing to manage their IT resources.
-- The study identified a set of target applications for cloud that spans various verticals. Targets for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) include application development and testing, disaster recovery, simulations, data warehousing, and analysis. Targets for software-as-a-service (SaaS) are customer-relationship management (CRM), email, unified communications, web applications and desktop environments.
-- An organizational convergence is taking place across the IT and networking departments within enterprises. A total of 80 percent of the enterprises surveyed have converged, or are in the process of converging, these departments into one organizational structure.
About the study: The study, conducted by Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), investigates the "public cloud" and the desire of enterprises to use external, on-demand infrastructure and applications. Cisco IBSG conducted in-depth, one-on-one interviews with more than 80 enterprise information technology (IT) decision makers from 43 enterprises and public-sector organizations in the United States, the European Union, and India. Additionally, Cisco IBSG interviewed 20 subject matter experts.
Contact: The complete white paper ("Network Service Providers as Cloud Providers: Survey Shows Cloud Provision Is a Bright Option") can be downloaded here.
Contact: http://www.cisco.com
Friday, December 3, 2010
SMBs Are Overworked, Cutting Corners, Engaging in Risky Technology Behavior
Resource-and-cash-strapped small businesses struggling to cut costs in a slow economy are leaving simple cost savings options on the table and putting data at risk, according to a recent survey. The survey uncovered several peculiar - and in some cases alarming -- technology practices including relying on "piggybacking" on nearby WiFi networks and saving critical business files on USB thumb drives.
Small business professionals are stretched thin staffwise, and fierce competition means more and more employees will be working on vacation over the holidays.
More than four in five (85 percent) small business professionals agree they conduct work outside of the office. A clear majority (72 percent) of respondents rarely take an email-free vacation.
To keep up with their hefty workload, many respondents agreed they rely on a mobile device such as a laptop or smart phone. The most preferred devices are laptops (38 percent) and smart phones (31 percent).
Data loss can be detrimental to any business. The loss of critical spreadsheets, marketing material and worse, customer information, can cost businesses a considerable amount of time and money to recover lost data, if at all.
Despite the consequences of data loss, the survey indicates that many small businesses are backing up critical business data using highly disposable and insecure methods:
While 40 percent of small businesses back up files to external hard drives, an alarming 50 percent of respondents said they or their company use USB thumb drives and CDs/DVDs to backup important information.
Other secure and cost-effective means of data storage, such as Web-based cloud storage, were seldom used by the small businesses surveyed:
-- While 43 percent of respondents are at least somewhat familiar with cloud computing, only 13 percent say they are using an online storage service -- the least of all backup methods cited.
-- For many respondents, WiFi in their home or office is the primary means of connecting to the Internet with their company-issued laptop. However, some respondents admitted to connecting to unsecured WiFi networks ("piggybacking") in order to conduct business:
-- 25 percent of respondents reported they or someone in their company piggyback other available WiFi networks to conduct business. Almost one in five senior-level executives (17 percent) and proprietor/owners (17 percent) surveyed say they piggyback on wireless networks.
Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has the potential to bring cost efficiency to any small business through free or low-cost audio and video communication via the Internet. Despite the cost benefits, the study found that:
-- Seventy percent of small businesses are not using VoIP for business calls. Almost nine in 10 (87 percent) small business professionals are somewhat or not at all familiar with the term "unified communications," which is the integration of voice, video, audio and instant messaging tools.
The results of the survey highlight the importance that small businesses place on personal brand reputation and appearance. Revealing the need to make a good first impression in a business meeting or new business pitch, the survey found nearly 70 percent of respondents agreed that the appearance of a laptop issued by a small business is a reflection of that company's commitment to quality and service.
About the survey: The Lenovo-AMD Small Business Tech Survey sought to identify common issues and trends in technology use by small businesses. The survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Lenovo between October 14 and November 9, 2010, among 722 adults aged 18 and over who owned or were employed by a small business with no more than 500 employees.
Contact: http://www.lenovo.com
Small business professionals are stretched thin staffwise, and fierce competition means more and more employees will be working on vacation over the holidays.
More than four in five (85 percent) small business professionals agree they conduct work outside of the office. A clear majority (72 percent) of respondents rarely take an email-free vacation.
To keep up with their hefty workload, many respondents agreed they rely on a mobile device such as a laptop or smart phone. The most preferred devices are laptops (38 percent) and smart phones (31 percent).
Data loss can be detrimental to any business. The loss of critical spreadsheets, marketing material and worse, customer information, can cost businesses a considerable amount of time and money to recover lost data, if at all.
Despite the consequences of data loss, the survey indicates that many small businesses are backing up critical business data using highly disposable and insecure methods:
While 40 percent of small businesses back up files to external hard drives, an alarming 50 percent of respondents said they or their company use USB thumb drives and CDs/DVDs to backup important information.
Other secure and cost-effective means of data storage, such as Web-based cloud storage, were seldom used by the small businesses surveyed:
-- While 43 percent of respondents are at least somewhat familiar with cloud computing, only 13 percent say they are using an online storage service -- the least of all backup methods cited.
-- For many respondents, WiFi in their home or office is the primary means of connecting to the Internet with their company-issued laptop. However, some respondents admitted to connecting to unsecured WiFi networks ("piggybacking") in order to conduct business:
-- 25 percent of respondents reported they or someone in their company piggyback other available WiFi networks to conduct business. Almost one in five senior-level executives (17 percent) and proprietor/owners (17 percent) surveyed say they piggyback on wireless networks.
Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has the potential to bring cost efficiency to any small business through free or low-cost audio and video communication via the Internet. Despite the cost benefits, the study found that:
-- Seventy percent of small businesses are not using VoIP for business calls. Almost nine in 10 (87 percent) small business professionals are somewhat or not at all familiar with the term "unified communications," which is the integration of voice, video, audio and instant messaging tools.
The results of the survey highlight the importance that small businesses place on personal brand reputation and appearance. Revealing the need to make a good first impression in a business meeting or new business pitch, the survey found nearly 70 percent of respondents agreed that the appearance of a laptop issued by a small business is a reflection of that company's commitment to quality and service.
About the survey: The Lenovo-AMD Small Business Tech Survey sought to identify common issues and trends in technology use by small businesses. The survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Lenovo between October 14 and November 9, 2010, among 722 adults aged 18 and over who owned or were employed by a small business with no more than 500 employees.
Contact: http://www.lenovo.com
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Security, IT Cost-Cutting To Drive Modernization Of Messaging
With further cost reductions and a "tech refresh" projected for the broader IT market in the coming year, trends in cloud services, virtualization, data loss prevention and encryption security will continue driving greater adoption of modernized messaging infrastructures among Global 2000 enterprises in 2011, according to Sendmail.
While many organizations will continue moving to cloud-based IT infrastructures, demand for migrating certain components of the messaging infrastructure to the cloud will be tempered as a result of numerous security and compliance risks, causing many to opt for hybrid infrastructure solutions instead. Continued adoption of virtualization technologies and the increased demand for DLP and encryption security solutions will be key drivers influencing more enterprises to modernize their messaging infrastructures with Sentrion Message Processors. Additionally, there will be a decline of costly, stand-alone point solutions by Global 2000 companies in favor of a single message processing platform that can be customized to fit specific messaging needs in 2011 and beyond.
In 2011 the following enterprise messaging infrastructure trends will be realized:
-- Cloud Computing to Drive Greater Adoption of Hybrid Infrastructures: Despite increasing demand for overall IT cloud services, the cloud hype within the messaging infrastructure market will be tempered by many compliance and security risks that will prevent enterprises from migrating certain components of messaging infrastructure to the cloud. This will cause many large enterprises to require an intelligent e-mail backbone at the internal layer, and increase adoption of hybrid infrastructures that make use of both cloud services and in-house infrastructures.
-- Increased Demand for Virtualized Messaging Infrastructures: According to a recent Sendmail survey, a majority of companies in 2011 are expected to continue migrating components of their email infrastructure to virtualized environments to improve the efficiency and availability levels of their message delivery operations. As a result, enterprise demand for virtual messaging appliances, such as the Sentrion Virtual Message Processor(TM) (MPV), is expected to continue growing steadily in the coming year.
-- Steady Decline in Traditional Stand-alone Point Solutions: In order to reduce operating expenses and increase efficiencies, more Global 2000 enterprises will modernize messaging infrastructures on a single messaging infrastructure platform with customizable email architectures that allow messaging applications of their choice to be included as add-on options. This approach frees enterprises from having to implement costly and specialized stand-alone email products every few years, and will cause a steady market decline of those solutions moving forward. More specifically, there also will be continued erosion of traditional stand-alone point solutions in the email security space, due primarily to email filtering technologies becoming commoditized. As a result, companies will begin either moving those functions to the cloud or simply adding these applications onto their messaging infrastructures.
-- Stronger Demand for DLP and Encryption Solutions: With new privacy regulations in full effect throughout the U.S. and Europe, there will be even stronger demand for DLP solutions, however, those solutions are expected to focus on networks and storage, not the endpoint. Full DLP implementation is too difficult for most organizations to implement so many will develop a "good enough" solution to protect email and other network-based communications where most policy violations occur. As a result, this will lead to deeper integration with best-of-breed message processing and network DLP solutions. Driven by these same requirements and stronger corporate security policies, the need to provide confidentiality of sensitive information being exchanged is increasing, and driving demand for secure messaging solutions such as encryption. Automated application and policy-driven messaging, combined with a "good enough" DLP architecture will prove to be critical elements for organizations looking to reduce dependence on the end-user for determining what should be encrypted.
Comment from Don Massaro, Chief Executive Officer, Sendmail: There is a market shift occurring in the IT industry today. IT leaders are under enormous pressure to cut costs and fundamentally change the way they approach IT. Looking ahead to 2011, economic conditions are expected to improve and many enterprises with aging IT infrastructures are expected to begin investing in more efficient IT alternatives. As the paradigm shift occurs, and technology trends in cloud computing, virtualization and security continue to emerge, Sendmail is uniquely positioned to win big with Global 2000 companies looking to reduce operating expenses and increase efficiencies with modernized messaging infrastructures.
Contact: http://www.sendmail.com
While many organizations will continue moving to cloud-based IT infrastructures, demand for migrating certain components of the messaging infrastructure to the cloud will be tempered as a result of numerous security and compliance risks, causing many to opt for hybrid infrastructure solutions instead. Continued adoption of virtualization technologies and the increased demand for DLP and encryption security solutions will be key drivers influencing more enterprises to modernize their messaging infrastructures with Sentrion Message Processors. Additionally, there will be a decline of costly, stand-alone point solutions by Global 2000 companies in favor of a single message processing platform that can be customized to fit specific messaging needs in 2011 and beyond.
In 2011 the following enterprise messaging infrastructure trends will be realized:
-- Cloud Computing to Drive Greater Adoption of Hybrid Infrastructures: Despite increasing demand for overall IT cloud services, the cloud hype within the messaging infrastructure market will be tempered by many compliance and security risks that will prevent enterprises from migrating certain components of messaging infrastructure to the cloud. This will cause many large enterprises to require an intelligent e-mail backbone at the internal layer, and increase adoption of hybrid infrastructures that make use of both cloud services and in-house infrastructures.
-- Increased Demand for Virtualized Messaging Infrastructures: According to a recent Sendmail survey, a majority of companies in 2011 are expected to continue migrating components of their email infrastructure to virtualized environments to improve the efficiency and availability levels of their message delivery operations. As a result, enterprise demand for virtual messaging appliances, such as the Sentrion Virtual Message Processor(TM) (MPV), is expected to continue growing steadily in the coming year.
-- Steady Decline in Traditional Stand-alone Point Solutions: In order to reduce operating expenses and increase efficiencies, more Global 2000 enterprises will modernize messaging infrastructures on a single messaging infrastructure platform with customizable email architectures that allow messaging applications of their choice to be included as add-on options. This approach frees enterprises from having to implement costly and specialized stand-alone email products every few years, and will cause a steady market decline of those solutions moving forward. More specifically, there also will be continued erosion of traditional stand-alone point solutions in the email security space, due primarily to email filtering technologies becoming commoditized. As a result, companies will begin either moving those functions to the cloud or simply adding these applications onto their messaging infrastructures.
-- Stronger Demand for DLP and Encryption Solutions: With new privacy regulations in full effect throughout the U.S. and Europe, there will be even stronger demand for DLP solutions, however, those solutions are expected to focus on networks and storage, not the endpoint. Full DLP implementation is too difficult for most organizations to implement so many will develop a "good enough" solution to protect email and other network-based communications where most policy violations occur. As a result, this will lead to deeper integration with best-of-breed message processing and network DLP solutions. Driven by these same requirements and stronger corporate security policies, the need to provide confidentiality of sensitive information being exchanged is increasing, and driving demand for secure messaging solutions such as encryption. Automated application and policy-driven messaging, combined with a "good enough" DLP architecture will prove to be critical elements for organizations looking to reduce dependence on the end-user for determining what should be encrypted.
Comment from Don Massaro, Chief Executive Officer, Sendmail: There is a market shift occurring in the IT industry today. IT leaders are under enormous pressure to cut costs and fundamentally change the way they approach IT. Looking ahead to 2011, economic conditions are expected to improve and many enterprises with aging IT infrastructures are expected to begin investing in more efficient IT alternatives. As the paradigm shift occurs, and technology trends in cloud computing, virtualization and security continue to emerge, Sendmail is uniquely positioned to win big with Global 2000 companies looking to reduce operating expenses and increase efficiencies with modernized messaging infrastructures.
Contact: http://www.sendmail.com
Oracle Users Rapidly Adopting Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is rapidly evolving among Oracle users, a survey finds.
Key highlights of the survey's findings include the following:
-- 29 percent of organizations reported they already have deployed an internal cloud.
-- 37 percent indicated some piece of their organization's workload processing or infrastructure is now available through private cloud services.
-- Private cloud implementation is growing significantly over the next year.
-- With private cloud implementations, respondents highlighted emphasis on "platform as a service" (database and middleware capabilities).
-- Adoption of private cloud services for IT workload processing or infrastructure is outpacing the use of public platform service providers.
-- Security continues to be a concern for public cloud and online application services.
Comment from Andy Flower, President of the IOUG: No puff or fluff, just reality that cloud is in use by our members and essential to companies worldwide.
Comment from Unisphere Research analyst and report author Joseph McKendrick: We expect the trend to private cloud to continue intensifying. Users who are relatively mature in their use of private cloud and who have invested more significantly are reaping cost savings by eliminating duplication, standardizing for operational efficiency and through higher asset utilization.
Comment from Rex Wang, vice president, Oracle Product Marketing: This survey shows that cloud adoption is increasing and that more organizations are interested in private platform-as-a-service clouds.
About the survey: The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), an independent community of more than 20,000 international database and technology professionals representing companies, government agencies and educational institutions, conducted the survey of IOUG members. The survey, consisting of responses from 267 IT Technology Professionals, and Data Managers, was conducted under the IOUG's ResearchWire program by Unisphere Research and sponsored by Oracle.
Contact: http://www.ioug.org
Key highlights of the survey's findings include the following:
-- 29 percent of organizations reported they already have deployed an internal cloud.
-- 37 percent indicated some piece of their organization's workload processing or infrastructure is now available through private cloud services.
-- Private cloud implementation is growing significantly over the next year.
-- With private cloud implementations, respondents highlighted emphasis on "platform as a service" (database and middleware capabilities).
-- Adoption of private cloud services for IT workload processing or infrastructure is outpacing the use of public platform service providers.
-- Security continues to be a concern for public cloud and online application services.
Comment from Andy Flower, President of the IOUG: No puff or fluff, just reality that cloud is in use by our members and essential to companies worldwide.
Comment from Unisphere Research analyst and report author Joseph McKendrick: We expect the trend to private cloud to continue intensifying. Users who are relatively mature in their use of private cloud and who have invested more significantly are reaping cost savings by eliminating duplication, standardizing for operational efficiency and through higher asset utilization.
Comment from Rex Wang, vice president, Oracle Product Marketing: This survey shows that cloud adoption is increasing and that more organizations are interested in private platform-as-a-service clouds.
About the survey: The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), an independent community of more than 20,000 international database and technology professionals representing companies, government agencies and educational institutions, conducted the survey of IOUG members. The survey, consisting of responses from 267 IT Technology Professionals, and Data Managers, was conducted under the IOUG's ResearchWire program by Unisphere Research and sponsored by Oracle.
Contact: http://www.ioug.org
Cloud Computing Maturing, Converging In Coming Years
If 2010 was the year of cloud computing awareness and adoption, the next phase of the cloud evolution will bring maturation and convergence, according to cloud computing experts.
2010 proved that, for many organizations, cloud computing can meet the demand for improved IT efficiency through a virtualized, secure infrastructure solution that is scalable, reliable and can provide organizations higher availability at lower costs when compared to a dedicated IT environment.
The results from an August survey by Yankee Group confirm this trend, with 24 percent of large enterprises with cloud experience saying they are already using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and an additional 37 percent expect to adopt IaaS during the next 24 months.
Comment from Rahul Bakshi, vice president Product Management, Managed Services at SunGard Availability Services: There has been a clear market trend of small and medium sized businesses looking to get out of the business of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure. These companies want to tap into the investment service providers have made in IT tools, automation and elastic technology. As we move into 2011, we see continuation of the maturity of cloud offerings with additional security enhancements, service improvements and convergence of various cloud solution technologies and standards to better address customer needs. These drivers will help accelerate the market adoption of IaaS. A key to growing market interest in cloud is the ROI an organization can realize through cloud adoption. When determining ROI, IT organizations need to look beyond just reducing capital expenditures -- even though major gains can be made there. The analysis should be based on a comprehensive view, considering all aspects required to deliver the solution -- assessing factors such as, are they able to deliver services more effectively and efficiently? And, can they take better advantage of capacity on demand -- like seasonal spikes -- and achieve faster times to market.
When developing an Infrastructure as a Service strategy, here are four key areas organizations should closely consider:
-- Business Assessment. IaaS will not replace everything in an internal computing environment. Just as many companies have a mix of Software as Service like Salesforce.com and internal systems, such as ERP, organizations will take a blended infrastructure approach. A good starting point is for companies to conduct a cloud readiness assessment to determine which applications have the best business and technical case to move to the cloud. Next, develop a roadmap for moving applications to the cloud in an efficient way and mitigating operational risks during the cloud migration process.
-- Security. Just as in the early days of managed services when providers needed to prove to customers they could address both physical and logical security aspects, cloud providers need to demonstrate multiple layers of data protection for enterprise-grade security and application availability. For example, organizations need to look for cloud environments that provide dedicated virtual machines which are logically isolated and protected to secure data across shared fabrics.
-- Compliance. Cloud computing is dramatically increasing pressure on service providers from a compliance perspective. Providers need to demonstrate they have embedded the appropriate services, controls, and procedures to support a customer's compliance requirements and to help customers gain the confidence needed to move applications to a cloud environment. Also, compliance standards cut horizontally -- like Sarbanes-Oxley -- and also vertically with industry-specific standards, such as PCI DSS and HIPAA. A service provider needs to demonstrate its cloud environment and processes address customer needs in both areas.
-- Services and Service Level Agreements. Cloud computing is beneficial when the right services are being offered as part of the solution. While many of the mainstream providers of cloud computing platforms offer an unmanaged, do-it-yourself cloud, some organizations may prefer that managed services, backed by the right service level agreement, be part of the overall solution. An organization needs to evaluate its specific needs as they relate to managed services and consider service a key criterion when evaluating vendors.
Contact: http://www.sungardas.com
2010 proved that, for many organizations, cloud computing can meet the demand for improved IT efficiency through a virtualized, secure infrastructure solution that is scalable, reliable and can provide organizations higher availability at lower costs when compared to a dedicated IT environment.
The results from an August survey by Yankee Group confirm this trend, with 24 percent of large enterprises with cloud experience saying they are already using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and an additional 37 percent expect to adopt IaaS during the next 24 months.
Comment from Rahul Bakshi, vice president Product Management, Managed Services at SunGard Availability Services: There has been a clear market trend of small and medium sized businesses looking to get out of the business of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure. These companies want to tap into the investment service providers have made in IT tools, automation and elastic technology. As we move into 2011, we see continuation of the maturity of cloud offerings with additional security enhancements, service improvements and convergence of various cloud solution technologies and standards to better address customer needs. These drivers will help accelerate the market adoption of IaaS. A key to growing market interest in cloud is the ROI an organization can realize through cloud adoption. When determining ROI, IT organizations need to look beyond just reducing capital expenditures -- even though major gains can be made there. The analysis should be based on a comprehensive view, considering all aspects required to deliver the solution -- assessing factors such as, are they able to deliver services more effectively and efficiently? And, can they take better advantage of capacity on demand -- like seasonal spikes -- and achieve faster times to market.
When developing an Infrastructure as a Service strategy, here are four key areas organizations should closely consider:
-- Business Assessment. IaaS will not replace everything in an internal computing environment. Just as many companies have a mix of Software as Service like Salesforce.com and internal systems, such as ERP, organizations will take a blended infrastructure approach. A good starting point is for companies to conduct a cloud readiness assessment to determine which applications have the best business and technical case to move to the cloud. Next, develop a roadmap for moving applications to the cloud in an efficient way and mitigating operational risks during the cloud migration process.
-- Security. Just as in the early days of managed services when providers needed to prove to customers they could address both physical and logical security aspects, cloud providers need to demonstrate multiple layers of data protection for enterprise-grade security and application availability. For example, organizations need to look for cloud environments that provide dedicated virtual machines which are logically isolated and protected to secure data across shared fabrics.
-- Compliance. Cloud computing is dramatically increasing pressure on service providers from a compliance perspective. Providers need to demonstrate they have embedded the appropriate services, controls, and procedures to support a customer's compliance requirements and to help customers gain the confidence needed to move applications to a cloud environment. Also, compliance standards cut horizontally -- like Sarbanes-Oxley -- and also vertically with industry-specific standards, such as PCI DSS and HIPAA. A service provider needs to demonstrate its cloud environment and processes address customer needs in both areas.
-- Services and Service Level Agreements. Cloud computing is beneficial when the right services are being offered as part of the solution. While many of the mainstream providers of cloud computing platforms offer an unmanaged, do-it-yourself cloud, some organizations may prefer that managed services, backed by the right service level agreement, be part of the overall solution. An organization needs to evaluate its specific needs as they relate to managed services and consider service a key criterion when evaluating vendors.
Contact: http://www.sungardas.com
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Virtualization And Cloud Technologies Add Complexity To Disaster Recovery Initiatives
Managing disparate virtual, physical and cloud resources is a growing challenge because of added complexity for organizations protecting and recovering mission critical applications and data, a study has found. Virtual systems are not properly protected.
The study highlights that 44 percent of data on virtual systems is not regularly backed up and only one in five respondents use replication and failover technologies to protect virtual environments. Respondents also indicated that 60 percent of virtualized servers are not covered in their current disaster recovery (DR) plans. This is up significantly from the 45 percent reported by respondents in 2009.
1) Inadequate Tools, Security and Control: Using multiple tools that manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments causes major difficulties for data center managers. In particular, nearly six in 10 of these respondents (58 percent) who encountered problems protecting mission-critical applications in virtual and physical environments reported this to be a large challenge for their organization.
In terms of cloud computing, respondents reported that their organization runs approximately 50 percent of mission-critical applications in the cloud. Two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) report that security is the main concern of putting applications in the cloud. However, the biggest challenge respondents face when implementing cloud computing and storage is the ability to control failovers and make resources highly available (55 percent).
2) Resource and Storage Constraints Hamper Backup: Respondents state that 82 percent of backups occur only weekly or less frequently, rather than daily. Resource constraints, lack of storage capacity, and incomplete adoption of advanced and more efficient protection methods hamper rapid deployment of virtual environments. In particular:
-- 59 percent of respondents identified resource constraints (people, budget, and space) as the top challenge when backing up virtual machines.
-- Respondents state that the lack of available primary (57 percent) and backup storage (60 percent) hampers protecting mission critical data.
-- 50 percent of respondents use advanced methods (clientless) to reduce the impact of virtual machine backups.
3) The Downtime and Recovery Gap: The time required to recover from an outage is twice as long as respondents perceive it to be. When asked if a significant disaster were to occur at their organization that destroyed the main data center, respondents indicated that:
-- They expected the downtime per outage to be two hours to be up and running after an outage.
-- This is an improvement from 2009, when they reported it would take four hours to be up and running after an outage.
-- The median downtime per outage in the last 12 months was five hours, more than doubling the two hour expectation.
-- Organizations experienced on average four downtime incidents in the past 12 months.
4) Major Causes of Downtime: Asked what caused their organization to experience downtime over the past five years, respondents reported their outages were mainly from system upgrades, power outages and failures and cyber attacks. Specifically:
-- 72 percent experienced an outage from system upgrades, resulting in 50.9 hours of downtime.
-- 70 percent experienced an outage from power outages and failures, resulting in 11.3 hours of downtime.
-- 63 percent experienced an outage from cyber attacks over the past 12 months resulting in 52.7 hours of downtime.
There is a gap between those organizations that experience power outages and failures and those who have conducted an impact assessment for power outages and failures: Surprisingly, only 26 percent of respondents' organizations have conducted a power outage and failure impact assessment.
Comment from said Dan Lamorena, director, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec: While organizations are adopting new technologies such as virtualization and the cloud to reduce costs and enhance disaster recovery efforts, they are currently adding more complexity to their environments and leaving mission critical applications and data unprotected. We expect to see organizations adopt tools that provide a holistic solution with a consistent set of policies across all environments. Data center managers should simplify and standardize so they can focus on fundamental best practices that help reduce downtime.
Recommendations: Treat all environments the same: Ensure that mission-critical data and applications are treated the same across environments (virtual, cloud, physical) in terms of DR assessments and planning. Use integrated tool sets: Using fewer tools that manage physical, virtual and cloud environments will help organizations save time, training costs and help them to better automate processes. Simplify data protection processes: Embrace low-impact backup methods and deduplication to ensure that mission-critical data in virtual environments is backed up, efficiently replicated off campus. Plan and automate to minimize downtime: Prioritize planning activities and tools that automate and perform processes which minimize downtime during system upgrades. Identify issues earlier: Implement solutions that detect issues, reduce downtime and recover faster to be more in line with expectations. Don't cut corners: Organizations should implement basic technologies and processes that protect in case of an outage, and not take shortcuts that could have disastrous consequences.
About the study: The 2010 Symantec Disaster Recovery Study is an annual global study commissioned by Symantec to highlight business trends regarding disaster recovery planning and preparedness. Conducted by independent market research firm Applied Research West during October 2010, the study polled more than 1700 IT managers in large organizations across 18 countries in North America, Europe and the Middle East, Asia Pacific and South America to gain insight and understanding into some of the more complicated factors associated with
Contact: http://www.symantec.com
The study highlights that 44 percent of data on virtual systems is not regularly backed up and only one in five respondents use replication and failover technologies to protect virtual environments. Respondents also indicated that 60 percent of virtualized servers are not covered in their current disaster recovery (DR) plans. This is up significantly from the 45 percent reported by respondents in 2009.
1) Inadequate Tools, Security and Control: Using multiple tools that manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments causes major difficulties for data center managers. In particular, nearly six in 10 of these respondents (58 percent) who encountered problems protecting mission-critical applications in virtual and physical environments reported this to be a large challenge for their organization.
In terms of cloud computing, respondents reported that their organization runs approximately 50 percent of mission-critical applications in the cloud. Two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) report that security is the main concern of putting applications in the cloud. However, the biggest challenge respondents face when implementing cloud computing and storage is the ability to control failovers and make resources highly available (55 percent).
2) Resource and Storage Constraints Hamper Backup: Respondents state that 82 percent of backups occur only weekly or less frequently, rather than daily. Resource constraints, lack of storage capacity, and incomplete adoption of advanced and more efficient protection methods hamper rapid deployment of virtual environments. In particular:
-- 59 percent of respondents identified resource constraints (people, budget, and space) as the top challenge when backing up virtual machines.
-- Respondents state that the lack of available primary (57 percent) and backup storage (60 percent) hampers protecting mission critical data.
-- 50 percent of respondents use advanced methods (clientless) to reduce the impact of virtual machine backups.
3) The Downtime and Recovery Gap: The time required to recover from an outage is twice as long as respondents perceive it to be. When asked if a significant disaster were to occur at their organization that destroyed the main data center, respondents indicated that:
-- They expected the downtime per outage to be two hours to be up and running after an outage.
-- This is an improvement from 2009, when they reported it would take four hours to be up and running after an outage.
-- The median downtime per outage in the last 12 months was five hours, more than doubling the two hour expectation.
-- Organizations experienced on average four downtime incidents in the past 12 months.
4) Major Causes of Downtime: Asked what caused their organization to experience downtime over the past five years, respondents reported their outages were mainly from system upgrades, power outages and failures and cyber attacks. Specifically:
-- 72 percent experienced an outage from system upgrades, resulting in 50.9 hours of downtime.
-- 70 percent experienced an outage from power outages and failures, resulting in 11.3 hours of downtime.
-- 63 percent experienced an outage from cyber attacks over the past 12 months resulting in 52.7 hours of downtime.
There is a gap between those organizations that experience power outages and failures and those who have conducted an impact assessment for power outages and failures: Surprisingly, only 26 percent of respondents' organizations have conducted a power outage and failure impact assessment.
Comment from said Dan Lamorena, director, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec: While organizations are adopting new technologies such as virtualization and the cloud to reduce costs and enhance disaster recovery efforts, they are currently adding more complexity to their environments and leaving mission critical applications and data unprotected. We expect to see organizations adopt tools that provide a holistic solution with a consistent set of policies across all environments. Data center managers should simplify and standardize so they can focus on fundamental best practices that help reduce downtime.
Recommendations: Treat all environments the same: Ensure that mission-critical data and applications are treated the same across environments (virtual, cloud, physical) in terms of DR assessments and planning. Use integrated tool sets: Using fewer tools that manage physical, virtual and cloud environments will help organizations save time, training costs and help them to better automate processes. Simplify data protection processes: Embrace low-impact backup methods and deduplication to ensure that mission-critical data in virtual environments is backed up, efficiently replicated off campus. Plan and automate to minimize downtime: Prioritize planning activities and tools that automate and perform processes which minimize downtime during system upgrades. Identify issues earlier: Implement solutions that detect issues, reduce downtime and recover faster to be more in line with expectations. Don't cut corners: Organizations should implement basic technologies and processes that protect in case of an outage, and not take shortcuts that could have disastrous consequences.
About the study: The 2010 Symantec Disaster Recovery Study is an annual global study commissioned by Symantec to highlight business trends regarding disaster recovery planning and preparedness. Conducted by independent market research firm Applied Research West during October 2010, the study polled more than 1700 IT managers in large organizations across 18 countries in North America, Europe and the Middle East, Asia Pacific and South America to gain insight and understanding into some of the more complicated factors associated with
Contact: http://www.symantec.com
B2B Integration And Collaboration For SMEs Are Critical
Seventy-five percent of small to midsized companies say that B2B integration and collaboration are strategic initiatives in their company, a survey has found.
Connectivity between buyers and sellers is similar to social networking solutions. Collaborative networks can be instrumental in launching an average company into best-in-class status, able to compete with even larger businesses. Cloud computing SaaS solutions clearly provide a competitive advantage by reducing customer service demand and managing the complexity of today's business environment.
Comment from Aberdeen's Nari Viswanathan: Thirty-seven percent of SMEs indicate having the ability to collaborate with a network of key customers versus 56 percent of best-in-class companies. Companies should segment their customer base according to revenue and identify the top customers with whom to set up a trading community network. Key process areas should be identified such as order management collaboration, inventory management collaboration, and forecast collaboration. Once identified, these collaborative processes should be implemented.
About the report: Aberdeen benchmarked the involvement of 62 small to mid-size enterprises (SME) regarding B2B integration and collaboration initiatives with a specific emphasis on their trading partner recruitment, enablement, ongoing maintenance, and performance measurement related activities.
Contact: http://www.aberdeen.com
Connectivity between buyers and sellers is similar to social networking solutions. Collaborative networks can be instrumental in launching an average company into best-in-class status, able to compete with even larger businesses. Cloud computing SaaS solutions clearly provide a competitive advantage by reducing customer service demand and managing the complexity of today's business environment.
Comment from Aberdeen's Nari Viswanathan: Thirty-seven percent of SMEs indicate having the ability to collaborate with a network of key customers versus 56 percent of best-in-class companies. Companies should segment their customer base according to revenue and identify the top customers with whom to set up a trading community network. Key process areas should be identified such as order management collaboration, inventory management collaboration, and forecast collaboration. Once identified, these collaborative processes should be implemented.
About the report: Aberdeen benchmarked the involvement of 62 small to mid-size enterprises (SME) regarding B2B integration and collaboration initiatives with a specific emphasis on their trading partner recruitment, enablement, ongoing maintenance, and performance measurement related activities.
Contact: http://www.aberdeen.com
Information Governance Risk Factors In Public And Hybrid Clouds
A new report explores how the use of public and hybrid cloud computing services are transforming information governance risk factors and will increasingly challenge IT creativity in developing new strategies for policy compliance and enforcement.
Enterprises moving to cloud computing are looking to move to the private cloud first. Three quarters of IT organizations are running or plan to deploy applications in a private cloud environment. Private cloud helps deliver lower IT costs, improved quality of service and greater business agility. In addition, private cloud can provide better control and more secure access to corporate information. Information governance policies in place today can be leveraged in private cloud environments, where information and applications are still under direct control of IT.
As organizations move their applications to the public cloud or adopt a hybrid cloud approach in which IT services are delivered through a mix of internal cloud resources and external service providers, CIO concerns around information management and governance rise in importance. Yet, only 34 percent of the organizations have a governance policy for cloud-based information. Nearly a third admit they are not at all confident in their preparedness for managing information in the public cloud and 57 percent believe their organizations need to spend more time defining a proactive information management and governance strategy."
Comment from Mark Lewis, Chief Strategy Officer of EMC's Information Infrastructure Products Business: While the cloud presents tremendous opportunities to improve the efficiency, flexibility and cost of delivering IT services, it also compels us to manage information in new, more creative ways. If IT fails to embrace information governance strategies that span enterprise, private cloud and public cloud infrastructures, their efforts to leverage information for business advantage will never be fully realized.
Global IT leaders have identified four emerging conditions that can complicate the flow and value of information in hybrid and public clouds. These include:
-- Unchecked proliferation of incompatible cloud platforms and services
-- Fragmentation of an enterprise's information architecture through isolated data and content within the clouds
-- Escalating potential for vendor lock-in
-- Complex chains of custody for information management and security
Strategies for adapting corporate information governance policies to the cloud's unique conditions include:
-- Own the information, even if you own nothing else. Assert your organization's right to own the information, even if you don't own the infrastructure, application or service associated with that information.
-- Hope for standards, but prepare to integrate. Lay the strategic groundwork for future data integration activities today.
-- Control cloud platform proliferation. Look for shared requirements in standardized business functions, such as finance, HR and CRM, and consolidate services organization-wide on a limited number of platforms.
-- Make information "cloud ready." Encrypt information and reorganize data sets so they're accessible and usable across multiple platforms.
-- Master solution integration. Shift the IT team's mindset from owning and operating IT systems to becoming master information service integrators.
Comment from Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC's Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer: Cloud computing offers tremendous scale, mobility and agility. However, if information governance and compliance policies do not evolve in the cloud, it can create complexity in your IT environment. IT professionals need to spend time defining these policies so there are rules for capabilities, such as information mobility, to satisfy business demands. This allows you to integrate your IT policy governance and compliance efforts into your organization's broader governance, risk and compliance strategy.
About the report: The report released today is the second in a series that provides lessons learned, proven best practices and expert guidance on how to transform information into business value. EMC expects to publish additional reports from the Leadership Council for Information Advantage in the coming months.
Contact: http://www.EMC.com
Contact: http://www.CouncilForInformationAdvantage.com
Enterprises moving to cloud computing are looking to move to the private cloud first. Three quarters of IT organizations are running or plan to deploy applications in a private cloud environment. Private cloud helps deliver lower IT costs, improved quality of service and greater business agility. In addition, private cloud can provide better control and more secure access to corporate information. Information governance policies in place today can be leveraged in private cloud environments, where information and applications are still under direct control of IT.
As organizations move their applications to the public cloud or adopt a hybrid cloud approach in which IT services are delivered through a mix of internal cloud resources and external service providers, CIO concerns around information management and governance rise in importance. Yet, only 34 percent of the organizations have a governance policy for cloud-based information. Nearly a third admit they are not at all confident in their preparedness for managing information in the public cloud and 57 percent believe their organizations need to spend more time defining a proactive information management and governance strategy."
Comment from Mark Lewis, Chief Strategy Officer of EMC's Information Infrastructure Products Business: While the cloud presents tremendous opportunities to improve the efficiency, flexibility and cost of delivering IT services, it also compels us to manage information in new, more creative ways. If IT fails to embrace information governance strategies that span enterprise, private cloud and public cloud infrastructures, their efforts to leverage information for business advantage will never be fully realized.
Global IT leaders have identified four emerging conditions that can complicate the flow and value of information in hybrid and public clouds. These include:
-- Unchecked proliferation of incompatible cloud platforms and services
-- Fragmentation of an enterprise's information architecture through isolated data and content within the clouds
-- Escalating potential for vendor lock-in
-- Complex chains of custody for information management and security
Strategies for adapting corporate information governance policies to the cloud's unique conditions include:
-- Own the information, even if you own nothing else. Assert your organization's right to own the information, even if you don't own the infrastructure, application or service associated with that information.
-- Hope for standards, but prepare to integrate. Lay the strategic groundwork for future data integration activities today.
-- Control cloud platform proliferation. Look for shared requirements in standardized business functions, such as finance, HR and CRM, and consolidate services organization-wide on a limited number of platforms.
-- Make information "cloud ready." Encrypt information and reorganize data sets so they're accessible and usable across multiple platforms.
-- Master solution integration. Shift the IT team's mindset from owning and operating IT systems to becoming master information service integrators.
Comment from Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC's Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer: Cloud computing offers tremendous scale, mobility and agility. However, if information governance and compliance policies do not evolve in the cloud, it can create complexity in your IT environment. IT professionals need to spend time defining these policies so there are rules for capabilities, such as information mobility, to satisfy business demands. This allows you to integrate your IT policy governance and compliance efforts into your organization's broader governance, risk and compliance strategy.
About the report: The report released today is the second in a series that provides lessons learned, proven best practices and expert guidance on how to transform information into business value. EMC expects to publish additional reports from the Leadership Council for Information Advantage in the coming months.
Contact: http://www.EMC.com
Contact: http://www.CouncilForInformationAdvantage.com
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Most Companies Believe Sensitive Data Can Be Secured in the Cloud
Most companies believe sensitive data can be secured in the cloud, a survey has found.
In addition, nearly half of the respondents also said they believe cloud-based solutions can be as secure as on-premise products, with over 40 percent stating they would consider replacing current solutions with cloud-based ones.
However, respondents did keep their feet on the ground with clear caveats that cloud solutions must include strong data protection, data segregation and the ability to comply with key compliance mandates, such as Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA and PCI DSS. Compliance was noted as mission critical by nearly 80 percent of those surveyed, and most respondents felt there was some data still too risky to put in the cloud, including intellectual property, financial information and employee records. The survey also showed most companies are willing to forego performance for cloud security, with nearly 80 percent saying they would sacrifice some cloud computing performance in order to ensure that the data was secure.
In the end, it comes down to whether or not a cloud vendor can address the top criteria for cloud security, which are: data protection (85 percent), auditing and tracking (53 percent), access control rules and securing data in motion (both at 36 percent).
For cloud vendors, the survey clearly reveals the most important criteria for companies evaluating a cloud vendor. Respondents placed greatest importance how their data is segregated from other customers (85 percent), whether or not the vendor has a comprehensive and secure disaster recovery plan in place (80 percent), understanding how their company data is secured within the application (79 percent), and understanding the vendor's security breach contingency process (72 percent). Access control rules, strong authentication and best-of-breed network security infrastructure were some of the other criteria near the top of the list when considering cloud providers.
Comment from Margaret Dawson, vice president of marketing and product management at Hubspan: The results of this survey show that while some of the concerns over cloud security may be overblown, vendors must be able to clearly show how they address data segregation, compliance and other areas critical to businesses interested in augmenting on-premise infrastructure with cloud-based solutions. These results mirror what we hear from our own customers, and Hubspan has been ahead of the game in providing best-in-class security and compliance-based B2B integration in the cloud.
About the survey: More than 200 companies completed the cloud survey, ranging in size from under 50 to several thousand employees. Respondents represented a range of industries, with high-tech, manufacturing, wholesale distribution, retail and B2B eCommerce accounting for 50 percent of the polls.
Contact: http://www.hubspan.com
In addition, nearly half of the respondents also said they believe cloud-based solutions can be as secure as on-premise products, with over 40 percent stating they would consider replacing current solutions with cloud-based ones.
However, respondents did keep their feet on the ground with clear caveats that cloud solutions must include strong data protection, data segregation and the ability to comply with key compliance mandates, such as Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA and PCI DSS. Compliance was noted as mission critical by nearly 80 percent of those surveyed, and most respondents felt there was some data still too risky to put in the cloud, including intellectual property, financial information and employee records. The survey also showed most companies are willing to forego performance for cloud security, with nearly 80 percent saying they would sacrifice some cloud computing performance in order to ensure that the data was secure.
In the end, it comes down to whether or not a cloud vendor can address the top criteria for cloud security, which are: data protection (85 percent), auditing and tracking (53 percent), access control rules and securing data in motion (both at 36 percent).
For cloud vendors, the survey clearly reveals the most important criteria for companies evaluating a cloud vendor. Respondents placed greatest importance how their data is segregated from other customers (85 percent), whether or not the vendor has a comprehensive and secure disaster recovery plan in place (80 percent), understanding how their company data is secured within the application (79 percent), and understanding the vendor's security breach contingency process (72 percent). Access control rules, strong authentication and best-of-breed network security infrastructure were some of the other criteria near the top of the list when considering cloud providers.
Comment from Margaret Dawson, vice president of marketing and product management at Hubspan: The results of this survey show that while some of the concerns over cloud security may be overblown, vendors must be able to clearly show how they address data segregation, compliance and other areas critical to businesses interested in augmenting on-premise infrastructure with cloud-based solutions. These results mirror what we hear from our own customers, and Hubspan has been ahead of the game in providing best-in-class security and compliance-based B2B integration in the cloud.
About the survey: More than 200 companies completed the cloud survey, ranging in size from under 50 to several thousand employees. Respondents represented a range of industries, with high-tech, manufacturing, wholesale distribution, retail and B2B eCommerce accounting for 50 percent of the polls.
Contact: http://www.hubspan.com
Mainframe Plays Critical Role In Cloud-Connected Enterprise
Mainframe computers continue to play a critical role in enterprise computing, have a key role in many companies' cloud-connected enterprise strategies, and the availability and development of critical mainframe skills remains a concern, according to a survey.
A significant majority (80 percent) of respondents named the mainframe as an important part of their current business strategy, and as part of their cloud plans (73 percent), and cited concerns about proficiency levels of recent college graduates as cause for concern when looking at sourcing the next generation of mainframe personnel.
The need for skilled mainframe workers becomes even more critical as companies look to leverage the mainframe as a key component of evolving plans for cloud adoption. More than two-thirds (73 percent) of respondents confirmed that the mainframe is -- or will be -- part of their organization's cloud computing strategy.
Among the survey's other significant findings:
1) Increased Mainframe Investment
-- A majority (80 percent) responded they will be maintaining or increasing spend on mainframe staff in the next 12-18 months.
-- More than three-fourths (76 percent) will maintain or increase their investment in mainframe software during the next 12-18 months.
-- Nearly half of respondents (46 percent) are looking for industry leadership from vendors on the evolving role of the mainframe in the enterprise.
2) Difficulty in Sourcing and Training Mainframe Talent
-- Nearly the same percentage of respondents (61 percent) don't believe the IT industry does enough to promote mainframe career opportunities to recent graduates.
-- 35 percent believe that recent graduates are not as proficient in mainframe technology as their counterparts that entered the workforce 10-years ago.
-- 61 percent said that hiring either took much longer than expected, took long enough to negatively impact their IT operation or are still looking for talent after more than six months.
3) Leveraging Social Media in Hiring
-- As the industry seeks to bolster mainframe education and careers in technology, companies will continue to hire. More than half (52 percent) of those surveyed cited social media networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn as the most effective recruiting tools. Fifty six percent indicated that they would like IT vendors to provide insights on the next generation of mainframe personnel, as they too, are feeling the staffing squeeze.
Comment from Dayton Semerjian, general manager, Mainframe, CA Technologies: With the resurgence of the mainframe underway and the recent release of IBM's zEnterprise hardware, it's clear that the mainframe is here to stay and will remain a critical component of enterprise data center as companies develop cloud strategies.
About the survey: The survey "Mainframe as a Mainstay" was conducted by Decipher Research, a marketing research services provider based in the U.S. Decipher surveyed 200 U.S. mainframe executives during September and October 2010.
Contact: http://www.ca.com
A significant majority (80 percent) of respondents named the mainframe as an important part of their current business strategy, and as part of their cloud plans (73 percent), and cited concerns about proficiency levels of recent college graduates as cause for concern when looking at sourcing the next generation of mainframe personnel.
The need for skilled mainframe workers becomes even more critical as companies look to leverage the mainframe as a key component of evolving plans for cloud adoption. More than two-thirds (73 percent) of respondents confirmed that the mainframe is -- or will be -- part of their organization's cloud computing strategy.
Among the survey's other significant findings:
1) Increased Mainframe Investment
-- A majority (80 percent) responded they will be maintaining or increasing spend on mainframe staff in the next 12-18 months.
-- More than three-fourths (76 percent) will maintain or increase their investment in mainframe software during the next 12-18 months.
-- Nearly half of respondents (46 percent) are looking for industry leadership from vendors on the evolving role of the mainframe in the enterprise.
2) Difficulty in Sourcing and Training Mainframe Talent
-- Nearly the same percentage of respondents (61 percent) don't believe the IT industry does enough to promote mainframe career opportunities to recent graduates.
-- 35 percent believe that recent graduates are not as proficient in mainframe technology as their counterparts that entered the workforce 10-years ago.
-- 61 percent said that hiring either took much longer than expected, took long enough to negatively impact their IT operation or are still looking for talent after more than six months.
3) Leveraging Social Media in Hiring
-- As the industry seeks to bolster mainframe education and careers in technology, companies will continue to hire. More than half (52 percent) of those surveyed cited social media networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn as the most effective recruiting tools. Fifty six percent indicated that they would like IT vendors to provide insights on the next generation of mainframe personnel, as they too, are feeling the staffing squeeze.
Comment from Dayton Semerjian, general manager, Mainframe, CA Technologies: With the resurgence of the mainframe underway and the recent release of IBM's zEnterprise hardware, it's clear that the mainframe is here to stay and will remain a critical component of enterprise data center as companies develop cloud strategies.
About the survey: The survey "Mainframe as a Mainstay" was conducted by Decipher Research, a marketing research services provider based in the U.S. Decipher surveyed 200 U.S. mainframe executives during September and October 2010.
Contact: http://www.ca.com
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Cloud Deployment Likely To Accelerate This Year
Adoption of cloud computing has lagged behind media buzz, but growth in cloud deployments is likely to accelerate in the coming year, according to a survey.
Other findings:
-- Half won't commit for five years: While genuine interest in the cloud is growing, nearly 40 percent of respondents indicated their organizations had no plans to use cloud services. As a result, the adoption curve for cloud computing will not follow the bell curve typical of most new technologies. After an initial surge of adoption, growth will slow until remaining companies see proof of success from early adopters. Once a critical mass of users establishes success, competitive pressures will force the remaining companies to adopt cloud services.
-- Cloud platform supremacy: the battle intensifies: Only three percent of respondents selected a primary cloud platform, with selections evenly split between Microsoft Azure Services Platform, Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services, indicating the competition for market dominance is still wide open and likely will intensify.
-- New support teams emerge to lasso the cloud: The survey found the first signs of organizational change with the emergence of new administrative teams dedicated to supporting cloud services. Leading-edge companies recognize that provisioning and support of cloud services will be fundamentally different than current application delivery models.
-- IT will adopt e-mail cloud services first: Survey results showed people are most interested in e-mail as a cloud service. Approximately 50 percent of the companies using, currently evaluating, or planning to deploy cloud services have or are considering e-mail. Enterprises are waiting for e-mail offerings to mature, however, with truly widespread adoption still likely years, rather than months, away.
-- "Best-of-breed" trumps standardization as more cloud decisions are made outside IT: The ease of use and scalability of many cloud solutions enables business area managers to choose their own platforms and applications rather than rely on centralized decisions by IT organizations. Survey respondents' relatively low interest in customer relationship management (CRM) is inconsistent with the popularity of Salesforce.com and other cloud-delivered CRM services, indicating that IT organizations are not involved in, and may not even be aware of, all cloud services used within their enterprises.
-- Small cloud service contingency plans spell big trouble: Cost reduction is cited by 34 percent of survey respondents as the primary driver for considering cloud services. Yet, the newness of cloud service delivery models coupled with this strong focus on cost reduction means some IT organizations will underestimate the need for proper contingency planning for service outages.
-- Federation will become IT delivery standard: Use of federation to share identity information across domains and enable business users to access multiple systems and services has grown steadily over the past several years. Twenty-four percent of survey respondents already deploy federation, and another nine percent plan to deploy it within the next 12 months.
-- E-discovery, compliance and security will drive increased Exchange support spending: More than 40 percent of respondents reported their resource requirements for e-discovery support and security increased over the past year, perhaps due to increasing regulatory oversight, litigation levels, or pressure to protect corporate information. Thirty-one percent saw growth in resources needed for compliance reporting and supporting audit requirements, and 70 percent were less than satisfied with their e-mail compliance processes. E-discovery, compliance and security likely will be the primary drivers of increases in Exchange support spending in 2011.
-- Fight will continue on desktop and storage battlegrounds: Ninety-one percent of TEC respondents are already using virtualization in production, and most of the rest are either evaluating or planning to deploy within the next 12 months. Server virtualization is either in use or under evaluation by 94 percent of responding organizations, and the market has reached saturation. Desktop virtualization still has room for growth in adoption, with current use at 46 percent in responding organizations. Storage virtualization currently is used by only 24 percent of responding organizations.
-- Technology investment strategies will forego cost-cutting, embrace opportunity: While many companies and government organizations still tightly control spending, responses on the TEC survey show promising signs of economic improvement. Only nine percent of responding companies are still cutting back, while 54 percent are making at least targeted investments. As the economy continues to improve and companies seek to accelerate revenue growth, there will be an increasing shift from cost-cutting purchases to more opportunity-based technology investments.
Comment from Gil Kirkpatrick, Quest chief architect and conference founder: Taken together, these predictions paint a picture of the key priorities of IT organizations and the technology market dynamics we can expect in 2011. We're excited to share these insights on the complexities of adoption behind the cloud buzz, platform vendor battles and shifting technology investment strategies.
About the survey: Quest Software, Inc.'s technology predictions for 2011are based on results of its annual survey conducted at The Experts Conference (TEC) U.S., hosted earlier this year by Quest. Survey results were analyzed by Quest experts to extract key insights and compelling trends. Results are based on analysis of this year's TEC conference survey responses from in-the-trenches IT practitioners, as well as historical perspective gleaned from conducting annual surveys.
Contact: http://www.theexpertsconference.com/us/2011/general-information/2010-us-survey-results
Contact: http://www.quest.com
Other findings:
-- Half won't commit for five years: While genuine interest in the cloud is growing, nearly 40 percent of respondents indicated their organizations had no plans to use cloud services. As a result, the adoption curve for cloud computing will not follow the bell curve typical of most new technologies. After an initial surge of adoption, growth will slow until remaining companies see proof of success from early adopters. Once a critical mass of users establishes success, competitive pressures will force the remaining companies to adopt cloud services.
-- Cloud platform supremacy: the battle intensifies: Only three percent of respondents selected a primary cloud platform, with selections evenly split between Microsoft Azure Services Platform, Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services, indicating the competition for market dominance is still wide open and likely will intensify.
-- New support teams emerge to lasso the cloud: The survey found the first signs of organizational change with the emergence of new administrative teams dedicated to supporting cloud services. Leading-edge companies recognize that provisioning and support of cloud services will be fundamentally different than current application delivery models.
-- IT will adopt e-mail cloud services first: Survey results showed people are most interested in e-mail as a cloud service. Approximately 50 percent of the companies using, currently evaluating, or planning to deploy cloud services have or are considering e-mail. Enterprises are waiting for e-mail offerings to mature, however, with truly widespread adoption still likely years, rather than months, away.
-- "Best-of-breed" trumps standardization as more cloud decisions are made outside IT: The ease of use and scalability of many cloud solutions enables business area managers to choose their own platforms and applications rather than rely on centralized decisions by IT organizations. Survey respondents' relatively low interest in customer relationship management (CRM) is inconsistent with the popularity of Salesforce.com and other cloud-delivered CRM services, indicating that IT organizations are not involved in, and may not even be aware of, all cloud services used within their enterprises.
-- Small cloud service contingency plans spell big trouble: Cost reduction is cited by 34 percent of survey respondents as the primary driver for considering cloud services. Yet, the newness of cloud service delivery models coupled with this strong focus on cost reduction means some IT organizations will underestimate the need for proper contingency planning for service outages.
-- Federation will become IT delivery standard: Use of federation to share identity information across domains and enable business users to access multiple systems and services has grown steadily over the past several years. Twenty-four percent of survey respondents already deploy federation, and another nine percent plan to deploy it within the next 12 months.
-- E-discovery, compliance and security will drive increased Exchange support spending: More than 40 percent of respondents reported their resource requirements for e-discovery support and security increased over the past year, perhaps due to increasing regulatory oversight, litigation levels, or pressure to protect corporate information. Thirty-one percent saw growth in resources needed for compliance reporting and supporting audit requirements, and 70 percent were less than satisfied with their e-mail compliance processes. E-discovery, compliance and security likely will be the primary drivers of increases in Exchange support spending in 2011.
-- Fight will continue on desktop and storage battlegrounds: Ninety-one percent of TEC respondents are already using virtualization in production, and most of the rest are either evaluating or planning to deploy within the next 12 months. Server virtualization is either in use or under evaluation by 94 percent of responding organizations, and the market has reached saturation. Desktop virtualization still has room for growth in adoption, with current use at 46 percent in responding organizations. Storage virtualization currently is used by only 24 percent of responding organizations.
-- Technology investment strategies will forego cost-cutting, embrace opportunity: While many companies and government organizations still tightly control spending, responses on the TEC survey show promising signs of economic improvement. Only nine percent of responding companies are still cutting back, while 54 percent are making at least targeted investments. As the economy continues to improve and companies seek to accelerate revenue growth, there will be an increasing shift from cost-cutting purchases to more opportunity-based technology investments.
Comment from Gil Kirkpatrick, Quest chief architect and conference founder: Taken together, these predictions paint a picture of the key priorities of IT organizations and the technology market dynamics we can expect in 2011. We're excited to share these insights on the complexities of adoption behind the cloud buzz, platform vendor battles and shifting technology investment strategies.
About the survey: Quest Software, Inc.'s technology predictions for 2011are based on results of its annual survey conducted at The Experts Conference (TEC) U.S., hosted earlier this year by Quest. Survey results were analyzed by Quest experts to extract key insights and compelling trends. Results are based on analysis of this year's TEC conference survey responses from in-the-trenches IT practitioners, as well as historical perspective gleaned from conducting annual surveys.
Contact: http://www.theexpertsconference.com/us/2011/general-information/2010-us-survey-results
Contact: http://www.quest.com
Friday, November 12, 2010
Investment In Cloud Computing Is Rising; Resistance To SaaS ERP Declining
Thirty-nine percent of respondents to a survey are willing to consider Software as a Service (SaaS) as a deployment option for their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations. This is a 61 percent increase in the willingness to consider SaaS from 2009 to 2010. Not only do we see a significant increase in willingness to consider SaaS or on-demand as a deployment method, but also notable is the decreased willingness to consider the traditional licensed on-premise option, which dropped by almost 18 percent.
Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents are considering SaaS because of the lower total cost of ownership. They are also considering it because it reduces the cost of upgrades and because they have limited IT resources and no interest in building IT staff. Because of this, 2010 could very well be the year in which SaaS ERP really gains strength in the marketplace.
Comment from Cindy Jutras, vice president research fellow and group director, Aberdeen: Since 2007 Aberdeen has been keeping watch on deployment models of ERP. In July 2007, we characterized ERP as the Last Bastion of Resistance to Software as a Service (SaaS). In June 2008 we revisited the topic and found SaaS ERP had not kept pace with the hype-cycle of other SaaS enterprise applications. Eighteen months later (at the end of 2009), in spite of the surge in interest in cloud computing and virtualization and the availability of SaaS ERP options from an increasing number of solution providers, SaaS ERP had yet to "take off." Finally in mid-2010 we are seeing an overall 61 percent jump in willingness to consider SaaS ERP. Will 2010 finally be the year when those walls of resistance come tumbling down? Or will they just fade away and leave us at the dawn of 2011 wondering what the fuss was all about?
About the report: SaaS ERP: Trends & Observations 2010 from Aberdeen Group is available at the Web site.
Contact: http://www.aberdeen.com
Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents are considering SaaS because of the lower total cost of ownership. They are also considering it because it reduces the cost of upgrades and because they have limited IT resources and no interest in building IT staff. Because of this, 2010 could very well be the year in which SaaS ERP really gains strength in the marketplace.
Comment from Cindy Jutras, vice president research fellow and group director, Aberdeen: Since 2007 Aberdeen has been keeping watch on deployment models of ERP. In July 2007, we characterized ERP as the Last Bastion of Resistance to Software as a Service (SaaS). In June 2008 we revisited the topic and found SaaS ERP had not kept pace with the hype-cycle of other SaaS enterprise applications. Eighteen months later (at the end of 2009), in spite of the surge in interest in cloud computing and virtualization and the availability of SaaS ERP options from an increasing number of solution providers, SaaS ERP had yet to "take off." Finally in mid-2010 we are seeing an overall 61 percent jump in willingness to consider SaaS ERP. Will 2010 finally be the year when those walls of resistance come tumbling down? Or will they just fade away and leave us at the dawn of 2011 wondering what the fuss was all about?
About the report: SaaS ERP: Trends & Observations 2010 from Aberdeen Group is available at the Web site.
Contact: http://www.aberdeen.com
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Majority Of Organizations Still Receive Paper Invoices
More than 70 percent of organizations receive over three quarters of their invoices in paper form, according to a recent survey. While automating invoice processing can reduce costs by 75 to 90 percent, more than half of the 100 respondents cited the perceived cost and resources required with on-premise software as barriers to automation.
Comment from Toby Bell, research vice president at Gartner: Many factors are prompting businesses to focus on enterprise content management (ECM) as part of a shift toward a SaaS or cloud model. The attractions for applications like invoice processing are obvious as it brings with it fewer costs for infrastructure hardware, software and management, and less complexity in the applications layer.
Comment from Roger Bottum, vice president of marketing, SpringCM: The impact on SG&A and risk reduction are obvious to most organizations. On-premise delivery models have been a barrier. But now with cloud solutions, automating the invoice process can be easy, fast and affordable to address.
About the survey: The survey was conducted by SpringCM, a specialist in cloud enterprise content management.
Contact: http://www.springcm.com
Comment from Toby Bell, research vice president at Gartner: Many factors are prompting businesses to focus on enterprise content management (ECM) as part of a shift toward a SaaS or cloud model. The attractions for applications like invoice processing are obvious as it brings with it fewer costs for infrastructure hardware, software and management, and less complexity in the applications layer.
Comment from Roger Bottum, vice president of marketing, SpringCM: The impact on SG&A and risk reduction are obvious to most organizations. On-premise delivery models have been a barrier. But now with cloud solutions, automating the invoice process can be easy, fast and affordable to address.
About the survey: The survey was conducted by SpringCM, a specialist in cloud enterprise content management.
Contact: http://www.springcm.com
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
CIOs Look To Improve Key Business Processes In 2011
Sixty-eight percent of 347 IT professionals who responded to a recent survey said they are expected to deliver tighter application and business process integration, creating more value for the business without significantly adding to the IT budget. Examples include integrating the order-to-cash and procure-to-pay process chains to improve cash flow.
IT professionals on both continents are being pressed to help their companies build a leaner, more agile and competitive business. Other high ranking responses included how to better exploit cloud computing, increasing the use of virtual machines to maximize flexibility and reduce costs, and implementing/extending service-oriented architectures (SOA) to extend the ROI of existing IT assets.
The survey results validate the belief that IT budgets remain tight and enterprise-wide transformational programs have been replaced by less risky, targeted projects that cost less and deliver more immediate results. Also apparent from the consistency of issues related by such a wide range of IT professionals is that, while companies are looking at more targeted projects, they are taking a more holistic approach, addressing the business purpose of the process, the human interaction with the process, process execution and monitoring, and managing the infrastructure required to run the process. Optimizing the business value of key processes lies at the heart of the results.
Comment from Gartner Research analyst Janelle B. Hill: Most companies no longer have the luxury of funding efforts that may succeed eventually; they want guaranteed business results in shorter time frames.
Comment from Andrew Evers, Redwood Software CTO: In this environment CIOs are expecting their organizations to work smarter and increase business agility while absolutely holding the line on costs. They are asking every department to contribute to and own the company's success. The results clearly demonstrate that IT business models have changed.
About the survey: Redwood Software conducted the 2010 IT Priorities survey on workload automation at the SAP TechEd conferences in Berlin, October 12-14, and Las Vegas, October 18-22, among process management IT professionals such as ERP directors, business process managers, application architects and others.
Contact: http://www.redwood.com
IT professionals on both continents are being pressed to help their companies build a leaner, more agile and competitive business. Other high ranking responses included how to better exploit cloud computing, increasing the use of virtual machines to maximize flexibility and reduce costs, and implementing/extending service-oriented architectures (SOA) to extend the ROI of existing IT assets.
The survey results validate the belief that IT budgets remain tight and enterprise-wide transformational programs have been replaced by less risky, targeted projects that cost less and deliver more immediate results. Also apparent from the consistency of issues related by such a wide range of IT professionals is that, while companies are looking at more targeted projects, they are taking a more holistic approach, addressing the business purpose of the process, the human interaction with the process, process execution and monitoring, and managing the infrastructure required to run the process. Optimizing the business value of key processes lies at the heart of the results.
Comment from Gartner Research analyst Janelle B. Hill: Most companies no longer have the luxury of funding efforts that may succeed eventually; they want guaranteed business results in shorter time frames.
Comment from Andrew Evers, Redwood Software CTO: In this environment CIOs are expecting their organizations to work smarter and increase business agility while absolutely holding the line on costs. They are asking every department to contribute to and own the company's success. The results clearly demonstrate that IT business models have changed.
About the survey: Redwood Software conducted the 2010 IT Priorities survey on workload automation at the SAP TechEd conferences in Berlin, October 12-14, and Las Vegas, October 18-22, among process management IT professionals such as ERP directors, business process managers, application architects and others.
Contact: http://www.redwood.com
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Application Performance Management Is Critical When Moving To The Cloud
Demand for application performance management is growing when moving applications to the cloud, according to a recent survey.
Key areas were surveyed to better understand plans for consolidation and virtualization; which applications would be cloud-enabled; attitudes toward using WAN optimization or APM solutions and service level agreements (SLAs) requirements.
The majority of MNC respondents indicate that Web conferencing, video conferencing and Microsoft applications are the most likely applications to be virtualized or cloud-enabled. Only 95 of the 500 companies plan to virtualize their call center applications and even fewer plan to virtualize customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human resources, or other applications. The selection of applications for the cloud is based on those that are used "off-the-shelf" versus those that are typically customized for unique business use.
The study shows most companies, 67.6 percent, plan to consolidate data centers and servers within the next two years, further validating that consolidation continues to be driven by cost reduction and centralization.
European multinationals' use of WAN optimization or an application delivery performance solution is mixed. Though 54.4 percent already have a solution in place, 45.6 percent indicate that they still do not currently use WAN optimization or an application delivery performance solution. With new access technologies and bandwidth costs varying by region, performance can be achieved without any solution. However, economic challenges continue to compel bandwidth savings and cost reduction as key drivers for MNCs knowing that bandwidth will not resolve application-specific protocol issues and guarantee end-user experience.
When asked about service level agreements (SLAs), 69.1 percent expect to have application-level SLAs such as application availability, while 55.9 percent expect managed network services SLAs such as round trip delay, packet loss and jitter.
Comment from Jean Critcher, Solution Director at Orange Business Services: As this study shows, WAN optimization and APM continue to be important to MNCs and most especially when they are moving to the cloud. As a continuance to achieve the fastest means to cost reduction, these solutions become more justified. Our customers who use WAN optimization and APM solutions from Orange benefit from double-digit savings to TCO and improvements to productivity while seeing ROI within a year.
About the survey: Orange Business Services assessed application performance management (APM) plans and attitudes among decision makers from 500 multinational corporations (MNC) in 12 European countries(1) across various industry sectors including financial services, health care, manufacturing, retail and transportation. The complete survey results are available online in a report titled "Application Performance Management: maintaining performance, productivity and getting ready for the cloud."
Contact: http://www.orange.com
Key areas were surveyed to better understand plans for consolidation and virtualization; which applications would be cloud-enabled; attitudes toward using WAN optimization or APM solutions and service level agreements (SLAs) requirements.
The majority of MNC respondents indicate that Web conferencing, video conferencing and Microsoft applications are the most likely applications to be virtualized or cloud-enabled. Only 95 of the 500 companies plan to virtualize their call center applications and even fewer plan to virtualize customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human resources, or other applications. The selection of applications for the cloud is based on those that are used "off-the-shelf" versus those that are typically customized for unique business use.
The study shows most companies, 67.6 percent, plan to consolidate data centers and servers within the next two years, further validating that consolidation continues to be driven by cost reduction and centralization.
European multinationals' use of WAN optimization or an application delivery performance solution is mixed. Though 54.4 percent already have a solution in place, 45.6 percent indicate that they still do not currently use WAN optimization or an application delivery performance solution. With new access technologies and bandwidth costs varying by region, performance can be achieved without any solution. However, economic challenges continue to compel bandwidth savings and cost reduction as key drivers for MNCs knowing that bandwidth will not resolve application-specific protocol issues and guarantee end-user experience.
When asked about service level agreements (SLAs), 69.1 percent expect to have application-level SLAs such as application availability, while 55.9 percent expect managed network services SLAs such as round trip delay, packet loss and jitter.
Comment from Jean Critcher, Solution Director at Orange Business Services: As this study shows, WAN optimization and APM continue to be important to MNCs and most especially when they are moving to the cloud. As a continuance to achieve the fastest means to cost reduction, these solutions become more justified. Our customers who use WAN optimization and APM solutions from Orange benefit from double-digit savings to TCO and improvements to productivity while seeing ROI within a year.
About the survey: Orange Business Services assessed application performance management (APM) plans and attitudes among decision makers from 500 multinational corporations (MNC) in 12 European countries(1) across various industry sectors including financial services, health care, manufacturing, retail and transportation. The complete survey results are available online in a report titled "Application Performance Management: maintaining performance, productivity and getting ready for the cloud."
Contact: http://www.orange.com
Consumer Devices, Social Media and Video May Be Causing Company IT Policies To Bend Or Break
There is a disconnect between IT policies and workers, especially as employees strive to work in a more mobile fashion and use numerous devices, social media and new forms of communication such as video, a new survey has found. As technology trends alter the way businesses communicate and operate, more than two-thirds of workers surveyed believed their companies' IT policies could be improved, and at least two of every five (41 percent) said they break those policies to meet their needs.
Key findings:
1. Employee Awareness and Adherence to IT Policies
-- The study revealed that while most companies have IT policies (82 percent), about one in four employees (24 percent) are unaware that such policies exist. An additional 23 percent reported that their companies do not have IT policies on acceptable device usage. When combined, almost half of the workers in the study (47 percent) either do not have an IT policy on device usage or do not know that one exists.
-- For those employees who have an IT policy, 35 percent say IT does not provide an explanation or rationale for why it exists, which can result in apathy, misunderstanding and selective compliance.
-- Among workers aware of IT policy, about two of three (64 percent) feel it could use some improvement. These employees believe policies could be updated to reflect real-world needs and work styles, such as finding an acceptable medium between device usage, social media, mobility and work flexibility.
-- Of those employees who admit to breaking IT policies, about two of every five (41 percent) say it's because they need restricted programs and applications to get the job done -- they're simply trying to be more productive and efficient.
-- One of five (20 percent) employees worldwide said they break IT policy because they believe their company or IT team will not enforce it.
-- This research points to an issue among many businesses worldwide: the need to re-evaluate and update IT policies to align with the growing reality of a workforce that is demanding more enablement to be connected anywhere, anytime, with any device and any information in their work and personal lives.
2. IT Policy Toward Employee Use of Social Media, Devices
-- Social media use is restricted to varying degrees around the world and per company. Although half (51 percent) of the employees surveyed worldwide believe social media, while not work-related, contributes to work-life balance, two of five (41 percent) said they are restricted from using Facebook at their job, and one of three (35 percent) is restricted from using Twitter at work or with work devices.
-- More than one in four (28 percent) workers are restricted from using instant messaging at work or with work devices, and one in five (21 percent) are restricted from doing personal e-mail on work devices and during work hours.
-- Two of every three employees (64 percent) believe their IT teams and companies should loosen up and allow social media use during work hours with work devices, citing work-life balance as a key reason, particularly because many of them can work in a mobile, distributed fashion and put in longer hours as a result.
-- The use of personal devices like iPads and iPhones is also restricted to some degree. Globally, almost one in five (18 percent) employees are not allowed to use their iPods at work, and almost one in five (18 percent) are restricted from using personal devices like employee-owned laptops or phones.
-- The majority of employees (66 percent) believe they should be able to connect freely with any device -- personal or company-issued -- and access the applications and information that they need around the clock. Policy or no policy, many employees will simply do it, raising the question about how effective a policy is and how IT can update, enforce and ensure better compliance.
3. The Rise of Video in the Workplace
-- The use of video is on the rise as a form of consumer and enterprise communication. Globally, more than two-thirds of IT professionals (68 percent) feel that the importance of video communications to their company will increase in the future. This sentiment is particularly true among those in Mexico (85 percent), China (85 percent), Brazil (82 percent), and Spain (82 percent).
-- However, not all employees who wish to use video communications in the workplace are able to do so today. About two in five employees (41percent) said they cannot use video as a communications tool at work, with more than half of employees in the United States (53 percent), the United Kingdom (55 percent), Germany (55 percent) and France (60 percent) not having the capability of using video for workplace communications.
Comment from Marie Hattar, vice president, Borderless Networks, Cisco: The time spent between work and personal lives has blurred. Employees expect to access networks, applications and information anywhere, at any time, on any device. With the expansion of diverse devices in the workplace, along with the growth of video as a favored mode of communication, IT organizations are facing many policy and management demands on their networking infrastructure. The good news is that IT departments can allow employees to be productive and satisfy their desire to socially network on consumer or company-issued devices through the agility and flexibility provided by a Cisco Borderless Network Architecture.
Comment from Nasrin Rezai, senior director, Cisco Security: While most companies have IT policies, employees are not always aware of or knowledgeable about them. For those employees who are cognizant, policies are not always considered up-to-date or reflective of real-world business and lifestyle expectations, and as a result they are broken many times. The Cisco Connected World Report spotlights the disconnect between IT, employees and policies. As workforces become more distributed and the consumerization of IT becomes a fact of mainstream life, the importance of updating appropriate policies to accommodate employee needs while balancing risk and security becomes critical.
About the study: The study was commissioned by Cisco and conducted by InsightExpress, a third-party market research firm based in the United States. Cisco commissioned the study to maintain its understanding of present-day challenges that companies face as they strive to address employee and business needs amid increasing mobility capabilities, security risks, and technologies that can deliver applications and information more ubiquitously -- from virtualized data centers and cloud computing to traditional wired and wireless networks.
Contact: http://www.cisco.com
Key findings:
1. Employee Awareness and Adherence to IT Policies
-- The study revealed that while most companies have IT policies (82 percent), about one in four employees (24 percent) are unaware that such policies exist. An additional 23 percent reported that their companies do not have IT policies on acceptable device usage. When combined, almost half of the workers in the study (47 percent) either do not have an IT policy on device usage or do not know that one exists.
-- For those employees who have an IT policy, 35 percent say IT does not provide an explanation or rationale for why it exists, which can result in apathy, misunderstanding and selective compliance.
-- Among workers aware of IT policy, about two of three (64 percent) feel it could use some improvement. These employees believe policies could be updated to reflect real-world needs and work styles, such as finding an acceptable medium between device usage, social media, mobility and work flexibility.
-- Of those employees who admit to breaking IT policies, about two of every five (41 percent) say it's because they need restricted programs and applications to get the job done -- they're simply trying to be more productive and efficient.
-- One of five (20 percent) employees worldwide said they break IT policy because they believe their company or IT team will not enforce it.
-- This research points to an issue among many businesses worldwide: the need to re-evaluate and update IT policies to align with the growing reality of a workforce that is demanding more enablement to be connected anywhere, anytime, with any device and any information in their work and personal lives.
2. IT Policy Toward Employee Use of Social Media, Devices
-- Social media use is restricted to varying degrees around the world and per company. Although half (51 percent) of the employees surveyed worldwide believe social media, while not work-related, contributes to work-life balance, two of five (41 percent) said they are restricted from using Facebook at their job, and one of three (35 percent) is restricted from using Twitter at work or with work devices.
-- More than one in four (28 percent) workers are restricted from using instant messaging at work or with work devices, and one in five (21 percent) are restricted from doing personal e-mail on work devices and during work hours.
-- Two of every three employees (64 percent) believe their IT teams and companies should loosen up and allow social media use during work hours with work devices, citing work-life balance as a key reason, particularly because many of them can work in a mobile, distributed fashion and put in longer hours as a result.
-- The use of personal devices like iPads and iPhones is also restricted to some degree. Globally, almost one in five (18 percent) employees are not allowed to use their iPods at work, and almost one in five (18 percent) are restricted from using personal devices like employee-owned laptops or phones.
-- The majority of employees (66 percent) believe they should be able to connect freely with any device -- personal or company-issued -- and access the applications and information that they need around the clock. Policy or no policy, many employees will simply do it, raising the question about how effective a policy is and how IT can update, enforce and ensure better compliance.
3. The Rise of Video in the Workplace
-- The use of video is on the rise as a form of consumer and enterprise communication. Globally, more than two-thirds of IT professionals (68 percent) feel that the importance of video communications to their company will increase in the future. This sentiment is particularly true among those in Mexico (85 percent), China (85 percent), Brazil (82 percent), and Spain (82 percent).
-- However, not all employees who wish to use video communications in the workplace are able to do so today. About two in five employees (41percent) said they cannot use video as a communications tool at work, with more than half of employees in the United States (53 percent), the United Kingdom (55 percent), Germany (55 percent) and France (60 percent) not having the capability of using video for workplace communications.
Comment from Marie Hattar, vice president, Borderless Networks, Cisco: The time spent between work and personal lives has blurred. Employees expect to access networks, applications and information anywhere, at any time, on any device. With the expansion of diverse devices in the workplace, along with the growth of video as a favored mode of communication, IT organizations are facing many policy and management demands on their networking infrastructure. The good news is that IT departments can allow employees to be productive and satisfy their desire to socially network on consumer or company-issued devices through the agility and flexibility provided by a Cisco Borderless Network Architecture.
Comment from Nasrin Rezai, senior director, Cisco Security: While most companies have IT policies, employees are not always aware of or knowledgeable about them. For those employees who are cognizant, policies are not always considered up-to-date or reflective of real-world business and lifestyle expectations, and as a result they are broken many times. The Cisco Connected World Report spotlights the disconnect between IT, employees and policies. As workforces become more distributed and the consumerization of IT becomes a fact of mainstream life, the importance of updating appropriate policies to accommodate employee needs while balancing risk and security becomes critical.
About the study: The study was commissioned by Cisco and conducted by InsightExpress, a third-party market research firm based in the United States. Cisco commissioned the study to maintain its understanding of present-day challenges that companies face as they strive to address employee and business needs amid increasing mobility capabilities, security risks, and technologies that can deliver applications and information more ubiquitously -- from virtualized data centers and cloud computing to traditional wired and wireless networks.
Contact: http://www.cisco.com
Friday, November 5, 2010
Cloud Computing Adoption Presents Significant Security Risks
Though organizations are increasing spending to protect data, many still feel pressured to reduce IT expenditures in other areas, leading them to look externally for efficient solutions, according to a new survey.
Despite an unproven track record, 45 percent of organizations are currently using, evaluating or planning to use cloud computing services within the next 12 months. The risks associated with cloud computing include data leakage, with 52 percent identifying it as the largest associated risk, followed by 39 percent who cite the lost visibility of company data as an increased risk of cloud-based solutions.
However, most respondents (85 percent) indicate that external certification of cloud service providers would help to evaluate security controls and increase trust.
Evidence also suggests that few organizations have fully assessed the risks associated with social networking. Just one-third report that social media presents a considerable information security challenge and only 10 percent say examining new and emerging IT trends is a very important information security function.
The focus in information security is shifting from a technology-only approach to a technology and people approach, as information security becomes an expanded function of which all employees are aware of and have a responsibility to adhere to. Without clearly defined and communicated security policies on the use of new technology, organizations' exposure to risk will increase.
Comment from Jose Granado, Ernst & Young LLP's Americas practice leader for Information Security Services: The combination of more mobility, increased social access to information and outsourcing to the cloud requires a change in traditional information security paradigms. The 'outsiders are now the insiders,' meaning people and organizations outside the borders of the traditional corporate environment play a role in helping to achieve information security objectives, but can also pose a risk to protecting your information. A comprehensive IT risk management program must focus on people, processes and technology to address information throughout its life cycle, wherever it resides.
About the survey: Ernst & Young's 2010 Global Information Security Survey was conducted between June and August 2010. Nearly 1,600 organizations in 56 countries and across all major industries participated.
Contact: The full report is available here.
Despite an unproven track record, 45 percent of organizations are currently using, evaluating or planning to use cloud computing services within the next 12 months. The risks associated with cloud computing include data leakage, with 52 percent identifying it as the largest associated risk, followed by 39 percent who cite the lost visibility of company data as an increased risk of cloud-based solutions.
However, most respondents (85 percent) indicate that external certification of cloud service providers would help to evaluate security controls and increase trust.
Evidence also suggests that few organizations have fully assessed the risks associated with social networking. Just one-third report that social media presents a considerable information security challenge and only 10 percent say examining new and emerging IT trends is a very important information security function.
The focus in information security is shifting from a technology-only approach to a technology and people approach, as information security becomes an expanded function of which all employees are aware of and have a responsibility to adhere to. Without clearly defined and communicated security policies on the use of new technology, organizations' exposure to risk will increase.
Comment from Jose Granado, Ernst & Young LLP's Americas practice leader for Information Security Services: The combination of more mobility, increased social access to information and outsourcing to the cloud requires a change in traditional information security paradigms. The 'outsiders are now the insiders,' meaning people and organizations outside the borders of the traditional corporate environment play a role in helping to achieve information security objectives, but can also pose a risk to protecting your information. A comprehensive IT risk management program must focus on people, processes and technology to address information throughout its life cycle, wherever it resides.
About the survey: Ernst & Young's 2010 Global Information Security Survey was conducted between June and August 2010. Nearly 1,600 organizations in 56 countries and across all major industries participated.
Contact: The full report is available here.
Three Critical Areas For SMB Cloud Application Adoption Success
An industry researcher suggests that small and medium businesses (SMBs) prioritize planning and management of the following areas to realize benefits from cloud-based applications:
-- Organizational: Organizational issues and people continue to provide the majority of obstacles to successful SaaS implementations. Training beyond simple "how to" instruction will aid adoption.
-- Technology: In most cases SaaS solutions need to link with existing business systems. Effective management of internal IT resources and/or external implementation partners is critical.
-- Operational Skills: While the need for software development and upgrading skills will lessen, more systems integration knowledge will likely be required. Also, a shift from capital to operational expenditures when deploying SaaS applications requires financial management adjustments.
Comment from Robert McNeill, Saugatuck Technology vice president: Our 2010 survey research indicates that CRM is one of the top five cloud-based applications being adopted by SMBs today, and is expected to lead SaaS adoption and deployment for SMBs through year-end 2012.
About the publication: Sage North America says that a white paper it sponsored "Software-as-a-Service: Managing Benefits for SMBs," by Saugatuck Technology, is available here.
Contact: http://www.sagenorthamerica.com
-- Organizational: Organizational issues and people continue to provide the majority of obstacles to successful SaaS implementations. Training beyond simple "how to" instruction will aid adoption.
-- Technology: In most cases SaaS solutions need to link with existing business systems. Effective management of internal IT resources and/or external implementation partners is critical.
-- Operational Skills: While the need for software development and upgrading skills will lessen, more systems integration knowledge will likely be required. Also, a shift from capital to operational expenditures when deploying SaaS applications requires financial management adjustments.
Comment from Robert McNeill, Saugatuck Technology vice president: Our 2010 survey research indicates that CRM is one of the top five cloud-based applications being adopted by SMBs today, and is expected to lead SaaS adoption and deployment for SMBs through year-end 2012.
About the publication: Sage North America says that a white paper it sponsored "Software-as-a-Service: Managing Benefits for SMBs," by Saugatuck Technology, is available here.
Contact: http://www.sagenorthamerica.com
Cloud, SaaS Are Preferred Deployment Schemes For Project Management
According to a project management software provider, cloud and SaaS-based solutions continue to be the preferred deployment choices for project management.
The industry shift to cloud computing and IT services will continue to gain momentum in 2011.
In fact, Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 responsible for ongoing cloud sourcing decisions and management. The benefits of "cloud economics," which include large upfront capital expenses being exchanged for lower regular operational expenses and simpler accountability for services delivered, will drive cloud adoption as CIOs and IT leaders try to deliver the most value from constrained budgets.
Comment from Ian Knox, vice president of marketing at Daptiv: Project management has traditionally resided in the IT department of the enterprise but as PPM becomes more strategic, it is emerging as a critical business discipline for prioritizing projects, budgets and resources. Given tepid IT spending projections for the coming year, managers and executives -- as well as IT personnel -- will need greater visibility into project, program and portfolio execution, as well as the ability to measure progress against key business priorities.
About the predictions: Daptiv's predictions for project portfolio management in 2011 are based on emerging industry trends and feedback from Daptiv's more than 500 enterprise customers. A key prediction: Project Management Offices (PMOs) will expand beyond the traditional IT realm and play an increasingly larger role in strategic planning and business execution, especially given anticipated budget and resource restrictions in the year ahead.
Contact: http://www.daptiv.com/
The industry shift to cloud computing and IT services will continue to gain momentum in 2011.
In fact, Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 responsible for ongoing cloud sourcing decisions and management. The benefits of "cloud economics," which include large upfront capital expenses being exchanged for lower regular operational expenses and simpler accountability for services delivered, will drive cloud adoption as CIOs and IT leaders try to deliver the most value from constrained budgets.
Comment from Ian Knox, vice president of marketing at Daptiv: Project management has traditionally resided in the IT department of the enterprise but as PPM becomes more strategic, it is emerging as a critical business discipline for prioritizing projects, budgets and resources. Given tepid IT spending projections for the coming year, managers and executives -- as well as IT personnel -- will need greater visibility into project, program and portfolio execution, as well as the ability to measure progress against key business priorities.
About the predictions: Daptiv's predictions for project portfolio management in 2011 are based on emerging industry trends and feedback from Daptiv's more than 500 enterprise customers. A key prediction: Project Management Offices (PMOs) will expand beyond the traditional IT realm and play an increasingly larger role in strategic planning and business execution, especially given anticipated budget and resource restrictions in the year ahead.
Contact: http://www.daptiv.com/
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Companies Are Not Prepared To Address Risks Created By Cloud Computing, Other New Technologies
Less than a third of global businesses have an IT risk management program capable of addressing the risks related to the use of new technologies like cloud computing, according to a survey.
In spite of the rapid emergence of new technology, just one in ten companies consider examining new and emerging IT trends a very important activity for the information security function to perform.
A significant increase in use of external service providers and business adoption of new technologies, such as cloud computing, social networking and Web 2.0, is recognized to increase risk for 60 percent of respondents. Yet, in spite of this, less than half intend to increase annual investment in information security.
Over half of respondents state that increased workforce mobility poses a considerable challenge to the effective delivery of information security initiatives, due to widespread use of mobile computing devices. For almost two-thirds employees' level of security awareness is recognized as a considerable challenge.
Half of respondents plan to spend more over the next year on data leakage and data loss prevention -- up 7 percent from last year. To address potential new risks, 39 percent are making policy adjustments, 29 percent are implementing encryption techniques and 28 percent are implementing stronger identity and access management controls. For the first time, continuous availability of critical IT resources was identified as one of the top five risks. 23 percent of respondents are using cloud computing services, a further 15 percent plan to use within the next 12 months. For 85 percent of respondents, external certification of cloud service providers would increase trust; 43 percent state that certification should be based upon an agreed standard and 22 percent require accreditation for the certifying body.
Comment from Paul van Kessel, Ernst & Young Global IT Risk and Assurance Leader: Technology advances provide an increasingly mobile workforce with seemingly endless ways to connect and interact with colleagues, customers and clients. These advances represent a massive opportunity for IT to deliver significant benefits to the organization but new technology also means new risk. It is vital that companies not only recognize this risk, but take action to avoid it. As the mobile workforce continues to grow, so does the level of risk. In addition to implementing new technology solutions and re-engineering information flows, companies must focus on informing the workforce about risks. The delivery of effective, and regular, security awareness training is a critical success factor as companies attempt to keep pace with the changing environment.
About the survey: Ernst & Young's 2010 Global Information Security Survey was conducted between June and August 2010. Nearly 1,600 organizations in 56 countries and across all major industries participated.
Contact: http://www.ey.com
In spite of the rapid emergence of new technology, just one in ten companies consider examining new and emerging IT trends a very important activity for the information security function to perform.
A significant increase in use of external service providers and business adoption of new technologies, such as cloud computing, social networking and Web 2.0, is recognized to increase risk for 60 percent of respondents. Yet, in spite of this, less than half intend to increase annual investment in information security.
Over half of respondents state that increased workforce mobility poses a considerable challenge to the effective delivery of information security initiatives, due to widespread use of mobile computing devices. For almost two-thirds employees' level of security awareness is recognized as a considerable challenge.
Half of respondents plan to spend more over the next year on data leakage and data loss prevention -- up 7 percent from last year. To address potential new risks, 39 percent are making policy adjustments, 29 percent are implementing encryption techniques and 28 percent are implementing stronger identity and access management controls. For the first time, continuous availability of critical IT resources was identified as one of the top five risks. 23 percent of respondents are using cloud computing services, a further 15 percent plan to use within the next 12 months. For 85 percent of respondents, external certification of cloud service providers would increase trust; 43 percent state that certification should be based upon an agreed standard and 22 percent require accreditation for the certifying body.
Comment from Paul van Kessel, Ernst & Young Global IT Risk and Assurance Leader: Technology advances provide an increasingly mobile workforce with seemingly endless ways to connect and interact with colleagues, customers and clients. These advances represent a massive opportunity for IT to deliver significant benefits to the organization but new technology also means new risk. It is vital that companies not only recognize this risk, but take action to avoid it. As the mobile workforce continues to grow, so does the level of risk. In addition to implementing new technology solutions and re-engineering information flows, companies must focus on informing the workforce about risks. The delivery of effective, and regular, security awareness training is a critical success factor as companies attempt to keep pace with the changing environment.
About the survey: Ernst & Young's 2010 Global Information Security Survey was conducted between June and August 2010. Nearly 1,600 organizations in 56 countries and across all major industries participated.
Contact: http://www.ey.com
As Cloud Technology Moves From Hype to Reality, Management Challenges Loom
Whether it is private or public, Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), an extension of the data center or just virtualization, conversations about the "cloud" are occurring in organizations of all sizes, a survey has found.
While IT professionals understand the need for and benefits of moving to the cloud, many continue to struggle with the challenges of managing this next big wave of computing.
Survey findings:
-- More than 60 percent of the respondents indicated their organizations are either evaluating cloud computing or already investing in the technology.
-- Respondents understood the benefits of a cloud-based approach, citing operational efficiency (28 percent), business flexibility (24 percent) and financial savings (19 percent) as the top three reasons for adopting cloud services.
-- The top cloud services that respondents were evaluating are Software-as-a-Service (40 percent) and Platform-as-a-Service (15 percent).
IT teams are the driving force behind the move to the cloud, but the responses showed that all the hype about the cloud is not outweighing pragmatism.
-- Nearly 40 percent are OK with a "slow but steady" approach to cloud computing.
-- Respondents were asked "When is your target time frame to begin implementation?" and (28 percent) responded that there was, "No target time set," although 16 percent of those respondents are on track to begin within the next six months.
The need to acquire more skills and knowledge was another key theme of respondents. Among the findings in this area:
-- Among their list of top concerns: Security (cited by 73 percent); ability to resolve application issues (55 percent); being blamed when service is down or slow (42 percent).
-- 77 percent feel they either lack the proper training or expect to have to augment their skills and expertise to become proficient in the cloud and to manage the implementation.
-- Nearly one-third perceive that a move to the public cloud creates an increase in their responsibilities and opportunities.
While respondents generally recognize the value of cloud services for the efficiency, flexibility and financial benefits noted above, their concerns indicate that effectively monitoring the availability and performance of the workloads moved to public, private and hybrid cloud environments is critical.
-- With respect to public cloud deployments, it is important for IT organizations to not only have visibility into availability and performance of these workloads, but also similar visibility into the network and infrastructure that connects end-users to these public cloud services. IT teams must ensure that the latency, bandwidth, and traffic prioritization of their networks are proactively managed to ensure responsiveness of services.
-- For IT shops building private cloud services, effective monitoring and management systems are critical to delivering the "on demand" model that end-users expect -- reliability is a critical expectation that can't be overlooked.
Comment from Suku Krishnaraj, Senior Vice President, Product Strategy for SolarWinds: As a company, we make it a priority to stay on top of the challenges that our customers face on a daily basis. More and more, we are hearing about how cloud -- and related trends such as data center consolidation, virtualization and SaaS -- is driving IT organizations to re-think their IT management needs and priorities. In the past, management of the IT environment was often an afterthought. But, this survey indicates that more and more IT organizations are thinking about the need to manage the performance and availability of these cloud-based services as a part of their planning process. As a provider of (private) cloud services, IT orgs need to ensure not just the availability of the compute infrastructure or silo applications, but also optimal performance across the whole IT stack, including application, compute, storage and network.
About the survey: SolarWinds conducted the survey in the fall of 2010 and received responses from nearly 100 IT professionals. The IT professionals were either customers or prospective customers of SolarWinds. As part of the survey, SolarWinds asked each IT professional a series of questions related to their organizations' plans to use cloud computing in their IT environment, the decision drivers for those plans, and the expected impacts of cloud deployments on their IT teams.
Contact: http://www.solarwinds.com
While IT professionals understand the need for and benefits of moving to the cloud, many continue to struggle with the challenges of managing this next big wave of computing.
Survey findings:
-- More than 60 percent of the respondents indicated their organizations are either evaluating cloud computing or already investing in the technology.
-- Respondents understood the benefits of a cloud-based approach, citing operational efficiency (28 percent), business flexibility (24 percent) and financial savings (19 percent) as the top three reasons for adopting cloud services.
-- The top cloud services that respondents were evaluating are Software-as-a-Service (40 percent) and Platform-as-a-Service (15 percent).
IT teams are the driving force behind the move to the cloud, but the responses showed that all the hype about the cloud is not outweighing pragmatism.
-- Nearly 40 percent are OK with a "slow but steady" approach to cloud computing.
-- Respondents were asked "When is your target time frame to begin implementation?" and (28 percent) responded that there was, "No target time set," although 16 percent of those respondents are on track to begin within the next six months.
The need to acquire more skills and knowledge was another key theme of respondents. Among the findings in this area:
-- Among their list of top concerns: Security (cited by 73 percent); ability to resolve application issues (55 percent); being blamed when service is down or slow (42 percent).
-- 77 percent feel they either lack the proper training or expect to have to augment their skills and expertise to become proficient in the cloud and to manage the implementation.
-- Nearly one-third perceive that a move to the public cloud creates an increase in their responsibilities and opportunities.
While respondents generally recognize the value of cloud services for the efficiency, flexibility and financial benefits noted above, their concerns indicate that effectively monitoring the availability and performance of the workloads moved to public, private and hybrid cloud environments is critical.
-- With respect to public cloud deployments, it is important for IT organizations to not only have visibility into availability and performance of these workloads, but also similar visibility into the network and infrastructure that connects end-users to these public cloud services. IT teams must ensure that the latency, bandwidth, and traffic prioritization of their networks are proactively managed to ensure responsiveness of services.
-- For IT shops building private cloud services, effective monitoring and management systems are critical to delivering the "on demand" model that end-users expect -- reliability is a critical expectation that can't be overlooked.
Comment from Suku Krishnaraj, Senior Vice President, Product Strategy for SolarWinds: As a company, we make it a priority to stay on top of the challenges that our customers face on a daily basis. More and more, we are hearing about how cloud -- and related trends such as data center consolidation, virtualization and SaaS -- is driving IT organizations to re-think their IT management needs and priorities. In the past, management of the IT environment was often an afterthought. But, this survey indicates that more and more IT organizations are thinking about the need to manage the performance and availability of these cloud-based services as a part of their planning process. As a provider of (private) cloud services, IT orgs need to ensure not just the availability of the compute infrastructure or silo applications, but also optimal performance across the whole IT stack, including application, compute, storage and network.
About the survey: SolarWinds conducted the survey in the fall of 2010 and received responses from nearly 100 IT professionals. The IT professionals were either customers or prospective customers of SolarWinds. As part of the survey, SolarWinds asked each IT professional a series of questions related to their organizations' plans to use cloud computing in their IT environment, the decision drivers for those plans, and the expected impacts of cloud deployments on their IT teams.
Contact: http://www.solarwinds.com
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