Archive for the ‘cloud computing’ Category

By Justin Lee, March 08, 2010

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — NASA recently announced via one of its websites that it is restrategizing its plans to acquire an enterprise data center.

NASA decided to postpone the acquisition after realizing that the NASA Enterprise Data Center program did not adhere to its enterprise needs. The agency’s needs shifted after recent leadership changes and new requirements from the Office of Management and Budget were introduced in relation to cloud computing, greening information technology, virtualization, and federal data center leadership.

Estimated to be worth $1.5 billion, the NEDC program is just one of five components in the agency’s planned IT consolidation. The agency has yet to issue a final request for proposal for the plan.

The agency says the NEDC contract would include requirements met under the Unified NASA Information Technology Services deal, which includes data center operations, data center management, Web hosting, and storage services.

In its recent notice, NASA said that it anticipates the “strategy and consolidation plan will significantly change” and will be completed this fall.

NASA said it is looking to develop a data center plan that will consolidate all data centers, systems, applications, as well as include a data center architecture and full enterprise assessment.

This would give the agency the chance to design an infrastructure strategy according to its business requirements and use technologies like cloud computing to cut energy costs.

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This news link is courtesy of Virtual Global, a provider of cloud computing solutions since 1995.

Article posted by Liveside.net
by Sunshine on 05 Mar 2010, 06:36 AM

If you missed the webcast yesterday, or just want to watch it again: they are available here. In his speech Steve Ballmer outlined the following 5 dimensions:

• The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities
• The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action
• The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions
• The cloud wants smarter devices
• The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud

70% of Microsoft staff are already working on the cloud across those 5 dimensions and by next year, that percentage would be 90. Quite a lot I’d say. In all-staff email sent out by Ballmer, he writes “We must move at cloud speed” and tells that a new ad campaign will be launched in the U.S.

http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2010/03/05/steve-ballmer-on-cloud-computing-we-are-all-in.aspx

This blog is brought to you courtesy of Virtual Global, a provider of enterprise-class cloud computing solutions since 1995.

(PRNewsChannel) / March 02, 2010 / Washington, D.C. / GTRA announced today that Chris C. Kemp, CIO of NASA Ames Research Center, will be presenting to federal CIOs, Chief Security Officers, CTOs, and Chief Architects at the Semi-Annual GTRA Council Meeting in Bedford Springs, Penn., June 6-8.

The topic of Kemp’s discussion will be “Public vs. Private vs. Hybrid Clouds: Is there a right choice?”

“As a CIO and head of NASA’s NEBULA project, Chris’ ideas on cloud computing are visionary and cutting edge,” says Parham Eftekhari, Co-Founder and Director of Research for GTRA. “He is exactly the type of leader government executives are looking to for answers on this revolutionary application of technology.”

Government delegates from all federal agencies will be breaking into small collaboration groups to discuss their challenges and how to create innovation solutions. Senior federal IT executives are eligible to attend, and proposed presentation abstracts can be submitted until April 1, 2010.

About GTRA: GTRA brings together executive-level government technology, Security, Enterprise Architecture, Green IT and Health IT leaders to collaborate, strategize, and create innovative solutions. The semi-annual GTRA Technology Council Meeting address the topics identified through research with government council members and industry experts. By sharing best practices and lessons learned, knowledge is exchanged in a peer-to-peer forum, resulting in actionable government-wide strategic plans and cutting-edge solutions. Through a unique collaborative methodology, GTRA is revolutionizing the way government does business.

For more information about the GTRA Council Meeting June 6-8, at Bedford Springs Resort, Penn., please visit http://www.gtra.org and http://www.gtra.org.

Contact:
Deborah Kay
Email: deborahk@gtra.org
Web: www.GTRA.org

Source: gtra.org

Open source software has in general been on the rise, and there’s no doubt
that it delivers many benefits to developers and end users alike. There are
numerous cloud computing services that are either written entirely in open
source code, or at least incorporating open source into the final
application. Two of the biggest advantages of open source are lower cost,
and greater flexibility, and these benefits fit well into the entire cloud
computing paradigm, which delivers the same. Open source in short,
enhances cloud computing’s promise to deliver greater cost savings and
flexibility to those who use it. It does this through two means:

First, by streamlining the development end by allowing developers the use of
existing open source code rather than “reinventing the wheel.” This model
correlates closely with the use of a cloud platform, which also allows cloud
applications developers to build applications on top of an existing
application infrastructure, so that routine functions need not be built from
scratch. Doing so not only provides an advantage in terms of reduced
development cost, it also has the advantage of allowing the developer to
access code that has already been proven. In this respect, cloud computing
applications, particularly cloud computing applications that have been built
using open source components, is more likely to be robust and possess
fewer flaws than an application built entirely from scratch from the ground
up.

Second, the open source paradigm answers the question, “What happens
to my cloud application if the provider goes out of business?” If cloudbased
applications are based on open software models, then if and when a
cloud provider goes out of business, an individual client could easily take
over their own applications if necessary, or transfer them to another
provider.

Is open software free software?

Here’s a quick answer to that question: No. Casual observers often
confuse these two very separate software movements. The “free software”
movement is an ideological platform that suggests that all software should
be free, and it is only practical in a very limited sense. The “open source”
movement is a technological platform that espouses open development,
because it allows for advantages such as continuous improvement of the
code base, and easier customization for individual users. The latter is
practical in almost all cases of software development.
Here’s a useful description from GNU:

” The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they
stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a
development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the
free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because
only free software respects the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy
of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software
‘better’—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an
inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. For the free software
movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the
solution is to stop using it and move to free software.”1

This is an interesting concept, and fascinating fodder for ivory tower
discussions in university seminar rooms and coffee houses, but ultimately
an impractical one. Ultimately, it is true that open software is indeed a
methodology used to make software technologically superior, but the
above argument of course eliminates incentive to make the software in the
first place.

Open source delivers the advantages of:

• Flexibility to adapt and customize software to suit individual needs
• Lower cost of development
• More robust development due to continuous revision

Free software, on the other hand, constrains development by limiting that
development only to academics, hobbyists and people with too much time
on their hands, and would eliminate an entire class of development
professionals who create software for a living.

We advocate the use of open source in cloud-based platforms as well as
cloud-based applications for the above advantages, and most importantly,
to overcome the potential drawback of cloud providers going out of
business and leaving proprietary applications, which companies may have
come to depend on, inaccessible.

This blog brought to you courtesy of Virtual Global, the fastest and easiest way to the cloud.
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1 Richard Stallman. “Why open source misses the point of free software.” Free
Software Foundation.

 
Provider of cloud platform tells what the cloud is . . . and what it isn’t.

Morgantown, WV (PRWEB) February 11, 2010 — Virtual Global, a leading provider of cloud-enabled enterprise solutions and the TeamHost™ online platform for creating SaaS applications, is clearing up some of the confusion about cloud computing. Their “Top ten misconceptions about cloud computing” addresses some of the common myths on the subject, clearing the way for effective and efficient use of the technology. The “Top ten misconceptions” is part of Virtual Global’s “Cloud Computing Made Easy” ebook, available as a free download on www.cloudipedia.com.

“The very word ‘cloud’ gives way to a lot of fuzzy definitions,” said Cary Landis, CEO of Virtual Global. “In reality, cloud computing is just as solid and reliable as any other type of computing, the technology just refers to a mechanism to connect infrastructure, applications, and platforms over a remote network, typically on virtualized off-site servers, over a secure IP connection.”

Cloud computing is seen by most analysts and industry observers as a disruptive technology, and one that is destined to continue changing the way we do business, the way we work, and even the way we think. “With such an important technology, it’s important to keep on top of some of the popular misconceptions,” said Landis. “A well-informed business, whether SMB or enterprise, will be able to turn cloud computing technology to its advantage, and gain a critical edge over the competition.”

Virtual Global’s “Top Ten Misconceptions about Cloud Computing” include:

1.    The cloud is just a return to centralized computing. The old days of dumb terminals connected to a centralized mainframe limited our computing power to one provider. With cloud computing, we can access the computing power of millions of providers from anywhere at any time, and for a fraction of the cost of host computing.

2.    The cloud is not secure. Truth-be-told, in-house systems are often less secure, because they use unproven home-grown security models. Cloud applications developed with cloud platforms use a common security model, which lends additional security from the ground up; and cloud providers will often pay more attention to issues such as physical security and access controls.

3.    The cloud isn’t ready for enterprise users. Enterprise software need not cost millions of dollars, or take years to implement. CIOs are increasingly demanding more affordable alternatives. Some of today’s popular cloud systems host tens of millions of users. The biggest concerns of enterprises rolling out mission-critical apps are flexibility, scalability and availability. The cloud has resolved those concerns.

4.    You lose control with the cloud. The very word “cloud” implies outsourcing to an unknown vendor; however this is a misnomer rather than reality. You can use cloud technologies internally, or outsource to a well-established vendor who has been offering reliable service for years. With the cloud, you can gain more control through a web-based control panel, while letting go of day-to-day maintenance. “The fallacy of direct control” posits that it is more efficient to retain control over those things that matter, while freeing up your time by leaving the details to a third party expert provider.

5.    It’s the same thing as utility computing or grid computing. Grid computing was an early predecessor that virtually clustered computing resources to serve a single purpose. Cloud computing has matured to serve multiple clients and multiple tasks simultaneously. Utility computing, by the same token, has evolved. Today’s cloud delivers all three major elements as a service: architecture, platform, and software.

6.    It’s only for low-end consumer applications. Cloud computing has gained popularity in many consumer areas, but has also gained widespread acceptance in business applications, including productivity suites, online backup and storage, and collaborative environments; with applications of enterprise-class software already being delivered over the cloud.

7.    It’s too isolated from my other data and applications. Cloud computing applications are easy to integrate with the rest of the enterprise, and already there are several integration tools on the market to make it happen.

8.    We won’t need PCs any more with cloud computing. Cloud computing is a broad concept with many elements, and powerful desktops are a central part of the cloud model.

9.    Reliability will be a problem. Virtualization and platform technologies are almost as old as computing itself. What’s new is the ability to market the capabilities. Cloud technologies can provide superior reliability with service level guarantees.
 
10.    The cloud will give you performance problems. Performance is seldom a problem with cloud computing. Latency can be minimized by selecting a provider with a data center in your own region, and by reviewing the provider’s upstream carriers and service level guarantees.

For a free, complete copy of Virtual Global’s “misconceptions” and landmark book, “Cloud Computing Made Easy,” visit www.cloudipedia.com.

About Virtual Global:

Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions and the TeamHost™ cloud platform for building and deploying SaaS applications without programming. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs. Virtual Global can be found on the Web at http://www.virtualglobal.com.

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Much as we all like to complain about government inefficiency, hulking bureaucracies and outdated procedures, there are a few areas where government really does excel in setting the standard for the rest of the country.

In the area of public access to documents over the Internet for example, the Feds have done quite well. It’s no longer necessary to drive downtown to a government office, or make a phone call and wait a week for a clerk to mail a form to us—we can just download it over the Internet. Even state Departments of Motor Vehicles—well known and maligned for hour-long waits and grumpy employees—have gotten onto the bandwagon of technology, and in most states it’s now possible to renew your license plate online or at an automated machine in the office lobby. And once again, it may well be the government that sets the pace for embracing the cloud computing model.

It’s not surprising that the biggest cloud project in government comes from NASA, an agency that always tends to be out in front of the pack with new technology. A cloud computing pilot called Nebula, being developed at the NASA Ames Research Center, “integrates a set of opensource components into a seamless, self-service platform, providing high capacity computing, storage and network connectivity using a virtualized,scalable approach to achieve cost and energy efficiencies.” NASA says that Nebula provides for rapid development of applications that are both policy-compliant and secure, promotes collaboration, and encourages reuse of code.

Nebula is a wonderful example of cloud computing done right. It is open source, which means it is transparent and highly interoperable. It is a full, true cloud system that incorporates infrastructure, platform, and software; all three of the main components of cloud computing. Nebula is already in use for educational and public outreach uses, collaboration, and mission support. Amateur astronomers use it to upload high resolution photographs, and the LCROSS participation site, where amateur astronomers work with NASA scientists to get a better view of the moon, is built on the Nebula platform.

Two useful elements of Nebula elegantly illustrate the benefits of cloud computing. It automatically increases computing power and storage as the web application needs it. This is a central benefit of cloud computing in general—the user need not worry about compute power and storage, since that’s all automatically and transparently taken care of on the back end. When more storage space is needed, it’s allocated. If more compute power is needed, you get it transparently. Second, Nebula addresses the security worry. It was built to be secure, as well as compliant with government policies (of which there are many).

The Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, who was formerly the District of Columbia technology chief, has been a strong proponent of use of cloud computing in government as a way to gain efficiency and save taxpayer dollars. In Washington DC, he was able to eliminate a $4 million initiative to create an intranet for the DC government, and instead, shift the district government to Google Apps—accomplishing the same goal, and saving a huge amount of money. Kundra’s move to the cloud enabled DC to save money and improve efficiency. For example, now the district’s training information can be obtained through online videos on Google Apps; the same Google Apps is also used to add more transparency to government by making procurement data available to the public. Kundra claims that “The cloud will do for government what the Internet did in the ’90s. It’s a fundamental change to the way our government operates by moving to the cloud. Rather than owning the infrastructure, we can save millions.”¹

This blog brought to you courtesy of Virtual Global, the fastest and easiest way to the cloud. 

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¹ Gautham Nagesh. “Local technology czar could be headed to Obama

administration.” Nextgov, November 26, 2008.

Healthcare applications (Health-IT)

The current administration continues to be aggressive in pursuing healthcare reform. Aside from the issue of universal health insurance coverage, which has gained the greatest coverage in the media, the reforms include much more under the hood. Most notably, this means implementation of electronic health records, and the creation of a nationwide health care infrastructure that would make it easier for healthcare providers to share and access patient records.  Part of this plan would create a National Health Information Network (NHIN), which is a broad, interoperable platform for sharing electronic health information. The NHIN would connect providers, insurers, and emergency responders. 

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the government’s health care informatics plan’s goals include: 

·         “Medical information will follow consumers so that they are at the center of their own care  

·         Consumers will be able to choose physicians and hospitals based on clinical performance results made available to them

·         Clinicians will have a patient’s complete medical history, computerized ordering systems, and electronic reminders 

·         Quality incentives will measure performance and drive quality-based competition in the industry.   

·         Public health and bioterrorism surveillance will be seamlessly integrated into care 

·         Clinical research will be accelerated and post-marketing surveillance will be expanded”¹

The concept of electronic medical records (EMR) and patient health records (PHR) is one that has long been discussed, and is already in use in other countries.  There is no doubt that it will be part of the current administration’s broad health care reform initiative, and there are already legislative incentives in place to encourage health care providers to get with the program. EMR doesn’t just mean that the hospital puts your patient records in their computer—it means a new level of sharing. This of course, is within the HIPAA regulation framework and assumes a rigorous level of security, but it allows for a cloud-based infrastructure to exist for EMR. The benefits are obvious. A patient’s medical records would be available to any authorized health care provider, anywhere in the country. You could travel anywhere you want, and your records go with you. Any authorized provider could access your records in case of an emergency.

Already, there is a common but limited version which has shown great benefit—many of the large drugstore chains keep customer records in a secure database, so that you can go to any branch, anywhere in the country, and receive your prescription. The database also includes relevant information such as drug interactions and allergies. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, this limited drugstore application will be integrated with all other healthcare providers. What’s the result? It could save lives. Error rates would be reduced, and caregivers will have more information at their disposal when making critical decisions about your care.

This technology, based strongly in cloud computing technologies, is rapidly gaining momentum. The RAND Corporation, in testimony presented to the Senate Finance Committee, highlighted just a few of the potential benefits of a cloud-based healthcare IT (HIT) system rolled out on a national scale:

“The hope of many is that the broad adoption of HIT systems with the aforementioned functionality in the United States will transform health care in terms of making it more efficient and effective simultaneously. Efficiency would be enhanced by reduced test duplication, improved drug utilization, better scheduling, reduced paper record handling, and improved claims processing and billing. Effectiveness would be enhanced by reduced errors (reduced handwriting-based errors, for example), reminders to improve preventative care, decision support for better evidence-based practice, improved management of chronic illness, and improved continuity of care for those patients seeking care away from their primary provider (such as was needed to support the mass evacuation that occurred after Hurricane Katrina). Effectiveness would also be enhanced by the quality of care assessment such systems would make possible and by improvements in the evidence base for best practices derived from the analysis of large electronic medical record databases.”

The potential social benefit is clear. Not only would individual hospitals benefit by moving to a more technology-based patient record system, society as a whole would benefit by integrating those systems together in a national database that relies on secure cloud computing technologies.

Besides the advantage of better patient care, cost savings would be enormous. In this day and age when the health care debate is often framed in terms of dollars and sense, a cloud-based national patient record system is an obvious element that should be included. RAND Corporation claims that savings that could be achieved would reach $80 billion per year, assuming a 90 percent adoption rate by hospitals and physicians. To put that figure in perspective, it’s a full four percent of the $2 trillion spent annually on health care in the United States.

The benefits can also be seen just looking narrowly at adverse drug events. Every year, there are errors in medication that result from lack of allergy or drug interaction warnings, handwriting errors, and poor dosage monitoring. The RAND study further estimates that the safety benefit would be enormous, avoiding as many as 2.2 million such adverse drug events per year, saving nearly $4 billion per year.

Could these savings be achieved without a cloud computing infrastructure? Not likely. The great benefits illustrated by RAND cannot be achieved if those electronic records are stovepiped, retained only by each individual provider. The cloud-based infrastructure suggested by the DHHS brings the scope of the proposal into greater perspective, delivering the benefit on a much wider scale, and allowing for the greater level of benefits that result only from data sharing to exist.

This blog brought to you courtesy of Virtual Global, the fastest and easiest way to the cloud. 

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¹ US Department of Health and Human Services.

 ² RAND Corporation. “The potential benefits and costs of increased adoption of health information technology.” Richard Hillestad, July, 2008. Testimony presented before the Senate Finance Committee on July 17, 2008.

Cloud computing is more than a technology - it’s also a game-changing business process. The reason it has gained so much traction is because of what it enables for entrepreneurs. A complete discussion of cloud computing must go beyond the technology that underlies the cloud process, to include a discussion of the greater question of what drives cloud computing, and what the social and macroeconomic impact of it may be.

In this book, we choose the term “people cloud” to illustrate how our workforce is scattering in many of the same ways that computing resources have scattered across the cloud. Even more, we are managing people resources over the Internet in many of the same ways that are managing computing resources. As a result of cloud computing as an enabling technology, we are seeing an explosion in entrepreneurship and a decentralization of larger companies.

The workplace has evolved from everyone in one place, to a scattered workplace, and finally to one in which the physical roof is replaced by a virtual roof.  The virtual workplace is again reconnected.

We’ve already seen major changes in the workplace. Companies have embraced a model of decentralization in favor of outsourcing and offshoring. Web 2.0 technologies have enabled a greater level of collaboration, which means two things: First, people no longer need to be physically present at the office, and can instead work from home, or anywhere else in the world. Second, this new level of collaboration allows companies to partner with smaller providers anywhere in the world to get the job done.

Jobs 1.0

The 1950’s mindset of the corporation as a sort of benevolent father is obsolete. That older (and short-lived) way of doing business was what we refer to as “Job 1.0″. During that time, we saw the corporation as a benevolent institution, which looked out after our own well-being. We had an expectation of a 30-plus year career with a single company, an opportunity to rise from within the ranks, and a relative amount of job security. The prevailing philosophy was that company growth was equivalent to the company’s apparent physical size. A company, during this time, that had 1,000 employees was considered to be more successful than one with 100 employees. Companies embraced the in-house strategy with a vengeance, and larger firms did everything from running their own internal print shops, to hosting their own cafeterias for workers.

This is in some ways reminiscent of the old-fashioned “company town,” which went so far as to even provide rental housing for its workers (usually substandard), a company grocery store, and so forth, and in the process, keeping employees beholden to the company, and usually in debt to it.

Job 1.0 came with three illusions: That physical growth of a company’s mass was equivalent to success, and that the “everything in-house” business model was beneficial to employees, and that it created a heightened sense of job security and loyalty.

Jobs 2.0

The “dotcom boom” broke down the illusions of Job 1.0. During this incredible time of entrepreneurism, the notion that a company with 1,000 employees is better and more successful than one with 100, or even one with 10, started to break down. New technologies allowed companies to do more with less. One clerk with spreadsheet software could do the work of ten people in the pre-desktop days.

What’s more relevant is that Job 2.0 started to break down the illusion of a single-company career as being beneficial. The desire for a 30-plus year career with a single company became less desirable, and employees became freer to move from job to job in search of greater opportunity. The dotcom boom ushered in a new era of mobility in the workplace, and at the same time, made it more acceptable and possible for someone to go out on their own and start an entrepreneurial venture.

Still, “Job 2.0″ operated under the concentrated model of corporate communities. Silicon Valley flourished, and contained an incredible concentration of talent, and more high-tech companies in one small region than anybody could imagine. That’s because while the concept of “job” had evolved, the concept of “company” had not yet shifted.

Many high-tech companies during this time were short-lived, but nonetheless contributed to the collective wisdom by creating new technologies that are still used today in the latest iteration of “Job 3.0″. Job 2.0 re-set the tone, breaking down the expectation of a 30-year single-company career, providing the technology for a dramatic change in how business processes are accomplished, and overcoming the ’50s mindset that prevented people from switching jobs or leaving a job to go out on their own entrepreneurial venture.

Jobs 3.0

And so we come to the latest version of what a job really means. Today, two factors are driving a permanent shift in employment patterns:

·         Modern communications technologies and cloud computing

·         High unemployment and a huge recession

These new technologies mean that we now have the technological wherewithal to move away permanently from the centralized model of work and employment. Collaboration no longer requires a physical presence, and this means companies can do more with less. It means that companies are keen to outsource many of the functions that were once done in-house. This means in turn that those functions are being done by people working at home, or for small companies that specialize in specific areas.

When we speak of the macroeconomic realities and how they too have enabled the cloud computing shift, we mean that the recession has made companies take a long, hard look at how they get things done. Companies are looking for new ways to become more efficient, and they are looking for technologies that enable them to do more with less. It’s not just a matter of getting new features or capabilities—it’s a matter of economic survival. The economic downturn transformed cloud computing from a “nice to have” into a “must have.”

The age of the cubicle is over. There are naturally some jobs that must be maintained on-premises, but increasingly, it is just as feasible to accomplish many tasks off-site, either through telecommuting or teleworking arrangements, or outsourcing to a third party provider. Today, the link between corporate size and corporate success is upside down. It is possible for a ten-person company to be more successful and productive than a 1,000 person company. And taking that to the logical conclusion, the possibility of a successful one-person company is now much more realistic than it has ever been.

The notion of working at one’s own home has gone through a lot of iterations over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, it was the standard, as craftspeople and tradesmen plied their trades out of their own workshops behind their homes, but the Industrial Age brought us a new normal. Working outside the home became the standard, and people started to see working at home as less desirable. Today, the pendulum shifts once again, as new technology makes it possible to conduct business from anyplace in the world.

The idea of working from a lounge chair on the beach in a tropical island isn’t that far-fetched. Or for those who don’t have a tropical island handy, at least, working from home. When you call into any large company’s Customer Service department for example, more often than not, you are either speaking to someone on the other side of the world, or someone who is wearing a bathrobe, sitting in their own kitchen with a laptop and broadband connection.

Ultimately, Job 3.0 has led to decentralization not only of the workplace itself, but of the workplace community. We no longer need Silicon Valley. It is no longer necessary for all those high-tech companies to be physically present in the same little section of central California. Silicon Valley has made itself obsolete. And what’s more fascinating is that it has made the very idea of what a “company” is, obsolete as well.

The end of the company as we know it

Cloud computing technology and outsourcing have an obvious symbiotic relationship, and one cannot exist without the other in the real world. Outsourcing becomes much easier and more realistic when there is cloud computing; and cloud computing becomes much more than just a theoretical technology when outsourcing functions as a practical application of it.

What is a job, and what is a company? Those questions seem simple to answer, but the answer isn’t always evident. Today, the answers are changing rapidly. In the last chapter, we talked about what a “job” really is and what it is becoming, now let’s talk about what a “company” is. Sure, in business school they taught you all about corporate structures, and how a corporation is an entity unto itself, but that’s no what we’re talking about.

A “company” has always been traditionally seen as an entity engaged in commerce, which has members (owners and employees) which carry out the tasks related to the company’s commercial endeavor. A larger company has “divisions” of employees, which may carry out tasks such as accounting, human resources, information technology, customer service, sales, and marketing. Seen in this way, a company is a very defined sort of organization that is self-contained. In a limited sense, every company had some interactions with other companies, as the company took on suppliers, vendors, customers, and partners, but still, it stood on its own as an island.

A company today, or “Company 2.0″, operates a little differently. It is still an entity engaged in commerce, but it is no longer dependent on its internal departments and employees to carry out those tasks. Instead, a company’s set of tasks is condensed down to its core mission, with all others being carried out by other companies. As such, the “corporate walls” have broken down and collaboration has built up. When a manager gets his or her weekly reports, they may not come from inside. Customer service may be taken care of by a company in Mumbai. IT is taken care of by a managed service provider in San Francisco, and marketing functions are handled by a handful of small and creative companies that collaborate with each other even further to accomplish the goals of the main company.

Web 2.0 technology, outsourcing trends, cloud computing, competitive pressure and other macroeconomic realities all have converged to make these major changes. Is a company with 1,000 employees more successful than a company with ten employees? The answer is no longer obvious. In many cases, the company with ten employees may be able to accomplish the same thing, reach the same sales goals, and carry out the same tasks as a much larger firm with many more employees.

The Virtual Company

Taking the concepts described in the previous section a step further, we can easily see the shift that has occurred from a workplace organizational structure that was several layers deep, to one that is leaner in nature, but incorporates a “cloud” of virtual extensions. In the past for example, a hierarchical business would include internal departments for data entry, payroll, public relations, IT programming, and so forth. In addition, the same business would retain functions like data storage, telecommunications, web hosting, and server farms internally as well.

The inherent inefficiencies of this hierarchical model are obvious.

The boundaries of the actual “company” have become permeable to the point of being nearly invisible. As a result, we are already seeing the emergence of the “virtual company.” These companies exist in reality today all over the world. A “virtual company” has no corporate walls at all. It may be organized to formally have only one or two employees, yet it may have dozens, or hundreds of people working towards its main commercial goal. The CEO’s office may be a spare room in her house; the “Marketing Department” is actually a virtual group of creatives working in spare rooms of their own, servicing not only the primary virtual company, but several others as well. The entire network of people—we can no longer call them “employees”—are connected in real time through modern collaborative technology, and the entire IT infrastructure exists in the cloud. Virtual private networks (VPNs) ensure that every party can connect to the applications and data they need on a secure basis, from any location and from any machine. At any given time, the Public Relations manager may be working out of a Starbucks, the tech support guy is sitting in his kitchen wearing a headset and nibbling on leftover pizza as he doles out advice, and the Vice President of Operations is keeping everything flowing smoothly from a bungalow on the beach in Thailand. Indeed, it is very possible that most of the members of this “virtual company” have never even met face-to-face. And they don’t need to.

Why does a company outsource?

A company engages in outsourcing because it brings cost savings and efficiencies, and because it has the technological framework to do so efficiently through innovations in cloud computing.

But the bigger question is, does it really make a company more cost-effective and efficient? Since traditionally, we think of achieving gains as something that is done through control, but this is not always correct. Outsourcing actually serves the broader goal of efficiency by breaking down those artificial corporate barriers, exposing processes so that they are more transparent and responsive to the corporate entity, and eliminating unnecessary layers of corporate bureaucracy.

A highly vertical company, which tends to do all functions in-house, will out of necessity have enormous layers of bureaucracy. Processes get bogged down. Reporting may not be responsive enough. Individual fiefdoms within the corporation may have conflicting goals, and may be so caught up in their own domain that they neglect the greater goal of the corporate entity. When a company is so large and organized vertically in this way, it may very easily lose focus and lose its ability to respond to the market quickly and efficiently. As such, the economic advantage is not the only advantage—a less integrated company will simply be able to respond better, maintain its core focus better, and spend its money better.

What makes a good company to begin with? A company that specializes in something; a company that does something or produces something better than anybody else. When a company starts devoting large amounts of energy and resources to tasks that are not related to that thing it does better than everybody else, then that company’s energy starts to dissipate. And more importantly, those peripheral tasks aren’t getting done as well.

For example, a company that makes pizza may make the best pizza in town. They’re good at it. That’s their “thing.” But there are other things they’re not as good at. Good pizza makers aren’t necessarily good marketers, and so that pizza company outsources the marketing function to another company, which is very good at what they do.

The ever-present question however, is whether it is safe to put mission-critical data on the cloud. The very term “cloud” implies that your sacred information is being stored someplace, and you probably don’t even know where or how. To little surprise, security is the far biggest concern among those considering cloud technology.

Yet, cloud computing is too big to ignore. It is likely the most significant shift in computing paradigms in the past 30 years. That shift is well underway, with consumers, small and midsize businesses, and even large enterprises putting applications and data into the cloud. They are shifting from pure on-premises applications and data storage to virtualized servers with hopefully reputable vendors.

If you’re an IT manager, it’s good to be paranoid. Losses from cybercrime and attack can be enormous, and the 2008 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey show an overall average annual loss of just under $300,000.

It may seem like a leap of faith to put your valuable data and applications in the cloud, and to trust cloud computing security to a third party. Yet faith is not a part of the equation, nor should it be. Every enterprise needs to know that its data and applications are secure, and the question of cloud computing security must be addressed.

In fact, the cloud does have several security advantages. According to NIST, these cloud computing security advantages include:

· Shifting public data to a external cloud reduces the exposure of the internal sensitive data

· Cloud homogeneity makes security auditing/testing simpler

· Clouds enable automated security management

· Redundancy / Disaster Recovery

All four points are well taken. Cloud providers naturally tend to include rigorous cloud computing security as part of their business models, often more than an individual user would do. In this respect, it’s not just a matter of cloud computing providers deploying better security, the point is, rather, that they deploy the precautions that individual companies should, but often don’t.

Is 2010 the year of cloud platforms?

Most application providers impose some level of security with their applications, although when cloud application providers implement their own proprietary approaches to cloud computing security, concerns arise over international privacy laws, exposure of data to foreign entities, stovepipe approaches to authentication and role-based access, and leaks in multi-tenant architectures. These security concerns have slowed the adoption of cloud computing technology, although it need not pose a problem.

Are cloud “platforms as a service” the answer? The very nature of a cloud platform is that it imposes an instance of common software elements that can be used by developers to “bolt on” to their applications without having to write them from scratch. This advantage is especially useful in the area of security. The cloud platform brings an elegant solution to the security problem by implementing a standard security model to manage user authentication and authorization, role-based access, secure storage, multi-tenancy, and privacy policies. Consequently, any SaaS application that runs on the common platform would immediately benefit from the platform’s standardized and robust security model.

Are private clouds the answer?

The term “private cloud” likely sounds like a misnomer because it really is. A private cloud generally refers to cloud computing technology within a firewall. In many cases, you can probably even touch the box that it runs on, so it’s not really “in the cloud”. Be that as it may, so called private clouds may be the ultimate solution for enterprises that want the best combination of benefits and risks. With a private cloud, enterprises can dramatically lower their time, risks and costs of engineering and maintaining Web-based software systems, without the security concerns associated with remote hosting. The easiest way to implement a private cloud may be to leverage an open platform, which inherently takes advantage of open APIs. This way, enterprises can build and integrate cloud-enabled systems over time without the proprietary dependencies.

Superior physical security through cloud computing provider

Lack of physical security is the cause of an enormous amount of loss, and insider attacks account for a surprisingly large percentage of loss. And while the specter of black hats hacking into your network from a third world country is very much real, very often, the “black hat” is in reality a trusted employee. It’s the guy from the Accounting department who you have lunch with. It’s the lady who brings you coffee in the morning and always remembers that you like two sugars. It’s the recent college grad with so much potential, who did such a great job on that last report.

Of course, insiders can attack your network and data regardless of where it is located, given enough incentive and information, but physical proximity of the actual hardware and data makes it much easier to gain access, and cloud data centers tend to have better internal physical security protocols, including locked rooms, regulated access, and other protections against physical theft and tampering.

Conclusion: Superior security through the cloud

Besides physical security, technical security is of the utmost importance. Hosting your own servers and applications requires extra measures. A larger organization may need to deploy dedicated IT staff to security only. Cloud computing, on the other hand, builds cloud computing security directly into the cloud platform. While the company still must maintain in-house security in any case, the provider ensures that the applications and data are safe from attack.

We tend to think that retaining control over everything is inherently more secure, when this is not the case. Smaller companies especially may lack the skilled security staff in-house, and even larger firms often just don’t have the resources to dedicate to implementing rigorous security on an ongoing basis. A cloud computing provider on the other hand, which offers a detailed service level agreement and retains skilled security staff in-house, will often provide superior security when compared with the in-house alternative.

For more information about cloud computing, please visit http://www.cloudipedia.com for a free copy of “Cloud Computing Made Easy.” Cloudipedia is a property of Virtual Global, a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions and the TeamHost™ cloud computing platform for building SaaS applications without programming.

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If you’d like to see where cloud computing is going, you simply look at the evolution of earlier computing platforms. In the 1996 documentary “Triumph of the Nerds”, Steve Jobs described his early vision to take the desktop to the masses: “It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers, or at least take our board and add the transformers for the power supply and the case the keyboard and go get, you know, et cetera, go get the rest of the stuff. For every one of those, there were a thousand people that couldn’t do that, but wanted to mess around with programming - software hobbyists.”

Web as the new preferred “platform-of-choice”

Interestingly, today’s cloud infrastructure is similar to the desktops of the ’80s in several respects. Although it ultimately benefits the ordinary end user, it’s mostly the techies that get excited about it and that continue to refine it. The result will be the same. Just as PCs were once seen as something “with potential” but nonetheless only used by a handful of “hobbyists” as Jobs puts it—or “geeks”, to not put so fine a point on it; cloud computing is seeing the same evolution. In the future, cloud toolkits and platforms will make the cloud as easy to use as today’s desktop computer; and will become as ordinary and accepted as the desktop or laptop PC.

So where did the concept of “cloud computing” come from? It goes all the way back to the origins of the Internet itself. The Internet was always seen in diagrams as a cloud, even before the term “cloud computing” came into use. The idea was that, as described by Google’s Kevin Marks, it “comes from the early days of the Internet where we drew the network as a cloud . . . we didn’t care where the messages went . . . the cloud hid it from us.”  The internet therefore gave us the first cloud, which centered around networking. Later, data abstraction added another layer to it. Today, the cloud abstracts the entire environment: infrastructure, platforms, and data and applications.

If you look closely at the Web, it is doing ALL of the same things as yesterday’s PC… except without the box (thus the word “cloud”).  Inasmuch as this may sound absurd to technologists, it’s an  equally perplexing notion to consumers.  Either way, we all should care because the implications are enormous. 

What are those implications?  Well, cloud computing represents the bigest technology platform war in about 30 years.  The biggest platform war since the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates days that were  dramatized in the cult classic “Triumph of the Nerds.”  The next couple years will be interesting.

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