Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

At VMworld Europe in Copenhagen, VMware CEO Paul Maritz offered an unvarnished assessment of how he sees the pricing model for virtualization and cloud resources evolving over the next decade. In his CRN article “VMware CEO Maritz: Get Ready For Consumption-Based Pricing”, Kevin McLaughlin discusses Maritz’s comments.

“We are going to have to move towards more of a consumption-based model,” Maritz said. “We are trying to keep the licensing stable for as long as we can, but in 10 years from now, things will have changed quite radically.”

Considering that consumption-based pricing is a percolating issue in the IT industry, and one that will likely fuel future friction between vendors and their customers and partners, reaction was mixed among those in attendance.

“He’s never been that forthright and direct about this issue,” said Keith Norbie, vice president and CTO at Nexus Information Systems, a VMware partner. “However, anyone who thinks the industry isn’t going to this kind of model is kidding themselves.”

Mike Strohl, president of Entisys, a solution provider and VMware partner, says he’s encouraged by the way Maritz is tackling consumption-based pricing because it makes things clearer to customers. But Ken Phelan, CTO of Gotham Technology Partners says VMware could find it difficult to institute consumption based pricing. “I can see why VMware would want this but I’m not sure they’ll be able to pull it off.”

At the recent Gartner Symposium IT/Expo in Orlando, David Cappuccio of Gartner presented 10 technology-related trends he feels will impact enterprise infrastructures in the next year. Michael Cooney of Network World shares the highlights in his article “Gartner: 10 key IT trends for 2012.”

1. The evolution of virtualization: Cappuccio says virtualization will drive more companies to tread IT like a business.

2. Big data, patterns and analytics: Unstructured data will grow 80% over the next five years,
so technologies that can manage it will become more important.

3. Energy efficiency and monitoring: Tools that watch and analyze power usage will help companies identify and eliminate the underutilization of their systems.

4. Context aware applications: How do we take advantage of smartphones? Context-based computing will go beyond business intelligence applications and create a unified communications environment with data from social networks and mobile devices.

5. Staff retention and retraining: Since loyalty is not common with new workers, companies need to get them excited enough about their jobs to stay.

6. Social networks: The collective voice of individuals and communities has an impact on business operations and strategies, so companies must enable and embrace it, but never ignore it.

7. Consumerization: New applications will be developed to address mobile users, but they won’t be desktop replacement applications.

8. Compute per square foot: The two issues facing the continued success of virtualization are the number of cores per server and overall data center energy trends.

9. Cloud computing: Cost, built-in elasticity and scalability will continue as big benefits for small companies, but once certain IT functions (like email) become less customized, larger organizations will also benefit from cloud computing.

10. Fabrics: The vertical integration of server, storage, and network systems and components with software to optimize shared data center resources efficiently and dynamically. Systems put out so far by Cisco and HP will unify network control but are not there yet.

Security pros have always relied on firewalls and other hardware to protect corporate networks, but with today’s users accessing Skype, Google Docs and even social media sites from their computers, new problems have surfaced. Many companies jut block the services they can’t control or just hope for the best. In his article “Building a Firewall for the Facebook Generation”, Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg BusinessWeek discusses how network security has had to change.

Modern computing habits require more sophistication than what’s provided by traditional security products. Older firewalls are designed to monitor one-way traffic. E-mails and data from websites pour in, and the programs look for suspicious patterns; for the most part, they treat all websites the same. Now threats can snake their way through a network in various ways: a user might go to Facebook, click on a link, and download a virus. “Most security groups used to focus on blocking apps like Skype or GoToMyPC but now are often required to allow them to be used,” says John Pescatore, an analyst at the research firm Gartner. “That’s why firewalls needed to evolve.”

Palo Alto Networks is leading the way, with an updated firewall that makes modern Web services safe for the workplace and gives companies control over how employees use them. Instead of an all-or-nothing approach, a company can let workers access, say, the updates on a social network, but not click on links or share sensitive information. “Our customers don’t want to block Facebook,” says Nir Zuk, founder of Palo Alto Networks. “They want to use it, but they also want some control.”

Is this the future of firewall protection? Gartner estimates that by the end of 2014, about 60 percent of firewall-type purchases will be for these next-generation products.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

Building a GRC (governance, risk and compliance) program is one of the most important parts of creating a cloud security strategy. Ben Tomhave, in his article “How to Manage Cloud Risk” on CRN explains the five keys areas companies should leverage to create a robust GRC program.

1. Survivability Strategy & Legal Defensibility: Overall, a move to cloud-based services should include a new legal analysis of the liability exposure, along with a new strategic outlook that puts a premium on networked systems survivability.

2. Formalized Methods: It’s becoming vital that decision methodology and security practices be clearly documented and understood. It’s also imperative that environment visibility be maintained and that key metrics be defined and actively tracked.

3. Policies 2.0: Policies should map each policy requirement to a control requirement, which in turn should be mapped to a regulatory or business objective. The policy framework structure should be as lightweight as possible to improve comprehension by those subject to it.

4. Enhanced Training & Awareness: If a training and awareness program doesn’t help connect people to the rationale and importance of a policy, then it’s not going to win buy-in, and won’t improve decisions that have an impact on security. Companies should re-evaluate programs so they educate personnel on expected behavior and improving the connection between peoples’ actions and the impact.

5. Audit & Quality, Beyond Checkboxes: The effectiveness of an audit routine is directly tied to the usefulness of the questions asked and the data generated. Tying audit and quality management to specific requirements, assets and objectives will create opportunities for improved visibility into practices, which will improve the organization’s ability to more effectively manage risk.

Even though many data center virtualization startups have moved on to the cloud, virtualization is still one of the IT industry’s most charged buzzwords. In his article “Virtualization 100” on CRN, Kevin McLaughlin talks about the latest trends and includes a comprehensive list of who’s who in the virtualization space

According to McLaughlin, although vendors often claim virtualization is just a stepping-stone to the cloud, there is still a lot of innovation going on in the industry. And since early ROI for virtualization has been impressive, companies are working to get the same advantages going in other parts of IT.

That’s because virtualization isn’t just happening in the data center. Desktop virtualization is making inroads and storage virtualization startups have been getting lots of attention lately. Perhaps the hottest part of the market is virtualization management, where startup companies are building tools and functionality that plugs gaps in big companies’ portfolios.

With today’s IT environments being more complex than ever with virtualization and cloud computing as well as the physical environment all competing for resources and often having conflicting demands, Network World published an article by Kerry Lebel “Automation tools for a complex environment” to highlight automation tools that can help IT organizations to a solution by focusing on six key areas for automation.

• Application release automation – look for flexible, cross-platform solutions that automate deployment activities, including upgrades, changes and patches, allowing for different environments, owners and processes.
• Run book automation – find a solution that automates and standardizes IT ‘housekeeping’ processes.
• Virtualization automation – look for solutions with intelligence to predict needs for both increased resources, automatically adding virtual machines when needed, and workload fluctuates, de-provisioning virtual machines when they are no longer needed.
• Application process automation – consider a single automation platform that supports all mission-critical applications and services across physical, virtual and cloud environments as well as understand dependencies across the entire IT organization.
• Job scheduling – look for a platform that works across all computing platforms, encompasses calendar- and event-based scheduling and supports old and new applications.
• Managed file transfer – find a solution that automates the entire process, ensures data accuracy and delivers secure, encoded file transfers.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

CIO blogger and cloud computing expert Bernard Golden speaks to the anxiety IT leaders may feel when making a decision regarding cloud computing deployment. This anxiety stems from the fact that each day there are new cloud computing solutions and vendors being touted. As Mr. Golden points out, when there are too many choices Senior IT executives fear making the wrong choice.

He provides three tips to overcoming this anxiety in his article titled “Cloud Computing: 3 Tips for Overcoming Implementation Anxiety.”

1. Start with a proof of concept: choose a low-risk, limited commitment application that can help you experiment with the cloud computing solution and generate learnings. Mr. Golden suggests starting with one application that is ‘legacy architecture’ and one application that is web-based.
2. Start with non-critical functionality: starting small with a non-critical application allows a more measured perspective and evaluation. Mr. Golden points out that any problems that may arise from a cloud deployment of a non-critical application can be looked at as opportunities for cloud education versus full on IT emergencies.
3. Avoid cloud infrastructure dependence: manage your application code for deployment flexibility and use components and cloud services that are widely deployed incase you need to migrate an application among several cloud providers.

Jim Duffy of Network world in his article titled “Six factors slowing adoption of converged I/O” takes a look at the conversations IT organizations are having nationwide regarding networking. Drivers of converged I/O interest have been the growth in server virtualization, cloud deployments and the increasing amount of server-to-server traffic.

Converged I/O is running local area networks (LAN) and storage data through the same wires and switches to reduce elements and cost. Converged I/O constitutes three key elements: 10 Gbps Ethernet, Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet and Ethernet equipped with lossless Data Center Bridging standard. Despite converged I/O being a hot topic in the IT industry here are some reasons why it is a process to think through before rushing to implement:

• Converged I/O is new technology and is attempting to replace proven and reliable methods. The storage networking side of an IT organization, in particular, can be very risk adverse to new technologies due to the criticality of their networks.
• New standards and proprietary techniques for extending converged I/O from the server rack and access switch are still in the development.
• There is still a question regarding the benefits of converged I/O beyond the server and access switch layer.

Mr. Duffy points out that converged I/O is a “years-long journey” not a technology to be rushed into. IT organizations need to have a foundation to work from of where they want to go and how they want to get there.

Most organizations in today’s business environment run multiple database management systems while seeing a rise in the amount of data stored and the need for quick and easy access to that data. Virtualization solutions & products can increase your company’s data and server efficiency.

Is your data center not virtualized yet? Here are seven reasons from CIO author Logan Harbaugh on why you should virtualize:

1. Virtualization allows you to get the most out of your server hardware since adding multiple operating systems and applications to the same server brings greater utilization
2. Redundant services can be set up for better fault tolerance since hypervisors allow operating systems and applications to migrate from one system to another
3. All operating systems are on one hypervisor meaning management can be administered through a single interface. IT will find that managing a dozen virtual servers is much easier than a dozen separate physical systems especially with the availability of management add-on tools
4. Applications can be partitioned on separate operating systems for greater reliability
5. Provisioning new servers for prototyping, testing and migration requires no additional hardware and set up is simple
6. Virtualization can bring more energy efficiency
7. Virtual desktop infrastructure can save on PC costs

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

Here’s a look at an article by Joe McKendrick for Forbes regarding cloud computings potential impacts to the US economy. The article titled “Cloud Computing May be a Shot in the Arm our Economy Needs” points to the many organizations that are “brokers of services” and don’t actually produce actual goods and how cloud computing makes these types of businesses more reliable and more successful than ever. Mr. McKendrick sees cloud computing as altering the business world in the following ways:

• Cloud computing paves the way for more “loosely coupled” corporations whose services will be passed through as cloud services
• Cloud computing is blurring the distinction between vendors who provide technology products and services and customers who purchase technology products and services
• Cheap-cloud computing availability could result in more startups
• Cloud computing allows for more software innovation
• Cloud computing allows for ‘micro-outsourcing’ in other words a much more straightforward and quicker avenue to tap into services when needed

Mr. McKendrick points out that cloud computing isn’t revolutionary because its changing the way of technology delivery but rather the real revolution is that cloud computing is opening up new lines of business in IT, service delivery and even among non-IT businesses.