Organizations’ adoption rate of moving more critical applications to the cloud is still slow mainly due to security concerns. Mr. Cottingham makes some recommendations for ensuring a more secure cloud. First, take advantage of all available security features and be sure to verify the cloud provider’s security. Recognize that many of the security measures for the traditional environment such as data encryption during transit, access management and password management should be implemented in the world of cloud computing as well. Stay on top of the policies and procedures of your cloud provider.

Cloud computing can offer an organization countless benefits and one of the best first steps to adoption is to find a smart and trusted partner to guide you through what is ultimately a journey.

For 2012 business intelligence and analytics has returned to the top spot for CIOs. Business intelligence has always ranked high but lost out to virtualization in 2010. Gartner believes that the comeback is due to the need for more real-time data, the challenges with big data and social networks. Virtualization has lost its top spot in 2012, but this is actually good news for the technology. The survey asks questions more around what ‘worries’ a CIO for 2012 or what ‘keeps them up at night’. Virtualization has proved to be a successful and key technology over the years.

Mobile technologies and cloud computing came in second and third on the list this year. According to Gartner’s survey 61% of the enterprises responding said they will be improving their mobile technologies in the coming years. As far as cloud computing, many CIOs now see the value and have stopped viewing it as a bunch of hype. CIOs also feel economic pressure to determine where cloud computing best fits in the enterprise.

The fact that data center capacity and data volumes are growing is expected, but the extent of that growth is surprising. Research estimates that data volumes will rise from 135 Exabytes in 2005 to 2,720 Exabytes in 2012 and even 7,910 Exabytes in 2015. Where is all this data coming from? There should be no surprises here: mobile data thanks to the heavy adoption of social media, machine-to-machine systems such as remote smart metering and on-demand home entertainment growth.

1. Understand the basics – such as, the core concept of cloud computing, the various deployment options and their use cases and, of course, how cloud computing differs from traditional IT operations.
2. Select areas of specialization and certification – once you have the basics down, focus on cloud computing’s hot areas and learn about any management of cloud infrastructure services environments and frameworks that exist in your current organization. Finally, look to earn certification regarding cloud computing.
3. Understand how cloud computing affects your job – cloud computing will impact some IT jobs more than others. For example, cloud computing automates a large portion of a system administrators job, configuring systems. System administrators will have to know more about running an automated environment that runs the server versus running the sever itself. Capacity planners will see their role become more challenging as cloud computing shortens the forecasting window and provides more variability of the load.

1. Server Efficiency: the foremost and most traditional benefit of switching to virtualization is to make more efficient use of processor cycles and RAM which can result in energy and cooling savings along with physical server savings.  Important to note that even small and mid-sized businesses need to be aware of “virtual sprawl”.
2. Disaster Recovery: backing up and storing VM files is a far easier than hardware servers. Plus, it is very cost effective to host servers at an alternative location incase onsite servers go down. That said, using server virtualization for disaster recovery still requires the same forethought and planning as other recovery methods.
3. Business Continuity: the goal of business continuity is to minimize service disruptions. Server virtualization enables live migration allowing administrators to seamlessly move VM files between physical server hosts without having to first power the servers down.
4. Software Development: virtualization allows for development costs as no additional hardware is needed for test environments.
5. Security Updates and Patch Testing: again, virtualization makes testing for bugs and errors on new software extremely easy.
6. Desktop Virtualization: server virtualization opens the door for client virtualization.

This year, Internet Protocol will upgrade to version 6 – marking the Internet’s biggest technical upgrade ever. Also, key Internet contracts held by the US federal government are open for bid. Below are five Internet operations that will or may see significant change:

1. Root servers may have a new operator. ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has overseen the operation of the Internet root servers since 1998. ICANN’s contract expires in March 2012
2. A new operator for the .com registry. Verisign has operated the .com domain since 1999. Verisign’s contract is also set to expire.
3. New top-level domains. In January, ICANN plans to introduce up to 1,000 new top-level domains.
4. More websites will support IPv6. The U.S. federal government has a mandate to support IPv6 on all of their public-facing websites by September 2012 which could drive further IPv6 deployment in the US.
5. Europe will run out of IPv4 addresses in 2012. This again puts more pressure on carriers and enterprises to move to IPv6.

A challenge when using load-based data centers for disaster recovery in cloud computing is tracking configurations of the infrastructure of an application. Why? Each application creates multiple elements within their environment such as server names, open IP addresses, DNS mappings, firewall rules, SAN and NAS configurations and database clusters just to name a few. Also, not only does an application create these elements but each element can exist for different environments such as production, test and development.
How to mitigate this challenge? Centralization of infrastructure configuration metadata. Centralized parameters and versioning of applications can decrease problems within the load-balanced data center and help to return the data center back to a stable state when disaster or errors have occurred.

1. Evolution of virtualization: virtualization will drive more companies to treat IT like a business.
2. Big data: unstructured data is predicted to grow 80% over the next five years. Technologies that get the most efficient usage patterns per kilowatt and higher-end performance optimization will increase in importance.
3. Energy efficiency: IT will need to inventory what compute resources are doing to reduce and optimization power consumption
4. Context aware apps: context-based computing will go beyond the business intelligence applications and will bring data together from social networks and mobile devices.
5. IT Staff: staff retention and retraining become a significant issue as baby boomers continue to retire.
6. Social networks: ignoring social networking is no longer an option for companies.
7. Consumerization: new applications will be developed to address mobile users, companies need a well-defined strategy to take advantage of this development.
8. Compute per Square foot: virtualization is one of the most critical components being used to increase densities and vertically scale data centers which can result in better server performance yielding to savings in floor space and energy.
9. Cloud computing: the possibilities for organizations to benefit from cloud computing will continue to increase.
10. Fabrics: further infrastructure convergence to optimize shared data center resources efficiently and dynamically.

On top of new mobile device management needs and the ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) trend, IT is likely to have to face the security consequences of their own virtualized networks and cloud-based services. Experts says that standard security controls such as data-loss prevention, anti-malware, encryption and intrusion prevention should not been forgotten. In fact, the need for regular assessments of how security vendors or cloud services support virtualized-oriented security is increasingly important.

Pitfall #1 – Failing to set up redundancies for disaster scenarios
Don’t assume that a cloud server is backed up somewhere else. You still need to make sure you’re backing up and will need a redundancy plan in place. Researchers at Forrester call this “the uneven handshake” between what the services cloud providers offer and the responsibilities left to the customer. Cloud services typically do not take care of security, application availability, backup and recovery, and service performance.

Pitfall #2 – Not accommodating for data center failures
Companies should ensure that their systems are load balanced and that workloads shift to different zones in the event of an outage.

Pitfall #3 – Failing to accommodate for potential bandwidth issues
App performance is coming to the forefront. Companies are beginning to look harder at the ability of the cloud to support business critical elements and achieve desired latency. A couple of years ago, companies were implementing centralized cloud deployments, trying to pack as many servers and storage devices as possible into a small set of data centers. Now, with increasing focus on app performance, companies are starting to shift to distributed platforms where they can run applications on infrastructure closer to end users in order to improve performance. Poor app performance is driving some businesses to switch from public clouds to private clouds.