With more and more companies looking at cloud computing projects, it is important for IT professionals to build their knowledge base. Meridith Levison in a recent CIO article gathers advice on where to start building cloud computing knowledge from leading experts in the field:

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.

Gregory Machler of CSO reports for Network World that a growing trend in disaster recovery for cloud providers is the use of load-balanced data centers instead of hot-cold data centers. A load-balanced data center replaces the data base suffering from a disaster with a similar data center that operates at a reduced capacity.

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.

Businesses that want to take advantage of Cloud Computing can learn from some of the common mistakes made by others, says Nancy Gohring in her Network World article.

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.

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

Even though conventional wisdom says virtualized environments and public clouds create massive security headaches, the godfather of Xen, Simon Crosby, sees it differently. Tim Greene’s interview with Crosby is the basis of his article “Godfather of Xen: Virtualization holds a key to public-cloud security” on Network World.

A fundamental characteristic of virtualization is isolation, the ability to restrict what computing goes on in a given context. It can be exploited to improve trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised, says Crosby, a creator of the open source hypervisor and a founder of startup Bromium, which uses Xen features.

Isolating processes more finely can boost security in public cloud environments, he says. “I think one will be to create a highly secure cloud system which can be used to deliver multilevel secure systems,” he says.

If he’s right, public clouds will become more secure and businesses will be more likely to trust them. The need for private and hybrid clouds, along with their costs, will disappear.

In 2011, cloud storage was one of the few technologies that could attribute its success to the lagging economy.  “Cloud storage systems and services helped users deal with the uncertain economics of 2011 by letting them fund that growth using operational expenditure funding, rather than having to make capital expenditures in the hardware, software and people required to run one’s own data center,” says Sharon Fisher in her Network Computing article.

The growth in demand for storage has been huge.  According to Aberdeen Group, 15% of companies in a June study reported their data growing between 80% and 100% annually.  And it’s not just organizations that need cloud storage.  With digital media files so large in size, consumers are also looking for an online repository for their personal media.  This year we’ve seen a variety of cloud service offerings emerge targeting anywhere from the consumer to the large organization.

From a business standpoint, organizations are seeing benefit from cloud storage in a number of ways – to relieve the pressure of escalating IT infrastructure costs and as an effective alternative for disaster recovery.

According to Techaisle, an SMB-focused research firm, “SMBs globally spent $11 billion on cloud computing in 2011.”  This is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% until 2015.

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

George V. Hulme’s article “Clouds of Anxiety: Companies Worry About Security of Cloud Computing” on ComputerWorld highlights some interesting findings from several surveys about cloud security.

A Forrester ForrSight survey shows that 67 percent of large enterprises are using cloud computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms to support production applications. That’s greater than the 61 percent saying they use IaaS for testing and development. This shows that companies aren’t just using cloud for simple tasks, but for crucial production systems.

The Ponemon Institute research firm found that 27% of the companies rated their management of cloud server security as fair and 25% as poor. A shocking 42% said if they wouldn’t know if any of their company’s applications or data was compromised in the cloud.

In a study by Dome9 Security, 61% of respondents say their organization doesn’t have a firewall management product for their cloud storage. Of those who don’t, 62% say it’s because they aren’t scalable, cost too much (59%) and aren’t available (57%)

The Dome9 results are mirrored by another recent Ponemon study that found less than 50% of organizations have the necessary technologies to secure their cloud deployments.

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

Nancy Gohring discusses cloud options in the article “Private cloud vs. public cloud vs. hybrid cloud” recently posted on IT World.

According to the article, a recent KPMG survey of 800 senior IT executives says 41% of respondents use or are planning to use a private cloud while 30% said they are or have plans to use a public cloud. According to Rick Wright, head of KPMG’s global cloud enablement initiative, choosing a public, private or hybrid clouds comes down to several factors.

Companies have to consider the business criticality of the applications they want to move to the cloud and how integrated they have to be with other enterprise functions. Regulatory issues, required service levels and usage patterns for the workloads are also important.

Based on these factors, businesses that must comply with strict regulations and have highly critical applications should opt for internal private clouds. Companies without tight regulatory controls and those using data that doesn’t have to be integrated into with other parts of their business can go to a public cloud. Security for both public and private clouds is still a concern, but as time passes, companies will become more comfortable with cloud storage.

In the end, Wright says, most companies will end up using a hybrid cloud model. Because a hybrid cloud is made up of both public and private cloud services, a business could run applications on their private cloud, but use a public when they experience usage spikes.

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

With many customers fully virtualized, it’s time to take them the rest of the way toward a true cloud solution, said Carl Eschenbach, at the Global Technology Distribution Council Summit in Newport Beach.

In the article “VMware’s Eschenbach: Six Ways To Drive Transformation Into Cloud” on CRN, Scott Campbell shares Eschenbach’s strategies on how the IT channel can take advantage of clouds.

Here are the strategies Eschenbach suggests:
1. Deploy Private Clouds
This still represents the largest opportunity, says Eschenbach.
2. Deploy/Manage Public Clouds
“We can help build public cloud and do that by leveraging the services that our partners have,” Eschenbach said.
3. Partner with Service Providers to Resell Cloud Services
VMware, and distributors can “bridge the gap” between public service providers and the VARs to sell public services back into the private cloud.
4. Assist Hybrid Cloud Migration
There is an opportunity to take applications that exist in data centers today and helping them move to public cloud, whether it’s software as a service or just a public cloud provider.
5. Buy and Resell Private Clouds
Building private clouds themselves or going to a service provider who has already built one and buying a rack.
6. Migrate/Transform/Build Applications on Top of the Cloud
“Companies have to think about selling software as a service and how to do that without disrupting the massive revenue streams they have today,” he said.

The final result will be significant adoption of cloud in the market by customers, Eschenbach said.

In his article “Reigning in Unstructured Data” for Computer Technology Review, Ken Cheney talks about unstructured data in a virtualized world.

With the proliferation of NAS storage devices, diverse file servers running all sorts of apps (not just databases), and cloud-based services, the growth of unstructured data in businesses is unfettered.

According to Cheney, in the wild and wooly world of unstructured data it’s important for companies to think out their data management and storage plans up front to ensure all of that info is handled correctly.

As more companies (and more smaller companies) jump on the virtualization bandwagon, things will only get more complicated when it comes to securing their unstructured data like the reams of Word and PowerPoint and PDF documents stuffed into their soon-to-be virtualized servers. Of course, these companies want to reap the cost-savings associated with server virtualization, but fail to think through the security implications as they make this move.

If you need more proof that the need for good, secure management of storage in our ever-virtualizing world is only going to grow, you only have to look to IDC’s latest numbers on the storage software market. The total size of that market segment hit $3.4 billion this quarter, up 11.3% over the year-ago-quarter. Within the overall storage software category, data protection and recovery software sales accounted for more than one-third (34.2%) of the total.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing. In his article “Where in the Cloud Do You Sit” on CRN, Robert Faletra tells us solution providers fall into three major categories: vintage, progressive and transformational.

Vintage partners have traditional on-premise, solution-based models with no significant plans to drive recurring revenue through off-premise hosted solutions.

Progressive solution providers are still driving more than half of their business through traditional on-premise solutions, but are growing the off-premise and hosted portions of the business model by greater than 50 percent as they drive the recurring revenue model.

Transformational partners have a pure- or near pure-play business that focuses on cloud type deployments.

According to Faletra, most providers sit in the progressive category and are predicting steady growth over the next 18 months. Transformational partners are the smallest category but are also experiencing growth. Only the vintage players are seeing stagnation in revenue growth.