[update: 6.23.2009 - "MIT CIO Symposium Organizer" is Christopher Reichert]
David Berlind is our Evening in the Cloud host. David says the discussion shouldn’t be about cloud computing definition, it should be about cloud computing benefits. The benefits will lead to the ‘right’ definition.
Evening format is a panel discussion, followed by networking and speed geeking demos to win over our virtual $1 million.
I’ll blog the panel tonight. Probably offer commentary on the speed geeking via twitter and follow-on posts.
Panel Format, each panelist has 8 minutes to “pitch us” as though they were visiting our organization.
Mike Feinberg, Senior VP, Cloud Infrastructure, EMC
Mike ask us to imagine: Infinite on-demand resources, economies of scale, servicing multiple industries
Commitment that is proportional to investment. Can IT organizations deliver cloud architectures? Is cloud synonymous with Internet access?
Customers are concerned with putting 100% of data in external cloud; customers want choice, control & flexibility, one size doesn’t fit all.
There will be a federation of Internal & External clouds. “internet access to capability and local access to capability”
Cloud computing is a storage and data problem. If you are going to compute on something, need access to data and information. Refers to Atmos product. Atmos has policy control to annotate data – confidentiality, etc. Policy used to manage where data is stored – Atmos in datacenter vs. online.
Not a statement about internet access, but architecture.
Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager (and Inventor), Google Apps
3 questions he is frequently asked:
1. what applications should i move to cloud?
2. what does google offer?
3. is anyone doing this?
benefits from Google are scale, innovation, cost.
4 layers: infrastructure, platform, identity & administration, applications
calls out fallacy of just moving existing applications to the cloud and being able to take advantage of all cloud capabilities
Google started with applications: gmail, talk, calendar, docs, sites etc.
Extended google platform to allow people to run their own applications – Google AppEngine & Web Toolkit; Gadgets; Google Secure Data Connector – secure bridge between Google cloud & enterprise, or other clouds
Value starts at Google Platform
Examples:
- Presidential Town Hall meeting, question submission, huge spike at submission deadline
- Cast Iron’s 360 degree customer view – pulled from Salesforce, Remedy
Companies that deployed apps – slide with 12-20 logos, not Fortune 500 companies
Sean Poulley, VP Online Collaboration Services, IBM
Agree with Rajen, running your infrastructure is a drag. Slide of IBM in the cloud, working with customers on private and public clouds.
“The cloud is a new way to solve old problems”. Problems won’t go away. Need to protect customer’s investment.
What is shifting to the cloud?
- workloads move to the cloud – analytics, collaboration, desktops
- cloud systems – IBM Cloud Burst – hardware, networking, systems management, virtualization for enterprises to build private cloud that has many of the capabilities of public cloud
Walking through LotusLive as intercompany collaboration platform: web conferencing, collaboration, email. Good example for Enterprise 2.0 crowd.
Closing with IBM as trusted partner – remember, they are supposed to be pitching.
“Customer Response”
Besides the audience, the panel has two customers who will now respond to the pitches.
Q: Christopher Reichert, MIT CIO Symposium Organizer, missed name: What’s your take/response to the McKinsey study on true costs of cloud?
Mike, EMC: confusing internet access with architecture. cloud is interesting – cost savings from efficiency and late binding.
Sean, IBM: reality is not all applications will move. Need to make economic decision, just like always. Not just economic though, need to consider business policy, risk management trade-offs.
Doug Cornelius, Chief Compliance Officer Beacon Capital Partners – self described as “the no guy”.
Doug’s question, “How do you deal with the geography issues” – legal, regulatory aspects of where cloud (data) is physically located.
Rajen, Google – absolutely an issue. What will be interesting is when/how policies, law catch up with technology. Listed a ton of policies, governmental organizations Google works with to ensure compliance.
Mike, EMC: Policy approach of Atmos allows organizations to manage this.
Sean, IBM: Tricky, technology is moving faster than the law. Always been issues of selling/deploying technology to other countries based on U.S. policy. Everything has cost, benefit, risk equation to be evaluated. If you want to be ultimately safe, you would do any of this stuff, nor get out of bed in the morning.
Doug Cornelius: Records management, really talking about records destruction. Really destroyed, not on backup tapes somewhere. Concerned about redundancy, good for back, bad for records destruction.
Sean, IBM: No CIO in right mind would not be looking at Cloud. Compliance though is the big concern. This often drives private clouds. Existing data centers are often chaotic. There is opportunity to create “cloud environment” internally, reduce data center sprawl.
Mike, EMC: IT knows how to run datacenter, but the question is how efficient is that data center running. Opportunities for both internal efficiency and taking advantage of public capabilities.
Q: issues moving data to cloud –
General discussion that we (the industry) have been talking about this for 7-8 years, however conversation has changed, not technology issue as much as philosophical/trust issue.
Rajen, Google mentions: security, legal contracts/data ownership, policy setting & enforcement
Q: Christopher Reichert, MIT CIO Symposium: Three bands of cloud adopters – small companies, little data to shift, large companies that have means to outsource the cloud shift (applications and data), middle group, don’t have means to shift, have critical, yet poorly performing applications.
Now I feel like I’m in vendor meeting, the question asked isn’t being answered (yet).
Rajen says good question on midmarket. Calls out Gartner research that suggested organizations not move data when move email to cloud. Interesting trend in midmarket is that companies just do a complete switch over. Obviously, doesn’t work for all types of applications.
Also mentions standards based Google App Engine, development language familiarity eases adoption.
Doug Cornelius: If cloud vendor doesn’t know SAS 70, talk to someone else, if can’t negotiate terms of service, throw them out of room. See this post of Doug’s for more tips on clouds and compliance.
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