Last week I had lunch with Walter Scott, CEO of GFI Software. Walter is a colorful character. He leaves his Ferrari at his house in Florida, his 8-foot Bourget chopper at his home in Massachusetts, and I'm not sure what he drives when he's at the company headquarters in Malta. And his most recent last cool vehicle, a whopping Ford F-650 pickup, is somewhere in the Middle East presumably being driven by an oil sheik.
The last big GFI news was the acquisition of Sunbelt Software out of Clearwater, Florida, which may explain the Ferrari 340 parked in the Sunshine State. Sunbelt was kicking some Symantec butt with Vipre, an anti-virus/anti-malware tool. Former Sunbelt CEO Alex Eckelberry always called Vipre the Porsche of anti-virus. It doesn't have every feature; instead it is lean, mean, and high performance. I thought this was CEO hype until I asked his customers. They agreed, feeling Symantec was bloated and Vipre wasn't.
GFI had a product line of its own, long before Sunbelt, which included GFI LanGuard, which offers network security, and Network Server Monitor.
GFI Cloud, for now, offers anti-virus, server and workstation monitoring and management and asset management largely through cloud versions of Vipre, Network Server Monitor.
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/17/2012 at 12:47 PM3 comments
The cloud has won many types of customers. Consumers love their Gmail and Hotmail, leftwingers their Huffington, right wingers their Drudge, sales types live in Saleforce, and Lync is setting the world of unified communication astir.
Meanwhile personal backup with services like Carbonite is revolutionized. Enough bacon has been saved to keep Homer Simpson fed for years.
IT, though, is still wary of using the cloud for hardcore disaster recovery. If they can't see their disaster recovery systems, or know their disks are held in some underground cavern, they just don't feel safe.
Seth Goodling, from storage vendor Acronis, analyzed some recent surveys that drive home this point.
This is actually great news because it serves as a challenge to the cloud storage vendors to perfect their technology, and absolutely prove it works. Once this is done, the cloud could be the easiest, safest, and maybe cheapest way to do DR ever.
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/10/2012 at 12:47 PM5 comments
Some of you reading this may be a CIO. Some may play that role, but not have the exact title. Others may be a few notches below. But it doesn't hurt for all of us to, at least at times, put on the CIO thinking cap.
So when it comes to imagining a full cloud strategy, here are some things David S. Linthicum, founder of Blue Mountain Labs, himself a CTO, advises.
First, Linthicum sees cloud as a C-level initiative and I guess I agree that a shift of this magnitude, while not always driven from the top, certainly is approved from those heights. For the cloud CIOs drive the strategy, then work with the other big C-level person, the CEO, to get 'er done.
CIOs should only propose what they understand, and so forming a group to analyze how cloud technology applies to the specific enterprise makes sense. CIOs should come away with details, such as where the cloud could have the most immediate impact and how well the current staff is equipped to handle the transition.
Larger shops have to deal with compliance rules, and the cloud adds a new wrinkle. This really means asking the hosting provider a bunch of questions. It might just mean that they are better prepared to handle your compliance than you are.
And lastly, looping back to staff, you may need to make some changes, as not all may be ready for the cloud. The skills of on-premises computing are fundamentally different from cloud. Instead of low-level admin functions, you'll probably need higher level application design and management. The cloud, done right, makes IT more strategic which ain't necessarily a bad thing.
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/10/2012 at 12:47 PM2 comments
As largely expected, Microsoft bought Yammer, a social media player. This is not like Bing, which is 100% going up against Google. While Yammer does compete against Facebook for consumers, let's face it -- that ship really has sailed.
I think Microsoft bought Yammer far more because it can be used for enterprise social networking. Those steeped in the Microsoft product line may remember that Microsoft, through Lync and other tools, already offers social networking, but this requires lots of software licenses and even more IT elbow grease. Yammer is much more quick and dirty. Redmond can upsell you later.
The price of all this? A mere $1.2 billion.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/26/2012 at 12:47 PM2 comments
Only the richest companies seem to offer public cloud services, or at least make a big name for themselves. Just think of the words Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. So it stands to reason it takes more than a few bucks to build a private cloud. After all, these elastic, self-provisioning capacity-on-demand, always-on utilities are built on highly virtualized orchestrated servers. While that is a mouthful, that's what private clouds in essence are all about.
Aaron Bawcom, CTO for Reflex Systems, is happy to sell you private cloud wares. But he also wants to save you some dough and recently penned a piece about saving money on private clouds without ending up with a hunk of junk.
As a virtualization management player, Reflex is obviously concerned with, er, virtualization management. Having a bunch of cheap servers running a bunch of uncontrolled VMs is not a private cloud -- it's a mess.
The key, if you are working with a service provider, is asking the right questions. How many pieces is the solution made of, or is it all one install? Are professional services needed at any point? Is it turnkey or does your shop have to script or develop around it? If the latter, is all this done in one language or script tool?
Once installed and running, how much of the management is automated versus requires your attendance?
I'm only scratching the surface. If you're itching for more info, head here.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/26/2012 at 12:47 PM5 comments
Microsoft MVP and long time author and trainer and consultant Don Jones is as bothered as I am about the misuse of the term cloud. First it was just cloud. Now private cloud is bandied about expecting we all know what the speaker means when the speaker doesn't always know what the speaker means.
That's why sometimes I takes to define the term before I use it, which can consume several paragraphs (which would be great if I were paid by the word and you would all bear with me).
Don has the same chagrin. He has come to much the same conclusion, except as an Microsoft MVP and long-time author and trainer and consultant, he has way more detail. Here's a summary.
Your data center is automatically provisioned, and even in your own premises, you pay as go. And finally, these private cloud computing resources are fully abstracted. You have no idea what is running where, nor should you.
This is the dream, and like many dreams, will not likely be fully realized. But parts can, Don argues. Areas of the data centers or certain departments can operate as private clouds with all these attributes.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/2012 at 12:47 PM0 comments
Azure is moving down the stack. Originally a Platform as a Service (PaaS) tool which is more or less a full stack to run your apps, just one level below Software as a Service (SaaS). Most companies move up to higher levels of sophistication. With Azure, Microsoft is moving down, broadening the service into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS are the basic building blocks, servers and virtual machines upon which you place things. This means you really have to build everything from scratch to run on the thing.
For those that feel I'm talking down to you, I apologize, but all these categories are pretty new and these terms aren't always used with great precision.
Now Azure has IaaS and PaaS. And Office 365 is Microsoft's answer to Software as a Service. The story is starting to get pretty complete.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/2012 at 12:47 PM2 comments
There's no quicker route to an IT pink slip than losing your company's data. That's why backup and disaster recovery decisions are so important. Make a mistake and you may find yourself flipping burgers next to your kid's high school classmates.
Cloud backup and disaster recovery providers are facing a huge trust gap. If you have trouble trusting devices you can see or those trucks that cart away your optical disks and hide them in caves, how on earth can you place your job future in the hands of something as amorphous as the cloud?
IT is not known for taking leaps of faith. IT needs to know the cloud is safe. Imation Scalable Storage director Brian Findlay knows these concerns first hands -- he hears them every day from customers and prospects.
While an advocate of online, or cloud backup, Findlay does caution IT to bring this in cautiously, and only as a piece of an overall backup strategy. Maybe he is thinking about those pink slips too.
IT should look at the vendors very closely and measure the offering for safety and security.
In the early days of online storage (which wasn't that long ago) the cost and speed of moving data across the WAN was daunting. Through deduplication, fewer bits traverse these wires, making the economics more attractive. Making it more compelling, storage prices continue to fall, a nice little double whammy. Oh, and bandwidth costs are dropping too.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/2012 at 12:47 PM0 comments
I've had a bit of a struggle with the definition of a private cloud because vendors, like with just about any other buzz word, often toss the phrase around without knowing or caring about its true meaning.
To me, a private cloud should have all the attributes of the kind of cloud owned by an Amazon or Rackspace. It should be a true utility, meaning that one needn't worry about capacity or backup. It should just work no matter what workloads are thrown at it. That means it is elastic, automatically absorbing spikes in demand.
Private clouds are based on virtual servers which have the ability to shift workloads through sophisticated orchestration and have an infrastructure that is a bit overbuilt or has spillover through a service provider in the event that extra processing is needed.
Glad I got all that off my chest!
So how does security fit it? It speaks to the VM part. Because the private cloud is really a set of moving VM parts, your security has to layer intelligently on top. Brian Robertson from Crossbeam Systems lives in this world and has a few words, actually paragraphs, actually pages of advice.
First, just a bit more about the problem. Let's say you move a VM from one server to another. No, let's say you regularly move lots of VMs from server to server. If the security isn't 100 percent in lockstep, these VMs may be vulnerable.
Robertson's main advice is to take a high-level philosophical approach and to "think of security as an extension of the private cloud and to develop a virtualization strategy that enables network security to be as dynamic as the rest of the environment."
Specifically, Robertson advises implementing "intelligent automation that understands the security environment to ensure optimal performance and reliability," moving to take as many of your disparate physical hardware security appliances as possible and consolidate them, and build a security infrastructure that scales as the private cloud grows.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/12/2012 at 12:47 PM1 comments
Though not quite Wizard of Oz caliber, Red Hat is working the open source levers into a pretty good position in the cloud world. Working off the Apache DeltaCloud project, Red Hat built a management platform it calls CloudForms. Got all that?
CloudForms, an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) management tool, is hybrid in a couple ways. First, it works with public and private clouds, and pulls them together into managed hybrid clouds. It also hybrid in that fact that it manages heterogeneous cloud systems while at the same time providing access to enterprise apps in a way that maintains existing IT security and compliance provisions.
If it sounds complicated, it kinda is. This is a developer tool aimed at layering new cloud or migrated cloud apps against IT infrastructure, not an off the rack solution!
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/12/2012 at 12:47 PM0 comments
Amazon has a pretty nifty service, AWS VM Import, which, as the name implies, lets you bring virtual machines from on-premises into Amazon EC2. Problem is, as the name implies, it only lets you import.
Now you can export VMs back to your premises. Equally slick. As you might have guessed, the service is called VM Export Service for Amazon EC2.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/05/2012 at 12:47 PM1 comments
French concern eXo believes there is a gap in social intranet offerings. Some are purely consumer-oriented public services like Facebook and lack the discipline for enterprise use. Other enterprise tools are hard to set up and take too long to establish, especially for ad hoc use.
eXo thinks it has the perfect middle ground with its Java-based eXo Cloud Workspaces. This tool is designed to let users build their own social intranets equipped with shared calendars, shared documents, wikis and access to all this through popular mobile devices (otherwise known as iPhone/iPads and Android phones and tablets. Windows, someday you'll have your day).
At the same time, IT can centralize what information end users access and how. This should be the best of both worlds.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/05/2012 at 12:47 PM2 comments