Case in point, Mike Vizard from IT Business Edge writes that the “Patriot Act May Hamper Cloud Adoption“:

But when it comes to actual corporate data, Massaro is betting that no matter what the economics are, corporate legal departments are going to direct their corporate officers to steer clear of any service that eliminates their ability to keep potential damaging information out of the hands of Federal prosecutors without so much as the nicety of being told what the government might actually be looking for.

The author also assumes that these sorts of National Security Letters are equivalent to someone sneaking in your backdoor, taking a sip of your milk from your kitchen, and not even leaving a thank you note.  However, the NSL’s have been explicity prevented from maintain a gag order, so all a service provider needs to do is notify you of the letter in question and you have the same effective protection as you would if your data was under your mattress.

This would be concerning if it made a difference if your data was on the cloud or not.  What company is going to be able to keep their data from the Federal government under subpoana or other legal device?  I’m not a lawyer, but if I played one on TV I’d take a look at this gem from AIG:

“More love notes from Elias,” Cassano wrote to his subordinates as he forwarded another set of Habayeb questions. “Please go through the same drill of drafting answers . . .”

The Cassano-Habayeb correspondence, along with thousands of other e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, as well as supporting interviews, reveal a company wracked by more division, doubt and turmoil than anyone on the outside realized during those tense months in 2007, a full year before the federal government undertook one of the largest corporate bailouts in U.S. history to prevent AIG’s collapse.

Whoa. I’m reading AIG’s emails. But, I’m pretty sure they weren’t “on the cloud.” How on earth did the Washington Post get these emails if they weren’t on the cloud??

Major cloud utility providers need to continue to publish transparent policies that address specific concerns like this.   However, the reality is that there are a dozen ways for the government, reporters, employees, hackers, and other malicious or benign agents to peruse and expose your data.   The cloud doesn’t guarantee security, but the alternatives also do not.  And as much as I love a good lawyer, they sadly can’t prevent de facto data leakage either.   Only diligence, a sound security policy, and the right mix of vendors, services, and products, can give you the peace of mind that you are doing everything you can to protect your company information.

James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart)
12/2/09 7:21 PM
RT @llangit: RT @mhindsbo: #Azure supports .NET languages, such as C# + VB + Java, PHP, Python and now also Ruby http://tinyurl.com/yfs7cn6

James Urquhart from eWeek reports that Azure is now supporting Ruby on Rails.

This is exciting – you now have a major platform cloud player validating the Ruby platform.

It also shows that Microsoft is starting to behave like a “split company” – the Windows and Server business clearly not holding the web services businesses hostage.    Previous Microsoft endeavors have always had vertical integrity as a goal – Browser, OS, Office, Server, Web.  They are changing.

I’m going to start experimenting with this stuff and report back what I find.

From InformationWeek:

Google partner LTech has already build an application called SharePoint Move for Google Apps using the API to help liberate data, as Google might put it, from SharePoint.

Sharepoint Move is based on the Google Sites APIs.  These types of APIs are what makes the cloud viable.  The best cloud computing platforms have open, easy-to-understand, standards based interfaces for developers, customers, and partners to build upon.

The idea behind Sharepoint move is to help organizations smoothly transition their users to Google Apps.  Many companies have invested a significant amount of time and training on systems like Sharepoint.   Tools that help to ease that transition have value in the cloud product ecosystem today.  We’ll be marketing more tools like this for the Google Apps platform (and other platforms) in the coming months.

From GigaOm (emphasis mine):

“I spoke with founding member Paul Kurtz, partner at Good Harbor Consulting, to get some details on the news — and I was a little surprised by what he had to say. While questions still remain in areas like data retrieval and identity management, Kurtz believes cloud computing is already secure enough to be used by large enterprises for mission-critical tasks. In fact, he thinks there are many security advantages to cloud computing. These include rapid software updates and upgrades, and, depending on the provider, multifactor authentication. It’s the outsourcing of IT operations to a third party that makes execs “swallow hard,” but he notes that even large banks already have run SAS 70 audits and assured themselves they can get what they need from the cloud.”

Good Harbor is led by none other than Richard Clarke. Richard Clarke was the White House Advisor on terrorism, among other prominent security postions.  You know who else ran a little operation called CTU that dealt with this sort of thing?

Or maybe more like Chloe since it sounds like he knows his way around a firewall: he was the Special Advisor to the President for Cyber Security.

And if Chloe says the Cloud is ready, who are we to argue?

From the Vocabulary of Cloud Computing:

The dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand.

A Google search reveals some of the history of the term.  It was coined by Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Services, and then developed by the community to capture the essence of the techniques required to bridge public clouds and private networks.

I think you’ll see more about “cloudbursting” as the enterprise starts to adopt the Cloud.   Web servers, development and test servers, and non-mission critical databases are being connected now.

The connective tissue to cloudburst in a secure fashion, like CohesiveFT’s VPNcubed, will play an important role in enabling IT administrators to burst outside of their tradtional on-premise or managed service datacenters.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I lived through the dotcom bust – I was a fresh faced developer just starting to get my stride.   I was in the office with too many Aeron chairs in a hip loft with lots of iMac’s and cable lighting.  After the parties ended, when the bottom fell out, there was not much left to do but look around and say “What happened?”  We all moved on, some of us started companies, some went to work for the Web 2.0 giants, some went to the Fortune 500.   For anyone who experienced those wacky days, especially in New York City, the movie August is a trip down memory lane.

Set in the waning days of the dotcom era pre-9/11, August captures glimpses of the reality and promise of that time.  The writer uses some awkward terms (“Click-and mortar”) and the acting and story aren’t particulary interesting.  But the essence of the day is there  – the office set is spot on, as is the CNBC-like interview in the opening scene.  Theres talk of Bezos, option lockups, and Gulfstreams.

Beyond the nostalgia, some of the writing touched a nerve with me as I thought about all of the good ideas (and bad ones) that didn’t quite have the chance to make it because of costs, bandwidth, and lack of existing services.  August was like that glowing orange copy of WIRED Magazine from 1999 that sat on my desk too long – reminding me of how both exciting and futile those days were.   How could we build the next great medium when we had to build for downlevel browsers and 56k dialup?  What can you do when ideas take millions of dollars of hardware and software just to get going?   With the emergence of the Cloud -  the hope and hype of the dotcom days may actually be realized.

The Cloud is pure “e”

The Cloud is freedom. It is unfiltered, immediate, and cheap innovation power.  It’s not just content delivery, storage, CPUs, or memory.   It is boundless rendering farms. It’s supercomputer simulation and modeling for the masses.  It’s world-class software, platforms, and infrastructure to build whatever you want without having to worry about what it might cost you if it doesn’t work out.  Thomas Edison would have been a fan.

In academia, imagine what this access will mean to the next generation of students and professors?  The same kids who are putting up EC2 clusters for C.S. class are going to be in the next doctoral programs at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.  They’ll be working for cloud services and product firms building the next generation of Internet technology.   The physical sciences and social sciences will also benefit from the ability to conduct limitless experiments at extremely low costs.

The government it using it on sites like Whitehouse.gov; and in probably other places that aren’t so public.

For those of us in the private sector we are presented with a unique opportunity to offer new products and services that would be unimaginable just a few years ago because of both costs and technical capabilties.

The economy is accelerating the adoption cycle

The slowing economy is forcing companies to take a look at the Cloud.  It was going to take many more years for the adoption of industrial strength software, platform, and infrastructure in a decent economy.   Without pressure to cut costs, there was little incentive for IT managers to take risk.

But the time has come.  Saving money is more important than sacred cows like email and infrastructure.   I’ve been in a dozen meetings in the past 45 days with CIO’s, CEO’s, and other decision makers at large firms.  They all feel it coming.  The smart money is going to the Cloud – in one form or another.  Who wants to be the CIO or direct report who recommends spending more money on traditional IT without evaluating the cloud?  How many  IT careers are in the making because of shrewd decisions and well executed plans that result in millions of dollars in cost savings?

What Fortune 500 CIO would have said this in 2007?

“Let’s put all of our corporate email and sales and customer data on some network that is located somewhere we don’t know, on hardware we’ve never seen.  We’ll pay them a modest yearly fee, only for the employees actually using it, and we don’t have to spend too much more worrying about it after we make the switch.  By the way, it only takes a few days or weeks to setup, even for tens of thousands of users.  And it works from a $250 netbook, a Blackberry, or a laptop that we never have to install software on.”

Not one.  They couldn’t.  This stuff didn’t exist the way it does now.

But they are saying it now – maybe in not those exact words, but with their wallets. They are saying it at small and large companies alike. The CFO is in charge now and she wants to lower costs and increase productivity.

The enterprise is adopting the Cloud. With software like Google Apps and Salesforce, platforms like AppEnine and Force.com, and infrastructure from Amazon.  There are dozens more promising products and services coming online everyday.

This isn’t going to be easy, but neither is golf or surfing.  There is a community of people working hard to find opportunities and develop this industry despite the slow overall economy.   As a bonus, much of the innovation is happening here in the United States, for as old industries die we need to create new ones for our children and future generations.  The pure “e” of the Cloud will be the catalyst for the next IT revolution.

PS -  Thanks to my friend Eric from Klotnet for lending me the August DVD.

It’s easy for startups and small firms to take advantage of the menu of cloud computing services out there, but how does an IT manager at a mid-size or large enterprise get in the game?  There is a ton of hype out there about cloud computing – and nervous IT managers don’t want to risk their reputation or their organizations cash fiddling with systems that can be argued as "unproven." 

While cloud computing won’t solve all your woes, or cut your IT budget to zero, it does offer a nice way to trim the fat and reduce overhead, including energy footprint and physical costs (space, hardware, ping pipe and power, etc).   All this while remaining scalable and flexible; options that heretofore went out the window when the budget axe came through.

But as the saying goes, "No one’s been fired for buying IBM," so let’s look at some low-risk, high-return entry points into the cloud for today’s IT manager.  I’ll outline them below and follow up with more detailed posts later.

1. Communication and Collaboration Services:  Let’s lump in email (Google Apps), phone (outsourced Voip), and project management utilties here.  There is obvious return (no hardware or maintenance costs, increased functionality, spam protection, scalability, etc) – but how can a larger firm use this in a safe, low risk way?  Exploring a progressive migration to these types of services, targeting the temporary and flexible portion of your workforce is a good start.  More on this to come.
2. Lab infrastructure: Can you think of lab related functions in your organization that require physical infrastructure and can be moved to cloud based hosting like Amazon EC2?  This sort of infrastructure is small in comparison to your mainline production and data processing systems, but I am sure occupies at least a few percentage points of your overall IT spend.   By labs, I mean things like:
   • development servers
   • QA and test servers
   • R&D and skunkworks environments
   • Training environments
3. Time-sensitive infrastructure: How much of your datacenter spend is dedicated to overnight reconciliations, true-ups, clearing, and processing? A unique advantage of utility oriented cloud computing solutions (like Amazon EC2), is that they can be turned on and off at will.  Imagine eliminating racks of servers that performed time-based functions and only paying for the time they are in service. I’ll explore the security implications of this later because this is a no-brainer if you can work that side of it out.
4. Web infrastructure: Intranets. Extranets. Public facing websites.  Get them out of your datacenter. If they are already out, get them out of Managed Services (or at least traditional managed services).  With the advent of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 support on Amazon EC2, and SQL Server support, only the most intensive web applications will continue to absolutely need to be in a physical managed environment. 

This is an evolving list, if you have any suggestions or thoughts, please comment! I’ll continue this thread of thought as the cloud computing space quickly progresses.

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A open, flexible Facebook-style API for Apps would be awesome.  Imagine the community building the next generation office platform.

Right now, developers outside of Google can write Gadgets that live on the outside layout areas of GMail. Google developers have done some interesting things with Labs – I use the easy to find "Mark as Read" button / gadget.  However, if trusted development teams in the community, and developers at companies adopting Google Apps, had complete access to everything – including the interface, Apps would meet the challenge set forth to it by Microsoft Office (and its powerful friend, VBA).  A fully programmable cloud-based office suite.

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Back in May, Microsoft began offering hosted Exchange on college campuses through its Live@edu service — a move some saw as a direct response to Google’s success in the higher education market. Yahoo is also pushing to entrench its Zimbra email and collaboration desktop in higher ed. It’s part of an overall trend toward hosted email services on college campuses, Laczynski said.

“We’re seeing interest in this space in general and specifically with Google Apps,” he said. “There’s a lot of excitement. … These are students that are used to Gmail. They love Google. They’re used to hosted services. They’re not corporate email users.”

I spoke with Colin Steele, from TechTarget, earlier this week  regarding the opportunities for solution providers working with Google Apps in the Education space.   It is truly an exciting time to be involved in a transitional technology wave.  Hosted and cloud-based services are the way things are going, and Google Apps is a great example of a real world case.  We’ve seen so much great interest from colleges, universities, and school districts around the country.