My thoughts on Apple's iCloud announcement, as posted on the Cognito blog.  

At a Cloud Computing seminar I attended earlier this year, I was surprised when one of the panelists - invited for his expert opinion on Cloud technologies - announced that not only did he have no idea why he was on the panel but that the thought the Cloud was an absolutely fad and waste of time. "I've read three books on the subject!" was what I recall him saying.

To me - and I've said this before - the Cloud is that avenue of technology that finally allows the actual technology to get out of the way of the user experience. Note that I'm not saying that it wasn't possible before, or that the Cloud is the answer to *everything*. 

Yesterday's iCloud announcement has, and will, cause some stir. Over the air syncing of all the things that matter - pictures, documents, applications and even music - using Apple's own data centers, for - and I think this is really important - free. Apple is paving the way for taking Cloud technology to the masses, and all those who wouldn't stop talking about how scary the cloud is. Free stops a lot of people from asking questions. Often, when speaking to customers about the fact that a lot of our technology offerings are based in the Cloud, you can already see that they've shown you the door. Talking to them about the benefits of the Cloud - the ease of use, availability from anywhere - doesn't seem to change their minds, until they hear the words, "unlimited storage", as is the case for email archiving in the cloud. Suddenly it sounds more interesting.

Read the rest of the post here>>

Originally posted on the IT trouble? Cognito it blog.

After attending yet another Cloud Computing Conference, where I had the chance to interact with various IT professionals on this high focus subject, I felt more or less that the same questions are getting asked over and over again.

• Is Cloud just a fad?
• How secure is the Cloud?
• But I don't want to put my data on the Cloud, now what?
• The Cloud's not for me because I have enough servers and computing power.

I can't attempt to answer all the questions in one go, but I wanted to talk about something that most (at least in the regional Cloud Computing talks I've been to so far) don't seem to fully address.

First, Cloud Computing is nothing new at all - only its use in mainsteam IT is (I use IT here to refer to IT departments). Hotmail was founded way back in 1996, and search engines (which can be considered applications running in the Cloud) were around since before then. Today, however, Cloud Computing has reached a stage where it is easily and readily available to every Tom, Dick and Harry. And you can be up and running in about 5 minutes!

Sadly, most of the standard Cloud Computing talks focus around Computing Power - something that is also known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service. IaaS means that you purchase infrastructure, or computing power to augment (or in some cases, replace) your in-house setup, or lack thereof. But there are more aspects to Cloud Computing: Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service. I'll talk a bit more about the latter.

Software-as-a-Service is an offering that can be traced as far back to the late 90's, where a provider delivered his software from his datacenter, rather than on each customer's site. Today, this has taken phenomenal proportions - with everything from e-mail to CRMs and ERPs to games and you-name-its available in the 'cloud.'

Here's what I want to highlight: the real advantage of using SaaS and Cloud Computing in general, is not about its cost. It's about what I call the symbiosis between IT and business. Call it what you want really, but today IT is a tool for business to get better, faster. And any IT that bogs the business down - and most IT does - should be seriously looked at, and fixed.

Read the rest of this post »

The reason people don't realize how widespread Web Applications really are is because they're ingrained in everything we do.  Software has always been available in a client-server architecture. Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail are just so much a part of our lives that we've been using them for years, over a decade even (Yahoo! and Hotmail began operating in the late 90's), without realizing that we had given into the Cloud way back then.

The spread of the web has allowed for more and more web-enabled applications. Plus, it's just easier. You can update, tweak and re-vamp the Web site without even touching anything at the end-user. The user just points his web browser back at the URL and continues operating. Very few web apps actually require something to be installed at the client site.

Today this concept has just taken off, giving rise to what we could call the Cloud Computing Era. More and more applications are web enabled today, in fact users even ask for this as part of their feature requirements. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now a sassy (get it?) way to go, allowing users to pay on-demand, when they want, how much they want and for how long they want.

All this is super, but now we hit the problem. Even if we assume that users are happy with the level of security, with the size of the 'cloud' increasing and the number of users increasing, this is getting harder and harder. To be able to protect applications and data in various dimensions continues to provide a challenge. Secure protocol, secure passwords and other security architecture are various pieces to a large puzzle, but security action is typically reactive. A hacker is working with outwitting what's already out there, security personnel are working with blocking whatever the hacker comes up with - and that's an unknown.

Read the rest of this post »