Live Blog -- CLoud Launch: Morning Panel

Reuven Cohen made an empassioned point about how there is no such thing as a "Canadian cloud" and put Canadian telecom providers on the spot for their lack of flexibility in offerings and mobile plans. Apparently, Reuven maxed out his mobile data plan pretty quickly...

Also according to Cohen, the NIST definition was created as a way for the US FedGov to procure the typical cloud based services as a direct result of a mandate from Vivek Kundra, first Federal CIO. According to one audience member, this has only helped bigger companies sell into the government and has excluded SMBs.

Misha Nossik added that risk aversion has prevented Canadian governments from adopting cloud computing even though they are trying desperately to hang onto their empires. Competition and efficiency is a major driver for cloud adoption in the US whereas Canada might not be facing this same pressure (yet?).

It seems that, with respect to government, maybe we should be discussing the need to consolidate services and share them on the whole rather than just outsource everything in an effort to use cloud computing. Here, there is a distinct lack of a cloud computing roadmap and maturity model to judge progress. Is it possible that, if we were to show the way to move forward and show the current state at various stages, adoption would be greater and simpler to promote?

Audience member invoked the Patriot Act in his point about how our legislation and regulations can help Canada's ability to become "data Switzerland". Cohen pointed out that this has been done before and that it was a failure because no one wanted it. With respect to Canada, he said, the cost structure is simply not competitive while Andrew Fisher added that the scale is simply not there (yet?).

It boils down to how Canadian companies can add value to cloud computing and an audience member agreed by adding that when [we] created the Canadarm, [we] decided we would not be NASA but would add value in a different way. Shahab showed how the Province of New Brunswick has become the call centre capital of Canada in this same way. Rough consensus, either by active advocacy or by passive non-opposition, seems to be that SaaS is where Canada can excel and add the value we're so desperately looking for.

Let's get some clarity and focus on our capabilities, first, I say. Then we can talk about where to add value. We can't get anywhere without first knowing where we start from and then knowing where we're going.

Thanks to Nossik for stopping the self/Canadian bashing.

Great examples

Great examples, use cases, and scenarios in Jinesh's session on migrating to the cloud. Helps to reinforce the idea that migrating operations to the cloud is a multi-step process and not something that can be done on a whim.

To Charge, or Not To Charge: That, Is The Question

An acquaintance of mine recently commented to me that "...startups that offer freemium services are doomed to fail..." Google defines freemium as follows: "Freemium is a business model that works by offering basic Web services, or a basic downloadable digital product, for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features." This would seem to settle the discussion, but the argument that was made was that the vendor is basically giving away the product. We see this today in various cloud service providers and especially so in SaaS providers.

Ultimately, this is true: a company with no revenue is not likely to succeed. However, a company with no customers is equally unlikely to do very well. The idea behind the freemium model is that users of the free product a) see the value of the product and decide to buy the premium version so that they are supported (freemium users may not be entitled to vendor support); or b) need access to some feature that is locked and only available in a paid subscription.

Logical, no? To an extent. Success as a vendor in this case is measured in the conversions of freemium users to paying subscribers. This metric, depending on the vendor's business plan, should be used to decide how aggressively the vendor should pursue users in order to try upselling the premium version.

The bottom line is this: customers will use a product for free, but for how long before they move on; vendors should upsell their customers and entangle them as soon as possible to avoid high freemium churn rates and to increase the conversion rate. The trick is finding the feature balance between the free product and the premium product.

Organizational Governance and Cloud Based Services

InformationWeek published a story on their site about how IT departments are 'losing ground' on cloud computing. The premise is that individuals in the organization are adopting cloud services with or without IT's knowledge and/or approval.

The article suggests that this is a security issue which, at the end of the day, it is. But, security is a part of information and organizational governance and, as such, this should be treated as a governance issue. If IT can't control usage of cloud services by the organization, is this a failure of IT or the organization? I can understand why someone would just use a credit card to get what they needed done sooner than later. However, this is no excuse for ignoring organizational business practice and compliance policies. In some organizations this would be grounds for dismissal.

Granted, IT departments can be slow. How, then, can IT help resolve this problem? How can IT be part of the solution? Clearly, employees need to be sensitized to the risks and issues surrounding their use of cloud based services in the organization and who better to do so than IT? Of course, this should not be taken to mean that IT should scare the bejeesus about of them, rather this should be an ooprtunity for IT to move closer to the employees and the business by seriously considering cloud based services and their impact on the organization, good or bad.

A great quote from the article: "Hello: it's 2010 and do you know where your data resides?"

Cloud Computing: Nomenclature Issues

The nomenclature for cloud computing, or the model for services consumed on a utility basis, has drawn much criticism and caused much confusion.

For those of you who are not aware, cloud computing draws its name from the fact that IT resources are "in the cloud", meaning that they are somewhere on the Internet, off your network. (A stylized cloud is often used to represent the Internet in architecture diagrams.) The most common term for cloud computing is the "as-a-Service" suffix: infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), software (SaaS), and storage (such as Amazon's S3). Clearly, IaaS and PaaS are derived directly from the hardware and development platforms and provide users with instances of the underlying resources on demand while storage is the use of storage media as a resource. SaaS, however, poses a problem: is software "cloud computing"? SaaS splits the community into two distinct camps: yes, SaaS is cloud computing because it is available in the cloud; no, SaaS is not cloud computing because you are subscribing to software on a monthly basis (unlike the utility model for IaaS and PaaS).

The NIST defines cloud computing as follows:
"Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models."

This definition leaves a bit of room for interpretation. Because of this, I propose alternate terms: "Cloud Based Services", "Services in the Cloud", or "Cloud Services". Each of these terms indicate that the services are consumed (be they IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or storage) are located or based in the cloud and do not confuse the issue of SaaS being a compute resource per se.

While the terms "Cloud Based Services", "Services in the Cloud", and "Cloud Services" are not revolutionary, they clarify the concept and are inclusive of the various forms of cloud computing.