Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

San Jose, CA – March 11, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of affordable, easy-to-use, 100% Cloud-based, network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced that it has launched a totally new and completely revamped website.

This addition caps a 12 month period in which Monitis has doubled its user base, won the 451 Group’s prestigious “Most Innovative Start-up” award for 2009, and driven a development schedule and roll out of one game-changing product after another.

According to Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, “Our Cloud-based, SaaS-driven, all-in-one suite internal and external monitoring tools is so far ahead of the game, that likely for the last 12 months and certainly for the last 6 months, there has been absolutely no comparison between the value and difference-making features we offer and the rest of the competition. Yet, until now our website didn’t reflect our radical advantages. As of today, this is no longer the case. We finally have a site worthy of our offering.”

The core of the new Monitis site is already live and a bevy of new features and additions will be streamed on-line in the weeks to come.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service which provides Cloud Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Monitis consolidates backend monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud. 

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. Recently, because it’s Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures, Monitis was named the Most Innovative Start-up for 2009 by The 451 Group at their annual Client Conference.  

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

Contact:

Monitis Inc.

Sales & Marketing Department

info@monitis.com

http://www.monitis.com

US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949

UK + International: +44-845-527-3346

France + International: +33-48-607-9035

2880 Zanker Road Suite 203

San Jose, CA-95134

USA

In a piece I read on Networkworld, I was reminded just how much virtualization will become a successful component of cloud computing – and vice-versa.

Let me explain. There may be myriad definitions floating around out there about just what exactly is the cloud, but the goal of the cloud is very clear: to vastly improve the cost-effectiveness and dynamic provisioning of IT services. Better, faster, cheaper, says the story.

And to be even clearer about the value of the cloud, virtualization is included in the top considerations of what is most important in the new computing environment. Of course, virtualization is not a new concept (consider the existence of virtualized mainframes, VPNs and LANs). But in today’s computing world, almost every aspect of IT can be virtualized, including servers, desktops, applications, storage, network switches and routers.

The story also predicts that, more and more, we’ll see Input/Output on network switches, appliances such as WAN optimization controllers (WOC), application delivery controllers (ADC) and firewalls become virtualized.

While this all might seem pretty matter-of-fact to IT folks, the point here is that sometimes we have to take a step back and look at the broader view of how the cloud is changing almost every aspect of enterprise computing. Amazing!

Do you have a vision of IT staff disappearing as cloud computing develops and ushers in more automation and self-functioning tools? This implies that there won’t be anything to manage in a network.

In a recent InformationWeek blog that I came across, the author says that about three-quarters of the systems people she spoke with at a recent end-users conference were concerned about losing their jobs to the cloud.

I think this is a worst-case scenario (and a downright scary story) that IT folks are conjuring up. What will likely happen is that roles will change – not go away – as more expertise is needed in managing an enterprise’s eventual and measured migration to the cloud.

Systems administrators and networking professionals will be responsible for helping their organizations transition to a new IT environment, as well as for ensuring that there is a smooth migration path from an on-premise network to a hybrid environment (which would include on-premise, a private cloud and some components of a public cloud.)

To prepare for greater cloud computing management roles, IT folks can learn how to work more closely with other business units within their firms, and to help them understand new requirements, limits, and benefits of the new model. These “soft skills” have “often been lacking in IT organizations,” says the author. But soon enough, they’ll be critical – because cloud computing naturally involves the collaboration of several different business units. After all, it is a major change in the way a company computes.

So the reality really is that IT roles will grow from solely maintaining a network to more strategic roles in order to assist their organizations in managing the new cloud computing infrastructure.

IT folks can also prove themselves valuable in helping their organizations monitor service level agreements (SLAs), uptime statistics, data breaches and other cloud performance indicators. Taking on the watchdog role will bring new respect and appreciation from upper management.

There’s a fascinating article by Reuven Cohen
about cloud development in one of the fastest-growing and most interesting markets of the world: India. The country’s immense population (1.17 billion people) and growth of the middle class is spurring technological development. It’s like watching weeds sprout through pavement.

Cohen quotes Janakiram MSV (a fellow blogger and IT guy who works with Alcatel Lucent, Bell Labs-India) about why India is poised for significant cloud computing growth. He says that the Indian sub-continent is a “very unique and a potent geography” for cloud platform vendors due to the presence of an end-to-end IT ecosystem.

But beyond infrastructure, other trends are shaping cloud growth there, among them:

- Untapped market potential. Unlike the U.S. and Europe, India hasn’t hit saturation levels yet. So there’s opportunity at every level, such as enterprise or public sector.

- India is a test ground for piloting strategic adoption techniques, for example, engaging with ISVs in order to develop a platform or working with a mature developer community to pilot an SDK adoption plan.

- Small and mid-size Indian companies are eager customers for cloud vendors and services, due to the promise of low IT costs, data storage and a pay-as-you-use strategy.

Just to give you an example of the level of interest and development in cloud computing in India now, there’s a CloudCamp (an “un-conference” where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas) India Tour going on right now that features five CloudCamp events throughout the end of February in some of the country’s largest cities.

I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of cloud-related news coming out of India in the coming months and years, and it’s clear that the demand for cloud services should be skyrocketing, too.

One day I read about a survey saying there’s little interest among businesses for data storage on the cloud; another day I read about a poll that leads me to believe the opposite. Such contradictions make me:

a) Question the polls themselves or

b) Remind myself how very enthusiastic—and yet at the same time unsure—IT folks and their CIOs are about the cloud these days – despite all the talk about it.

The latest poll comes from ReliaCloud, a Minneapolis-based IT infrastructure developer. It surveyed 150 IT decision makers at small and large companies across the US, and found that three-quarters of them said development of cloud computing was a priority for 2010.

In the poll, a majority, 85% or so of decision makers were either currently implementing cloud computing services or had plans to do so within the next year. Further, 95% of IT decision makers think that cloud computing will either radically shift or have a definite impact on how technology services will be provided inside their companies.

Here’s the conflicting part about data storage. The survey found that the services that would be best suited to cloud computing were Web applications, databases and data storage.  

So why does one survey reveal IT folks saying “yes” to data storage on the cloud and another saying “no?” I think businesses are still torn up about issues like security and support, while at the same time they’re attracted to the cloud’s promises of up-time/high availability, performance and cost savings.

Let’s wait and see how cloud providers in 2010 act to reassure IT people on their doubts and – through development and enhancements – also affirm their positive beliefs.

Wondering about the WAN landscape in 2010? Well, think virtualization, cloud computing and video traffic; they’ll all be part of WAN optimization this year, according to a news account that I came across recently.

Riverbed, which specializes in IT infrastructure (including WAN optimization) performance for enterprise networks, applications, and storage, predicts that this year more and more end users will demand to connect to corporate resources – no matter where they’re working. Among its forecast, it said: “As more cloud and virtualization projects come to fruition, users will be further away from their data. More vendors including Riverbed will step up to provide offerings for the cloud that address several key issues including service availability, data and vendor lock-in, security, data transfer bottlenecks and performance unpredictability.”

Sounds like much-needed help in a world where SaaS providers like Google get attacked in cyberspace because their cloud app (Gmail) customers are political dissidents. Safety, security of data – those are the kind of assurances that companies want about the cloud. Seems like I can’t say this enough!

More demand for WAN-optimized solutions will come, too, because the growing inventory of apps traversing the cloud will be content-rich, real-time and bandwidth-intensive, “as the use of collaboration and Web 2.0 applications become more widely utilized across distributed enterprises and virtual workgroups,” said Adam Davison, vice president of corporate sales and marketing at Expand Networks, in the story.

And Davison makes a good point that – in the face of increased demand for advanced WAN optimization solutions – IT folks are “already realizing that it is no longer just about providing acceleration, but about enabling enhanced levels of traffic visibility and control, and assuring the quality of the user experience across all these complex environments.”

So, seeking greater adherence to SLAs is part of the future, too, I’m glad to see. That’s a trend that I can confirm, too, providing monitoring services to companies whose end goal is to provide their customers with a seamless and positive solution.

Watch out Google Docs. I read about a service from Box.net (offered via a company called Increo Solutions that Box.net has acquired) that allows users to upload and view the content of a wide variety of files as well as share and embed files across the Internet.

There’s also an embedded viewer that lets you see all the files, just like you’d see in Google Docs (Personally, I like the above viewer better).

Why is embedding files anywhere on a website news-worthy or notable? As noted on readwriteweb.com, it’s one thing to upload and share documents online, but downloading them carries issues for companies and end-users.

For one, a company, out of concern for privacy, may not want their documents to be downloaded. Another: sometimes end-users just want the convenience of viewing something online, and that’s the extent of it – they don’t want to download it. They’re the ‘less-is-more’ kind. They don’t even like to carry around thumb drives.

But today’s workforce is different from that of even a few years ago. There are more home-based workers, and, much to Apple’s delight, iPhone sales (and other smart phones) are going through the roof. In short, people now have easier ways to access and collaborate on documents. That’s why these tools, from the likes of Box.net and Google are so important – and needed—these days.

Apparently, this ability to store, upload, collaborate and download (if one so chooses), is being called “cloud content management” by Box.net, yet another cloud buzzword.

If cloud content management (permit me to invent the acronym: CCM.) works smoothly, that gives enterprises and end-users a tremendous boost of confidence in the cloud, and I applaud that. But there are plenty of IT folks at both growing and large companies alike that still have reservations about the soundness and security of the cloud – whether it’s over the reliability of a platform or the safety of data.

So, even as these CCM tools multiply, so will services like cloud data center and cloud platform monitoring.

Imagine yourself as an IT superman, and on your best day, configuring 50 or so desktops at your company. That would be pretty impressive, I’d say.

Now, imagine process automation that can ramp up thousands of virtual machines in less than a month. In this age of virtualization, this is a reality now with products such as Surgient’s Cloud Express suite of tools that allows IT organizations to do just that.

I read about this new development by Austin, TX-based Surgient on CTOedge, and the goal is to provide companies with a turnkey set of systems management tools automating the provisioning of virtual servers across massive cloud computing deployments. That’s according to Brian Wilson, Surgient’s VP of services and support.

So, you may ask, why is this capacity so important in today’s computing environment? Well, like everybody else in the corporate world these days, IT has to cut costs, and that often means labor, unfortunately.  Meanwhile, the number of virtual servers that organizations need to deploy or implement keeps on climbing. And so companies need to employ the latest IT automation tools that do the job of the system manager.

I don’t like to see anybody – and their skill set – replaced, but this is the kind of technology that companies need today to increase efficiencies on a grand scale and stay competitive. And I suppose the more competitive that companies remain, the better able they’ll be to expand and grow and then, perhaps, take on more IT specialists to focus on other areas. It’s a vicious cycle.

Meanwhile, companies, especially small businesses, continue to seek out services, such as automation to monitor websites, that allows them to do more with little or no IT support staff. And the cloud is the perfect infrastructure model because IT tasks like monitoring can be done 24/7 and from anywhere in the world – not just one location.

Local and national governments around the world continue to migrate data and productivity applications to the Cloud – as part of initiatives to save money and make processes more efficient.

We’ve certainly seen cloud computing initiatives in the U.S., for example, the city of L.A.’s migration this year from internal email to Google’s Gmail – a move expected to save the city hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years. And cities around the U.S. are considering conversion to the cloud, too.

National governments, too, are developing private clouds. The U.S. announced its Apps.gov initiative last year (Google’s handling this one), and the Japanese have built an infrastructure dubbed the Kasumigaseki Cloud.

But now, from across the pond (the Atlantic ocean, that is) comes news that the U.K. government plans to save more than £3 billion pounds yearly by 2013/14 by sharing software and IT services in the cloud. The British want to build a government-wide cloud computing platform (to be called the G-Cloud) and an application store, among other IT strategies.

Right now, Whitehall (as the government sector is known) runs on hundreds of data centers and tens of separate networks. And that’s just not going to work going forward, according to Government CIO John Suffolk, in a story about the initiative. Here’s more on how the U.K. government would save: right now, public sector agencies buy many separate versions of the same type of software packages, serving common departments such as HR and finance, as well as much of the same IT infrastructure. But the centralized G-Cloud would allow the public bodies to reuse the same software applications.

The British G-Cloud would slash the number of data centers from hundreds to about 12, which would save British taxpayers about £300 million pounds per year and cut server power and cooling costs by 75%. Plus, the G-Cloud’s app store, where government agencies could re-use apps on a pay-as-you-go basis, is estimated to save another £500 million pounds per year.

Britain’s proposal is impressive, and I expect we’ll see even more cloud development by governments around the world. And as we do, we’ll see even more demand for ways to monitor cloud platforms.

It makes sense to protect your investment in a cloud provider – especially when public money is at stake.

Chief information honchos at companies are hot for cloud computing and virtualization in 2010, says a new report by Gartner.

In the study, Gartner asked CIOs to list their top technology priorities for 2010, and respondents ranked virtualization as their top area of focus. Next came cloud computing and web 2.0. That makes sense because Gartner researchers predicted that firms will invest more in hosted solutions this year and less in hardware – as budgets continue to shrink and be constrained.

And what are CIOs most concerned about? At the top of the list: business process improvement. The next biggest concern is reducing IT costs, according to the study.

I’m very happy to see that CIOs, the ones who hold the purse strings, are not just paying lip service to the cloud and virtualization. In fact, in a story I read elsewhere, Gartner has boldly predicted that one-fifth of all businesses will own absolutely no IT assets come 2012 – due to migration to cloud computing.

CIOs are getting more serious about incorporating cloud tools into their cost-saving strategies. Seems everyone wants a piece of the pie, as cloud computing and virtualization solutions continue to prove big money savers for companies, and more companies invest in the technologies.