Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

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.