In my previous blogs we talked about why you would need a business case when moving to the Cloud and how you could allocate your budget. Today, in the final blog within this series I will talk about whether buying on-demand resources and capacity to run your IT has the potential to be less expensive.

3 reasons why Cloud should save you money

Every conversation on cloud I have with CIO and sourcing decision makers eventually turns to a discussion of cost and the assertion that cloud computing is less expensive. From a technology perspective, there are at least three key reasons why a well-run third-party public Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS) provider should be able to deliver compute resources less expensively than a typical internal IT organization:

• Load aggregation. By combining the highly variable compute loads from a pool of organizations, it should be possible to achieve better utilization levels.
  
• Cost of power and electricity. By locating datacentres in areas with low-cost power, hosting and IaaS providers can lower their cost of compute resources. Given that power can often represent 35% of operating costs, this advantage is significant.
  
• Labor utilization. Compared with a typical IT organization operating a Public IaaS platform that is standard and heterogeneous IT infrastructure and delivered in a one-to-many model is much more streamlined, efficient and cost-effective.
  

The key issue however is not the cost of delivering IT compute services as such. For IT buyers, the issue is comparing the price of acquiring a public IT cloud service versus the cost of providing it internally. Pricing is a function of market conditions, seller motivation, and buyer requirements. In mature industries, cost and price are usually highly correlated. The cloud computing market is in a period of rapid expansion, affecting both providers and their service offerings. Pricing varies from very short-term contracts, literally minutes of usage, to multiyear contracts with associated discounts. The scope of the public IT cloud service offerings varies even more widely.

The long-term outlook is that public IaaS has the potential to reduce the cost of IT delivery. However, there is no guarantee, even likelihood that any particular project or application will certainly be hosted more effectively with hosted or IaaS resources. As with most complex technical questions, the answer is a function of many variables. Nevertheless, IDC believes that public IT cloud services will evolve rapidly into a major IT platform, and for that reason, IT organizations should continue to explore new options and applications.

For midsize and larger projects, IDC recommends IT leaders and other business executives rely on the proven business case methodology factoring the relevant components, including direct resource costs (equipment, software, and services), assurance costs (such as monitoring, patching, and maintenance), and indirect costs (including buildings, energy consumption, taxes, and IT management), and comparing them with external options (also fully encumbered with all relevant costs including assurance and IT management).

This is the final blog in a 3 part series on the business case for Cloud.    In addition to the blogs, IDC in partnership with TELUS developed a Cloud workbook based on a 2011 IDC survey with Canadian businesses to determine how they can take advantage of the flexible, on-demand way to access infrastructure and applications via Cloud.  Highlights from the workbook include:

• Use cases detailing how companies of varying sizes across verticals are deploying Cloud
  
• Types of Canadian Cloud providers and their offerings
  
• Key consideration questions to assess infrastructure-based Cloud services as part of your IT strategy
  

You can get full access to the workbook here

Mark Schrutt

IDC Canada

Not all cloud services and the providers who deliver them are equal. In the conclusion of our series Send in the Cloud: A limited series to help you develop a Cloud storage strategy, we thought it useful to present some final guidance when considering suitable cloud storage providers.

We’ll walk through four areas to look out for:

• The Cloud Storage Provider
  
• The Cloud Storage Service
  
• Your Data – Portability, Security
  
• Implementation and Support
  

Cloud Storage Provider

• The Organization
  

As with any decision involving the sourcing of a business service, it is important to determine whether the organization delivering it has the expertise and track record to demonstrate seriousness in the particular domain. Usually, a solid provider includes a long reputation of delivering similar or identical services.

• Trust
  

Consider a service provider with whom you feel you can entrust some of your most valuable assets, your data backup, intellectual property or the content that fuels your business. Just like you would treat holding your organization's cash with an established financial institution, consider a cloud service provider that is in good financial standing, engages in ethical business practices and presents fair and equitable terms and conditions for the service.

• Legacy of data centre expertise
  

Not only is the history of delivering IT services an indicator of trustworthiness, but also one of technical and organizational competency. Hiring, training, and managing experienced data centre professionals provides distinct skills and capabilities that are the foundation of a trust and stable cloud service.

The Cloud Storage Service

• Quality Commitment
  

The quality of the provided service should include a commitment for service quality. Enterprise class services entail a well-defined service-level agreement (SLA) with specified provisions should service quality not be met. Note that some services providers describe service objectives that the provider has no vested in reaching, in particular with value-oriented or free services.

• Flexibility
  

As with service providers, client organizations are not created equal. Good service providers will be able to adapt their services and work with you to address your specific needs. Modular services allow for more flexibility whereas integrated solutions can provide advanced capabilities. It is also helpful to consider whether the provided service offers room for future growth that aligns with your organization’s changing business requirements.

• Technical Capabilities
  

Some services are more capable than others, with some offering far more access and connection options, different back-up solutions, compatibility with existing IT systems and services or powerful management tools. It is up to you to decide whether these are essential for your organization or “nice to have”s.

• Subscription Commitment
  

Commitment from you, as the client, is a key deciding factor as well. Certain services providers offer service in a flexible manner, whereas some require term contracts. The level of incremental service or tier can also be large or small. Being able to try the service before committing is invaluable in choosing the appropriate provider for you.

• Fees
  

Obtain a clear breakdown of what is included in the service and find out the cost of any optional add-on services. Be well-informed of all overage charges, surcharges, or hidden fees. In the case of cloud storage specifically consider things such as bandwidth charges and the cost of performing bulk migration of data either to or from the service.

Data, data portability, data security

• Data Protection
  

Your data needs to be protected with the most modern IT and physical security practices from malicious activities and natural disasters. Fully-secured data centres with built-in redundancies are expensive investments that not all organizations are capable of making. Some cloud services offer multiple tiers of protection which you may find suitable for your needs even for additional fees.

• Data Security
  

Ensuring data security in a multi-tenant cloud is a key consideration and a known barrier to cloud adoption. A cloud storage service that obscures user account information from the stored data helps eliminates unlawful access to by both outsiders and the service provider’s staff. Some service providers perform background checks on all employees to prevent such occurrences.

• Jurisdiction
  

As your business data resides in your service provider’s facilities, consider the physical location of the infrastructure and the ensuing jurisdiction issues. An end-to-end Canadian service provider (incorporation, data centre facilities and network connections) is not subject to the US Patriot Act, which allows the US government access to data stored with the service.

• Data Portability
  

As a client, provider lock-in is both irritable and expensive. To minimize this concern, consider a service that uses industry-standard software and protocols that allows your data to be transferred at your convenience, and will not retain your data beyond your service commitment. Don’t forget to check for the existence and cost of optional services to perform bulk migration to the cloud storage service or from it when you choose to.

Implementation and Support

• Assistance
  

What levels of assistance and support will you receive when you subscribe to the service and on an ongoing manner, even round the clock support. Phone, e-mail, online (self-support) mechanisms and the languages in which these are provided vary between providers. Some providers will also provide integration or development support for cloud storage services that are accessible for application development.

• Ease of use
  

The level of complexity of the service can determine whether your organization is receiving the solution’s full value.  Those that are simple to integrate with your existing IT environment and easy to implement will reduce your operating costs and will also lower switching costs significantly. You will be delivering value to your organization much quicker as well.

I hope you found this blog series on Cloud Storage valuable and welcome your questions or comments.

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS' hosting and data centres.

In 5 Things to consider when you’re considering the Cloud for data back-up and archiving, I discussed using cloud storage services for backup and long term data retention (or archiving) purposes. Today let's examine how cloud storage can be an effective platform for sharing, storing and distributing useful content.

Content Sharing and Distribution

Long before people started trusting the cloud as their backup ‘repository,’ the Internet, through a range of capabilities, was being used to store and share information in various forms between users and between organizations.

One of the first applications of cloud storage is the ability to store and share content between users, especially if the files being shared are serving multiple users or cannot be effectively delivered through means such as FTP or e-mail. A couple of weeks ago we mentioned DropBox, a service that has gained popularity mostly among consumers likely largely due to a free space limited service tier and a mobile access option. The web is littered with a multitude of “file sharing” services, many of which are commonly used for underground peer-to-peer activity. This broad category of solutions also spans subscription based services such as YouSendIt that are more effectively designed to bypass e-mail limitations.

The common themes for many of those services are the low (or even free) pricing options designed to convince users about the benefits of the services. There is even an experimental Windows add-on called GMail Drive that allows you to use a Gmail account as a virtual disk drive. Not all alternatives offering extensive security options or guaranteed reliability; your mileage will vary greatly.

For organizations that seek secure and reliable content sharing and distribution, commercial grade cloud storage services and technologies can include other capabilities such as strong authentication, secure transfer, tracking options and functionality to integrate the storage as an extension to another application or web site.

A historic perspective on web content

As you can imagine (and see from this graph supported by UN data), the Internet has gone through tremendous, quasi exponential, growth since 1990. But the world wide web (does anyone still refer to it that way?) grew wider not only in its geographical span and complexity but also in the huge variety of applications and content it supports.

The files comprising this consumable content were originally limited to rather static web pages, images and a constrained variety of files that would be ‘understood’ by web browsers such as Netscape (RIP) and early versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Since the early nineties the types of content we can access evolved greatly to support a myriad of unstructured content (i.e. documents) and multimedia types.

Another dramatic contrast is the change in content complexity and sizes we consumed then and now. Not too long ago, relatively speaking, early web users visited pages containing a few images, links to documents and the odd background midi sound file totaling up to several tens of kilo-bytes in size.

Things have evidently changed quite a bit over the years - in an article authored by a Google search engineer several weeks ago the average web page is almost 400 KB in size. No longer constrained by modem era bandwidth speeds, we now gobble up dynamic content that is much richer and encapsulated in data files that are many times larger than what we could dream of what for many of us seems not too long ago.

Web content is versatile and complex

While there are a number of standard mechanisms to transport application data over the Internet, the most pervasive access mechanism to the abovementioned content is HTTP.

HTTP and its secure (and slower) sidekick HTTPS have over the years become synonymous with Internet. These are transport mechanisms supported by the browser you are using to read this blog as well as support secure web based applications and on-line shopping transactions.

The browsers, with their ever increasing capabilities, have evolved as one of the primary means to transport and present content, and through a variety of add-on's present an increasingly rich and multilayered experience users can interact with through numerous devices, including smartphones and even some TVs.

The richness of web content and the great diversity of devices, languages, bandwidth speeds and screen sizes require both content and the systems that supply content to be ever more versatile. Web sites today have the “intelligence” to adapt and optimize the user’s experience based on those and other factors. In order to achieve that, the web content we use is in simpler term an assembly or layer cake of multiple types of content of varying quality and from different sources.

The same Google article mentioned above succinctly illustrates this point through some factual data. Current web pages include on average 30 unique images and represent over 40 distinct sources of information, each requiring the browser to fetch these images and data fragments to assemble a web page we can read.

The richness of the web meets cloud storage

The fragments of data displayed through a web browser can come from a variety of sources and depend on the composition of dynamic and static content being pulled from various sources. While some of these sources are proprietary and secure systems such as the databases containing information, others can be more open content repositories that are optimized for delivery of content objects.

Let’s use an online travel booking site for example.

Consumers looking for hotel properties for their next vacation will search the hotel or travel site looking for properties that meet criteria such as star ratings, amenities and room availability. Information such as pricing, availability and even reviews will be predominantly textual and prone to change, therefore originate from data systems and are formatted for display in real-time. Much of the compelling content a hotel property may use to convince you into booking a vacation (beyond a great price) is visual – ranging from basic pictures of the property and amenities to captivating 360 degree virtual tours of guest rooms and videos of activities the property offers.

This type of content, albeit visually appealing is relatively static. The same digital assets (multimedia files of different kinds) can be displayed to any user browsing through the hotel web site, shared between different properties of the same hotel chain or even used by other travel sites and affiliates promoting this property.

While you can still pick up a glossy printed brochure at the local travel agencies these are becoming a thing of the past, online alternatives have evolved to provide a richer and more compelling buying experience as well as a more efficient and effective means to update content and adapt it based on the user, device or the popularity of the content.

Content Delivery Networks

Another approach that is often used for the last 15 years or so is a Content Delivery Network (CDN for short). These services are designed to replicate copies of files (often images, multimedia and even software applications such as mobile apps) to servers (known as Points of Presence – POPs) globally and maintain an up-to-date repository (cache) that would be accessible to users and their various devices with minimal delay.

While CDNs were originally developed to address issues like shopping cart abandonments, there are numerous free and commercial CDN options today in the marketplace that have evolved significantly with the growth and proliferation of the Internet, including services that are optimized for delivery of mobile content, flash content, small objects (small images) or large objects (electronic delivery of software for example).

Cloud Storage and CDNs are interrelated and share some similarities and benefits. One such great benefit is achieved by replacing static and sometimes rich and heavy content within a web page with a reference to an object stored on the cloud. That way resource demanding content (due to size or repetition) is offloaded from the web servers such that web sites are able to scale significantly better.

Depending on the situation some web sites will work better with one approach, in others both approaches can provide a complementary solution.

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS hosting and data centres.

The vastness of the Internet and human ingenuity creates new breeding ground for innovative forms to share and consume content through the Cloud. Cloud storage entails several characteristics that allows it to be used as an abstracted utility for storing and retrieving these content objects. Stay tuned for the next time where we weigh in on the benefits and risks of cloud storage. If you have any specific questions about the cloud or what you're reading here, please leave a comment.