What questions are essential to ask your cloud provider

Many of you asked if I could provide a cheat sheet on how to select a cloud provider. Inherently, a one-size-fits-all solution does not exist in cloud due to its dynamic nature and the continuous evolution in strategic alignment that most businesses experience in this new digital world. Fortunately, I believe the following set of questions will provide you with a great place to start in making sure you can feel confident in your cloud provider.

How do you guarantee your Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

As an enterprise architect who has supported multiple software as a service (SaaS) offerings in recent years, the first question that I’m always asked relates to the SLA. Most businesses are interested in uptime, systems availability, network resiliency, fail-over options and capacity.
As an example, a viable cloud provider will feel comfortable responding to the following concerns:
• Do you offer 24/7 support?
• How do you manage monitoring of the systems?
– Do you monitor all systems and applications?
– Do you monitor only uptime or do you include transactional monitoring?
– Would I receive alerts as well?
• How do you guarantee global connectivity and consistent speed?
– This presents an interesting component as most businesses now rely on global customer outreach. For example, an Italian customer should have the same digital experience as a customer in Taiwan.
• Do you have dual link or pairing connectivity to your data centers?
– In many cases, we are now seeing cloud providers that provide dual link with additional fail-over through their own network. A company like SoftLayer has made a name for itself using such setup.
• Do you meet or exceed industry standards for systems availability?
– Industry standard for systems availability hover around 99.8%

Who is responsible for the support of the application, systems and environment?

Responsibility for support will depend on the type of cloud services that you choose:
• Software as a service (SaaS)
– Vendor bears responsibility for applications, data, run time, middleware, etc.
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
– Business bears responsibility for applications, data, run time, middleware and operating system
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
– Business bears responsibility for applications and data

How do you manage backup, fail-over and disaster?

This is the million-dollar question. For most businesses, the ultimate fear of losing data can only be alleviated if a cloud provider can demonstrate through its Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that it has the policy and procedures in place to ensure a strong disaster recovery stance. There are many different techniques to ensure proper data backup, and some are more expensive than others. At minimum, a dual backup strategy such as backup-to-disk (local) and backup-to-tape (external) will guarantee that your data will be available following a disaster.

What type of integration do you offer for connecting to third-party?

As the cloud evolves, more and more activities are performed through APIs among countless third-party providers. At times, such connectivity may require the creation of VPN tunnels or other esoteric connectivity options. It is important to know and understand what policies and options are offered as a major consideration for you to conduct business.

How easily can I port my application to on-premise or another cloud provider?

As we all know, cloud is “pay-as-you-go/pay-as-you-grow.” You may find the need to move to another cloud provider or even decide to bring your business back home. This is a very important consideration as the ability to port your application whenever and wherever guarantees that you will always have a choice and that you—and you alone—are in control of your business.
I hope I answered your questions and provided a sense of direction when engaging with a cloud provider. Feel free to contact me on twitter @thinkahead and let’s continue the discussion.

Mobile, the path forward for small businesses

As the world enters the always-on, always-connected world of mobile, many Small Businesses (SMB) and Small Medium Enterprise (SME) still find themselves lagging behind in terms of adapting their business strategy to this new Mobile world. Web e-commerce was already a seismic shift for many in the traditional world of brick-and-mortar at the turn of the century.

Subsequently, companies that took the early risk of aligning and extending their brick-and-mortar offering to the web understood that the primary key benefits behind an e-commerce offering relates to access and discovery. Furthermore, such companies also understood that providing consumers with easy access to their goods, products and services from the comfort of their home or office was also a conduit for consumers to visit brick-and-mortar locations to finalize the hands-on experience.

Fast forward 14 years and assess the mobile revolution which, from my perspective ,will have a lasting impact on the way we interact with each other and our environment. Let’s look at some data so as to appreciate mobile growth:

Mobile data growth (Nielsen U.S Demographic):

81% of adults aged 25-34 have smartphones. (This is a sweet spot for marketers)

Almost 70% of US teens 13-17 use a smartphone

50% of US adults 55+ own a smartphone

Mobile data insights:

·         Internet

o   50% of the average global mobile web users now use mobile as either their primary or exclusive means of going online

o   Mobile web adoption is growing 8 times faster than web adoption did in the 1990s and early 2000s

o   Global Mobile traffic now accounts for 15% of all internet traffic

o   Smartphones and tablets have caused internet use to increase 93% since 2010

·         Advertising

o   eMarketer expects US mobile to reach $31.1 billion by 2017.

o   eMarketer have seen  a 20%  growth thru Social Media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)

§  Facebook has proven that mobile advertising works

Messaging

o   Almost 3 out of 5 consumers prefer marketing text messages and other push messages over other forms of mobile marketing according to mBlox market research

§  59% of respondents would share demographic information

§  43% of respondents would share their location

§  26% of respondents would share their contact information

§  10% of respondents would share their browsing history

§  5% of respondents would share their contacts

§  53% of consumers prefer SMS or text messages for offer promotions

·         Email

o   62% of emails were opened on a mobile device

o   Mobile users read emails more often than desktop users

·         Apps

o   The average consumer actively uses 6.5 apps throughout a 30-day period

o   78% of smartphone users access a retail site via a mobile app

o   44% of table users accessed a retail site via a mobile app

·         Mobile business (e-commerce & payments)

o   80% of consumers plan to conduct mobile commerce in the next 12 months

o   57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site

o   So: not having a mobile optimized website is like closing your store one day each week

(Infographic via ComScore)

As the aforementioned data shows, one should no longer ask “Why should our business adopt a Mobile First strategy?” Rather, the question to ask is when. The most striking data point ,from my perspective, is the 93% internet increase. Folks are now consuming more information than ever, while sitting at breakfast, in the bus, walking, getting coffee, having a drink; in short anytime, anywhere. People use mobile apps or web sites formatted specifically for mobile devices to browse the internet, engage in social activities, purchase goods, and consume financial data, travel or healthcare services.

You may now wonder how to build a strategy which will extend your business to the mobile medium and platform. My short answer is as follows:

 Cloud technology and services come first to mind, for which a business may use Software as a Service to enhance market penetration, through the use of marketing campaign. There are countless SaaS offerings from big players like SalesForce.com, Eloqua, Marketo,  and IBM Campaign to Constant Contacts for smaller businesses, most of which offer branded mobile apps. Additional SaaS services will definitely help with your mobile website development or deployment, and many web hosting vendors provides services from which even a non-technical individual can use WordPress to create web sites that are automatically formatted for mobile devices.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) also provides a great value proposition for businesses with an IT department or development team. Such businesses can select a private Cloud for development purposes, or use a Production Cloud with a web front-end for customer access. Hybrid Cloud (Private and Production) is also an option, for which all infrastructure management is left to the Cloud provider to handle.

Many Cloud providers now offer a suite of SaaS or PaaS services specifically designed to help businesses enhance their mobile footprint. Traditional Cloud vendors like Amazon, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and now Google are building this one-stop-shop for all your computing and mobile needs. Smaller vendors like GoDaddy and Network Solutions are also building great offerings at an affordable price.

So what are you waiting for?

In the event that you would like to continue the discussion, ping me @thinkahead

Seven benefits of cloud

I was recently asked to provide an overview of the benefits of cloud. In all fairness, it would be difficult for anyone to answer this question and provide a thorough overview as cloud benefits continuously evolve with the addition of new services, uncompromising research and innovations that relentlessly push the boundaries of the underlying technology and architecture.

Additional breakthroughs in horizontal and vertical markets as well as the birth of new ecosystems and development platforms provide the construct behind a continuum of opportunity for businesses to benefit from cloud providers’ enhancements to technology offerings.

To truly appreciate and take advantage of the impact and benefits of cloud computing, I believe that you must also understand that cloud is primarily an extension of IT and your business.

Even though this may be a tall order, I will take this opportunity to introduce you to the benefits of cloud from an enterprise architect perspective and show how it relates to your business.

1. Cost:

Most of you would agree that it is easier to get operational expenditure (OPEX) approval than capital expenditure (CAPEX), especially related to the following points:

• No hardware or computing resources lingering on balance sheet
• No depreciation
• No need for lengthy justification
• No monthly review of system utilization
• No need to refactor computing resources after project completion
• For the cost of a cappuccino a day, a user can access his own dedicated server

2. Choice

Choice as a benefit shows no boundaries in most cases, and will only be limited by your OPEX budget. You have the ability to choose from an extensive set of services for any business need, including:

• Software as a service (SaaS)
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
• Business Process as a service (BPaaS)

You can also easily have a global reach with the ability to choose the geographical location of your data center, choose your network access (private, hybrid or public) and choose your bandwidth throughput.

3. Scale: Flexibility and elasticity

Holiday online shopping is a great example of the scaling power behind cloud technology, as retailers must prepare for online activities to support well on 1,000 times more consumers connecting to their web sites than during regular months. In other cases, a company may need temporary computing power to track consumer sentiment toward its products. Cloud can provide the following to help meet these needs:

• Elastic web farm to support 1,000 or 10,000 users based on business need
• The ability to move from private to public networks on a whim to test new applications
• The ability to temporarily expand storage to support a marketing campaign or event

4. Speed

One of the key differentiators for a company relates to its ability to be first to market, such differentiators correlate to speed of execution for which I provide a few examples below:

• Virtual resources adapt more easily to business objectives requirements
• Rapid expansion of bandwidth speed as needed
• Access to solid-state drive (SSD) technology on-demand enhances application speed
• No red tape—cloud effortlessly adapts to technology landscape changes

5. Integration

I foresee that within five years, the major cloud providers will create an interconnected Internet super highway on which data will travel, communicate and collaborate interactively in the delivery of services that cannot be fathomed today. Cloud will help to enable this by:

• Providing countless application programming interfaces (APIs) for the consumption of third party services
• Think of OData, JSON, JSONP, XML for API data access
• Providing flexible access to traditional SQL or NoSQL databases
• Providing analytic platforms for countless business needs

6. Audit and compliance

This is my personal favorite. As an IT practitioner, I can validate that audit and compliance is probably one of the biggest burdens on any IT organization. Fortunately, cloud can help in the following ways:

• Cloud vendors’ service level agreements (SLAs) ensure that all audits and compliance activities are logged, monitored and audited to your satisfaction
• Regardless of business security requirements, most cloud vendors abide to industry standards to support Sarbanes & Oxley, ISO2001, ITIL, SAE116, SaS Type I & II, HIPAA, PCI and more
• Cloud providers are regularly audited by third party organizations to ensure that security standards are met

(Related: Is cloud computing secure?)

7. Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

BCP truly showcases one of the many benefits of cloud and how it can serve as an extension of IT and your business. BCP enables:

• Disaster recovery with cold or hot backup
• Disaster recovery with high-failover or high-redundancy
• Data deduplication and backup
• Testing and verification of recovery procedures

As you can see, the benefits of cloud are numerous, varied and have the potential to fulfill countless business objectives and scenarios. Let’s connect on Twitter @thinkahead and continue the discussion. In the interim, please head to SoftLayer (one of my favorite cloud providers) and test their offering and see how SoftLayer can help your business
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Speaker at IBM Impact 2014

I had the opportunity to talk at IBM impact 2014 in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada.
Most of the discussion surrounded Bluemix and IBM transformation into a Cloud solution and services provider...