CTO Roundtable - Consumer IT and Cloud Computing

Last week, I attended the April meeting of the Washington Area CTO Roundtable. The topic was "Consumerization of Enterprise IT - Choices and Risks in Moving to the Cloud" by Doug Neal of CSC.

The main theme of Doug's talk was that consumer-oriented and cloud-based technology are significantly impacting enterprise IT. CTOs and CIOs ignore it at their peril. The basis of Doug's presentation was a study tour he and CSC held last fall.

Here are my rough notes from Doug's presentation:
- Employees are very tech savvy today
- Business execs are aware of consumer tech and cloud computing and want key questions answered. CTOs/CIOs better get prepared.
- Cloud computing is a series of layers (infrastructure, platform, software (saas), business process) plus orchestration
- As you go down the cloud stack, you get flexibility and greater ability to customize
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google App Engine are SAS70 compliant
- AWS is PCI compliant
- Cloudbursting - the cloud approach to share compute chores between local and cloud resources, using the cloud to handle peak loads
- Cloud is especially good for things that can be turned on and off, a big source of cost savings
- Cloud computing makes it easy to be wrong at capacity planning
- Speed to deployment is key cloud advantage
- Cloud adds considerable complexity although management services are emerging
- Cloud promotes easy collaboration with 3rd parties - easier to provide secure access to a 3rd party in the cloud than to a private network
- For redundancy, you can have a redundant array of inexpensive clouds (Cohesive FT and quagga provide routing technology)
- there are now AWS options in US and EU
- New cloud vendors:
-- 3Tera - platform as a svc
-- GoGrid, Flexiscale, and Mosso are alternatives to AWS
- Use case: by shifting cached data from Akamai to EC2, CSC realized huge savings @ 95% performance
- Legacy support: BP migrated SAP R3 to cloud

- On APIs:
-- Identi.ca - an open source implementation of Twitter with Twitter-compatible API (based on Laconi.ca)
-- Open source AWS APIs are emerging - Ubuntu (Karmic Koala, successor to EUCALYPTUS)

- on user tech independence, BP now offers users tech choice if user volunteers, passes test, and agrees to not need Tech support (signs agreement) and provide $1000/year tech stipend

- If need to scale up/down quickly use cloud but encrypt
- Major savings come from turning off instances
- Recommendation: move at least dev, test, and DR environments into cloud
- Approximately a 20:1 cost advantage on cloud storage
- Use cloud tech for private clouds

Issues:
- Federated identity is needed
- Security authorizations
- Change propagation

Think of Cloud Computing as compute resources with an on/off switch.