Given the youth of the cloud industry, some would say it’s difficult to quantify its benefits and easy to point out the risks.
Not surprisingly though, more research is starting to emerge that points out significant, objective benefits from implementing the cloud correctly. Gartner recently released
this study titled “
Significant Benefits Realized With Supply Chain Management in the Cloud”that yielded these key findings:
· Cloud-based supply chain solutions are primarily utilized to optimize existing on-premises IT investments.
· Supply chain cloud computing has risen in significance, with 75% of Gartner's survey respondents currently using or implementing it.
· Supply chain, finance and commerce management cloud solutions have blurred the lines between functional technology applications that support business communities and the business communities themselves.
· Supply chain cloud computing results in significant benefits, such as IT cost reductions of 5% to 20%.
The following section about cloud concerns was particularly interesting:
Companies are definitely realizing the rewards of cloud. One organization we spoke to captured the feeling of many companies when noting it is "tired of the long installations of ERP and upgrades, when other businesses are reaping value such as quicker time to productivity, greater ROI and lower costs."
There are still many organizations, however, that are dragging their heels on investing in cloud computing solutions. Although they vary, here are the top four reasons why companies aren't investing in cloud computing:
· Security concerns
· Too much invested in ERP
· Currently satisfied with traditional investment
· Data ownership concerns
As companies become more familiar with cloud-based applications, they find much of their initial concern unwarranted. The data security offered by the cloud provider is oftentimes better than anything the company could deliver, and issues on data ownership and recovery are getting worked out during the negotiation phase.
As more and more companies turn to cloud computing solutions for the computer support solutions, this data will become more and more commonplace, and security concerns for cloud computing will become far less commonplace.
Last week, Facebook interrupted the lives of nearly 1/14th of the population of the planet. Its 500 million users were temporarily kicked off their site to sit in the squalor of the Great Social Blackout. "Like" buttons across the internet were useless, students in classes across America groaned with boredom, and BP enjoyed a few minutes of relief.
Twitter usage spiked, and prompted a storm of Facebook-related venting. Some of our favorites:
@TheDollSays: Facebook users are roaming the streets in tears, shoving photos of themselves in people’s faces screaming ‘DO YOU LIKE THIS? DO YOU??’
@alqaeda: Facebook is down. Not sure if we did that, but we should claim credit anyway. Hurting the infidels where it hurts, etc.
@PostSecret: BREAKING NEWS: Facebook is down. Worker productivity rises. U.S. climbs out of recession.
@joeschmitt: "Either Facebook is down or Mark Zuckerberg just set everything to PRIVATE."
@IceNinjaSquad: "Facebook was down and 500 million users were forced to talk to their friends face to face. It was horrible."
It’s funny to poke fun at for a while. Essentially Facebook provides a huge cloud to 500 million users, so we wanted to know what really happened. A Facebook update filled us in:
"The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed…. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site."
So does the outage reflect poorly on Facebook? Sure it was inconvenient for a couple hours, but think about how often this happens:very, very rarely.Though the outage was significant, it’s not the fact that Facebook was down for 2.5 hours that should be dropping jaws, but the fact that it ONLY took 2.5 hours to restore access to its 500 million users. Hats off to Facebook for their quick thinking and ability to do what needed to be done.
Our very own Dolly Parton was against it, but the FCC has ruled unanimously in favor of using white space airwaves for the next generation of wireless internet: Super-Wifi.
The ruling has been two years in the making, after being approved in 2008 but got hung up in court because Dolly Parton, church-pastors, and theatrical production companies objected that super-wifi could interfere with traditional broadcast and amplification equipment’s ability to function correctly.
The FCC has apparently addressed these issues in the latest ruling.
Good luck, Dolly. East Tennessee is pulling for you.
Read the full story about super-wifi
here.
By 2020, most, if not all, information technology support (IT support) will be outsourced to external companies who manage an organization’s IT needs,
according to Jason Bloomberg, technology maven at ZDnet.com. The collapse of enterprise IT is just one of his predictions in a recent article. Tracing his finger along the route the IT services industry has taken the past few years, he notes the exponential leaps in cloud computing adoption, outsourced network support and managed services among small to medium-sized businesses. From there, Bloomberg lifts his gaze out a few years and plants his finger on 2020. There, he says, lies “the collapse of enterprise IT.”
What does “the collapse of enterprise IT” mean?
By “the collapse of enterprise IT,” Bloomberg claims that non-IT companies will stop doing IT themselves. For instance, if you own a manufacturing plant, you will employ no IT-related workers. Instead, such companies will have strategic partnerships with IT companies to which they outsource their unrelated IT requirements. In-house IT for non-IT related companies is like building your own office furniture.
Is it true? Will enterprise IT be obsolete by 2020?
The answer is: it’s debated (as you can imagine.) Some think outsourcing your IT will completely forfeit your competitive advantage. Others foresee a less apocalyptic compromise. Joe McKendrick of ZDnet.com says all businesses will maintain strategic service-related partnerships and that there is no compromise for tech savvy executives who appropriately leverage software for their enterprise.
Our perspective
There’s no denying the end of IT as we know it is coming. That does NOT mean the end of enterprise IT. Instead of completely booting an IT staff, non-IT related businesses will only perform IT tasks that provide intrinsic value to their operations. What we will see is greater and greater levels of outsourcing non-intrinsic information technologies to external service managers. Just like internally processing payroll has gone by the wayside, companies will soon outsource the management of non-essential technologies like management of servers, firewalls, email and data backup, etc.
The enterprise IT apocalypse is coming. The end (of the old, inefficient, clunky business age) is near. We’ve already seen huge surges in this trend in East Tennessee among the clients we serve in Knoxville and Chattanooga. In the post-enterprise IT-apocalyptic world, those businesses that survive and thrive will create strategic partnerships with external IT providers. These partnerships will bolster the competitive advantage of those who think strategically, anticipating the future and streamline accordingly.
As the managed services industry grows, companies are figuring out how their departments can work with managed service providers. David Powell, vice president of managed services at TekLinks, describes the emergence of the co-managed managed services model in this guest post.
Oftentimes, managed services are presented as an either/or proposition where:
· either the customer retains control of the network
· or the managed services provider takes those assets or resources to a remote facility and takes on remote management of them.
What we’re beginning to see in the managed services industry is that it’s not an “either/or” proposition but much more of an “and & both” proposition where the customer and the technology provider work together to manage the network. The customer keeps some level of control and works with the managed services provider, outsourcing certain functions.
The way we see this manifest itself is through the information technology company remotely executing commoditized services and basic IT functions to serve them back up to the enterprise.
So how do we decide what stays in-house and what IT support to outsource? What we do is take a list of all the applications used in your business and ask “which of these applications has intrinsic value to be performed internally by your internal IT staff?” Line of business applications will have great intrinsic value to the organization, so they typically should be managed by the internal IT staff, whereas email or hosted Exchange could be handed off to a provider along with backups and tier 1 helpdesk support. With these functions out of the way, the IT staff has more resources to devote to your company’s line of business applications and advanced helpdesk issues requiring specialized internal knowledge.
So you begin to co-manage the network. There are a couple things this does:
1. Your current internal staff becomes more efficient and focuses on the needs of the business instead of the commoditized tasks that are typically performed within the IT environment.
2. Your staff is not threatened. Over the past couple of years in the economic downturn, workforce has been laid off but work load has not. Thus, we have fewer people doing the same amount of work. When a managed services provider comes on to co-manage a network, not only do current staff not feel threatened that they’re being kicked out, but what they see is an opportunity to get a lot of work performed without asking the boss for more headcount.
Although the co-managed verbiage we use is new, the concept is not. Co-management is not dissimilar to outsourcing payroll because there’s no intrinsic value in doing payroll internally, but aspects of those processes are still retained by the company.