Like you, I am really sick of the hype around "cloud computing." Our industry hasn't really defined cloud computing so its easy to dismiss it as the latest spoonful of marketing pablum (remember things like "push" content and "dynamic trade?" Yuck!).
Moving beyond the market-speak alone however there are some really interesting projects going on. In my humble opinion, one of the most progressive of these is taking place at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). DISA is "a combat support agency responsible for planning, engineering, acquiring, fielding, and supporting global net-centric solutions to serve the needs of the President, Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and other DoD Components, under all conditions of peace and war." In other words, DISA is the IT smarts behind the U.S. military.
There are plenty of details about what DISA is doing, but here are a few highlights:
1. DISA is looking at cloud computing in 4 areas: Infrastructure-as-a-service (ex. virtual desktops), platform-as-a-service (ex. processing, storage), software-as-a-service (ex. software stack, SOA), and applications-as-a-service (ex. MS Office).
2. DISA is already doing a lot of research and testing around a cloud development model. DISA is a strong proponent of Forge.mil, for sharing and developing open source software within DOD.
3. DISA is working with vendors like HP, Northrup Grumman, Mitre, and Simtone on advancing its existing infrastructure as well as future projects.
While cloud computing is a relatively immature architecture, DISA is already reaping efficiency benefits. For example, DISA is already able to provision processors and storage from a shared pool within a few days -- a process that used to take weeks to accomplish. Through the use of virtualization and technology refresh, DISA also was able to reduce its "annual sustainment cost" for one of its customers from $26 million to $14 million. Pretty impressive.
As always, I have a few take-aways from this example:
1. While DISA is doing a great job of presnting its cloud achievements, you have to really track the military and/or federal space to know about it. The feds, especially CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra, need to trumpet the successes and lessons learned at DISA much more aggressively.
2. Before confusing the market with more cloud hype, I suggest that tech companies become familiar with a real implementation story at DISA.
3. For all the naysayers that describe federal IT with examples of IBM 370s still running, the DISA cloud story is a breadth of fresh air. Here is an example where the feds are on the cutting edge.
- About Networking Nuggets and Security Snippets
- Jon Oltsik is a principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group responsible for the networking and security services at ESG. Prior to joining ESG, Jon was the founder and principal of Hype-Free Consulting. Mr. Oltsik previously served as VP of Marketing & Strategy at GiantLoop Network where he managed all marketing activities and defined the company’s strategic vision. Jon was also a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research where he covered a wide range of infrastructure and IT topics. In this role, he was frequently quoted in business journals, including the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and the New York Times, and was also the recipient of a prestigious "best research" award for his breakthrough report, "The Internet Computing Voyage."
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please
disa is doing community source not open source software development. forge.mil is a loser
also the cloud is all hype and BS based on powerpoint charts, promises, promises and more promises that DISA will fail to keep.don't believe the marketing hype
Anon
Anon, please contact me directly some time so we can set up time to chat (jono@enterprisestrategygroup.com). You seem to have extremely good information while I am getting PowerPointed and spun.
Cloud Computing
A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing.
http://www.kemptechnologies.com/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=pv&utm_content=zs&utm_campaign=home
Cloud Computing Is For Real
Just because early visionaries were ahead of their time does not mean cloud computing will not happen. Many governments and telcos around the world are taking a hard look at a variety of cloud computing models which follow, to varying degrees, the three characteristics cited in the prior blog.
A slightly different twist pursued by many of these entities is that with "cloud computing", your entire computer is moved into the "cloud". Think about it. You are not accessing individual applications via a browser (which means you still have a computer on your desk), but with a dumb terminal that is nothing more than a TV screen, showing you the session in the cloud. Even the browser is in the cloud.
It's like mainframe computing, except that you keep the usability of the individual PC and can access it from anywhere on the public Internet. With this model, security goes way up, TCO goes way down, and end user value/utility is much higher.
Lorenzo Mejia
SIMtone Corporation
To me virtualization is the
To me virtualization is the winner, cloud computing is the misnomer
Infra-structure and Platform as a service is a hosted, and probably virtualized environment that applies to any computing resource.
Software as a Service and Applications as a service is splitting hairs. Again a hosted and probably virtualized, application and software resources.
Security is in no way increased. Now all your traffic is over a public network and not a private one. If your data is on hardware that is not yours, well that was your decision as well.
Cloud Computing
In general, I agree except there are indeed quite a bunch of mainframes running "370" style applications that will take an "arm" and a "leg" to modernize and /or transform to run in the cloud. How do I know? I worked for the mainframe vendor (that one) for 23+ years and my clients included some of the "agencies". Albeit, my work includes such transformations.
Cloud Computing Security
In response to the prior blog who comments: " Security is in no way increased. Now all your traffic is over a public network and not a private one," I wish to comment that in the next generation of cloud computing where your full computer sits in the cloud and you access it with a dumb, mainframe-like terminal, there is no data traffic over a public network because there is no data traffic. Does data flow between a mainframe and mainframe terminal? No, because the terminal acts like a TV, showing only a picture of the data that sits in the mainframe. It's the same way with stateless cloud computing.
As for the comment: "If your data is on hardware that is not yours, well that was your decision as well," I wish to observe that cloud computing does not require you to use someone else's hardware. Any enterprise can implement stateless cloud computing in their own data center, on their own hardware.
I invite readers to see the SIMtone website for more on how this works.
Lorenzo Mejia
SIMtone Corporation
www.simtone.net
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