Cloud Computing is Maturing

With the dog days of summer 2011 upon us and the US debt ceiling negotiations in Washington DC seeming to be going nowhere, it is refreshing to be able to report that cloud computing is having a really great 2011 so far:

- The big IT providers are making progress building up their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings.

- Our favorite players such as Apple and Microsoft are beginning to make their moves with offerings such as iCloud and Azure.

- The whole concept of multi-tenancy and virtualization is beginning to become part of the mainstream discussion (i.e. 18 months ago only us techies even knew what those terms meant).

- Although there were some security bumps early this year with Amazon and Sony, the market seems to be getting comfortable with the notion of a public cloud.

- The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers are beginning to close some big deals and therefore the previously radical idea of running a global 2000 enterprise in the cloud is no longer a “wild” idea.

- Global 2000 CFOs are ecstatic with the new economic realities of  cloud computing.

- Global 2000 CEOs are beginning to understand the strategic business benefits of cloud computing.

- The idea of Information Governance and eDiscovery in the cloud is beginning to take shape as some of the big IT providers are realizing that these components need to be a standard part of any IaaS/PaaS offering.

- Consolidation is enabling the market to begin to cull itself down to a more manageable number of players with the financial legs to provide the stability that the market is demanding.

So, the cloud computing market is maturing pretty much on schedule.  As such, the next five (5) years should be very exciting.  And,  as is the case with any new markets, there will be some big bumps along the way and maybe even some really unexpected turns.  However, under any circumstances, it will be fun to be able participate and watch.

In a blog posting by James Staten on the Forrester website on July 12, 2011 titled, “The Cloud Computing Market Grows Up”, Mr. Staten does an excellent  job listing the industry highlights and indicating that cloud computing is indeed growing up very nicely.

The full text of Mr. Staten’s Blog Posting is as follows:

Mark this date. While it isn't an anniversary of anything significant in the past, it is a day where our beloved cloud computing market showed significant signs of maturing. Major announcements by VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft all signaled significant progress in making cloud platforms (infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] and platform-as-a-service [PaaS]) more enterprise ready and consumable by I&O professionals.

* VMware updates its cloud stack. The server virtualization leader announced version 5 of its venerable hypervisor and version 1.5 of vCloud Director, its IaaS platform atop vSphere. Key enhancements to vCloud include more hardening of its security and resource allocation policy capabilities that address secure multitenancy concerns and elimination of the "noisy neighbor" problem, respectively. It also doubled the total capacity of VMs service providers can put in a single cloud to 20,000. VMware also resurrected a key feature from its now defunct Lab Manager — linked clones. This key capability for driving operational efficiency lets you deploy new VMs from the image library and the system will maintain the relationship between the golden image and the deployed VM. This does two things; it minimizes the storage footprint of the VM, much as similar technology does in virtual desktops, and second it uses the link to ensure clones maintain the patch level and integrity of the golden master. This alone is reason enough to consider vCloud Director.

To help both virtualization and cloud environments, VMware also made a significant change to its licensing model, moving away from CPU core entitlements (VMware will still count processor sockets, though) to pooled vRAM entitlements. This change ties licensing more to the use of the product and encourages greater VM consolidation as it counts VMs by size, rather than per physical server. This incents packing lots of VMs on a single system and even lets you share vRAM entitlements across physical systems to accommodate more seamless growth of your environment and management of the pool, a key operational change called out in our Virtualization Maturity Model. Basically, now you can entitle your virtual environment in total, based on its capacity, and fill it up as much as you want. This is much more consistent with their service provider pricing model; and if your goal is to build a private cloud, isn't that the point?

All in all, this shows that VMware gets it and is taking an active role in helping educate its customers that virtualization and cloud operations are two different things and making these distinctions clear is critical to their and your success. Well done, VMware.

* Citrix's acquisition of its OpenStack doppelganger, Cloud.com comes just months after Citrix announced its intention to commercialize an OpenStack solution for enterprises and service providers. Now they can stop that work. Cloud.com has successfully penetrated the service provider market with its OpenStack-based solution and racked up some solid wins in the enterprise to boot. This buy accelerates Citrix' IaaS efforts and gives solid financial backing to CloudStack. Sadly, though, it also reduces the number of commercial distributions of OpenStack by one.

Enterprise I&O pros should note that CloudStack is hypervisor agnostic, so this isn't a Xen-only play. And the synergies between CloudStack and the rest of its application and desktop virtualization portfolio aren't lost on the company or its service provider partners and prospects. Look to see more combined solutions that help you vend apps and desktops from a cloud in the future.

* Microsoft, here at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles, stepped up its cloud game as well by showing the beta of System Center 2012, which adds a self-service portal for using Hyper-V as a private cloud platform and better orchestration for workload deployment. It also demonstrated new public cloud services from Boeing and General Mills plus a commissioned report by Forrester attesting to the differentiated economics of cloud platforms, something I talk about with CIOs in a report published this past spring.

For ISVs, Microsoft also announced commercial opportunities on Windows Azure for its massive software partner ecosystem. The Azure Marketplace can now vend commercial applications, meaning that any software application built for Windows (using the VMrole) or through Visual Studio (using the worker role) theoretically can be offered through Windows Azure as well.

Together, these announcements are strong milestones to the continuing progress and solid traction cloud platforms are having with the market. While the private cloud market is still very, very young, moves like these put it on more solid footing and should lead to expanded options for I&O professionals.

Labels: CEO, CFO, Cloud Computing, Compliance, eDiscovery, ESI, Forrester, Fujitsu, IBM, Information Governance

posted by Charles Skamser @ 3:50 PM 0 Comments

eDiscovery Integration Platforms are Maturing

In a Blog post on July 14, 2010 by Bill Ives titled, “eDiscovery Market Consolidates but Integration Remains a Challenge”, Mr. Ives quotes a recent report titled “eDiscovery Market Consolidation Continues Its Steady March,“ from Brian Hill at Forrester, “…that recent survey results indicate that 60% of records management stakeholders and 57% of message archiving users perceive “synchronizing eDiscovery, records management, and archiving efforts” to be a challenge.”

Mr. Ives goes on to say that, “As usual, organizations must focus on separating marketing hype from actual functionality, especially in the area of end-to-end process capabilities. While integrated advances can provide concrete benefits and help rationalize application infrastructure, it’s important to look at these in the context of a broader eDiscovery strategy.  Such strategies should identify technology gaps and costly process integration points. Then enterprises need to request more eDiscovery application integration. Even then you cannot expect to end up with a single provider.”

I agree with the statement that it is unrealistic to expect to get an end-to-end solution from a single vendor and therefore enterprises should be taking a best-in-class approach.  And, I also agree that enterprises need to be weary of the integration issues and obstacles.  However, I would point out that organizations such as Exterro, with their Discovery Workflow platform have matured to the point of being a legitimate solution for seamless “enterprise class” integration of disparate eDiscovery technologies and more importantly, an advanced project management and workflow platform that meets and possible even exceeds the needs of today’s eDiscovery and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) professionals.

Consolidation is going to continue and “the consolidators” will endeavor to integrate their new toys. However, having spent a good portion of my career in enterprise class applications development, I have first hand knowledge of the difficultiies involved in integrating completely different code bases into a seamless solution.  There is now doubt that in today's world "coding world" with application frameworks, etc. that it is much easier to accomplish these "integration" tasks.  However, very few of the technology solutions that these consolidators are trying to integrate were written with or for today's framworks and therefore will end up being nothing more than "black boxes" that are sent calls and return results.  Further, it is highly unlikely that the consolidators have the intimate technical appreciation of knowledg of these applications to be able to extend them beyond their current versions (I've tried that before also).

As such, integrating best-in-class / single component solutions internally is always going to be an attractive alternative  for those organizations that want to or need to be on the leading edge across the entire process lifecycle.  And, with platforms like Discovery Workflow from Exterro, these organizations will be able to continue to mix and match and upgrade to new best-in-class solutions without missing too many beats in the process and ultimately prove to provide formidable competition to the single source solutions that grew out of consolidation.

Labels: Consolidation, eDiscovery, Exterro, Forrester, Integration, Project Management, Workflow

posted by Charles Skamser @ 1:52 PM 1 Comments

The Market for Comprehensive Solutions that Support the Entire eDiscovery Lifecycle is Wide Open

Brian Hill, a senior analyst at Forrester Researced, posted an article on the Forrester Website on Tuesday July 14, 2009 titled "The Frustrations of eDiscovery".  The article is actually an overview of the results of a study that Forrester conducted on the state of the eDiscovery market.

The statistics that caught my attention were the fact that only 23 percent of the respondants had an end-to-solution, 75 percent considered their eDiscovery practices to be reactive as opposed to proactive and less than 20 percent believed that there eDiscovery practices would stand up to a challenge that they were forensically sound and that the data produced was accurate.

Having grown up and worked in the Information Technology age and now focusing my efforts on the eDiscovery market , I am not surprised by these findings but rather saddened as eDiscovery solutions have quickly matured and there is no excuse for any organization to have less than acceptable eDiscovery infrastructure and practices.

However, as an eDiscovery consultant and technology developer and provider, I am encouraged with the results of this study as it indicates that the market for comprehensive, single source, full eDiscovery Lifecycle solutions is still wide open. The next ten (10) years should be fun.

The full text of Mr. Hill's article follows:

As escalating volumes and types of information drive swelling e-discovery costs, many firms are exploring how information retrieval technology can support critical steps in the e-discovery process. Manually reviewing documents represents the largest direct cost associated with e-discovery. To control this expense and mitigate legal risk, businesses are re-examining strategies, processes and technology investments.

Currently, few companies report having a holistic approach to e-discovery. Forrester’s research suggests just 23 per cent have an end-to-end approach to gather and filter data. And two-thirds consider their e-discovery strategy reactive rather than proactive.

We asked if firms were confident that, if challenged, their organisation could demonstrate that its electronically stored information was accurate, accessible and trustworthy. Fewer than one in five was very confident.

Several factors account for this lack of confidence. These include large and growing volumes of content; diverse applications, tools, and file types; undocumented, disorganised data architectures; increased litigation and rapidly changing case law; and a fragmented vendor ecosystem.

Although a variety of electronically stored information can be relevant to e-discovery, most litigation to date has focused on email, loose files, and employee desktops. Other content types will become increasingly important for e-discovery.

To illustrate, 18 per cent of respondents reported plans to add voicemail access by e-discovery this year. The survey highlights that structured content in databases and line-of-business applications will be increasingly important to e-discovery.

Search and retrieval technology can play an important role in easing e-discovery cost burdens. However, a relatively small percentage of the decision-makers Forrester surveyed use enterprise-grade search tools for e-discovery purposes today. A larger proportion use operating system (OS) search, native search within applications, and desktop search tools.

Complicating the limitations of basic OS and desktop search, information retrieval to support e-discovery faces several key challenges. Expanding international requirements complicates e-discovery support for many firms.

IT leaders report facing increasing challenges in meeting foreign language requirements and different ­ and sometimes conflicting ­ demands for e-discovery with numerous national, regional, and local regulatory and privacy requirements.

Given these challenges, many firms simply outsource a range of e-discovery processes to third parties. The significant expense associated with heavy reliance on service providers, however, is increasingly leading many organisations to bring certain e-discovery steps in-house to cut costs.

Currently, a single, unbroken search and retrieval infrastructure is not realistic or feasible. Most firms use a mix of point solutions at different stages of the process.

These fragmented applications, however, can contribute to e-discovery headaches. In fact, survey respondents cited synchronising e-discovery, records management, and archiving efforts as being highly problematic.

Poor internal communications, disjointed applications, and ad hoc efforts make e-discovery a painful process, while effective information retrieval applications can bolster business e-discovery efforts. But without appropriate focus on the people and process aspects and application rationalisation, organisational success at mitigating legal risk will be limited.

Brian Hill is a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Please visit www.forrester.com/computinguk for several complimentary reports made available to Computing readers by Forrester Research.

Labels: Comprehensive Solutions, eDiscovery, Forrester, Full Lifecycle, single source

posted by Charles Skamser @ 3:14 PM 0 Comments

SearchStorage.com Blog post Misses Point on Forrester Teleconference on email Archiving

Beth Pariseau with SearchStorage.com misses the point "with her title" in an August 19th, 2008 posting titled Forrester urges users to avoid overkill with email archiving
regarding comments that Forrester analyst Jo Maitland made in a recent conference call to clients about email archiving.

Maitland did a really great job outlining the requirements of email archiving under various scenarios and never really urged users to avoid overkill. In fact, she states appropriately that “Email archiving is a strategic project, not just a quick fix to manage performance or service levels - it aims to manage information for the long term.” And, she only used the words "overkill" when discussing the use of WORM Storage when stating while policy-setting is still an area of unavoidable complexity, Maitland also emphasized that users won’t necessarily need all the features in every archiving and e-Discovery product. WORM, for example “is overkill for most things.” Instead, if a company really needs WORM for a subset of data, she advocated a tiered strategy where only the data that really needs WORM protection is migrated and stored on a WORM system.

I agree with Maitland on this issue. However, I would add the facts that for those organizations under SEC compliance requirements, SEC Rules 17a-4, 204-2 and 31a-2 require storing relevant emails in WORM storage for a given period. And, there is no doubt that maintaining separate WORM storage just for email adds to costs and increases support and management demands on storage administrators. However, some Web-based email archiving can save these admins money and relieve a few headaches. In addition, Web-based archiving also typically offers secure storage. This provides a real disaster recovery benefit, since emails are automatically stored off site.

However, I contend that to use this example and quote from Maitland in the title is a dangerous misrepresentation of the seriousness of email archiving. I would suggest that the title should be Forrester outlines email archiving mistakes to avoid.

The full text of Beth's posting is as follows:

Everyone and their brother has an email archiving story to tell you these days, or so it seems. But Forrester Research analyst Jo Maitland told Forrester clients in a teleconference titled “Email Archiving Mistakes to Avoid” to keep things simple in their selection of a product and setting of policies.

Users need to begin with a strategy that addresses backup and archiving separately (apparently not everyone in the storage industry read Mr W. Backup’s definitive “Backups are not Archives” article a couple years ago…). Then, they should take into account their requirements for the deployment - whether it will be for end user restore/Exchange optimization, or for legal discovery.

According to Maitland, this is the most crucial step in determining which product will work best in a given environment, and one not everyone clearly understands. This isn’t helped by an overcrowded market with vendors trying to shout over each other with ever-more-complex features, but Maitland boiled it down to a few key things. An archive for e-Discovery should mark data for legal hold and notify an administrator when new content hits an existing search; those seeking an archive for legal discovery should also try to look for one that covers more data types than just email.

For email optimization and end user restore, the product should allow access to emails via a Web browser, automatically copy messages to the archive and delete them from primary storage (too many stub files can still clog up the mail server), and allow simple retrieval back to the inbox.
The two purposes for an archive - eDiscovery and end user restore - can be mutually exclusive, Maitland said.

Once the requirements are determined, Maitland advised that policies be set - and once again, kept as simple as possible. “Nirvana policies are not practical,” she said. If policies are too strict or too lax, she pointed out, “everybody ignores the policy and finds underground ways of keeping their data anyway.” A 30-day deletion policy, moreover, “flies in the face of 10 years of best practices in records management,” and can still expose a company to risk when it needs some data to defend itself. But keeping data forever quickly overwhelms today’s search and indexing tools.

While policy-setting is still an area of unavoidable complexity, Maitland also emphasized that users won’t necessarily need all the features in every archiving and e-Discovery product. WORM, for example “is overkill for most things.” Instead, if a company really needs WORM for a subset of data, she advocated a tiered strategy where only the data that really needs WORM protection is migrated and stored on a WORM system.

So, yes, with this type of tiered approach, it means ongoing management, something Maitland said admins often overlook when planning an archiving strategy. “With archiving today it can’t be just plug it in and forget it,” Maitland said. “Email archiving is a strategic project, not just a quick fix to manage performance or service levels - it aims to manage information for the long term.”

Labels: eDiscovery, email archieving, Forrester, WORM

posted by Charles Skamser @ 2:05 PM 0 Comments