Thursday 29 July 2010
According to public lobbying disclosures, the search engine giant spent more than $1.8 million since the beginning of the year in lobbying politicians, policymakers and the White House on issues such as cloud computing, the Wall Street Journal report finds. This lobbying effort has been ramped up over last year when the company spent $730,000 during the second quarter of 2008. The issues Google has been pushing seem to run the gamut of subjects the company would be interested in from regulations on online advertising, to the adoption of cloud computing services - which the paper reports Google spoke to the Department of Defense about.
There is a growing number of issues being debated in Washington affecting the internet and our users and we feel it is important to be involved in those debates,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich told the paper. It appears that there may be a growing interest in cloud computing from governmental organizations as news reports have indicated that the National Security Agency and the City of Los Angeles are both considering using cloud computing.
No doubt its an innovative concept but somewhere it is threatening IT jobs. IDC has predicted that by 2012, investment on cloud service will increase to $42 billion. Analyst firm indicated that as time will pass cloud computing will become more and more prevalent it will replace the jobs performed by IT professionals. There’s nothing to worry, this won’t happen at least for the next few months. As of now SaaS is in and cloud computing is the next level but not its replacement. It is more likely to take five years for any company to switch over. Initially, cloud computing will create new jobs for monitoring infrastructure performance, datacenter operations, shifting to cloud service provider like Google, Amazon etc. According to Mark McDonald, Vice President of Gartner’s group, there will not be much growth in these infrastructure jobs at cloud providers end, due to the economies of scale that came from massive, highly automated and virtualized service-based infrastructures.
This is basically the shift from blue-collar to white-collar IT professionals. Configurations and maintainance of infrastructure jobs will face a major risk as outsourcing the functionality would just ignore administration. So, lesser jobs will emerge for server administrators, database administrators and infrastructure as network staff and companies don’t need to carry their extra burden. Some of these people can be retained by companies but will be given the role of datacenter automation or some monitoring work instead of CRM. And the in-house software developers’ job will be more of SaaS integration with SaaS.
Novell’s perspective on the cloud is we envision ourselves as an arms vendor to the cloud. We are not going to be off creating a Novell cloud; we don’t believe we hold that place in the market. Rather, we see people who are: Google, Amazon, Rackspace. They’re going to need infrastructure tools to run their clouds, which is basically the next generation of what a data center is. Because we made a strategic decision as a business on selling to the cloud providers, that’s a small target market, so we can have traditional partners focus on selling to the end customers today, and we can make a small investment in selling to cloud providers and building that relationship because it’s a small universe of people.
Novell transitioning to a very indirect form of business, where our operating system goes to market to the ISVs, our management tools go to market through solution providers or cloud vendors, our security offering goes to market through cloud providers. You’re starting to see an evolution in Novell as an infrastructure/plumbing vendor.
Does this mean Google wants to be in the software development game or the web hosting business? What’s the company’s vision for App Engine, and where does it fit in the cloud computing landscape? SearchCloudComputing.com caught up with Mike Repass, product manager for Google App Engine, during a recent trip to California. here are lots of people carving out bits of the public web and fencing it off. We’d like to keep it open and App Engine is a way to encourage that. We’re saying, let’s build a business that supports web advocacy, even though it may be low margin, let’s make it easy for people to build on the web. We’re never going to get to the level of Microsoft, in terms of the number of people we have in support and training and all of that, but maybe we can think up some novel solutions for that.
Hosting is a commodity business. Adwords, is the highest margin business of all time, and we’ll never get that margin off App Engine. It’s the same for Saleforce.com on their core business, selling CRM as a service, versus Force.com. They are really pushing Force.com, but perhaps for promotional purposes or lead generation, it’s a loss leader and perhaps we are in the same boat. The question gets at, what are Google’s core competencies? We know how to deal with hundreds of thousands of machines. All our hardware is custom built and not something we could easily serve up at a raw level in a way that makes sense to people. Infrastructure as a service would be a play against Google’s core competencies.
Despite what some vendors might tell you, the use of open source software will be a fundamental element to the future of public and private cloud computing infrastructure, according to The 451 Group. Speaking at Red Hat Inc.’s Open Source Cloud Computing Forum Webcast on Wednesday, the New York-based research firm said open source and cloud computing could actually be a match made in technology heaven. Significant advantages include the reduced barriers to entry, open data standards and APIs, and flourishing support communities. For companies like Red Hat, ISVs have to more fully embrace moving apps that enterprises need to the public cloud, according to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. For the future, the company wants to see a higher degree of compatibility between external cloud providers, zero cost of entry and exit for users moving to cloud-based environments, better data mobility, the elimination of ISV licencing obstacles, and an overall reduction in complexity for on-premise cloud installations.
The Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. success stories were also echoed by Aslett, who said both public cloud platforms benefited from low cost licencing and flexibility, as well as the ability to empower their developers. Other benefits that open source will bring to private cloud environments include lowered barriers to adoption, de facto interoperability standards, SLA-based subscription pricing, flexible licencing, and the ability to choose whether or not you want to contribute your source code modifications, ut while open source has certainly shaped the foundation of cloud computing and its biggest success stories, some industry watchers have argued that the cloud model threatens to introduce a new layer of complexity for organizations, whether they are taking advantage of public clouds or building out private clouds.
The city of Los Angeles is considering moving away from traditional applications from Microsoft and other providers and switching to Google for its email and other features - all of which would be in the cloud. InformationWeek reports that the city will likely spend more than $8 million on the contract with Google over the next five years, but will see a saving of more than $6 million in licensing fees from Microsoft and Novell over that same time along with an additional $7.5 million in “soft savings.” The contract must be approved with some questioning the security of using cloud computing, but Google says its product would be an improvement over what the city has been using.
Security is at the core of how we design Google Apps, and as the City of Los Angeles’ evaluation report notes, the proposed cloud computing system is an improvement over the level of security currently in place,” Google said in a statement according to CNET. “It also provides other benefits of cloud computing - such as increased innovation at reduced cost - which are driving the city’s request for a cloud solution to suit its IT needs.
In a relational model, even when developers are working in a locally distributed grid, they are usually working with centralized data stores and machines they can tweak to optimize access performance. Not so in the cloud. Sauer said learning how to develop under a distributed model is not necessarily more difficult, as much as it is a matter of relearning how to store and call data. “With App Engine, you’re talking about a platform that by its very nature is very distributed,” said Sauer. “Every time your browser makes a request, you may hit a different server or a different part of the data store.”
In other words, if you fetch 100 rows of data, the requests might go out to a few dozen machines, and still more machines might actually return the data. This forces developers to think about the ways they read, write and store data in ways that suit those patterns, Sauer said. But the distributed model used in App Engine can find those rows of data and bring them back all at once, in parallel, rather than in some relational pecking order.In terms of application portability, Sauer said App Engine tends to be more welcoming of native code written in Java than Python. In April, Google App Engine added support for Java to its existing support for Python, which proved to be a popular language among the troops as the Mountain View, Calif.-based giant grew. With Google’s cloud-based application development platform now open to a more mainstream language, many developers are taking a closer look.
Two announcements last week, one from Microsoft and one from Google, demonstrate how cloud computing is transforming IT. Actually, transforming is to antiseptic a word. It implies a gentle improvement, akin to a caterpillar turning into a lovely butterfly. The reality is that transformations are wrenching, with market re-ordering taking place as companies struggle with or take advantage of technology developments. Within the companies wrenching transformations take a personal toll as employees are laid off or find themselves working for a new company post-divestiture. Nevertheless, this creative destruction (a term coined by Joseph Schumpeter, subject of an excellent biography that is well-worth reading) is a fact of modern life. Silicon Valley, source of the biggest contributor to the increasingly speedy pace of this destruction-the microchip-has certainly experienced its share of upheaval.
Microsoft came out and announced that it is going to make a cloud-based version of Microsoft Office available-in both free and paid versions. The former will be ad-supported; the latter, presumably, will contain no ads but will include support. For Microsoft, this move to online applications represents a grave threat and an enormous opportunity. As to the threat side, it’s easy to see the obvious one: if Microsoft gives away what it used to charge for, it seems like it would hurt their business.
One of the themes we proclaim to companies we talk to is that the cost of software is going to drop; this provides an example, because how likely is it that companies will pay as much for support of an online version as they do for the packaged alternative? With this move to online Office, the Office product line now becomes a franchise to protect rather than a growth opportunity to build.
Origin Storage, the storage systems integration provider, reportedly said the company does not find the repeated security breaches in Twitter surprising. The company said that such attacks will be expected as many IT staff and managers are being pushed into adopting cloud computing services on a fast track basis. Twitter recently has been the target of various security attacks. First, the so-called “Month of Bugs” phenomenon exposed the vulnerabilities in third-party Twitter applications and then, the Koobface worm hit the site, causing the social network to temporarily suspend any accounts it discovered spreading the worm. Recent reports suggested that a computer hacker has gained access to confidential documents of Twitter and some of its employees, and then forwarded the material to other servers. According to Twitter, the attack did not compromise user accounts, except for a screenshot of one person’s Twitter page.
Origin Storage said that this latest Twitter hack seems to be the result of a guessable password of a company co-founder on the Google Apps service. The company said that using strong password policies forces the users to go for difficult passwords. In a recently published report, the company stated that take-up of encryption amongst organizations is improving, but there is a big question mark over the encryption used being powerful enough to beat the crackers. Recent reports have shown a growing number of organizations are adopting data encryption in the wake of a litany of data breaches, losses and thefts in the last 18 months.
The confidential information of the Internet goliaths has been exposed once again. This time, Twitter.com has fallen victim. Hundreds of corporate e-mails, financial projections, private meeting notes and other sensitive data became available to a hacker, who then sent his ill-gotten gains to TechCrunch.com which published most of the information. Web sites that handle millions of users daily should learn from this privacy snafu. In reality, there is no such thing as Internet security. Other big names such as Yahoo and Google have fallen victim to the false word “security.” These companies have become incapable of securing sensitive data. Web security is a two-way street. Hackers have begun to target Web sites with weak security, find passwords, and then use them on the more secure sites. While education to the average end-user is important, companies have equal responsibility in today’s new cloud-computing environment.
But is it the technology industry’s fault? Or should we fault the broken model of security in the concept of password protection? In the Twitter case, the hacker gained access simply by cracking an employee’s password stored offsite on a GoogleDocs document. GoogleDocs is part of a new revolution in the computing world, dubbed cloud computing. Cloud computing programs are like traditional applications but they store data on an outside server, making it available anytime. Strong passwords are a necessity with cloud computing applications such as GoogleDocs and Gmail because they are all linked to a central account. If that account has a weak password, the information within it is highly vulnerable.
