I just called up my cable company to reconfigure my ever increasing
cable bill and renegotiated the costs. So the idea that cloud services
has a defined cost structure I would debate on. My personal experience
in all cloud services is that some have gone up, some have gone down. :-)
As the premise options become
a. more expensive
b. less attractive
and quite frankly as we dinosaurs age out/retire/the youngsters that
only use Google apps take over/ this will all change. No one here is
not saying all of this is not happening, I'm just not willing to accept
some of the ideas that the vendors provide are the key advantages. It's
an advantage for them for sure.
As the vendors themselves stop developing premises based software - (and
this is the key movement I see in the SMB space) - because it's cheaper
for them (less support for us pesky desktops with lord knows how many
versions of OS), easier for them to build the infrastructure where they
want it, and better for them as they can plan on the revenue
subscription model. As Rod said, it's the app model taking over.
It is what it is. All of us will deal. But outsourcing isn't always
best for a firm (ask the NSA and their outsourced admin Snowden) and has
it's risks as well as the benefits that shouldn't be overlooked.
Ask the hard questions of the vendors and don't just click through those
eulas (as we in small biz do). Ask who has the encryption keys, etc etc.
(spreadsheets from the cloud security alliance as examples)
https://downloads.cloudsecurityalliance.org/initiatives/ccm/ccm-v3.0.1.zip
https://downloads.cloudsecurityalliance.org/initiatives/cai/caiq-v3.0.1.zip
Many of the vendors are still putting in place key elements and still
fighting jurisdictional issues. (Examples:
http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2014/06/04/unfinished-business-on-government-surveillance-reform/
http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2014/07/01/advancing-our-encryption-and-transparency-efforts/
Susan Bradley
Meet up with me, Amy, Philip and Jeremy at the Brain Explosion in Florida this
September. I'll be talking about protecting your network
http://www.thirdtier.net/brain-explosion/
On 7/22/2014 6:47 PM, Ken Schaefer wrote:
I s*trongly* urge the guys (and gals) on the list that think like the
previous post to take a step back, and ask yourself “why are these
cloud providers becoming popular?” This is a bit of a long post, but
bear with me – but it might help shape your future career.
For large enterprises, we went to outsourcers a long time ago – MSPs
also had some limited penetration in the SME market. But traditional
outsourcing involves a fair amount of vendor management overhead, so
it was significant barriers for SMEs (and even large organisations).
Despite these costs and barriers, people still outsourced. Why?
There’s only a single reason IME.
Look in any ITSM framework (ITIL is the obvious candidate here), and
you’ll see a section in Service Architecture called “Financial
Management” – how do develop business services that provide value
whilst also being profitable (or at least, break-even). In many
organisations, due to the thinking in some of the posts in this
thread, it was impossible to quantify the actual cost of IT. Consider
the very simple financial model below. It doesn’t even have a service
catalogue – it just attributes general ledger costs (actual cash
outgoing) back to business units. *Most organisations had IT units
that were incapable of figuring this out*.
Instead, IT is simply see as a sinkhole of random requests for money –
need to replace the SAN. Need to replace a server. Need to buy some
network bandwidth. But what’s the **value** provided by that kit? What
applications is that kit supporting – is the app bringing in $1m
running on $2m of expenses? What business units are consuming this
expense? Can they justify the bills being spent by IT to support them?
**THS** is why outsourcing (and now Cloud) is popular. *Cloud gives a
very defined set of services, for a very defined set of costs* (and
it’s also OPEX to boot – which is usually a bonus). A business can see
how much a printed page is costing, or 1GHz of CPU or 1GB of mailbox
storage, or 1 CRM user. All the licensing, hardware, labour, network,
IT service management etc. is wrapped up into a single $x/month, and
it comes in a nice service catalogue format.
Certainly this is more of an issue for larger enterprises today, than
it is for smaller companies. But as the barriers to engaging an
external provider continue to fall (and they will), it will become
more and more attractive to all parties. Companies **will** buy IT
services just like they buy marketing, legal, utilities, property
management and cleaning services today.
**If** your IT BU can get ahead of the game, and turn itself into an
actual IT Service Provider (and reading something like ITIL Service
Architecture and Service Design books is essential here, IMHO), then
you stand a chance of still providing IT services internally. If not,
then it will simply become too attractive to go with an external
provider, and just buy commodity IT services from an external IT
Service Provider.
This is just the top of the iceberg, and I’m happy to elaborate if
there’s any genuine interest in the topic. I have seen a reasonable
amount of moaning about “the cloud” on the list though, and a bit of a
failure to understand why it’s popular. The drivers above are not
going to change – they are just going to increase. So, as IT folk, we
can either ride the wave, or get dumped on the beach. I know which I’d
rather prefer, even if it isn’t the career I anticipated when I
started out. Hopefully the above gives you a bit of visibility into
one facet of what IT architecture involves JFiguring out how we do the
above is one facet of working as a service management architect (if
that’s a route you choose to go down).
Cheers
Ken
*From:*[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *J- P
*Sent:* Wednesday, 23 July 2014 11:06 AM
*To:* NT
*Subject:* RE: [NTSysADM] I'm sure you've heard already...
a) 200 per month to manage
b) storage, minimal as its SQL based and the database compresses at
roughly 90% (again this is one particular case) DB is <1GB , post
compression less than 100mb
c) host was already pre-existing , so the hardware was already in
place , and under warranty, and i normally add extend support once the
initial 3yr 5x9 expires
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] I'm sure you've heard already...
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 00:48:47 +0000
a)How much is that host (and associated network equipment, storage,
security appliances etc.) depreciating per month?
b)What the additional management overhead of another VM? (backup
space, DR testing, ongoing patching, new outage windows)
It’s never as simply as “just add another VM”, otherwise running
100,000 VMs would cost just as much as 1 VM
*From:*[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *J- P
*Sent:* Wednesday, 23 July 2014 10:17 AM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* RE: [NTSysADM] I'm sure you've heard already...
I was referring to the vendors cloud , i.e. "we'll host our XYZ
software on our servers/cloud for you" thus giving management the
illusion that it's more cost effective , no hardware to maintain, no
"outages" , no IT cost etc..
They don't take into account "well based on users and modules, it will
be 900 per month"
When in reality , just add a VM guest to an already existing host and
voila
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] I'm sure you've heard already...
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 23:57:32 +0000
That's becoming less of an issue. You can now create your own local
server and app images and upload them to Azure to run in a VM of your
creation. Eliminates the compatibility issues.
Sent from my Surface Pro 3
*From:*J- P <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Tuesday, July 22, 2014 6:49 PM
*To:* '[email protected]' <mailto:[email protected]>
At one non-profit I work for , when upgrading/updating to latest
accounting application version , the salesperson himself said
"based on the amount of modules you use, you would be wise to host in
on premise"
Jean-Paul Natola
> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 14:23:53 -0700
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] I'm sure you've heard already...
>
> I still have a fair bit of line of business apps that aren't in the
> cloud (granted that's a yet) and if that vendor moves to the cloud it's
> highly unlikely to be in Microsoft's cloud.
>
> Meanwhile back at the cloud we pick really sucky passwords and we are
> not solving the access problems of divergent cloud vendors.
>
> Small businesses that are just starting out may be more Google apps
> ready than Microsoft cloud ready.
>
>
> Susan Bradley
> Meet up with me, Amy, Philip and Jeremy at the Brain Explosion in
Florida this September. I'll be talking about protecting your network
> http://www.thirdtier.net/brain-explosion/
>
> On 7/22/2014 2:16 PM, Rod Trent wrote:
> > The Cloud is all about small business - at least from Microsoft's
perspective.
