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Friday Cloud News Roundup

Federal Government Defines Roadmap for Cloud Services

A basic plan that defines the government’s top priorities for standards as well as defining the government’s requirements for future cloud services was revealed this week. Although still a draft version, it will serve to speed the rate at which agencies can adapt cloud computing services and provide action plans for meeting standards. The aim is to make it easier for government to purchase and implement cloud computing solutions and should also make it easier for anyone considering doing cloud business with any government agency to create cloud computing solutions that can be readily adapted.

What every Business Should Know About Cloud

Forbes magazine takes a look at what has been developing in the cloud computing world for the last year. Why executives need to consider it and where it makes sense is examined in a closer look at what kinds of questions a CEO should be asking when considering a move to the cloud. A link to a webinar discusses how to evaluate a business case for the cloud for your business.

Vendor Neutral Platform for Financial Services Industry Debuts

The announcement of NYSE Technologies release of an open source code that will sit between operating systems and applications could be a big boon to a wide variety of financial systems. They are donating the piece of code to allow trading, the development of market data and other financial services to be openly created at minimum costs. By turning over this piece of code to the Middleware Agnostic Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAMA) with the Linux Foundation, the non-profit consortium can make it available to be downloaded for free.

Gartner Symposium Points to Cloud Brokerage

The recent Gartner Symposium was a huge success by all the numbers, with vendors, deals and attendance all up from last year. A topic that surfaced was the emergence of Cloud Brokers who help businesses by customizing cloud services to fit the needs of the consumers. This move reflects the changing role of IT and the re-imagining of various roles with it. Gartner looks at how these changes brought about by the cloud revolution will affect the post-modern business.

New Service Tracks Cloud Spending
With new cloud services becoming easier than ever for employees to turn on and off with a credit care, how do you control the costs? Up until now, it was difficult to impossible. A new offering called Cloudability may be just the answer for many businesses who want to give their employees the flexibility to call up services as needed but still control the costs.

The Legal Impact of Cloud in Entertainment

When you download a piece of music from the cloud, who owns it and who is due the payment for the copyright of that material? With the introduction of the cloud into the complex world of copyright issues for music, the creation of various ways to develop electronic content and deliver it has once again begun to muddy the waters.

There has been tremendous growth in the business of cloud-based distribution systems to the point that the industry has begun to rely upon them for a larger share of their business models. This unexpected turn has led to some unusual and, what was bound to be unclear, copyright issues. The end result has been a twofold need for balance. The first is for copyright holders who need and have a right to create and control ownership and distribution of their work. The second is the desire of the general public who consumes and, in fact, creates the demand for that work to use it and access it through service providers of the various platforms available. All of this needs to be able to continue to grow without consumers infringing on the copyright ownership of the artists and companies who own these copyrights or companies denying consumers access to content they desire.

Cloud Enables Anytime, Anywhere Access to Media

At the center of this controversy is the ability of virtual servers in the cloud to deliver content anytime, anywhere to an ever-growing audience. It is this unprecedented growth and the proliferation of devices that can access virtual servers and the content they deliver that has turned content on the go into such a huge commodity. Everyone wants in on the deal, and that content access model creates issues through the act of copyrights being “transferred, transmitted and distributed” according to Barry Slotnick, Chair of the Intellectual Property and Entertainment Litigation Practice Group at Loeb & Loeb, New York.

“We are in a perilous time for copyright owners,” comments Slotnick. “The decisions are not looking good for owners, to say the least.” He points to Napster and admits that the new world of cloud hosting service providers and cloud servers “are legitimate businesses arguably willing to comply with the law.” And in fact the majority of cloud servers are more than willing to ensure they do not run up against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in their efforts to deliver the benefits of the cloud to an every growing and hungry consumer.

For many involved in the legal aspects, the key feature is the intended audience. The question soon revolves around two ways of looking at a cloud-based service provider’s role. Are they simply a passive neutral conduit of content or do you consider them to be basically an electronic locker holding that content and then distributing it?

Can you characterize the cloud server deliver system as nothing more than another version of the thumb drive, simply a more efficient model of that concept? At what point do we need to balance the ability of technology to deliver in amazing new ways against the need to compensate the creators of the content who hold the copyright?

Legislation has been used in the past to regulate this balance of need versus ownership, and the DMCA was supposed to address that for the new delivery of content. But already the changes in technology have begun to make those laws outdated. “The law will always be behind the technology,” commented Slotnick. He pointed out that the DMCA “was useful about a year into the millennium.”

Video Recording Technology Boosted Sales for Copyright Holders

Other changes in technology have run into this problem before, and have found some unexpected results of the rapid changes from new technological delivery systems. The videocassette recorder (VCR) is a good example of this. When the VCR was first established, there were fears that the devices would cut into sales of entertainment. Instead it opened up totally new markets for delivery of entertainment. As opposed to cutting entertainment copyright holders out of old business, suddenly the market for redistribution of material previously available for free on your television could be purchased or rented for multiple viewing at home on your VCR player. This created a whole new revenue stream for many.

The channel for distribution has now changed to cloud servers that make this same material available across a multitude of devices. The same need to compensate copyright holders for that material will need to be satisfied, and those who look to enter into this brave new world will need to be aware of this.

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The Future of Open Source Cloud Computing May Be Cloudy

CMSWire recently published an article that looks at open source cloud computing and its possible future direction. One of the biggest problems with open source cloud computing today is the lack of standards across the board. Taking a closer look at why standards are important and why they don’t yet exist is important to the growth of open source. Some of the reasons for standardization are:

• Improve interoperability
• Lower adoption costs for technology
• Reduce focus on commodity features

The article goes in to greater detail on these reasons as well as listing a few more. But if standards are so important, why are we so slow in finding it? One solution for open source cloud computing is to create an open platform and that is what Open Stack claims to be. If it is such a great solution, then why is Red Hat not a part of the stampede towards OpenStack? For more on this discussion and a look at the answers to some of these cloud computing questions, read more at CMSWire.

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Government Cloud Case Studies

There are many government agencies that have moved to the cloud in recent years. This site has listed the case studies of many of the agencies who now use software-as-a-service or have implemented cloud hosting and shows where the cost savings were realized. These case studies include:

• Bureau of Engraving and Printing – Migration of off the shelf case management system to cloud based Software-as-a-service system for greater flexibility to monitor cases in anytime anywhere.
• Department of Energy – Los Alamos Laboratory expansion required faster flexible deployment that led to launching a web-based portal for real-time self-service requests and provisioning.
• NASA – Replace current system for working groups with an open-source platform that allows collaboration between NASA and the American public.
• Social Security Administration – Needed to upgrade and streamline current response plan. Developed Online Answers Knowledge base with scalable FAQ option for online inquiries to meet peak traffic loads.

Although not a very detailed presentation, it does give anyone looking for examples of solutions in cloud hosting some ideas on what has worked. Many of the departments have numerous citations in this blog, so a wide range of solutions are presented.

Both federal and State government agencies are represented, and the names of specific programs are given when applicable. Both solutions using software-as-a-service and cloud hosting are represented, along with other cloud computing solutions. For presenting to decision makers or considering the scope of a change, the information is valuable for anyone looking at the possibility of moving to the cloud soon. Government studies can be accessed here.

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Business Intelligence in the Cloud

With the advantages of cloud computing stated loudly all over the web, is it any surprise that Business Intelligence (BI) should be moving to the cloud as well? With its need for reporting and analysis and an ability to control costs, cloud computing has the flexibility to provide just what BI needs.

With the ability to provide customers with a platform that can deliver standalone internally facing reporting and analysis, as well as providing an application framework for reporting and a development platform for function-specific data analysis the cloud-based BI tools are ideal for SMBs.

There are a number of types of analytics and statistics that are typically serviced by BI systems. Some of these that might be considered for Cloud BI are:

• Traditional Relational databases, where they are the primary source data system
• Systems Integrators for assembling customer solutions
• Solving a function-specific data analysis problem such as supply chain analysis
• Giving SMBs web-based applications sophisticated reporting and analytics
• Project experimentation and evaluation at a distance for large enterprises

For a more detailed analysis on cost/operating models, architectural models and business models of cloud computing tools for BI, be sure to read the entire article here.

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