Software has become a part of our life.  It touches every aspect of our life.  Internet has made our world small and flat.

As the software consumption increases, so the customer expectations too.  This results, increase in complexity to develop and maintain the software.  We have to find innovative ways to reduce the cost, at the same, to scale up or scale down the infrastructure, as per the business demands

Cloud computing:  Cloud is a new consumption and delivery model inspired by consumer internet services, as per IBM.  The evolution of IBM Jazz offerings in the cloud for development and testing can make your team more efficient and agile, with less administrative overheads, finally reducing the overall cost.

Learn more about IBM Rational Software Delivery Services (SDS) for cloud computing.

This is fun.

Earlier this year Berkley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department published an article with Berkley’s view on What Cloud Computing is.

1. The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand, thereby eliminating the need for Cloud Computing users to plan far ahead for provisioning;

2. The elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users, thereby allowing companies to start small and increase hardware resources only when there is an increase in their needs;

3. The ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed (e.g., processors by the hour and storage by the day) and release them as needed;

The article also ranks the top 10 obstacles and opportunities for cloud adoption

1. Availability of a Service
2. Data Lock-In
3. Data Confidentiality and Auditability
4. Data Transfer Bottlenecks
5. Performance Unpredictability
6. Scalable Storage
7. Bugs in Large-Scale Distributed Systems
8. Scaling Quickly
9. Reputation Fate Sharing
10. Software Licensing

Nothing here is new and it is probably mutually shared amongst the whole cloud and virtualisation community, however their article provide a resourceful insight on how charge back should work and should be conducted.

Every day more organisations find themselves in a ocean of VMs that somehow need be accounted and charged back to their internal owners. The adoption of chargeback toolsets will not help this organisations if they don’t have a defined chargeback model.

The original Berkley document if located at http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf

Have Fun

NOTE: Pacific-Tier Communications invites guest bloggers to provide articles that would be of interest, and benefit to our readers. This week we are happy to introduce Mr. Andy Slater, CMO, Presence Networks.

‘‘The ‘Command and Control’ management style enjoyed by many CEOs in the past has gone. Today teamwork and collaboration are the norm. Leadership the accepted management style, people orientated collaboration the culture, people centric technology the facilitator.’’

We stand at a transition point in business. As the global economy starts to work its way out of recession CEO’s and management teams around the world are beginning to plan for growth. But they won’t do that by simply taking back into their businesses the bottom line costs they just spent 18 painful months getting rid of. The enlightened are looking for a new ways of working, how to unlock the people power in their organization in a secure and focused manner, to accelerate speed of decision making, reduce costs, and drive productivity.

Technology has been at the centre of social and industrial change since the printing press. Through history there have been transition points. The invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay heralded the start of the industrial revolution. The spread of democracy around the world can be traced to the invention of the telephone by Graham Bell and its adoption around the world. Suddenly totalitarian states could no longer constrain the flow of people’s ideas, information, and aspirations.

More recently mobile devices and the internet has accelerated the flow of information with images and video, so now international public opinion can be formed and galvanized by what were once isolated events. The video of student Neda Agha-Soltan’s shooting in Iran caught on a mobile phone started an outcry around the world which is still vocal today.

Social networking has become the norm for many who ‘tweet’ their way through the day sharing thoughts on everything, from the mildly interesting to the creative. The need to communicate is infectious and has a profound effect on the way we live – and work. Given a common cause, people power is unstoppable.

 The ability of these new people networks has been recognized by business where the more enlightened maintain Online Brand protection programmes, write blogs, tweet, and endeavour to instigate viral campaigns to manipulate networks to their own advantage.

But is this relevant to business ?

A ‘company’ is called that simply because it is made up of people. How many companies say that their most valuable asset is their people? How true it is. Try running a railway without drivers or signal men, or running software development without programmers. People matter and leading managers recognize what’s happening in social networking can be harnessed to drive their businesses – people power, or business collaboration. Indeed, some would say it can’t be stopped – adapt or die.

The nature and culture of management in business has changed already. The ‘Command and Control’ management style enjoyed by many CEOs in the past has gone. Today teamwork and collaboration are the norm. Leadership the accepted management style, people orientated collaboration the culture, people centric technology the facilitator.

IT has to step up to this challenge to enable these new strategies – only if it can deliver business solutions, not just fancy names for the same technology, will it meet the true business need. Collaboration in the business environment is recognised as being one of the key tools CEO’s are looking at to drive productivity for the next decade – particularly if it can be delivered without complexity or capital investment.

To make the successful transition their vision has to be converted into a strategy. A strategy that addresses the three pillars of change – Culture, Technology and Process.

You can’t identify at the start of a shift in business culture all the business aspects that will be impacted, but you can describe the vision; a culture where information travels to the right people, any time, in any place, on any device. Where virtual teams form rapidly to solve business problems then dissolve just as quickly, without management intervention. No more ‘I sent an e-mail’ excuses but effective communication between empowered people.

The process of creating this culture needs to be led by a management that believes and demonstrates it through the way they act and how they communicate. The benefits are business processes that will be changed, new ones invented, and many scrapped. This is long term business development, a journey, not a light-switch change – but a revolution when looked back on from the future.

The technology to achieve this has to be invisible. People centric technology is intuitive, adopted because it engages its users, inspires and opens up new horizons. You know its right when your people can’t function without it.

Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service, and Unified Communications are all technical developments which alone do not deliver cultural change (except maybe in the IT department). These will be part of the solution, but are not the ‘end game’.

The application that runs in the world of the users, that gives them a real-time window on their business world, enables them to interact with people based on their availability, skills, interests and knowledge in a secure way, will be the deliverer of cultural change. This will be the application that grows productivity for businesses, for the next decade.

Andy Slater

You can contact Andy at andy.slater@pnglobal.net  or visit Presence Network’s website at http://www.presence-networks.net

Outra característica elementar do Cloud Computing é o serviço medido pelo uso, um sistema bastante conhecido para serviços de utilidade pública, como a energia e a telefonia.

Em “A Grande Mudança”, Nicholas Carr continua a tese do seu texto/livro anterior “What Does IT Matter?” e compara a evolução dos serviços de TI com os sistemas de energia. Antes de Thomas Edison e seu império oferecer esse serviço como utility e cobrar pelo uso, as industrias do início do século XX e final do século XIX tinham cada uma os seus próprios geradores.

Muita gente torce o nariz para essa comparação. Eu aceito e incorporei radicalmente esse conceito dentro do business plan que desenvolvi pra minha empresa. Penso que é um caminho sem volta. As empresas irão deixar de realizar investimentos em TI (capex) e passar a usar verbas de custeio (opex) para usar os serviços de TI.

A mudança deixa em “xeque” conceitos que estamos acostumados a usar há mais de 20 anos, como ROI (Return of Investiment) e TCO (Total Cost Ownership). Isto porque ao vender uma solução de cloud é necessário que o cliente separe verba de custeio e não investimento para a TI.

Um exemplo que gosto de citar é o de uma empresa de Contact Center. O objetivo dela é ser o mais eficiente em termos de custo e ao mesmo tempo prestar um bom serviços aos seus clientes. É um mercado competitivo e complexo, pois atender pessoas não é algo simples.

Mas o cerne da questão é o custo e eficiência. Tipicamente, se quiséssemos vender uma solução de Service Desk, por exemplo, iríamos usar ferramentas para calcular o ROI e o TCO para justificar a venda, que daria o retorno em “x” tempo para empresa.

Mas pensando em Opex, precisamos compreender que o custo de Posição de Atendimento (PA) é por hipótese R$ 20 mil por mês. Então quando vender a solução de cloud computing, você estaria cobrando por hipótese R$ 5 mil por PA por mês. Ou seja, você aumentou substancialmente o valor (25%) do custo da célula de atendimento. Para justificar isso, você precisa identificar quão eficiente se tornou essa célula.

Parece banal, mas não é. O cliente irá racionalizar em como esse custo que entra direto na operação é indispensável ou necessário para ele se tornar competitivo, produtivo ou mesmo como lhe dá vantagem competitiva. Isso é o que qualquer solução de informática desde sempre se propôs ao seu cliente, a diferença é que o cliente irá desejar esse retorno imediatamente, sem longo prazo de “payback”.

Por isso que para explicar esse conceito, usei uma figura do Wikipédia que gosto muito. Ela também deixa de forma bem evidente que os custos gerais vão ser bem menores, cada vez mais tendendo a zero, devido a constante propensão dos produtos em se tornarem commodities, assim como os serviços de energia e telecom.

Technology Review has published an interview with cryptography pioneer Whitfield Diffie that is worth reading. I had the great pleasure of presenting to Whit down at the Sun campus. He is a great scientist and a gentleman.

In this interview, Diffie–who is now a visiting professor at Royal Holloway, University of London–draws an interesting analogy between cloud computing and air travel:

“Whitfield Diffie: The effect of the growing dependence on cloud computing is similar to that of our dependence on public transportation, particularly air transportation, which forces us to trust organizations over which we have no control, limits what we can transport, and subjects us to rules and schedules that wouldn’t apply if we were flying our own planes. On the other hand, it is so much more economical that we don’t realistically have any alternative.”

Diffie makes a good point: taken as a whole, the benefits of commodity air travel are so high that it allows us to ignore the not insignificant negatives (I gripe as much as anyone when I travel, but this doesn’t stop me from using the service). In the long term, will the convenience of cloud simply overwhelm the security issues?

The history of computing, of course, is a history full of such compromise. Right now we are in the early days of cloud computing, where all of us in the security community are sniping at the shortcomings of the technology, the process, the legal and regulatory issues, and anything else that appears suspect. But truthfully, this is the ultimate low hanging fruit. Identifying problems with the cloud is effortless; offering real solutions is considerably harder.

Not surprising, Diffie offers a real solution, which is to look hard at trusted platforms. In the end, convenience will sweep over us all, so it is important to quickly establish the best secure baseline we can. The secure base for cloud computing needs to become like aircraft maintenance schedules–something that is a given part of the process and an important component that allows us to reasonably invest trust in the system as a whole.

Usei o termo características elementares por influência das aulas de Química. A ousadia da proposta é identificar e discutir quais são aquelas características que definem em detalhes a pergunta do primeiro slide “O que é Cloud Computing? ”.

Primeira característica que cito é o modelo de licenciamento do Cloud. Em um slide adaptei a figura de uma apresentação da eVapt, que mostra a era de “TI como Serviço” como um avanço nas relações dos fornecedores com os clientes e do valor dos serviços de TI , em comparação com as eras “Client/Server” e mainframe.

Um exemplo que gosto de citar aqui é um projeto de downsizing que participei e tinha como objetivo migrar do Verimation Memo no mainframe para Microsoft Exchange em servidores Intel. Na época, o cliente conseguia usar apenas 1.000 usuários simultâneos no serviço de caixa postal do grande porte, embora a empresa tivesse 90.000 funcionários.

Se continuasse pensando em termos de mainframe, a empresa tinha pouquíssimas opções. No entanto, no modelo client/server, tanto a Microsoft quanto a IBM com o Lotus Notes poderiam atender ao projeto, além de uma série de opções de servidor de correio eletrônico em ambiente Unix, pouquíssimo conhecido no Brasil na época.

Na era do Gmail, Hotmail e Yahoo! que possuem dezenas de milhões de caixas postais, parece que esta história faz muito tempo que aconteceu. Mas o Gmail começou a operação no dia 1^o de Abril de 2004, ou seja, passaram-se apenas 5 anos.

Ao analisar os mais variados serviços de mensageria que hoje existem, cobrando valores irrisórios dos clientes, é fácil perceber o indiscutível valor destes serviços para os clientes de diferentes segmentos de mercado. Também percebemos como estes fornecedores se relacionam cada vez mais com os clientes para implementar novas funcionalidades ou serviços que o façam distinguir no mercado. Talvez seja essa a idéia do GoogleWave lançado esse ano com muito mais alarde, mas no mesmo modelo de convites do Gmail no passado.

Mas o modelo de licenciamento e a sua relação com o cliente é apenas uma das características de Cloud Computing, ainda há muito mais o que se discutir sobre o que é a nuvem computacional e é o que faremos nos próximos posts.

Fornecedores estruturam oferta. CEO da Plusoft acredita que aplicativos de gestão de clientes serão vendidos apenas como serviço
 

Os sistemas de gestão de clientes (CRM, na sigla em inglês) evoluíram consideravelmente ao longo dos últimos anos e ganharam espaço no universo corporativo. Um pouco pelo aperfeiçoamento tecnológico, um tanto devido à evangelização sobre as potencialidades da ferramenta e muito graças às lições aprendidas nos meses de turbulência econômica – informação virou um artigo valioso no direcionamento de estratégias.

No primeiro semestre, a IDC percorreu 339 empresas brasileiras e descobriu que uma das três prioridades dos CEOs vincula-se a entender melhor e aprimorar o atendimento aos clientes. “Durante o período de crise, muitas empresas descobriram que tinham pouca ou nenhuma informação para tomar decisões”, comenta Reinaldo Roveri, gerente de análise de mercado da consultoria no País, apontando que CRM e BI, assim, entraram mais fortemente na pauta.

Pelo que mostram os acontecimentos, a proliferação dos conceitos de web 2.0 impulsionarão transformações ainda mais profundas nesse tipo de tecnologia e impactarão as rotinas dos usuários. Duas orientações são latentes: o advento da computação em nuvem que transforma quase tudo em serviço e a importância das redes sociais.

Fornecedores estão atentos a essas duas frentes. “Em um prazo de três anos, não enxergo mais a venda de licenças de CRM”, prevê Guilherme Porto, CEO da fabricante nacional desse tipo de ferramenta Plusoft, acreditando que esses aplicativos serão vendidos como serviço (SaaS, na sigla em inglês). O executivo apoia sua afirmação numa orientação percebida junto aos seus clientes. “Hoje, em 50% das cotações, os clientes já pedem opções tanto no modelo de venda quanto no de locação de software”, avalia o executivo, citando que há cerca de dois anos, o porcentual girava na casa dos 15%.

Roveri, da IDC, é um pouco mais conservador nas previsões, mas compartilha a visão do executivo. “Este modelo de entrega (SaaS) é uma forte tendência”, avalia, sem precisar uma data para transformação completa no modelo de venda dos sistemas. O especialista justifica sua opinião com a atratividade da compra “como serviço”, a capacidade de otimização do fluxo de caixa e ao avanço das redes e da internet.

Os provedores de tecnologia atentaram-se para a tendência e traçam suas estratégias. Nesse campo de batalha, a Microsoft luta com seu CRM Online; a Oracle contra-ataca com o CRM on Demand e a Salesforce.com tenta ostentar o estandarte de um dos ícones e pioneira no mercado de sistemas de gestão de clientes no modelo SaaS.

Assim como seus concorrentes internacionais, a Plusoft quer aproveitar as mensagens do mercado e atender as duas tendências que se anunciam. Há cerca de três meses, a empresa investiu R$ 700 mil em desenvolvimento e fechou parceria para hospedar uma versão “as a service” de seu CRM nos data centers do UOL. De acordo com Porto, a tecnologia é um dos ingredientes da “loja de aplicativos” anunciada pela unidade de host da empresa de internet.

Dois contratos – ambos por um prazo de 36 meses – foram fechados até o momento. O acordo, com uma universidade e uma empresa do setor agroquímico, contempla 56 posições comercializadas a R$ 189, cada.

Porto estima que a iniciativa de CRM SaaS represente entre 18 e 20% do faturamento (não revelado) da Plusoft no ano de 2010 e ajudar a companhia a ingressar em uma camada de clientes de médio porte. A ferramenta, por exemplo, poderá ser comercializada pelo UOL, que pagará comissão à fabricante.

O software de gestão desenvolvido pela companhia nacional se divide em seis partes. Uma delas, lançado no final de agosto, alinha-se justamente à outra tendência que permeia o mercado. Batizado de iCustomer, o módulo mapeia e analisa redes sociais.

Em meados de novembro, a Salesforce.com – um dos expoentes no fornecimento de CRM no modelo SaaS – apresentou a ferramenta Chatter. O sistema é um mix entre uma aplicação de colaboração corporativa e uma plataforma de desenvolvimento social, provando que os conceitos de web 2.0 se enraízam no mercado. 

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You can backup your system with our database management, take a whole screenshot of your system, and install it on another computer, or boot from teh cloud, freeing up your entire hardrive!
Creating your cloud to be you web host, you can manage it yourself, or speak with a business consultant that it available 24/7 to guarantee your site to create income, or do whatever you can think of to do. The Clouds are the limit, so I’ll see you in Cloudopolis!

Another article, Security Is Chief Obstacle To Cloud Computing Adoption, on cloud computing and security.  Last month Gartner had an excellent post.  A Google search on “cloud computing” & “security” yields over 53 millions results.  So, the concerns abound regarding security and I have posted before on how security is one of two critical issues, particularly with CIOs, with cloud computing.  (The other being the “End User Experience.”)

The security concerns are valid and range from loss of control, compliance & legal, data protection, disaster recovery and confidentiality.

But companies, including Amazon, Google,  Microsoft, Saleforce.com have implemented secure cloud infrastructures. Recently, the City of Los Angeles announced that it has just put it’s trust in Google apps for it’s 30,000 city employees.  Salesforce.com, which we use internally at World Wide, is trusted by over 65,000 companies and million users.  In addition to the SaaS firms, there are the hosting and infrastructure as a service companies like Savvis.

My thought is that these companies employ as competent and as strong of  information security and risk management staff as any internal Fortune 500 IT organization.

I’m not suggesting it’s a trivial matter, but overcoming the “security obstacle” is possible.  Besides, it’s not an all or nothing matter.    Two deployment dimensions exists.  First, the cloud paradigm is a continuum between private and public infrastructure.   CIO’s concerned with security can take advantage of cloud technology and start within their own, private four walls.  The second dimension is the type of data.  CIO’s can decide which apps and information they’re most comfortable with moving to the public cloud.

When moving your apps and data to a public cloud, additional options exist for how that information is managed.   Chris Black, leading our federal data center strategy, also reminds me of the cost element associated with the public cloud deployment dimension.  Chris said in an email to me, “Cost is proportional to security.  You can ask that your data [in the public cloud] be isolated and pay for the independent infrastructure and utilize/leverage the operational services. “

Some transactions and information have a lower risk profile and, in fact, CIO’s have been letting millions of bits of private company information exit their four walls to the public cloud for years.  That app? Corporate email.  Payroll is another application with highly sensitive information that has been processed outside of IT’s four walls for years.

There are many sources of information regarding approaching security in the cloud.  The ENISA Cloud Computing Security Risk Assessment is an excellent starter and provides an approach to:

We should not forget that there are actual security benefits associated with cloud computing.  From the same Report:

1. Security and the Benefits of Scale
2. Security as a Market Differentiator
3. Standardised Interfaces for Managed Security Services
4. Rapid, Smart Scaling of Resources
5. Audit and Evidence-gathering
6. More Timely, Effective and Efficient Updates and Defaults
7. Benefits of Resource Concentration

Overcoming the security obstacle is well worth the effort to gain all of the much publicized benefits of cloud computing’s “ilities” (scalability, agility, flexibility) and its service/utility cost model.

As an Adobe Solutions Partner, Key2Flex is always on the lookout for new technological developments especially from Adobe. We recently found out that the software giant has just released a beta version of their new service, Adobe Stratus, for evaluation purposes.

Stratus is a “hosted rendezvous service that aids establishing communications between Flash Player endpoints.” [Source: Adobe]
Stratus introduces users to a new communication protocol called Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP), which is actually built on User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Compared to Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) that re-transmits lost data which is a cause for delay, RTMFP is ideal for real-time communication because it uses datagrams to transmit data resulting in low latency. Aside from that, RTMFP makes end-to-end media transfer possible. Now, users can send media to each other directly because with RTMFP, users no longer need to send all their data to the Flash Media Server (FMS) for centralization. However, FMS is not completely eliminated in the process as it is required for authentication which occurs while establishing connection between users. As of date, RTMFP is supported by Flash Player 10 and above or Adobe Air 1.5 only. What Stratus does is it connects the Flash Player’s instances from user to user therefore enabling P2P communication. For that reason, user must stay connected to the Stratus service during their entire communication session. Applications must be in Actionscript 3.0 on either Flash Professional CS4 or Flex Builder 3.

Adobe Stratus offers user numerous benefits:
1. Low Latency due to datagram transmission
2. Reduced server bandwidth cost because it bypasses the FMS except during authentication.
3. IP independent – users can still connect to each other even when changing IP addresses.
4. Speex audio and H.264 video codec is available in Flash Player v. 10.
5. Data Prioritization – time-critical data are given priority.

But there are some drawbacks as well:
1. Stratus does not support media relay, shared objects and server side scripting unlike with FMS.
2. Dropped or missing data packets may sometimes occur.
3. Does not provide SSL or RTMPS authentication – instead, use nonce to authenticate.

Electric Alchemy: Cracking Passwords in the Cloud: Breaking PGP on EC2 with EDPR: “
ELECTRIC ALCHEMY
INFORMATION SECURITY

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2009

Cracking Passwords in the Cloud: Breaking PGP on EC2 with EDPR
Cloud Computing has enabled some interesting projects:  undertakings that wouldn’t have been attempted without the cheap, flexible, easy to provision and simple to release computing power that ‘cloud’ delivers.

The New York Times used Amazon EC2 and S3 to create PDF’s of 15M scanned news articles.  NASDAQ  uses Amazon S3 to deliver historical stock information.  We recently tapped into the power of the cloud to perform brute force password cracking attacks which simply aren’t feasible using traditional IT infrastructure.

We at EA are ‘pro-cloud’ and have been assessing the security of various incarnations of cloud for some time now.  However, until recently we had not had an opportunity to leverage the massive scalability that cloud promises.  That changed a few months ago when we were approached by a client who needed several PGP ZIP archives decrypted thr”

(Via .)

It’s clearly with respect to Steven Covey’s framework for managing one’s career – The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People that is the focus of this post. You might recall the four quadrants, notably, Covey’s observation that many of us spend too much time with “busy work” and not enough time practicing principle #2 – “beginning with the end in mind”. So here goes:

1. Let’s start with what really matters the most: get out of the Social Media cloud. Online customer conversations about your brand, viral marketing campaigns, and digital media are simply technologies and processes that enable customer to company relationships. This new medium of the Internet adds tremendous complexity to the existing brand ecosystem and requires an informed approach, not rose colored glasses.

2. Understand whether or not your brand or your company should undertake a business strategy that includes the digital medium as a key element of its operations. Bear in mind, for instance, that digital ad spend is a very small slice of a very large pie dominated by broadcast television and other conventional media platforms that work very effectively in building brand awareness and influencing customer behaviour.

3. Take stock of what the company is currently doing about the way in which customer relationships are managed. Begin by understanding whether or not you operate in a B2B, B2C environment and the extent to which your brand and customers are right for a new initiative. For example, if your company sells industrial transformers vs. shampoo how ‘close to the customer’ do you get now?

4. Consider the culture – is your company already ‘customer-centric’? Does the company’s leadership openly discuss the importance of customer relationships? Does the company capture, use and share customer information across the enterprise to make improvements? If not, you’re going to be starting from ground zero, with a low likelihood of any measureable success.

5. Benchmark with other companies that have decided to leverage online customer conversations – what worked, what did not and why? Stay away from self-styled consultants and “social media” experts. The online environment is too nascent for anyone to be a legitimate expert – technologies and applications are in such a state of flux, major changes can take place, in a very short period of time relegating new tools to the trash bin of technological rust buckets.

6.  Understand how much, if anything, is being said about your company or brand. Set up some online conversation monitoring and test out the extent of and quality of online conversation at a basic level, over 3 months. Try a 3-4 monitoring vendors and see if they come up with comparable results based on the same research objectives. Moreover, make sure they have the right capabilities such as separating real conversations from spam, shills, hate groups and imposters (14 year old posting about $60,000 BMWs).

7. Timing is everything. Is your company, winning or losing market share? Does your company have a winning value proposition? Are current product offerings outdated, service delivery faltering and value delivery weak? If so, the ‘wisdom of mobs’ might take your company down an accelerated slippery slope and discourage the organization from re-inventing and undertaking transformational change.

As you can see, these 7 habits are not really about diving into the deep end of the “Social Media” pool. On the contrary, this is really about not getting caught up in the current “cycle of hype” and taking a clear, rational and informed approach to customer relationship management in a digital world. The notion of engaging in customer conversations is as old as the days when commerce was conducted in the village square, so listen and learn, then get into action. – Ted Morris ©4ScreenMedia  www.twitter.com/morristed

Acaba de me chegar o convite para participar nesta nova plataforma da Google chamada a ser revolucionária, como todo o que faz esta empresa.

Trata-se de uma versão beta com muitas possibilidades mas ainda não funcionais. A inclusão de documentos e de imagens ainda não está disponível, já experimentei a inclusão de alguma extensão e a conversa ao vivo.

A utilização de HTML5 (ainda experimental) faz que por fim possamos desfrutar de todas as funcionalidades multimídia sem a necessidade de plugins ou de descarregar ao computador os objectos.

Continua a mudança à nuvem. O navegador será o computador…

Para fazer partícipes desta nova ferramenta a mais pessoas quero aproveitar para convidar aqueles leitores que o desejarem. Conto com 10 convites que se podem solicitar ao meu mail: joamma (at) baixamar (dot) net.

Se já és usuário da ferramenta podes engadir o meu contato: joamma2000 (at) googlewave (dot) com

Convites

Gadget Mapa

Conversa

Até as companhias que moveram grande partes do seus negócios para o cloud computing têm dificuldade em confiar no modelo para o caso de aplicações ou informações estratégicas.

[Leia mais em: http://tinyurl.com/ykestvy ]  Revista CIO

Ao que tudo indica, computação em nuvem (cloud computing, em inglês) deve ser o termo mais popular da indústria de TI em 2009. No caso das empresas usuárias, por sua vez, os departamentos que cuidam da tecnologia da informação foram praticamente obrigados a, em algum momento neste ano, analisar a adoção desse modelo, que promete reduzir custos, aumentar a eficiência e a flexibilidade das operações.

This week’s reading took a look at emerging technologies and their significance to small and medium businesses.  The technologies were grouped by time to adoption.   Under one-year or less, cloud computing and mobiles came as the top two technologies.  (The New Media Consortium, 2009) These technologies are here now and rapidly growing.

I’d heard of cloud computing just a few weeks ago when a Language Arts teacher asked the question, “When will we use cloud computing at this school?” At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about.  While I hadn’t known that Facebook was using cloud computing, I did hear recently that Facebook has over 300 million members.  So, when I read this week that Facebook uses cloud computing, it made sense.  The exponential growth in membership probably could not happen at the rate that it has if Facebook were limited to just the hardware it owned.  The reasons supporting cloud computing make sense to me.  Why pay for infrastructure and the maintenance of infrastructure when you can keep your overhead low and just pay for the service?  Why not choose a robust system that can automatically switch to available resources when a resource goes down, one that is scalable and flexible?  At this point, I see cloud computing benefitting my classrooms if the district were to put in the structure such that great amounts of data could be generated, manipulated, and stored by my students.

Mobiles, from specialized tools to mobile phones, have a great potential in the classroom.  I know a teacher who takes short movie clips of his students so he can document participation or misbehavior.  I think it’s a handy tool for the teacher.  I won’t mind the day my students want to record what we’re covering in class so they could review the notes at home.  In math, we currently use graphing calculators, and I look forward to the day when students don’t have to have to buy a separate $100 calculator but instead download a $1 application that lets their cell phone become a graphing calculator.  If the sixth sense device were to become available, I expect my students to adopt it quickly because the user interface is more intuitive.

For the 2 to 3 years time frame, augmented reality and location based services were the top two technologies.  It was hard for me to relate to these technologies that early adopters are testing.  I wonder if the Wii would fall under augmented reality?  As more cell phones and other devices have built in GPS, I can see how handy and feasible it will be to have location based services.

It was amazing to me that there was even a 4 to 5 year time frame category in the paper.  I would speculate that the top 2 technologies, semantic-aware applications and smart objects, as neat as they are, will go through significant changes over the next 4 to 5 years and as the rate of change makes a few years seem more like an era.

Bibliography

The New Media Consortium. (2009). The New Media Consortium Publications . Retrieved November 25, 2009, from The New Media Consortium: http://www.nmc.org/publications

Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (“computing”). In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them. It typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.

The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it conceals. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.These applications are broadly divided into the following categories: Software as a Service (SaaS), Utility Computing, Web Services, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Managed Service Providers (MSP), Service Commerce, and Internet Integration. The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that is often used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.
Characteristics
In general, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud-computing offerings employ the utility computing model, which is analogous to how traditional utility services (such as electricity) are consumed, whereas others bill on a subscription basis. Sharing “perishable and intangible” computing power among multiple tenants can improve utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle (which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development). A side-effect of this approach is that overall computer usage rises dramatically, as customers do not have to engineer for peak load limits. In addition, “increased high-speed bandwidth” makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.
Economics
Diagram showing economics of cloud computing versus traditional IT, including capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx)Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use. Consumption is usually billed on a utility (e.g., resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (e.g., time-based, like a newspaper) basis with little or no upfront cost. A few cloud providers are now beginning to offer the service for a flat monthly fee as opposed to on a utility billing basis. Other benefits of this time sharing-style approach are low barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead, and immediate access to a broad range of applications. In general, users can terminate the contract at any time (thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty), and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties.According to Nicholas Carr, the strategic importance of information technology is diminishing as it becomes standardized and less expensive. He argues that the cloud computing paradigm shift is similar to the displacement of electricity generators by electricity grids early in the 20th century.Although companies might be able to save on upfront capital expenditures, they might not save much and might actually pay more for operating expenses. In situations where the capital expense would be relatively small, or where the organization has more flexibility in their capital budget than their operating budget, the cloud model might not make great fiscal sense. Other factors impacting the scale of any potential cost savings include the efficiency of a company’s data center as compared to the cloud vendor’s, the company’s existing operating costs, the level of adoption of cloud computing, and the type of functionality being hosted in the cloud.

Architecture

The majority of cloud computing infrastructure, as of 2009, consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers with different levels of virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere that provides access to networking infrastructure. Clouds often appear as single points of access for all consumers’ computing needs. Commercial offerings are generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers and typically offer SLAs. Open standards are critical to the growth of cloud computing, and open source software has provided the foundation for many cloud computing implementations.
Cloud architecture, the systems architecture of the software systems involved in the delivery of cloud computing, comprises hardware and software designed by a cloud architect who typically works for a cloud integrator. It typically involves multiple cloud components communicating with each other over application programming interfaces, usually web services.This closely resembles the Unix philosophy of having multiple programs each doing one thing well and working together over universal interfaces. Complexity is controlled and the resulting systems are more manageable than their monolithic counterparts.Cloud architecture extends to the client, where web browsers and/or software applications access cloud applications.Cloud storage architecture is loosely coupled, where metadata operations are centralized enabling the data nodes to scale into the hundreds, each independently delivering data to applications or users.
Public cloudPublic cloud or external cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense, whereby resources are dynamically provisioned on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the Internet, via web applications/web services, from an off-site third-party provider who shares resources and bills on a fine-grained utility computing basis.

Hybrid cloudA hybrid cloud environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers “will be typical for most enterprises”. A hybrid cloud can describe configuration combining a local device, such as a Plug computer with cloud services. It can also describe configurations combining virtual and physical, colocated assets—for example, a mostly virtualized environment that requires physical servers, routers, or other hardware such as a network appliance acting as a firewall or spam filter.

Private cloudPrivate cloud and internal cloud are neologisms that some vendors have recently used to describe offerings that emulate cloud computing on private networks. These (typically virtualisation automation) products claim to “deliver some benefits of cloud computing without the pitfalls”, capitalising on data security, corporate governance, and reliability concerns. They have been criticized on the basis that users “still have to buy, build, and manage them” and as such do not benefit from lower up-front capital costs and less hands-on management, essentially “[lacking] the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept”.While an analyst predicted in 2008 that private cloud networks would be the future of corporate IT, there is some uncertainty whether they are a reality even within the same firm. Analysts also claim that within five years a “huge percentage” of small and medium enterprises will get most of their computing resources from external cloud computing providers as they “will not have economies of scale to make it worth staying in the IT business” or be able to afford private clouds. Analysts have reported on Platform’s view that private clouds are a stepping stone to external clouds, particularly for the financial services, and that future datacenters will look like internal clouds.The term has also been used in the logical rather than physical sense, for example in reference to platform as a service offerings, though such offerings including Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform are not available for on-premises deployment.

Key Characteristics
Agility improves with users able to rapidly and inexpensively re-provision technological infrastructure resources.
Cost is claimed to be greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure. This ostensibly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third-party and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks.
Pricing on a utility computing basis is fine-grained with usage-based options and fewer IT skills are required for implementation (in-house).
Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they are using (e.g., PC, mobile). As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.
Multi-tenancy enables sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users thus allowing for:
Centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)
Peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for highest possible load-levels)
Utilization and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10–20% utilized.
Reliability improves through the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery. Nonetheless, many major cloud computing services have suffered outages, and IT and business managers can at times do little when they are affected.
Scalability via dynamic (“on-demand”) provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis near real-time, without users having to engineer for peak loads. Performance is monitored, and consistent and loosely-coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.
Security typically improves due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than under traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford. Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible. Furthermore, the complexity of security is greatly increased when data is distributed over a wider area and / or number of devices.
Sustainability comes about through improved resource utilization, more efficient systems, and carbon neutrality. Nonetheless, computers and associated infrastructure are major consumers of energy.

Layers
Clients : A cloud client consists of computer hardware and/or computer software that relies on cloud computing for application delivery, or that is specifically designed for delivery of cloud services and that, in either case, is essentially useless without it. Mobile (Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile) Thin client (CherryPal, Wyse, Zonbu, gOS-based systems) Thick client / Web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, WebKit)
Application : A cloud application leverages cloud computing in software architecture, often eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer, thus alleviating the burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support.  Peer-to-peer / volunteer computing (BOINC, Skype) Web applications (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) Security as a service (MessageLabs, Purewire, ScanSafe, Zscaler) Software as a service (A2Zapps.com, Google Apps, Salesforce) Software plus services (Microsoft Online Services) Storage [Distributed] Content distribution (BitTorrent, Amazon CloudFront) Synchronisation (Dropbox, Live Mesh, SpiderOak, ZumoDrive)
Platform : A cloud platform (PaaS) delivers a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service, generally consuming cloud infrastructure and supporting cloud applications. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers.
Services Identity (OAuth, OpenID) Payments (Amazon Flexible Payments Service, Google Checkout, PayPal) Search (Alexa, Google Custom Search, Yahoo! BOSS) Real-world (Amazon Mechanical Turk)
Solution stacks Java (Google App Engine) PHP (Rackspace Cloud Sites) Python Django (Google App Engine) Ruby on Rails (Heroku) .NET (Azure Services Platform, Rackspace Cloud Sites) Proprietary (Force.com, WorkXpress, Wolf Frameworks)
Storage [Structured] Databases (Amazon SimpleDB, BigTable) File storage (Amazon S3, Nirvanix, Rackspace Cloud Files) Queues (Amazon SQS)

Servers : The servers layer consists of computer hardware and/or computer software products that are specifically designed for the delivery of cloud services. Fabric computing (Cisco UCS)
Infrastructure : Cloud infrastructure (IaaS) is the delivery of computer infrastructure, typically a platform virtualization environment, as a service. Compute (Amazon CloudWatch, RightScale) Physical machines) Virtual machines (Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace Cloud Servers) OS-level virtualisation Network (Amazon VPC) Storage [Raw] (Amazon EBS)