2012 is mere hours away. A new business quarter looms, & Irish cloud companies will be gearing up for the traditional January assault on the market. With the last twelve months behind us, & a new year to look forward to, 2012 is the year that will make or break the cloud in Ireland. As such, I've taken a look ahead at what I believe the next 12 months will hold for the cloud computing market.
1. The continued rise & rise of the enterprise app market
With thriving markets for Apple's iOS devices, Android, Google Apps, SalesForce Force.com, & Amazon's App Store already mainstays, 2012 will be the year where AppStores will take off in the enterprise space, providing Cloud services to replace traditionally more expensive pieces of software. This will come from the growing PAAS space, where developers will build out on these platforms. If Google Apps is anything to go by, there will be a big push in this space for enterprise from the big five.
2. PAAS growth
With AppStores taking off, PAAS players will be rubbing their hands gleefully. Long gone are the days of issues over OpenSource VS Microsoft. The real power play is going to be in who provides the better incentives for developers financially. Sure, Google's Android market has more Apps than Apple's, but Apple makes a better payout to developers, & more often. It is also widely acknowledged for having better earning potential for developers. People in the PAAS area turning to the enterprise App market will be aware that having a great App is not enough, enticing people to use your market & make it worth their while will be the key.
3. More mobile & tablet computing
We're starting to see the death of even netbooks with Dell winding their offerings down, & the real focus is on the mobile & tablet computing side of things. With these access points being so focal in the consumer market, it is only natural that adoption in the enterprise area will follow, which will go hand-in-hand with an explosion in the enterprise app market in 2012. The frantic increase in the lawsuits over IP in the tablet/mobile computing space right now across the globe should tell you everything. For the big players, we're at the forefront of the latest technology warfront. Control of the battlefield is essential to how platforms, app stores, developers & the future of the technologies in the enterprise space is at stake.
4. Less Private Cloud discussions
As far as I'm concerned, the debate over private cloud is well & truly over. Private cloud doesn't exist. Call it what it is; virtualised consolidation of private environments. This contentious area of the cloud has been debated ad-infinitim, & has been murked by vendors who were silling these kind of solutions against what are accepted cloud solutions as a means to show a value against what are often cheaper competitive solutions. Private cloud in 2012 will become part of the 'do you remember when' types of discussions, as opposed to constructive parts of discussions about where the cloud goes from 2012.
5. More consumer cloud solutions
Between Google & Amazon's music lockers, iTunes, iCloud, & Microsoft recently announcing they were seeking to bring on more cloud services for their mobile OS users, & Nintendo sneaking an App store under the radar, things are moving at a freight train pace for consumers. Digital Television is finally coming into the fore across Europe, so expect an explosion of cloud-based consumer services for the consumer, including TV-related ones, especially following the US court ruling that TV/movie content uploaded into cloud lockers by consumers is not a violation of copyright law. With Apple rumoured to be releasing a range of televisions in their own unimitable style this year, & With SOPA coming under increasing pressure publically, consumer cloud will continue to be the canary down the mine for Cloud services, which will eventually cross over into the Enterprise.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Episode 18: Did 2011 have a silver lining for the cloud in ireland?
2011 for the cloud in Ireland was a turning point. At the start of the year, there were but maybe two handfuls of cloud computing service providers in Ireland, & twelve months on, the choice has ballooned, with numerous IAAS & SAAS providers in the market place, pushing forward the commoditisation of the cloud away from preserve specialty services they have been in recent years.
One of the biggest complaints & criticisms levelled at Irish cloud service providers by their customers, even by those in the market space as potential adopters is the inability by those same providers to actually make the services easy to access, in the same way Apple makes its technology intuitive & accessible. They want it easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. They don’t care how it works, or why it works and rightfully so. They don’t need to. It should ‘just work’ right out of the well packaged & marketed box as promised. It’s not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that is in the forefront of the Irish cloud space.
To an extent, 12 months on this is still the case, but as the Cloud pervades further in the consumer space, the innovations from this will drive into the enterprise solutions to address this. This is atypical of how the technology life cycle works. First, things become the preserve of a few innovators at the vanguard with early adopters. Then, the tech is adopted, moulded & shaped to find it's way into the biggest market where real cost-return scales can be achieved, to then eventually become more refined, powerful & resilient at the enterprise level.
Earlier this year, Microsoft & the IDA announced Ireland could become a global centre of excellence for the cloud. And this showed, with Irish Cloud companies taking in investment from VC funds, foreign cloud companies setting up shop here, like EngineYard, Marketo, & Tethras, to name but a few (although this had more to do with a low unchanged Corporate Tax rate than Ireland's output from the cloud to date), the big players like EMC, IBM, HP & Dell furthered their investment in their cloud services from Ireland.
Cork Institute of Technology announced in May that it had under consultation with cloud system heavyweights EMC, VMWare, Cisco, GreenPlum, RSA, & SpringSource, developed a two year programme to allow people to attain an actual qualification specialising in the field of cloud computing, as opposed to say a grouping of certificates from various companies; i.e. Cisco accreditation, VMWare VSP etc. This was heralded as proof of Ireland's ability to reshape & own its identity as a knowledge economy.
2011 was also the year where people realised the true impact of what happens when cloud can & does go wrong. None more so than the outages at Amazon, & the countless security breaches throughout the year. These incidents made news headlines, & had people jittery, reacting over the top, & discussions about how fragile the cloud was were made like they were children's fairytales. This could not have been farther from the truth, but the fallout in the media was plain to see, & not limited to specialist media.
Security, reliability, resiliency & data protection were all constant reoccurring themes. While Ireland was being positioned by its new Government as a Cloud Computing/Digital Gaming/Life Sciences & Clean Tech place to do business.
Ireland itself was not engaging in areas such as helping to tighten up on areas of digital security, following up on EC court rulings about ISP content blocking, or its own Government moving towards cloud adoption the same way some of its European & global counterparts were.
All of this happened against a backdrop of increasing economic depression at home & globally. Ireland asked & got its change of leadership earlier this year, and that leadership by year end despite sound bites, media ramblings, event appearances has still failed to reach out to those in the Irish Cloud market, even despite the announced €5m centre of cloud excellence announced by that same Government.
2012 will require the indigenous cloud computing sector in Ireland to shout to have its voice heard above the noise of foreign multinationals whose first interest is in tax savings they can make here rather than fostering Irish industry to serve itself at home & abroad.
One of the biggest complaints & criticisms levelled at Irish cloud service providers by their customers, even by those in the market space as potential adopters is the inability by those same providers to actually make the services easy to access, in the same way Apple makes its technology intuitive & accessible. They want it easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. They don’t care how it works, or why it works and rightfully so. They don’t need to. It should ‘just work’ right out of the well packaged & marketed box as promised. It’s not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that is in the forefront of the Irish cloud space.
To an extent, 12 months on this is still the case, but as the Cloud pervades further in the consumer space, the innovations from this will drive into the enterprise solutions to address this. This is atypical of how the technology life cycle works. First, things become the preserve of a few innovators at the vanguard with early adopters. Then, the tech is adopted, moulded & shaped to find it's way into the biggest market where real cost-return scales can be achieved, to then eventually become more refined, powerful & resilient at the enterprise level.
Earlier this year, Microsoft & the IDA announced Ireland could become a global centre of excellence for the cloud. And this showed, with Irish Cloud companies taking in investment from VC funds, foreign cloud companies setting up shop here, like EngineYard, Marketo, & Tethras, to name but a few (although this had more to do with a low unchanged Corporate Tax rate than Ireland's output from the cloud to date), the big players like EMC, IBM, HP & Dell furthered their investment in their cloud services from Ireland.
Cork Institute of Technology announced in May that it had under consultation with cloud system heavyweights EMC, VMWare, Cisco, GreenPlum, RSA, & SpringSource, developed a two year programme to allow people to attain an actual qualification specialising in the field of cloud computing, as opposed to say a grouping of certificates from various companies; i.e. Cisco accreditation, VMWare VSP etc. This was heralded as proof of Ireland's ability to reshape & own its identity as a knowledge economy.
2011 was also the year where people realised the true impact of what happens when cloud can & does go wrong. None more so than the outages at Amazon, & the countless security breaches throughout the year. These incidents made news headlines, & had people jittery, reacting over the top, & discussions about how fragile the cloud was were made like they were children's fairytales. This could not have been farther from the truth, but the fallout in the media was plain to see, & not limited to specialist media.
Security, reliability, resiliency & data protection were all constant reoccurring themes. While Ireland was being positioned by its new Government as a Cloud Computing/Digital Gaming/Life Sciences & Clean Tech place to do business.
Ireland itself was not engaging in areas such as helping to tighten up on areas of digital security, following up on EC court rulings about ISP content blocking, or its own Government moving towards cloud adoption the same way some of its European & global counterparts were.
All of this happened against a backdrop of increasing economic depression at home & globally. Ireland asked & got its change of leadership earlier this year, and that leadership by year end despite sound bites, media ramblings, event appearances has still failed to reach out to those in the Irish Cloud market, even despite the announced €5m centre of cloud excellence announced by that same Government.
2012 will require the indigenous cloud computing sector in Ireland to shout to have its voice heard above the noise of foreign multinationals whose first interest is in tax savings they can make here rather than fostering Irish industry to serve itself at home & abroad.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Episode 17: When the cloud goes bust & you're up a river without paddles
2011 has not been a kind year for Irish business. Five small businesses failed every day this year. 2011 has also seen a huge increase in the number of cloud service companies open for business in Ireland across SAAS/IAAS/PAAS areas. A burning question for many about taking their trip into the cloud is; what happens if my provider goes bust? How do I get my data back?
Browsing through vast majority of the terms & conditions belonging to many cloud services providers operating in the Irish market, there are absolutely no provisions in there about what happens to your data, or how you can access your data in the event your provider of choice goes bust.
When companies are touting for your business to move what are key systems from inside your business into theirs, & there are no provisos for what becomes of access to your data in the event they go into receivership, or go out of business when your business depends on that data, there is a much bigger issue at play.
An oft-quoted comic book theme is that 'with great power comes great responsibility'. This is true, & an even more crucial truth for the Cloud, & something the cloud industry must do to win faith from would-be converts. It is not good enough to say 'but we won't be going bust'. Provide your customers with explicit details of how in the event of the company going out of business what happens to their access, & more importantly than their data. In this current period of time, un-necessary costs to wrangle access to your property as a small business is unhelpful, & undermines any pro-cloud arguments.
Small businesses more than anyone else today cannot afford risk. If you offer a cloud service, you better provide a better form of risk than the data in or on their premises. The 'savings' argument is no longer enough. In a world where assurity carries a greater premium, this must be a tenet for the cloud service provider.
Sure, big cloud companies servicing big business will make sure that in the fine lines of the contracts there's provisions for these kind of what-if's. But, this really has got to also become part & parcel of offerings to small businesses by default, not something they should be paying a premium for, afterall - you are being charged with holding onto their data; which in today's world is the real asset in any business, not the bricks & mortar.
If you are currently being courted by a cloud services company, ask them what their provisions are for access & retrieval of your data from them in the event they go bust, & if these provisions are in the contract or agreement for your services from them. If they're not, I would suggest walking away. Someone's word is no substitute for your business being dead in the water because you can't access your data when you need it.
One thing that we have learned in 2011 is that data capture, analysis & actions arising from those activities is absolutely paramount. Take supermarkets. The data being collected on each shopper is shaping your shopping experience; what special offers get put where, aisle layout, how to drive people through the store to essentials to encourage people to buy more than was intended. We are long past the 'if you build it they will come' routine, & businesses today need access to their data on demand; no delays, no hiccups, no impediments.
So, as you shop around for your cloud service needs, ask your friendly cloud sales rep about contingencies for access & retrieval of your data if they should for any reason 'go bust', & more improtantly, how quickly your data can be exported back to you.
Browsing through vast majority of the terms & conditions belonging to many cloud services providers operating in the Irish market, there are absolutely no provisions in there about what happens to your data, or how you can access your data in the event your provider of choice goes bust.
When companies are touting for your business to move what are key systems from inside your business into theirs, & there are no provisos for what becomes of access to your data in the event they go into receivership, or go out of business when your business depends on that data, there is a much bigger issue at play.
An oft-quoted comic book theme is that 'with great power comes great responsibility'. This is true, & an even more crucial truth for the Cloud, & something the cloud industry must do to win faith from would-be converts. It is not good enough to say 'but we won't be going bust'. Provide your customers with explicit details of how in the event of the company going out of business what happens to their access, & more importantly than their data. In this current period of time, un-necessary costs to wrangle access to your property as a small business is unhelpful, & undermines any pro-cloud arguments.
Small businesses more than anyone else today cannot afford risk. If you offer a cloud service, you better provide a better form of risk than the data in or on their premises. The 'savings' argument is no longer enough. In a world where assurity carries a greater premium, this must be a tenet for the cloud service provider.
Sure, big cloud companies servicing big business will make sure that in the fine lines of the contracts there's provisions for these kind of what-if's. But, this really has got to also become part & parcel of offerings to small businesses by default, not something they should be paying a premium for, afterall - you are being charged with holding onto their data; which in today's world is the real asset in any business, not the bricks & mortar.
If you are currently being courted by a cloud services company, ask them what their provisions are for access & retrieval of your data from them in the event they go bust, & if these provisions are in the contract or agreement for your services from them. If they're not, I would suggest walking away. Someone's word is no substitute for your business being dead in the water because you can't access your data when you need it.
One thing that we have learned in 2011 is that data capture, analysis & actions arising from those activities is absolutely paramount. Take supermarkets. The data being collected on each shopper is shaping your shopping experience; what special offers get put where, aisle layout, how to drive people through the store to essentials to encourage people to buy more than was intended. We are long past the 'if you build it they will come' routine, & businesses today need access to their data on demand; no delays, no hiccups, no impediments.
So, as you shop around for your cloud service needs, ask your friendly cloud sales rep about contingencies for access & retrieval of your data if they should for any reason 'go bust', & more improtantly, how quickly your data can be exported back to you.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Episode 16: Knock knock. Who's there?
Security in the cloud. This is the re-occurring theme when the technology conversation turns to cloud computing. Usually that's followed by "Where's my data?" or "Who can get access to my data?" or "Do I have complete control of my own data?" Security in the last twelve months has become the real deal breaker, & issues experienced by a high profile name in the technology world like Sony really made alot of people who have been on the fence about whether to take some of their business critical systems into the Cloud.
Recently, the Ponenmon institute conducted a study that revealed that 67% of the IT professionals questioned admitted that their respective organisations were vulnerable to hackers due to lax firewall security. Scarier was that 42% of those surveyed said that were they breached or attacked, they'd have no way of knowing what was compromised. And it got worse with over half saying they were of the opinion that their staff had no knowledge about the potential risks of open firewall ports.
The full insights of that study would appear shocking to those outside the Cloud Computing industry, but to those in it, it's not, but it also isn't the full story. The study neglects the real root of the issue; good security governance from the desktop upwards in any infrastructure. The truth is, there seems to be a general lack of knowledge about security & the implications of security issues from the receptionist to the CEO, with no-one seemingly taking full responsibility for it. No-one drawing a line in the sand about where the buck truly stops.
People leaving their screens unlocked, downloading software, or opening e-mail attachments without care, providing the opportunity for those out there to re-enact a digital version of the siege of Troy. There's even less of a responsibility taken by those who code websites, or are designers-for-hire. Many don't seem to understand the platforms they are building for, or understand how the applications they design & build for clients work in the cloud.
The issue really comes down to one single fundamental questions; would any of us leave our wallet down for anyone to peruse at will or take? The answer is no, we wouldn't. Data in any business IS the wallet of the company. It has to be given the same reverence, respect & care. Sure, the questions about where your data is, or who has access to it are valid, but the real question any organisation must ask is simple & stark; do WE ourselves treat our data the way we expect our service providers to treat it?
As sure as you could establish a cloud solution with a cloud service provider, then pen test that to within an inch of its life, the more important pen tests need to be done within your own organisation. One of the continually growing areas of access compromise is people taking advantage of social engineering; the process of obtaining information and or access through deceit.
People are still taking calls from people claiming to be from well known technology companies to run pieces of software on their machines, only to later find themselves compromised, exploited and or defrauded. People are still clicking on links in e-mails telling them to log on & confirm passwords. Ask any online gamer how often they've heard of someone getting compromised.
The simple truth of this is, no matter how good the hardware platform is, how good the process is from the service provider, & how good you think your staff is, the real threat to the security of your business comes from within. Your service provider is only as good as your own instructions, your own knowledge & understanding, & your own ideals, & those ideals being kept rigidly.
A degree of suspiciousness, caution & paranoia is not only healthy, but acceptable as well as needed in today's Digital Age. The level of concern about security in the cloud is really to do with business' own insecurity over its own processes, data handling ideals than what the service provider's level of security offers. If you can sleep well at night knowing your wallet is safe, shouldn’t your data in your business be able to feel the same?
Recently, the Ponenmon institute conducted a study that revealed that 67% of the IT professionals questioned admitted that their respective organisations were vulnerable to hackers due to lax firewall security. Scarier was that 42% of those surveyed said that were they breached or attacked, they'd have no way of knowing what was compromised. And it got worse with over half saying they were of the opinion that their staff had no knowledge about the potential risks of open firewall ports.
The full insights of that study would appear shocking to those outside the Cloud Computing industry, but to those in it, it's not, but it also isn't the full story. The study neglects the real root of the issue; good security governance from the desktop upwards in any infrastructure. The truth is, there seems to be a general lack of knowledge about security & the implications of security issues from the receptionist to the CEO, with no-one seemingly taking full responsibility for it. No-one drawing a line in the sand about where the buck truly stops.
People leaving their screens unlocked, downloading software, or opening e-mail attachments without care, providing the opportunity for those out there to re-enact a digital version of the siege of Troy. There's even less of a responsibility taken by those who code websites, or are designers-for-hire. Many don't seem to understand the platforms they are building for, or understand how the applications they design & build for clients work in the cloud.
The issue really comes down to one single fundamental questions; would any of us leave our wallet down for anyone to peruse at will or take? The answer is no, we wouldn't. Data in any business IS the wallet of the company. It has to be given the same reverence, respect & care. Sure, the questions about where your data is, or who has access to it are valid, but the real question any organisation must ask is simple & stark; do WE ourselves treat our data the way we expect our service providers to treat it?
As sure as you could establish a cloud solution with a cloud service provider, then pen test that to within an inch of its life, the more important pen tests need to be done within your own organisation. One of the continually growing areas of access compromise is people taking advantage of social engineering; the process of obtaining information and or access through deceit.
People are still taking calls from people claiming to be from well known technology companies to run pieces of software on their machines, only to later find themselves compromised, exploited and or defrauded. People are still clicking on links in e-mails telling them to log on & confirm passwords. Ask any online gamer how often they've heard of someone getting compromised.
The simple truth of this is, no matter how good the hardware platform is, how good the process is from the service provider, & how good you think your staff is, the real threat to the security of your business comes from within. Your service provider is only as good as your own instructions, your own knowledge & understanding, & your own ideals, & those ideals being kept rigidly.
A degree of suspiciousness, caution & paranoia is not only healthy, but acceptable as well as needed in today's Digital Age. The level of concern about security in the cloud is really to do with business' own insecurity over its own processes, data handling ideals than what the service provider's level of security offers. If you can sleep well at night knowing your wallet is safe, shouldn’t your data in your business be able to feel the same?
Monday, November 14, 2011
Episode 15: The one where Ireland leaves the front door unlocked
Ireland is at an incredible juncture in its history. Our national debt is of gargantuan proportions, we're in a harsh period of austerity, & the real economy is on the verge of complete collapse with barely any growth, & things are looking to only get worse for the citizens. Our exports however are the only thing that's saving our bacon. Richard Bruton, the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation stated last month in the Dail that "Ireland is well placed to exploit opportunities in new sectors such as Cloud Computing & Digital Gaming, Life Sciences & Clean-tech". He went further to state that "Ireland’s services sector continues to grow & in 2010 accounted for 45.3 per cent of total exports."
One of the growing areas of concern in the tech sector continues to be security. Major gaming hubs from Sony, Nintendo, Enix, Sega Pass, Nintendo & Steam have in recent months come under attack to be compromised, as have Nokia, The Sun, CitiBank to name but a few. When you look through the major gaming names previously mentioned, you realise that these guys are in the top tier of that sector, & with their millions, they got their security totally wrong.
If we're going to engage digital gaming as a means to increase our exports alongside cloud computing, we must place an incredible amount of attention on us having a strategy for cyber security in Ireland. In the area of cloud computing, as each market around the world begins the embrace, the first question is always around security, & it continues to be a question even in further developed cloud computing markets.
Ireland is one of the more mature markets for cloud. The sales penetration levels wouldn't tell you that, but it is much further along over four years later from when Ireland's first indigenous cloud computing provider entered the market. Back then, security was a huge issue, & there was alot of scaremongering about the security of the cloud versus traditional managed or collocated I.T. infrastructure services. So, with the market being more mature & over a hundred cloud computing services providers in Ireland, the tech exports market being so crucial to our economy you'd assume Ireland had a cyber security strategy already in place.
You'd be wrong. According to a question posed by Clare Daly last week to Pat Rabbitte, our Minister for Telecommunications, Energy & National Resources, that framework document doesn't yet even exist. His department are only in the process of developing it for publishing some time in 2012. We're hedging our survival as a country on I.T. services, & the digital economy & we have absolutely no framework as a country on the single biggest threat & concern to that sector?
Coincidentally, my collegue over at CloudBook, Thu Pham, wrote a great article about the concerns of security in the Cloud for SMB's (or, SME's to us in Ireland). While this article does discuss things from a US market standpoint, we're trying to attract US cloud market players to Ireland. So this does provide some viewpoint into what kind of market expectations these players have to work in back home.
Yes, you could revert to type & cast that off as a typically Irish response to a problem, & that it is the same slip-shod approach that was taken to our banking sector; "we'll worry about those problems after the fact." But that's not acceptable. It can't be. If we're spending huge resources on trying to attract direct foreign investment from technology based services companies, positioning Ireland to take advantage of cloud & digital gaming opportunities, this legislation must be of absolute priority.
Four years ago under the previous government, the question was asked about the Irish Governments shift to cloud computing, & the then-Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan stated that only one department had engaged in looking at a virtualisation or cloud computing strategy so far, & that was his own department. It may be of interest to know that Cloud Computing has been part of Dail discussion 37 times since this present administration has come to power. In seven months, that is approximately five times a month without an exclusion on parliamentary breaks. Thirty seven discussions, with no sign or mention of a government strategy for Cloud Computing to address the costs & inefficiencies of the Government I.T. infrastructure.
There has also been no real approach made to the Cloud Computing industry in Ireland by Government. Discussions behind closed doors with the big five about direct foreign investment don't count. They're not the real players. Had the Government made approaches to companies like Hibernia-Evros, Network Recovery (who recently achieved ISO certification on their cloud), SunGard AS Ireland, DigiWeb, DediServe, DEG-Telecity-Redbus (recent merger of Telecity Redbus & DEG), Eircom, or the any of the other players, any of these players would have made alot of PR hay from the opportunity without any hesitation.
There needs to a proper industry working group, which would help understand the size of the Irish Cloud Computing market, its potential value to the Irish economy from service exports, & its potential for growth, market penetration & adoption throughout the business chain. This group needs to work with the department of trade, the department for public finance & expenditure, as well as the department of communications to help it understand what is needed from a national cyber strategy.
Ireland asked & got its change of leadership earlier this year, it is now time that changed leadership acted like leaders, instead of dithering like a deer in the headlights, reach out to those in the Irish Cloud market, reach out to those in the Digital arts markets (gaming/entertainment etc.), form some proper advisory working groups, & get on with helping to make the push behind a group of industries that form the tech sector that helps support our exports to allow us to fix our real economy, or are they going to continue to bet the farm on those who will move at a moments notice for tax & cost sakes premiums?
One of the growing areas of concern in the tech sector continues to be security. Major gaming hubs from Sony, Nintendo, Enix, Sega Pass, Nintendo & Steam have in recent months come under attack to be compromised, as have Nokia, The Sun, CitiBank to name but a few. When you look through the major gaming names previously mentioned, you realise that these guys are in the top tier of that sector, & with their millions, they got their security totally wrong.
If we're going to engage digital gaming as a means to increase our exports alongside cloud computing, we must place an incredible amount of attention on us having a strategy for cyber security in Ireland. In the area of cloud computing, as each market around the world begins the embrace, the first question is always around security, & it continues to be a question even in further developed cloud computing markets.
Ireland is one of the more mature markets for cloud. The sales penetration levels wouldn't tell you that, but it is much further along over four years later from when Ireland's first indigenous cloud computing provider entered the market. Back then, security was a huge issue, & there was alot of scaremongering about the security of the cloud versus traditional managed or collocated I.T. infrastructure services. So, with the market being more mature & over a hundred cloud computing services providers in Ireland, the tech exports market being so crucial to our economy you'd assume Ireland had a cyber security strategy already in place.
You'd be wrong. According to a question posed by Clare Daly last week to Pat Rabbitte, our Minister for Telecommunications, Energy & National Resources, that framework document doesn't yet even exist. His department are only in the process of developing it for publishing some time in 2012. We're hedging our survival as a country on I.T. services, & the digital economy & we have absolutely no framework as a country on the single biggest threat & concern to that sector?
Coincidentally, my collegue over at CloudBook, Thu Pham, wrote a great article about the concerns of security in the Cloud for SMB's (or, SME's to us in Ireland). While this article does discuss things from a US market standpoint, we're trying to attract US cloud market players to Ireland. So this does provide some viewpoint into what kind of market expectations these players have to work in back home.
Yes, you could revert to type & cast that off as a typically Irish response to a problem, & that it is the same slip-shod approach that was taken to our banking sector; "we'll worry about those problems after the fact." But that's not acceptable. It can't be. If we're spending huge resources on trying to attract direct foreign investment from technology based services companies, positioning Ireland to take advantage of cloud & digital gaming opportunities, this legislation must be of absolute priority.
Four years ago under the previous government, the question was asked about the Irish Governments shift to cloud computing, & the then-Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan stated that only one department had engaged in looking at a virtualisation or cloud computing strategy so far, & that was his own department. It may be of interest to know that Cloud Computing has been part of Dail discussion 37 times since this present administration has come to power. In seven months, that is approximately five times a month without an exclusion on parliamentary breaks. Thirty seven discussions, with no sign or mention of a government strategy for Cloud Computing to address the costs & inefficiencies of the Government I.T. infrastructure.
There has also been no real approach made to the Cloud Computing industry in Ireland by Government. Discussions behind closed doors with the big five about direct foreign investment don't count. They're not the real players. Had the Government made approaches to companies like Hibernia-Evros, Network Recovery (who recently achieved ISO certification on their cloud), SunGard AS Ireland, DigiWeb, DediServe, DEG-Telecity-Redbus (recent merger of Telecity Redbus & DEG), Eircom, or the any of the other players, any of these players would have made alot of PR hay from the opportunity without any hesitation.
There needs to a proper industry working group, which would help understand the size of the Irish Cloud Computing market, its potential value to the Irish economy from service exports, & its potential for growth, market penetration & adoption throughout the business chain. This group needs to work with the department of trade, the department for public finance & expenditure, as well as the department of communications to help it understand what is needed from a national cyber strategy.
Ireland asked & got its change of leadership earlier this year, it is now time that changed leadership acted like leaders, instead of dithering like a deer in the headlights, reach out to those in the Irish Cloud market, reach out to those in the Digital arts markets (gaming/entertainment etc.), form some proper advisory working groups, & get on with helping to make the push behind a group of industries that form the tech sector that helps support our exports to allow us to fix our real economy, or are they going to continue to bet the farm on those who will move at a moments notice for tax & cost sakes premiums?
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Episode 14: Happyslapped by a Cloud Marketeer
Cloud brokers & consultants like to talk alot about 'demistifying the cloud'. There's alot of whitepapers, case studies & cloud blogs on 'what is the cloud'. Marketing people almost soil themselves in delight at the prospects of how much money they can make from some of the cloud sales campaigns they design, complete with resplendent back slapping over well-earned cocktails on a Friday evening after work.
The I.T. industry is getting drunk & high of its own spin & the slap-happy tags of 'As A Service' onto things. But recently, I do believe this merriment has gotten to the stage of 'wasted'. That point of drunkeness where even the smallest task is nigh on impossible. I'm talking about the recent love affair with 'Bring Your Own Data' being slapped on as a marketing tag. Which usually comes now with a side order of 'all you can eat data'. Now sure, 'all you can eat data' is nothing new. Anyone who's worked in telecoms has had this phrase bandied about in meetings, internal memos etc..
But, this was never a phrase much seen in marketing. It would usually appear under 'unlimited data' with an asterisk pointing to small print telling you fair usage limits applied. The actual phrase 'all you can eat data' in the cloud is being used, & being used as its considered 'disruptive' & to make it stand out from the traditional straight-edged I.T./telecoms marketing speak of 'unlimited data'.
Okay, so disruptive marketing in the current I.T. services market is nothing new. But slapping 'Bring Your Own Data' on as a marketing piece frankly just shows both how desperately stupid marketing people are about the cloud, & also how incredibly badly those in the Cloud space have been about educating their customers, & also why the cloud space is so small right now. And this really shows in our nearest trading partner, the UK.
A new survey reveals that the current cloud computing services market for UK SMBs is worth £660m. According to the region-by-region reports done by the British Government that were published in October 2010, the total number of small to medium businesses in the UK is somewhere close to the order of 4.7 million. If you were to just take a pure average on that, the survey shows SME/SMB spend on cloud in the UK is currently valued at approx. £150 per year per small company. That's barely even the cost of a few Google premium mail accounts.
Stupidity such as 'Bring Your Own Data' is not marketing people being smart, or driving business into Cloud companies. In fact, the entire prospect of what the cloud offers, whether it is PAAS/SAAS/IAAS was always based on 'Bring Your Own Data'. It is in fact a fundamental of it. Calling it BYOD is stating the bloody obvious, & fooling no-one.
For example, in an IAAS scenario, you're asking people to bring their own data to your cloud facilities, otherwise they'd be bringing their own hardware & data & it would be classed as colocation. In the scenario of SAAS services, of course they're bringing their own data - whether they are a start-up, OR an established company. The same even goes for PAAS; you're bringing your own data to plug into a platform to generate systems in the cloud.
The marketeers in the Cloud have become too drunk off their own illusions of success that they can slap 'As A Service' on things, found a new cow to milk that upon inspection, even at possibly the biggest cross section of the potential market for Cloud, even just within the UK as an example they've made a cloud market worth roughly the same as the shared hosting market four years ago (i.e. pre recession/global market meltdown).
Success? I think not. Cloud marketeers need to get their heads out of the clouds, back onto a footing of reality, & actually engage with the prospective customers. The excuse of 'people won't pay' doesn't wash. They will. People look for cheap services because there's nothing to make them see beyond the value of the cheap services. And it's really a message that is crucial right now as the world still recovers; LOOK AFTER YOUR CUSTOMERS.
Slick marketing & corny chat-up lines like 'Bring Your Own Data' are like the prawn cocktail; dated, & no-one's really buying them. Return to basics, & bring your customers along with you, & give them the value they will pay for, & get rid of silly marketeers who are damaging the growth potential of the Cloud. You'll save yourself money too in the process that you can spend properly on your customers.
The I.T. industry is getting drunk & high of its own spin & the slap-happy tags of 'As A Service' onto things. But recently, I do believe this merriment has gotten to the stage of 'wasted'. That point of drunkeness where even the smallest task is nigh on impossible. I'm talking about the recent love affair with 'Bring Your Own Data' being slapped on as a marketing tag. Which usually comes now with a side order of 'all you can eat data'. Now sure, 'all you can eat data' is nothing new. Anyone who's worked in telecoms has had this phrase bandied about in meetings, internal memos etc..
But, this was never a phrase much seen in marketing. It would usually appear under 'unlimited data' with an asterisk pointing to small print telling you fair usage limits applied. The actual phrase 'all you can eat data' in the cloud is being used, & being used as its considered 'disruptive' & to make it stand out from the traditional straight-edged I.T./telecoms marketing speak of 'unlimited data'.
Okay, so disruptive marketing in the current I.T. services market is nothing new. But slapping 'Bring Your Own Data' on as a marketing piece frankly just shows both how desperately stupid marketing people are about the cloud, & also how incredibly badly those in the Cloud space have been about educating their customers, & also why the cloud space is so small right now. And this really shows in our nearest trading partner, the UK.
A new survey reveals that the current cloud computing services market for UK SMBs is worth £660m. According to the region-by-region reports done by the British Government that were published in October 2010, the total number of small to medium businesses in the UK is somewhere close to the order of 4.7 million. If you were to just take a pure average on that, the survey shows SME/SMB spend on cloud in the UK is currently valued at approx. £150 per year per small company. That's barely even the cost of a few Google premium mail accounts.
Stupidity such as 'Bring Your Own Data' is not marketing people being smart, or driving business into Cloud companies. In fact, the entire prospect of what the cloud offers, whether it is PAAS/SAAS/IAAS was always based on 'Bring Your Own Data'. It is in fact a fundamental of it. Calling it BYOD is stating the bloody obvious, & fooling no-one.
For example, in an IAAS scenario, you're asking people to bring their own data to your cloud facilities, otherwise they'd be bringing their own hardware & data & it would be classed as colocation. In the scenario of SAAS services, of course they're bringing their own data - whether they are a start-up, OR an established company. The same even goes for PAAS; you're bringing your own data to plug into a platform to generate systems in the cloud.
The marketeers in the Cloud have become too drunk off their own illusions of success that they can slap 'As A Service' on things, found a new cow to milk that upon inspection, even at possibly the biggest cross section of the potential market for Cloud, even just within the UK as an example they've made a cloud market worth roughly the same as the shared hosting market four years ago (i.e. pre recession/global market meltdown).
Success? I think not. Cloud marketeers need to get their heads out of the clouds, back onto a footing of reality, & actually engage with the prospective customers. The excuse of 'people won't pay' doesn't wash. They will. People look for cheap services because there's nothing to make them see beyond the value of the cheap services. And it's really a message that is crucial right now as the world still recovers; LOOK AFTER YOUR CUSTOMERS.
Slick marketing & corny chat-up lines like 'Bring Your Own Data' are like the prawn cocktail; dated, & no-one's really buying them. Return to basics, & bring your customers along with you, & give them the value they will pay for, & get rid of silly marketeers who are damaging the growth potential of the Cloud. You'll save yourself money too in the process that you can spend properly on your customers.
Clouded Issues gets shortlisted for the 2011 Eircom Spiders 'Big Mouth' category award
Wow, that title is a mouthful - but yes, I am extremely proud to announce that 'Clouded Issues' has been shortlisted for the Big Mouth award at the 2011 Eircom Spiders, & is flying the flag for the Cloud in Ireland at the awards being the only Cloud blog shortlisted. I'd really like to take the time to thank everyone who has been involved in my journey in the cloud who has in effect made the nomination possible, & the people who went out of their way to have me nominated in the first place. I am grateful beyond any words I could ever possibly express for that kind of support.
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