Agile and proactive use of the cloud

The companies that we are engaged with currently all share a few common traits and these companies see that their competition is not the same as it was 2 or 3 years ago. In previous years, the SMB market shared common competition, they new where the competitions offices were, they had clients in common where they gained market knowledge, and they could see the activities the competition was doing. Not so today. The SMB market is changing and the new competition is coming at them worldwide. Take software, years ago the barrier to entry was extremely high both in talent and in the infrastructure to develop, test and deploy....this has all changed with the cloud. Talent is ready and eager to work, ideas are evolving, and infrastructure is inexpensive, secure, and reliable.

The companies that are embracing the cloud as a tool are more agile and proactive about driving their business. Most of these companies are experiencing huge and rapid growth. Why? They are able to respond to their customer needs, when the customer expects them to respond, and with more relevant information. They are able to do this because they have turned a cost center into a revenue generation tool and these businesses have more time to invest in what the customer wants. They no longer spend their time on break fix or capacity planning, they spend their time on what the customer needs.

Critical Sanity Checks

I used a robust web tool today to access an account of mine online.  The company had spent millions on the interface, the functionality, dashboards, etc.

I tried to enter a new form of payment to use their services - error and crash.

There are lots of forgivable errors on a website or application.  Make sure that taking your customer's money isn't one of them.  These should part of the sanity checks you run everytime you release code.  Don't let anything go to production that stops a customer from paying.

Do you have sanity checks?  Do they have the right things in them?

Amazon Web Service

2nd Watch is now a solution provider for Amazon Web Service (AWS). We are excited for our customers as this means a greater level of support when leveraging AWS to expand revenues and cut IT costs. You can find us under Solution Providers at http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/solution-providers/.

Spokane Journal of Business

Linn Parish of the Spokane Journal of Business recently wrote an article about 2ND Watch. View the article at www.spokanejournal.com. From a business perspective here are the highlights of cloud technology:

• Lower IT costs (30% to 50% less)
• Best in class tools
• Increased productivity
• Safe and secure

JEFF

Do you still run your own Exchange Server?

I was reminded by a friend the other day that one of the keys to creating and maintaining a successful business is to focus on what you do well - your core business.  Its good advice but people still ignore it.

I keep running into companies that insist on running their software on their own hardware and administering the whole thing - or worse paying someone to do it for them.  Things like Exchange have become utilities in the new world of Cloud Computing - this is a wasteful approach.

Lets explore the concept for a moment with a real example.

Small Business
A small business who long ago bought a piece of hardware from their IT services partner that was loaded with Microsoft's Small Business Server product - a scaled down version of several Microsoft Server skus put together in one box.  With 20 users this small business likely paid $8-10,000 or more for the piece of hardware/Software and has little or no expertise on staff to run it.  When the server has an issue (security patch crashes Exchange, or user downloads a virus, etc.) this small business is stuck calling the IT services firm to fix the issue.  If its a nasty issue the hours rack up at an extreme cost (usually more than $100/hour) and hopefully soon the business is back on its feet.  Unfortunately its checkbook is a bit lighter - possibly several thousand dollars lighter.

If the firm has a proactive management contract in place it will be paying several hundred dollars or more a month to patch and manage the server in addition to any downtime fixes or other issues that will rack up the IT service bills.

Product upgrades?  Security patches?  Downtime?  These all require paying an IT Service provider or trying to hack it out on your own.

Small Business Solution
For $100/month this same small business can run the same software in Microsoft's professionally run datacenter (not their back room next to the mop bucket).  When downtime occurs, many engineers fully trained on supporting the product leap into action to fix the issue.  The cost to you for downtime?  None.  In fact if Microsoft violates their 99.9% uptime guarantee they credit your service for the downtime.

Isn't this how a service is supposed to work - if there are issues someone pays you instead of the other way around.

-Kris

Security and Compliance in the Cloud

I was reminded by many local IT leaders today while attending a Cloud information session that security and compliance is still top of mind when discussing Cloud IT.

The table below is the latest research I have done into vendor claims around compliance.

As it seems is always the case with Technology, the devil is in the details.  If you have ever worked with PCI compliance you know that Infrastructure is just a piece of the puzzle.  Vendors like Amazon and Microsoft can and do meet infrastructure requirements for PCI compliance.  Does this mean that if I host my e-commerce site on Amazon's EC2 Cloud Service I'm suddenly PCI compliant?  Not by Amazon alone.  You have solved some of the puzzle but you still have to deal with data storage, encryption, etc.  These are application level issues and things that Amazon's EC2 does not address (by design).

It doesn't mean Public Cloud Providers are not serious about security or compliance (quite the opposite actually).  It simply means Cloud providers are not silver bullets in the security or compliance category and you still need to engineer an appropriate solution to meet any security or compliance requirements you have.  Public cloud providers can still be used to achieve compliance across a number of initiatives.

Cloud providers add some impressive tools to your toolbox - use them wisely.

-Kris

Small Business in the Cloud

I spoke with a client today who is a local health care professional who owns his own business and is frustrated by the amount of technology he has to work with and how archaic it is to administer.

He has a typical small business - 5 employees, 10 PCs and Small Business Server to tie everything together.

I spoke with him about the path to Cloud Computing for small business.

As someone in modern Healthcare he relies on many core technology systems to run and manage his business.  Some of these are still semi-hardwired to his physical equipment/space.

We talked about slowly removing workloads form the Server so that some day he doesn't need it anymore.  Office 365 will be a good start by quickly moving Email and document collaboration off of the server.  Next we will move file storage.  Last but not least we will start to identify applications that can be hosted in the Cloud at a reasonable price and redundancy footprint.

Cloud infrastructure is not a silver bullet but it is a very useful toolbox for the IT professional to solve problems more efficiently that was has typically been available for small businesses.

I am working on a Small Business Server in the Cloud offering so stay tuned for that update.

-Kris