“Rather than simply dropping off some training packets or holding a webinar with multiple partners, independenceIT created a customized presentation that gives our sales, support and technical teams insights into effectively selling and managing cloud services,” said masterIT CEO Michael Drake. “The extended session  we attended allowed our staff to quickly expand their knowledge and troubleshoot potential sales road blocks. iIT helped us crystallize our go-to-market strategy and identify new markets we could address with this offering.”

This is what he is referring to for anyone that is a MSP, VAR,  Carrier, and  "IT" guys big and small . They have all been making the shift to the cloud along with their customers. This had been predicated by the huge migration of IT from on premise deployments to cloud based (hosted) solutions. The opportunities are endless for the solutions that can be provided and the market potential for these businesses but the transition has not been easy. That is why the success and failure of your service provider relies so heavily on their education / preparation in providing cloud services and the underlying vendor they decide to use. To help with the later of those two challenges, Allentown, PA based independenceIT* has announced the launch of iIT University "iIT U". The aim of the program is 3 fold and initially targeted at service providers who aim to partner with iIT. The 3 aspects are as follows :

1. Strategic consultation on the shift necessary to become a Cloud Service Provider

2. Personalized training sessions for technology, support, and sales teams.

3. Marketing help in producing messaging that lowers confusion regarding the cloud.

This effort shows a true commitment to clearing the air about the cloud service provider business model and benefits SMBs and SMEs downstream by providing better equipped providers and higher levels of service. Other cloud vendors would do well in following suite in showing this level of commitment to their partners success and the happiness of the end user, you.

Read more about iIT University here : http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130429-907677.html

*Disclaimer : I am employed by independenceIT

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Beyond the mid sized players, you also have thousands of smaller players offering their own cloud services, platforms, and cloud enabling software and service. Veddio competes in the infrastructure and cloud enablement sectors at this level.

The point being that there are a number of “WHOs” to choose from when selecting a vendor for your various cloud needs. It doesn’t stop their. Your company or organization may have the resources and desire to build your own cloud or a mix between your own cloud paired with a vendor (a so called “hybrid cloud”). This is, of course, a more expensive and detailed adventure but the “Who” becomes mostly the team your already familiar with or build.

Furthermore, the biggest “Who” in Cloud computing is you. The service should scale to your needs and make your life more manageable. That also means that the responsibility for proper planning still lays on you (or your onboarding consultants). The responsibility to make sure your data is protected and service is always available will always be yours but with one or more Cloud partners, that can be a manageable and affordable task.

What?

So what is “the Cloud”? It’s a question that feels like it’s been answered ad infinitum. What we are really talking about are hosted IT services. They are services and computing models that have been in existence for decades. We aren’t going to rehash the definition, but let me offer you an analogy. Let’s say you want a steak dinner (no offense vegetarians), but you don’t want to cook it yourself. The Cloud is your steak dinner delivered to your no matter where you are. You don’t care how the sausage (or steak in this case) is made, you just know it comes from a factory “in the cloud” and is delivered to you when you need it and how you want it.

What else? The Cloud is the desktops, laptops, and mobile devices your already using. Through these internet connected devices, you have the utinsles you need to chomp down on your cloud. Therefore, the cloud does not eliminate the need for physical devices. It simplifies the devices you need by eliminating the need for servers. Your personal devices are empowered by the ability to share and access your cloud based resources. The “what” of the cloud are the things you are using, even the servers you no longer see.

Where?

Where are these “servers that you no longer see”? They are everywhere. Every major city and even some smaller ones have datacenters. You wouldn’t know that inside those unassuming building are farms of servers, drinking seas of power, cooling, and data to provide “the cloud” to you. Similar to the backbones and interconnections that make up the internet, the idea is that it shouldn’t  matter where the computing or storage is being done, as long as it can be delivered to wherever you are.

In some cases, the “Where” of your data becomes very important. If you are in an industry has compliance rules, you will need to ensure that the facilities that encompass your “cloud” are compliant. You may need to ensure that you have physical access to the data in the case of an audit.

That brings up the second “where” of your location. The promise of “computing anywhere” is limited by the availability of internet wherever you are at the time. To put simply, if you don’t have a good internet connection, you will not have a good experience with “the Cloud”. Depending on the service you are trying to use, your mileage may vary.

As a suggestion, with the lowering cost of high speed bandwidth, it would be prudent for you to have a redundant internet connection considering key components of your operation will be dependent on that connectivity.

Why?

“Why” is a personal question. There are many benefits to this model of computing including some we have touched on.

How would you like to be able to work as if your in your office from any where you are?

Would the savings of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars enable you to take advantage of more computing resources or new software platforms?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have technology that grew with your needs?

How would you like to be able to execute on all of this in minutes or hours and not months?

We would remise not to explore the negative “WHYs” along with the positive.

Can you handle an occasional outage?

Will you always have internet where you will need your computing resources?

Are you willing to pay for a backup of your backups?

Are you comfortable with the security history of your chosen vendors?

Are you ready to learn new platforms and interfaces?

There are deeper “WHYs” behind the cloud such as “why has the cloud garnered so much traction in what seems like all of a sudden?”. The answer to that is believed to be the large infrastructure growth behind some of the most successful internet companies of the 2000s. With the increased capacity of these build-outs, it made sense to commodities them and offer computing as a service on a wide scale. We are the beneficiaries of over spent IT infrastructure.

How?

There are many ways to get started in cloud computing and you may already be using hosted services. If you are a Google apps or Microsoft Office365 customer, then you are in the cloud. If you talk over a phone system that communicates over the internet instead of over copper, your in the cloud. If you backup your data to somewhere – “out there”, your in the cloud. If work from a desktop or development environment you have to log into over the internet, your in the cloud. If you would like to be, there are plenty of vendors to take you there. The flight tickets are relatively inexpensive this time of year. 

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A Primer on Cloud Storage - Feb 17, 2012

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Web Apps

When accessing Software as a Service, it’s generally in the form of an application that you’re accessing via a browser. In some cases data transfer of the web application to your local browser will be no more than that of a normal website. In other cases, the application may be utilizing some of the features of the HTML5 standard that require downloading media or storing data. Having said that, one of the benefits of HTML5 are the lower file sizes of images displayed as SVGs vs. the standard PNG images. 
Because of the variety of web applications and methods for developing a web application, it’s impossible to set one static number on the bandwidth requirements. 
A Hosted Exchange interaction (comparable to Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or any other Email web application) requires a minimum 4.2 kb/sec per user. 
Applications like SharePoint Online, which could be compared to a Dropbox solution, have a higher minimum at about 8 kb/sec per user. 
Communication Applications generally top the requirements because of the constant streaming and uploading of audio or visual content. Most voice protocols require 80 kb/sec per user and video protocols come in at as much as 350 kb/sec per user.

In all cases, these numbers should be doubled to account for a daily peak of twice the average of what expected to be required and even then these numbers can be considered bare low experience minimums. Often in the case of Communication Applications, the bandwidth usage is almost nothing when there is no active usage (having an interaction).

With Web Apps, as with normal websites, if the bandwidth is available there will be no throttling (unless it’s from your ISP) and your browser will attempt to retrieve the data as fast as possible. The limits then become how fast your browser can process the download. Real bandwidth usage in your environment may spike to the full size of the site download if there is no throttling and you have plenty of bandwidth. The usage of caching will lower your actual bandwidth usage if you’re visiting an application where most of the elements do not change.

Your bandwidth costs in accessing Web Apps are no more complicated then the cost of service from your ISP.

Platforms

Platform as a Service such as Virtual Servers can be accessed in a variety of ways but the bandwidth requirements are more predictable. In the case of a Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, or comparable remote server offering, the bandwidth requirements will depend on the type of server which will dictate how you interface with it.

If you are accessing a Window server, you will likely need an RDP connection to access the desktop environment. The minimum bandwidth required for a usable RDP session is 26.4Kbps per user or session. If you are accessing your server over a VPN connection, you may need as much as 512Kbps per site.

In the case of a Linux based server, you may be able to connect and interact with that server with a SSH connection. That connection would require as little as 346bps per session to maintain a connection.  You may need to connect to a desktop environment on your Linux server and in that case would be using a VNC connection. According to the makers of VNC, 33Kbps is sufficient for accessing a remote desktop with low graphics requirements.

The numbers noted are all minimums and performance may not be sufficient for a desktop quality experience.

Besides your ISP costs, your bandwidth costs in accessing Platform services can be slightly complicated. In some cases you will be paying for data transfer from your server to the rest of the internet (which includes your remote connection to the server). Many provider counts both upload and download bandwidth usage, some only count download usage.

 Infrastructure
 

Cloud Storage is one of a few solutions categorized as Infrastructure as a Service. There are no real minimums or recommendations for cloud storage. Your experience with the back and forth data transfer will based on whatever available bandwidth you have. The more bandwidth you have, the faster your data can be transferred. 

Just as with PaaS above, you will likely be paying for the bandwidth of your data transfer to the cloud provider. The difference here is that in many cases you do not pay to upload the data, but pay more to download it. 

Desktop vs. Mobile

The significant difference between a desktop device vs. a mobile device in accessing "the Cloud" are the limits of the mobile network. This can become less significant when you are stationary and connected with to a Wi-Fi network with high speed internet access. With some devices, this may be your only option as not all devices support the 3G and 4G networks necessary to get an internet connection back to your cloud resources. 

With real speeds reported at between 1Mbs and 3Mbs can provide more then significant pipe to support your usage to a number of services.

Costs when you access the cloud via a mobile device may compile if you are using a carrier that charges for your increased bandwidth usage. 

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A Primer on Cloud Storage - Feb 17, 2012

4Ws and an H about Cloud - Jun 20, 2012

Sponsored by the Call Center Outsourcing Community & the Virtual Contact Center Outsourcing Community

This migration is evident by the recent news of lower prices for S3 storage from Amazon as a result of explosive growth in usage, reaching 762 billion stored objects in Q4 of 2011 up from 262 billion in 2010.

The official statement from Amazon is that with the explosive usage, their cost is down and therefore those saving are being passed to the customer.

Therein lies one of the key values of cloud storage; with aggregated and shared resources we all benefit from lower costs. As far as scale, local storage mediums still have a way to go before we can tout petabytes of storage on our desktops. Meanwhile Microsoft Azures currently offers virtually unlimited storage capacity. In addition the cloud offers redundancy and mobility. 

How does it work?

Physically, cloud services are spanned across multiple processing, memory, and storage resources. These resources are clustered and spanned across multiple locations, which are grouped in "farms" or "zones". To make sure you can send and receive quickly, data is generally cached through your nearest edge location (lower latency). It goes without saying that you need the internet to access or update your cloud stored resources. The more bandwidth the better. 

Most IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) storage options like Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure Storage are transactional (like working with a database) but there are plenty of software clients and web based services that allow you to interface with your storage objects in a more familiar interaction. 

When you get to your PaaS (Platform as a Service) storage offerings like Dropbox and Box.net you start interfacing with desktop software interfaces that integrate with your existing desktop file management (folders and files). Some of these services are backed by the IaaS providers. For example, Dropbox is stored in Amazon's S3, while Box.net uses its own infrastructure (and here's why). Microsoft is also in this space with the consumer facing Sky Drive and so is Apple with the iCloud. 

The flavors of service offerings in the SaaS (Software as a Service) space are varied. In this space you can include offerings like Google Docs and Hosted Microsoft SharePoint offerings from various Microsoft Partners or from Microsoft via the Office365 offering. I think Evernote, which I’m using to draft this blog post, fits in this space as well. You can also include the many online storage products from backup companies like Mozy(here is a cool infograph from Mozy on physical storage vs. digital storage) and Carbonite. Backup services generally have their physical storage in-house due to their proprietary security and data compression technologies (and to keep costs down). In the online backup space, you find providers like Veddio that allow you to leverage their infrastructure, platform, and software to create your own Cloud Backup offering. 

So how do you use this stuff?

IaaS

Here is a good reference for getting started with Amazon S3 : http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/amazon-s3-the-beginners-guide/

Microsoft has an entire training kit available for Azure : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=8396

PaaS

The first thing you get on Dropbox's site is a getting started video.

Here is a video for new users of Box.net.

Learn about getting started with Sky Drive here and iCloud here.

SaaS

Google Docs is easy enough, but here is their help site just in case.

Here are all the resource for deploying and using Hosted SharePoint in the Enterprise.

And in order of appearance :

Evernote

Mozy

Carbonite 

Veddio

Learn more about the software strategy behind Amazons Cloud and others at http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture

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The Bandwidth Cost of Cloud - Feb 27, 2012

4Ws and an H about Cloud - Jun 20, 2012

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