Is the cloud green?

This post was originally published on ThoughtsOnCloud on May 3rd, 2013

Today, the world is focused on green – from technology to transportation, the environment is on everyone’s minds.  You would think it’s self evident that the cloud is green. Common sense tells us that a shared service will be more economical and more ecological than everyone using their own separate, non-optimum infrastructures.  It’s like how it seems obvious that travelling by bus is better for the environment than travelling by car. However, statistics show that people who travel by bus burn more energy than people who travel by car because the buses often only have a few people on them and they’re big and heavy and use a lot of diesel.

It’s obvious that instead of everyone running their own old PC that is not properly maintained and only used infrequently, it’s better to share a server hosted by someone who knows how to look after it.  It would be a modern ecological server, probably based in Iceland or somewhere where keeping the system cool is not so difficult. It would be a shared elastic environment with everyone using partitions on the same system so they maximize the capacity and they can hibernate the environment when it’s not in use so as to not waste any power or wear out the disks.

However, the more capacity you give to people, the more they seem to use it. If you add an extra lane to a motorway it doesn’t ease congestion, it just gets used by more people.  You’d think that with the advent of new technology, such as cars, people’s journey time to work would reduce but actually commuting time now is roughly the same as it was 100 years ago, it’s just that people travel further. A kitchen bin is always full and you carry on trying to cram more into it. If you put another bin next to it they wouldn’t both be half full, you’d be trying to cram waste into the top of both. People increase their usage to use up capacity.

So if we give people access to more computing power through the cloud then they’ll use it. Individuals may be able to find a cure for cancer during their lunch break and make the world a better place but they’ll use a lot more carbon than they did before cloud.

A study by Accenture found that “cloud solutions can reduce energy use and carbon emissions by more than 30 percent when compared to their corresponding Microsoft business applications installed on-premise.”

Reuven Cohen, SVP of Virtustream said “I’m sure that if you were to compare a traditional data center deployment to a near exact replication in the cloud you’d find the cloud to be more efficient, but the problem is there currently is no way to justify this statement without some kind of data to support it.”

By moving your processing to the cloud, you’re moving it to a generally available resilient environment with multiple instances of power, network and cooling. How much energy is actually used by the network? In the UK the Environment Agency publishes a CRC (Carbon Reduction Committee) Energy Efficiency Scheme Performance League Table. In the 2011/2012 results BT Group (UK network provider formerly known as British Telecom) ranked third in terms of absolute carbon emissions, with two other network providers and seven data centres also appearing in the top 100.

The UK Government’s CloudStore includes the question of whether the data centre adheres to the EU Code of Conduct in each submission. It will be interesting to see whether this is used by customers as part of their search criteria and whether this results in an increase in data center tracking and reporting of their energy usage.

So, is the cloud green? The answer depends on definitions of the cloud and what is green. I think the cloud is green. I think that running a workload in a shared modern data center will use less carbon than running it in a traditional on-premise environment. However if the data center is not efficient or the infrastructure is not already in place; if an excessive amount of network is used, if you change the service level requirements or if you increase your usage then this could have negative ecological consequences, but in other ways the world will become a better place.

 

Infrastructure Optimisation Using Cloud for Higher Education

This post was originally published on ThoughtsOnCloud on February 13, 2013

In my previous blog post I discussed the benefits of using cloud in each of the three pillars of a higher education organisation – administration, education and research. In this post I cover the optimisation of the infrastructure that underpins all of these pillars.

A university typically runs an IT environment similar to any small and medium sized enterprise (SME). It might run process management software, web portal, collaboration software, HR and finance software, student relationship management software, and on multiple operating systems, all interlinked by using an enterprise service bus (ESB) with service-oriented architecture (SOA), open standards, and a common security directory.

This business is not really the university’s core business. The university doesn’t want to maintain the skills to run these systems, and, more importantly, doesn’t want to worry about the underlying operating systems and databases. Ideally the university would have an empty data centre and for these products to be managed by a cloud service provider (CSP). The university would retain responsibility for the business function, such as the custom nodes of the ESB and the process management work flows. The CSP would upgrade the products when necessary. With well developed component architecture, the university could purchase these various components from separate CSPs and connect the components with cloud broker software, also available on the cloud.

Universities might want to own their own software licenses for the normal workload but there will be peak periods where more CPUs are needed than the software licenses allow (for example, student registration is used far more in late August and early September, so currently they have to pay for this peak capacity all year). With cloud, universities can potentially pay for this excess on a pay-as-needed basis.

In this environment, provisioning is more important than ever, that is, universities might benefit from IBM SmartCloud Provisioning with the Hybrid Cloud Integrator plug-in to provision to IBM SmartCloud Enterprise and manage the images. Although, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise does have a good portal and APIs.

Service wrappers for management of middleware and the database can be added or universities can continue to do it themselves and adopt the extended services as these services are made available as standard options in future releases.

As described in my previous post in the student administration section, multiple institutions can benefit from sharing services and data centres in community clouds.

Staying with private cloud, shared between faculties, dynamic infrastructure that measures, predicts and manages a cloud can offer virtualised resources, delivered with elastic scaling and benefiting from economies of scale. In moving its own development infrastructure to cloud, IBM achieved an 84 percent annual saving of $3.3 million by reducing hardware, labour, power, and software license costs.

At North Carolina State University (NCSU) a multi-institute Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) serves 30,000+ students and staff and has reduced software license costs by 75 percent. NCSU now makes VCL available to 250,000 users through partners in North Carolina and beyond. The software was donated to the Apache foundation by North Carolina State University and IBM.

Through the IBM Cloud Academy, IBM collaborates with K-12 schools and higher education institutions to integrate cloud technologies into their infrastructures, sharing best practices and working together on the transformation.

Cloud and the three pillars of higher education

This post was originally published on ThoughtsOnCloud on February 11, 2013

The education sector is under increasing pressure to provide a better quality of service while managing the rising costs of operations and shrinking budgets. Key areas are student retention, graduation rates, grant funding, and demands for IT resources for learning and research. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, over 30 percent of students in higher education in developed countries leave without a degree or certificate. Of the 25-64 year-olds with less than an upper secondary qualification, 42 percent are not employed. Cloud computing can help in many ways such as transforming learning processes to be more student-centred, and also reducing costs through shared services.

The activities of a typical higher education establishment (referred to here for convenience as university) can be split into three distinct areas:

• Administration
• Education
• Research

Underlying all of these are the typical infrastructure foundations that any business is based on.

University administration

Administration is not a differentiator for a university. Student registration, HR, payroll, finance, library, and procurement are all basic services that can benefit from standardization on the best system and sharing this on a community cloud, benefiting from reduced costs and increased reliability.

However student relationship management is key. With the rising cost to the student of attending university, institutions need to compete, with one another and also with alternatives, to attract and retain students and funding. By improving the student experience throughout the student lifecycle, and also achieving success in research, the institutions can improve their reputation and so attract the best students.

From the very start of the relationship between the student and the university, when the student is choosing which university to attend, software such as IBM cloud-based Coremetrics software can be used to track visitors to the university and other websites, identify curriculum areas of interest and provide ongoing tailored advertising. By the time the student joins the university, this information can be part of their profile within IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, which is used to maintain the relationship and provide engaging education.

IBM Decision Management for Education software-as-a-service solution focuses on student welfare and one higher education institution using it to address student retention issues, and can now predict with 80 percent certainty whether a student will drop out.  It uses all available information within the institution to make real-time informed decisions by using predictive analytical technologies, greatly helping to identify individuals with greatest propensity to succeed and also at-risk students. In this way, teachers can apply resources and interventions most effectively.

Student education

Many students who drop out of university leave in the early stages of their course. Cloud-based social networks and collaboration in those early stages can help students to learn, thrive, and succeed in a way that wasn’t previously possible. In addition to making the learning experience more engaging and accessible, cloud gives an opportunity to reach an entirely new user base, including schools, young offenders, those not in education, employment, or training (NEET), the disabled, stay-at-home mothers, and students in other countries.

IBM together with Birmingham Metropolitan College (BMet) in the UK devised the “Classroom in the Cloud”solution based on IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, and IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business. Using the cloud-based social collaboration and networking tools, including file sharing, web conferencing and instant messaging, BMet can deliver on-demand learning to students outside the classroom and on the move.

Learners can access education in a way that suits their lives. Social networks can help initiate the development of communities outside the classroom, encouraging learners to create an individual ecosystem of learning. Teaching staff can collaborate across departments, sharing resources and working together in real time. Staff and students have less need to travel between campus locations, reducing both costs and carbon footprint.

The emerging trend of social, mobile, and cloud (SoMoClo) allows universities to give what they want, where they want it, how they want it:

• The learner can benefit from any time, any place, any device, on-demand learning, with social collaboration, aligning with digital lifestyles, and a tailored education experience, globally, Higher participation can be achieved by engaging through any device with a portable immersive seamless web experience, based on the cloud, kept up-to-date, relevant, and accurate.
• The instructor benefits from a shared knowledge ecosystem, location independent working freedoms, and enhanced tools to engage students and manage success.
• The university itself benefits from global, exponential scalability, collaboration partners and customers anywhere, richer learner journey, dynamic workforce, and sustainability.

IBM works closely with open and community-source learning management system providers, such as Sakaiand Moodle, which can be run on the cloud,  to provide project planning and implementation services, enabling schools and colleges to migrate from proprietary licensed software.

A shared cloud service unites departments and campuses to eliminate information silos and to deliver comprehensive education.

Through the IBM Academic Initiative and the Academic Skills Cloud, IBM expands the resources and experiences offered to students, allowing universities to incorporate technology into their curricula, enabling universities to be more agile and nimble in keeping students current with the latest technologies. London Metropolitan University is the first in the UK to use this solution. Anthony Thomson, Chairman of Metro Bank, said, “Metro Bank hires for attitude and trains for skill, but can only recruit among the select number of graduates with strong aptitude for IT. Academic initiatives, such as the one set up by IBM and London Metropolitan University, are extremely useful in helping to build a level of graduates who have the suitable skills set that is required by employers.”

Research

There are many areas where cloud can help people doing research in universities, obtaining funding, and selling the results. Researchers can use on-demand processing power and elastic storage, for example from IBM development and test cloud, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. “Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management on the cloud” can be used to manage the development process. For platform as a service, IBM has IBM SmartCloud Application Services. The accounting mechanisms of IBM SmartCloud Enterprise can be used to track costs of particular projects so that costs can be recharged within the user organization.

IBM developed The Academic Research Collaboration and Analytics system with the University of Rhode Island. The system uses cloud-based analytics and social networking tools to help researchers more easily find funding opportunities, identify collaborators around the world; and locate the latest published research findings in their fields. This solution helps academic researchers quickly find the resources they need to plan, manage, and measure the progress of their research projects.

Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is establishing a high performance computing as service (HPCaaS) cloud to enable the various colleges, schools, and departments to do research and support industries. Explaining the benefit of cloud, Dr. Lu, NTU School of Material Sciences and Engineering says “Our graduate students pay a lot of money in 5 years to be a scientist [to solve world problems] not to become an IT specialist [to configure the systems].”

Carnegie Mellon University transformed its research cloud to a regional cloud – a platform for collaboration between research, education, and industry offering dynamic provisioning of Apache Hadoop parallel computing environments.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s Clinical Research Computing Unit developed a cloud infrastructure to support secure virtual desktop and computing needs for internal and external investigators. This infrastructure gives a cost-effective standard virtual desktop environment, securing access to research data.

In my next blog post I will discuss the benefits of using cloud for the infrastructure optimisation to underpin the three pillars.

Equipping Students for a Cloud-based Workplace

This was first posted on businesscloud9 in November 2012

In my previous blog post here I discussed the potential impact of Cloud on the roles performed by a traditional IT department. I discussed that the build, run and operational roles will be significantly reduced as they will move to the cloud to be performed by automated systems or by managed outsourcing companies. However, there will be an increase in the importance of IT strategy, governance, and relationship management. Commercial and financial skills will be key in aligning the relationships with the different cloud providers, and the internal and external customers. The IT department will be more closely linked to the business, and technical skills will still be needed to integrate the services and provide first line helpdesk support. I suggested that there is a potential challenge with skills. With many of the traditional junior roles in development and operations moving outside the enterprise, what can be done to ensure that candidates for these new strategy and coordination roles will gain the experience they need?

I think that for most roles there won’t be a big change in training. Currently project management, relationship management, and financial roles in the IT industry are not typically staffed by people who studied Computer Sciences.  The skills were taught as part of industry agnostic courses or even after being recruited into work. There is no need for the content of the training itself to change.  Although there have been many reports of a decline in the number of applicants for traditional university science courses this may not be an issue as the balance of skills in the IT department will change to include more of these less technical, more business aligned roles.

For the IT strategy, governance and control skills, some of these will need to be taught as dedicated subjects within Computer Science courses. Some of the lower level technical skills that are being outsourced will need to be taught so that they can be appreciated and understood even though they will not be used directly in industry.

E-skills research states that employment in the IT industry is forecast to grow at 5 times the national average over the next decade.  With the advent of devices such as the Raspberry Pi, I believe that there will be a resurgence of people gaining technical skills in their home life which hasn’t been seen since the home PCs of the 80s were replaced by games consoles.

Where IT roles have been replaced by automated systems, there is a need for training on how these systems work, how to choose them and how to use them. Students will need to understand the concept of the Cloud Service Provider and how to engage with them. It would be very valuable for students and new hires to spend a period of time on secondment to a Cloud Service Provider. This way, they could develop the technical hands on expertise that has been outsourced, forming a basis of the required governance, strategy and control skills.

Universities are changing rapidly. With the introduction of student tuition fees this year students are now customers and universities are more competitive and more focused on attracting students than ever before. They are starting to work closely with businesses.  Companies like IBM are working closely with industry and academia, including schools and universities, to develop smarter skills that will prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow – whatever they might be.

Through the IBM Academic Initiative, IBM is partnering with a number of universities to expand the resources and experiences offered to students, better preparing them for the careers of tomorrow. For example, IBM collaborates with the University of the West of Scotland giving students access to software and technology training to gain skills in business analytics and business modelling.

IBM is also piloting an Academic Skills Cloud to make its software available in a cloud computing environment to more easily allow universities to incorporate technology into their curricula, enabling universities to be more agile and nimble in keeping students up to date with the latest technologies.  London Metropolitan University is the first in the UK to use this. Anthony Thomson, Chairman of Metro Bank, said, “Metro Bank hires for attitude and trains for skill, but can only recruit among the select number of graduates with strong aptitude for IT. Academic initiatives, such as the one set up by IBM and LondonMetropolitanUniversity, are extremely useful in helping to build a level of graduates who have the suitable skills set that is required by employers.”

In summary, the future looks bright. We have most of the skills that we need and good progress is being made to establish a pipeline of the right skills for the future.

Cloud’s impact on the IT team job descriptions

This was first posted on businesscloud9 in July 2012

For many people Cloud is seen as an evolution of outsourcing. By moving the traditional IT resources into a public Cloud customers can focus on their core business differentiators. Cloud doesn’t take away the need for the hardware, software, and systems management, it just encapsulates and shields the user from them.

It puts IT in the hands of the external specialists working inside the Cloud . And by centralising IT and the skills, costs can be reduced, risk can be reduced, and businesses can focus on their core skills giving improved time-to-market and business agility.

But where does this leave the customer’s IT department? Can they all go home or do some of the roles remain, or are there actually new roles created? Will we have the skills needed for this new environment?

Let’s look in more detail at some of these roles and the impact that the extreme case of moving all IT workloads to external Cloud providers would have on them:

IT Strategy

Strategic direction is still important in the new environment. Business Technology and Governance Strategy is still required to map the Cloud provider‘s capabilities to the business requirements. Portfolio Management & Service Management Strategies have increased importance to analyse investments, ascertain value, and determine how to get strategic advantage from the standardised services offered by Cloud . However, the role of Enterprise Architecture is significantly simplified.

Control is still needed although the scope is significantly reduced. IT Management System Control retains some budgetary control, but much of its oversight, coordination and reporting responsibilities are better done elsewhere. Responsibility for Portfolio Value Management & Technology Innovation is mainly handed to the Cloud provider.

At the operational level, Project Management is still required while Knowledge Management has reduced scope but best practices and experiences will still need to be tracked.

IT Administration

The scope of IT Business Modelling is reduced as many of the functions in the overall business and operational framework are no longer required.

There are changes in administration control. Sourcing Relationships and Selection is critical for the initiation and management of relationships with providers. Financial Control and Accounting will continue to manage all financial aspects of IT operations. HR Planning and Administration is still required, but the number of people supported is reduced. Site and Facility Administration is no longer needed.

All of the operational roles in IT administration have increased importance. IT  Procurement and Contracts as well as Vendor Service Coordination are needed to manage the complex relationships between the enterprise and Cloud provider. Customer Contracts and Pricing is needed for the allocation of Cloud costs to internal budgets as well as providing a single bill for services from multiple Cloud providers.

Service Delivery & Support

The main casualties of the move to Cloud are the build and run functions. The Service Delivery Strategy will remain in-house, although once the strategic decision has been made to source solely from the Cloud this becomes largely redundant. Responsibility for the Service Support Strategy moves to the Cloud provider.

Service Delivery Control and Service Support Planning also move to Cloud provider, while the Infrastructure Resource Planning functions are likely to be subsumed into the Customer Contracts and Pricing administration role.

Responsibility for Service Delivery Operations and Infrastructure Resource Administration moves to Cloud provider. However the help desk and desk-side support services from Service Support Operations remain essential activities for initial level 1 support, but beyond this support will be offered by the Cloud provider.

 

Further observations

Governance is a critical capability, particularly around maintaining control over SaaS adoption. Integration of services will be a challenge, but perhaps this will also be available as a service in the future. Relationships with partners and service providers in all guises will become increasingly important.

There is a potential issue with skills. With many of the traditional junior roles in development and operations moving outside the enterprise, it’s hard to see how candidates for these new strategy and coordination roles will gain the experience they need. Academia therefore has an important part to play in ensuring that graduates are equipped with the right skills.

In summary:

1. Most current job roles remain, although many have reduced scope or importance.

2. Fewer strategic roles are impacted than control or operational ones.

3. Build and Run are the main functions which move to the Cloud providers.

4. Planning and commercial skills are key; linking the IT department more closely to the business

 

Contact Center in the Cloud reduces total business expenditure

This was originally posted on ThoughtsOnCloud on October 9, 2012 

I was recently asked to investigate how we could reduce the cost of running a global telecoms business. I took a look at the study by the IBM Institute for Business Value, “The contact center of the future: Spanning the chasms“. Although it was written 10 years ago much of it is still valid today, however it occurred to me that further improvements could be made by bringing cloud into the picture.

In the example given in the study, the cost of running customer relations is higher than the cost of the running the network. Other studies show customer service to be more expensive than IT expenses.  So it’s clear that the contact center holds had the greatest potential for reducing the total cost of running the business. I’m sure that a similar potential exists in other industries too.

The study talks about consolidating multiple contact centers with an enterprise based architecture to allow the flexibility to easily integrate of divests parts of the contact center operation. It also discusses the technology improvements of network-based routing allowing a series of contact centers to interoperate and work in concert, universal queuing allowing enterprise-level business rules to manage customer service throughout the web of contact centers, and Voice over IP (VoIP) improving the performance of contact center agents because of the integration of voice and data technology solutions over an IP network.

Ten years on with the introduction of cloud, Bring Your Own Device, and home working, I wonder whether we’re ready to take this to the next level and disassociate the dependency on the physical location. Whether we could remove the physical contact center as we know it and take the web of contact centers to the extreme of each individuals working from home.  If we could reduce the cost of the technology used by each contact center agent so that it was almost negligible then we could offer access a much deeper talent pool by offering flexible home based working.

Opportunities could be given to the highly qualified women who are only able to work during school hours or after children can go to bed. Or to people who cannot travel to a contact center for personal or geographical reasons.

A friend of mine recently installed a virtual desktop client on a Raspberry Pi, a $25 credit card sized computer, and posted a video here of him using it to access a Windows 7 virtual desktop. For an additional $50 it is possible to buy bundles of the other components that are needed such as a keyboard, mouse and memory card. The computer could easily be attached to or integrated into the monitor or TV and provide a very low cost, easy to use and maintain contact center terminal for home workers.

IBM’s virtual desktop cloud software, IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business, provides virtual Windows or Linux desktops, running on a server that can be accessed from a variety of end user devices such as iPads, thin clients, old desktops, netbooks, and laptops. It combines VDI technology with stateless and personalized dynamic sessions, integrated offline VDI (for disconnected and mobile use) and remote branch support. Its open architecture provides flexibility and choice by supporting virtual Windows and Linux  desktops, and a variety of storage, directory, peripherals, and remote display protocols.

By combining these different technology advances I think we have a very exciting future ahead using cloud for business change, cost reduction, and work/life integration.

How IBM cloud can help ISVs

This post was originally published on ThoughtsOnCloud on September 21, 2012

The Development and Test community is one of the most obvious groups that can benefit from cloud; and this is one of the key activities of independent software vendors (ISVs). When you decide that you want to develop a new product or a new release, you want access to your development environment immediately so that you can start realizing your idea and get it to market before the market has moved on or the competitors have moved in. You don’t want the delay that comes with requesting infrastructure setup in a data center and you don’t want long-term commitment in a rapid application development and test environment. As you move toward cloud with standardization, automation, virtualization, pay-as-you-go, and self-service, you can achieve this agility.

Software development tooling

IBM’s Rational portfolio covers the whole software development lifecycle, and it’s available for access on IBM’s cloud. It can also be used to develop solutions that will actually run on a cloud. The IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution in IBM SmartCloud Enterprise brings together the key software development phases — requirements-gathering, development, and test management — pulling them together on a shared platform, with end-to-end governance. Here, the outputs from one phase are inputs to the next, allowing iteration; by putting it on the cloud, users from multiple locations can collaborate on the process.

Although the GUI for most other tooling can run in a browser with the majority of the application running in the cloud, some still require a thick desktop client. For this type, you can use a virtual desktop such as the IBM Smart Business Desktop Cloud. Again, this way gives any time and anywhere access with reduced cost of ownership for the desktop environment.

Virtualized testing

IBM’s recent acquisition, Green Hat, uses cloud to reduce the time and cost needed for application testing. Test environment setup and maintenance consumes 30 – 50 percent of a test cycle, and has issues such as third-party availability, security, and operational restrictions. Green Hat provides virtualized heterogeneous hardware, software, and services shared across parallel development teams to provide 24×7 testing capabilities on demand. Over 70 technologies are supported including BPM, databases, Tibco, Oracle Fusion, and IBM.

Security testing as a service

IBM Rational AppScan OnDemand is a software as a service offering to identify and prioritize web application security vulnerabilities and risks. It traverses a web application, analyzing and testing the application for security and compliance issues, and generating actionable reports. The service is then able to prioritize findings, interpret results, and make fix recommendations to simplify the remediation process.

Load testing as a service

With IBM Rational Load Testing on the IBM cloud, you can define large load tests, build a schedule of tests to be applied to the application, and run them from multiple virtual agents on the cloud.

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise

Of course you can simply use the standard IBM SmartCloud Enterprise public cloud, which gives pay-as-you go access to a clean, fresh, newly installed Linux or Windows operating system where you can develop and test using your own tooling. It has an intuitive GUI and secure APIs so that you can automate your use of it.

Provisioning 

Development and test environments can quickly be provisioned from the traditional environment onto the IBM cloud, and also others, using Tivoli Provisioning Manager with the hybrid cloud extension. This way gives the ultimate flexibility of, for example,  developing in a cloud environment and then using it on premises for production.

Other cloud-based support services

Even if you choose to run your own infrastructure, IBM has many cloud services that can help you keep this running – backup and archiving to the cloud, security monitoring, and availability monitoring from the cloud.

Hosting your own software on the cloud

After you’ve written your software, you can even offer it as software as a service, hosted on the IBM cloud. An increasing number of ISVs are using IBM cloud to host their solution, ranging from CohesiveFT for cloud development tooling, to SugarCRM for a full Customer Relationship Management solution.

You can get additional help from IBM by signing up for the IBM Business Partner initiative IBM Cloud Computing Specialty, which is designed to help Cloud Services Solution Providers engage more closely with each other and with IBM in this key growth area.