This announcement coincides with the publishing of ESG’s whitepaper on “DR in the Cloud” using AWS.

All things being considered, I am very excited about the AWS Storage gateway (AWS SG), mostly because it reminds me in some ways of Microsoft’s for-sale backup product, System Center Data Protection Manager that I used to manage.  DPM wasn’t the most full-featured backup software on the market, but it did at least two very good things:

The AWS Storage Gateway is a credible offering for what its initial release is designed to do.  And like most cloud-based offerings, one can expect it to be enhanced in months, not years, as customers give feedback and operational lessons are learned.  As Terri points out, the AWS Storage Gateway may not be taking over the world of cloud-based storage enablement quite yet.  But the AWS Storage Gateway, when seen alongside all of the other AWS offerings, shows how Amazon is continuing to evolve its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings.   And those evolutions are good not only to Amazon and its ever-growing AWS direct customer base, but also to the partners that will develop even more solutions based on them for the rest of us.

ESG recently authored a white paper on “DR in the Cloud“, based on where we see companies struggling with home-grown DR solutions — and how the AWS offerings can help.

To read the ESG Whitepaper on “DR in the Cloud” using AWS, click here.

Thanks for reading.

ESG recently published our market landscape report on OLFS at www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/12/online-file-sharing-and-collaboration-in-the-enterprise/

Last year, ESG shared its perspectives on BaaS at www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/02/data-protection-backup-as-a-service/

BaaS and OLFS have a lot in common, so their convergence is natural, and frankly, almost inevitable.

• They work by installing an agent on the range of consumer devices that you carry. After installation and a usually user-friendly (wizard or push-button) experience, they routinely if not near-continuously transmit changed data to the cloud.
• They rely on a massive cloud-based storage architecture, whether it is self-maintained by the original vendor or leveraging a public cloud’s storage platform, e.g. Amazon.
• They’re sold usually on a subscription basis, almost always with tiered offerings, based on how much storage you plan to consume

So, what is different between OLFS and BaaS?

• BaaS is focused on multiple recovery points as a key design criteria, often including a definable retention period for past versions
• OLFS is focused on sharing – whether that means across your varied devices, or between you and your friends/coworkers, will vary based on the OLFS offering

Some OLFS offerings do support previous versions, though its usually within the context of restoring that Word document that you just accidently overwrote — and not preserving your data for a year. And while whole-machine recovery may not be a primary design function of most OLFS, the reality is that if your machine is re-image-able from either it’s factory DVDs, a monthly backup to a USB drive, or perhaps your corporate backup solution … and your data is regularly uploaded to some OLFS cloud — then whole machine recovery really can be a fairly trivial event.

BaaS-only solutions know that that they are “backup” solutions, so sharing options aren’t typically part of the model — which makes sense.

So, how does Mozy’s Stash solution stack up?

I took the opportunity to try out both the Mozy Backup and Stash offerings on one of my home machines. The setup for backup was relatively straight forward and I found it interesting how they pre-define data types and then simply prompt you to either back them up or not. I will look closer at its BaaS capabilities in a later blog post (or ESG Lab validation) but for now, I just wanted to get it installed so that I could be one of the millions of Mozy Backup customers that could now try the Stash feature.

Stash functionality enabled pretty easily, with the standard OLFS concept of defining a root-level folder for data storage. And as exciting as it sounds, I dropped some files into it and watched my drive light and network lights start blinking away. Sure enough, by installing the same Mozy client software on my work laptop, the files were there. Yay! But let’s be clear — it is a beta of a first release in the space. I am actually an avid user of another OLFS service which has a key feature that Mozy doesn’t yet offer — sharing between users. For that reason alone, I can’t use it yet. If you don’t share data with others, is Mozy viable for you? Maybe.

Although it is ‘beta’, it isn’t fair to call their offering a ‘1.0’ — because they aren’t standing it up from scratch. Mozy has oodles of experience with what it takes to create a lightweight agent technology across a variety of consumer devices. They understand how to build and operate a cloud-based storage platform at scale. They have millions of subscribers. Some of them may be using another OLFS, and if they aren’t sharing with others, may be happy to run one less agent and pay one less monthly bill. Other Mozy subscribers may have been thinking about OLFS, and the Stash offering will be what gets them started. And don’t forget, it is still only in beta.

So, more functionality will eventually come, and like most cloud-services, incremental features will come months, not years, later. Some of Mozy’s backup users will jump on this (likely increasing their storage consumption subscription in the process) — and Mozy will invariably hear the feedback of what their install base wants vs. needs. And with Mozy’s agility, as well as their commitment to cloud-enabled storage, things can only go up.

What excites me the most is seeing examples of the convergence between BaaS and OLFS. And if Stash helps more folks to get their data into the cloud, that is goodness. Beyond the convergence, I’m also looking forward to seeing what happens with Mozy Stash 1.1 … 1.5 … 2.0.

In 2009, people were 3X more likely to cancel an IT project, or cut headcount to contain costs then they were to use cloud services.

By 2011, folks were just as likely to consider implementing a cloud solution to contain costs as they were to kill a project or fire people.

2012 data tells us that we’ve crossed the chasm – people are now MORE likely to use cloud techniques as a cost containment/reduction strategy then they are to shoot a project or get rid of people.

This, my friends, is a tipping point. (How many more book themes will I steal in this blog, I wonder?)

Cost reduction/containment is by far the most important catalyst to a long term, thriving market opportunity. Always. Strategic value (i.e., making money on your decision versus saving money by your decision) is always secondary. Always.

Thus, we can now assume that cloud has moved mainstream – and will only accelerate. As soon as a market accepts you as a valid cost containment/reduction strategy, you are invited backstage, where the deals happen.

So, what’s that mean? Markets become interesting when the status quo is upset. The status quo likes things, well, to stay the same. The same being “you give me money, I spend it. You bitch about it, then you give me more money.” Something that derails that flow tends to upset those on the receiving end.

So as more and more people adopt cloud-based strategies (initially) to cut costs, who among the status quo will be negatively affected? Want to know how to figure it out in your own shop? See which sales guys start coming around way more often than normal. See how many times they call you “Buddy!” lately. Those are the ones at risk. Those are the ones who will react in violent opposition (overt or covert) to your move to the cloud.

Those are the ones who will adapt (quickly) or perish (slowly and painfully).

Game on!

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

• Executive sponsorship
• Long term forward IT thinking (Note: this is difficult to find since most CIOs get bonuses on a yearly basis and not for long-term cloud strategies)
• Self assessment and discovery to identify successful opportunities
• A skill set mix that breaks down the barriers between IT disciplines and flattens the IT organization
• Application experience to truly understand the application, its impact on IT infrastructure, and more importantly, its impact on the business
• Economic and financial analysis that involves the CFO and key stakeholders in the business
• Legal and contract knowledge to negotiate and help transform the business to alternative consumption models
• And perhaps most importantly, transparency. From an end-user’s perspective, the transition to any internal, external, hybrid, public cloud strategy should be completely invisible and transparent.

There is not a single solution that is going to solve your cloud computing initiative. Rather, it is a set of services, education, and training that will shift IT into the next era of computing.

You can read Mark’s other blog entries at Liquefying IT.

You can read Mark’s other blog entries at Liquefying IT.

The trend toward “consumerization” marches onward in IT; more and more end-users are choosing their own hardware platforms and software applications in lieu of the IT-sanctioned business tools provided by their companies. These end-users are looking to tackle issues like data sharing, portability, and access from multiple intelligent endpoint devices, creating a conundrum for IT as it needs to balance business enablement, ease of access, and collaborative capacity with the need to maintain control and security of information assets.

This report looks at SaaS offerings focused on sharing and collaboration and purposely excludes those services focused primarily on data protection and backup.

Since 1940, Telcos have enjoyed massive success.

The cloud is about to either radically change that, or radically change the telco.

When the cable guys came out with IP phone services to your house at 1/5th the cost of your standard land line, the Telcos fought it (of course). Now all of your phone service is IP, whether you know it or not, or whether you still use your Telco for it or not.

The Telco survived because it adapted to a new reality (And because humans are lazy).

Since the dawn of the Cloud Era (you know, way back in 2008ish), I’ve been trying to figure out how the monolith organizations such as Telcos were going to play in this transformative era. At first they did what they always do — “Oh, a shiny new business opportunity, we’ll do it too!” — they put up infrastructure as a service (Telcos are the equivalent of the “channel” historically for infrastructure vendors – and got “stuffed” with gear in the exact same way.  Now they are trying to find a means – any means – to get someone to use that capacity). Then they started offering some kind of services themselves – backup has been a popular one, though since Telcos don’t speak that language, they tend to languish or focus (rightfully) on consumers.

But what is a Telco? A telco is a communications infrastructure provider – who happens to have the most important thing required in this transformation – a direct customer billing relationship.

Now that all Telcos – and all enterprises – have adopted IP-based telephony, the stage has been set for the next wave — which will be complete cloud-based unified communications (including video) services.

Telcos will have to adapt to providing these services in order to retain their value over the next 10 years, or they will be relegated to being bandwidth brokers alone.

Enterprises will want to outsource ALL of their complex UC/Video needs the exact same way they outsourced their complex CRM needs. As a matter of fact, this is exactly the kind of value added next generation service SalesForce should be providing – since the whole point of “unified” now means “integrated” and SalesForce is the integration platform of choice for most businesses.

SalesForce won the CRM war not because it taught the market to want CRM – it won because the market wanted CRM but no one delivered it in the way buyers wanted to consume it – until SalesForce. Make it simple and give it to me as a service. That’s how people want to consume complex infrastructural/core stuff. Unified communications and video are the exact same thing.

So, there is no SalesForce for UC – yet. This is why Telcos have to get their shit together here, lest they miss out on a massive global movement yet again.

The arms dealers will be interesting to watch evolve. It’s still way early, but Microsoft has a play – and they sure have a cloud initiative. IBM has the cloud, but not a play yet. Dell and HP aren’t doing anything that I can see. People like Polycom will be interesting to watch. Cisco made a big bet here long ago – and is doing quite well (although until they or a partner deliver it as a cloud service, they will have the same problems as Siebel did early on with CRM – way too complex and expensive for a normal company to deal with)

The existing arms supplier to the Telcos for IP Telephony version 1.0 is Broadsoft, but Telcos are mumbling that they don’t have the chops to be there for version 2.0. Thus far, while there are a few contenders, the one I’d bet on is Thinking Phone Networks in Cambridge, MA. Little, but they seem to have all the right parts, people (CEO is a continuous home run hitter), and are built for the cloud. They have very large, very global players cruising in and out of the peoples’ republic of Cambridge as of late, and I know of at least one multinational global conglomerate OEM deal about to happen. I don’t know enough about the others (yet) to be able to tell who has a legit chance or not. This is a new space for me, but one I do find fascinating.

My point isn’t to call the winner, my point is to call the next market in this space. Just like the big banks said “no one will ever buy stock online” or the Telcos said “no one will ever use an internet phone system” (How are Nortel and Avaya doing these days?), both have evolved WAY beyond from what could be – to what should be. We don’t want to own and manage PBXs anymore then we want to run our own power plants. It’s a natural cloud-based service.

My data of record is in the cloud on salesforce – connected/integrated seamlessly with my communications – and none of it sits on my site. I rent what I need when I need it.

It’s the reason I now run Apple everywhere in my life. It just works. And that’s how all this stuff is supposed to be.

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

As a confessionary disclosure:

• My computers run Windows, including my home server
• My gaming consoles are Xbox 360s (yes, plural)
• And my family’s smartphones are Windows Phone 7

So, I am admittedly a fan of some of the technologies that come out of Redmond – though certainly not everything.

These days, everyone seems to be preaching “cloud,” particularly every enterprise IT vendor looking for new conversations and SMB technologies aimed at reducing the workload on the SMB IT generalist. So, in mainstream IT, we are all super-saturated in cloudy talk. And Microsoft is just as vocal here as everyone else, with its Private Cloud built upon Windows Server, System Center and Hyper-V; as well as its Public Cloud, Windows Azure. What I find interesting is that the “3 Screens and a Cloud” (3S+C) story is so much more subtle and seems to be coming consumer-first, instead of enterprise-led.

Notes and Pictures

My wife has finally recognized the power of Office on her phone, with the discovery of OneNote. In lieu of disorganized notepads, stickies or other paper/electronic lists, she has wholly embraced OneNote – specifically because it uses “the cloud.” Meaning that the OneNote notebooks are stored in a folder in her SkyDrive, and are transparently and automatically kept in sync between her PC, her netbook, and her Windows Phone. Since then, she discovered uses for various Word Docs and Excel spreadsheets to be viewed on her phone, but her Ah-Ha moment was pasting a recipe from a website into OneNote on her PC, and then checking her phone to see it appear before she left for the store.

Since I work in a “cloudy” world, she sat me down and forced me to explain what “the cloud” was. Her other Ah-Ha moment was when she understood that her Hotmail email and her unlimited capacity to take pictures from her phone that were uploaded to the SkyDrive Camera Roll were examples of using “the cloud.”

She doesn’t care about “the cloud” or “which cloud” – but she absolutely appreciates when the “syncing” word pops up on various devices, even if she hadn’t previously understood exactly what it was doing or cared enough to even be curious.

Xbox

This week, Microsoft releases the latest dashboard (system UI) for its Xbox360 – and one of its features is “Cloud Storage.”

You can read just how cool this feature is to a gaming family on my gaming blog, XboxDad.com.

The short version is that game saves (progress/score), as well as your gaming profile (ID), are now storeable within the Xbox Live service (cloud).

• My teenage nephew, Matthew, is the quintessential power-gamer, who can now pull down his GamerTag and game-saves at any of his buddies’ houses, without carrying/losing USB sticks or proprietary memory devices.
• For years, my kids and I have each had our own Xbox memory sticks to shuffle around between our family room and bedrooms, depending on who wanted to play where and with whom.
• It also removes a source of dissatisfaction – losing a GameSave due to corruption. By syncing stuff to the cloud, we get automatic backups (ironically, my other passion at work).

It won’t take long before gamers consider cloud-storage to be their norm. It is easy to turn on and then completely transparent, except when it is visibly of huge value … kind of like backup is transparent until you need to restore, but I digress.

My point here is that most gamers don’t care about “the cloud.” Some of them play others online, while others just want portability of their data. But starting today, they are all consuming services from yet another of Microsoft’s cloud-based services.

—–

“The Cloud”

I could offer other examples, but here is why it matters:

For many consumers, “the cloud” isn’t a destination, it’s just a method. In these examples, it’s just the glue.

• I doubt that my wife will ever open a web browser and go to SkyDrive to open the online version of her OneNote notebook, but she could. On the other hand, these days, she would be hard pressed to take even small notes without either the PC at her desk, her netbook while volunteering at school, or on her phone while sitting on the couch. Why? Because she knows that her data is the same everywhere and that is new value/capability that she didn’t have before and wouldn’t want to be without.
• In my house, we’ll be retiring a bunch of memory sticks and cartridges this week, and I bet we aren’t alone. Again, check out my other blog, XboxDad.com, for more on that.

Frankly, all of the “cloud” buzz aimed at IT/business folks is likely confusing or even agitating to normal people that in fact use cloud-services every day. It turns out that a lot of that “cloud” buzz confuses and likely agitates a lot of business and IT people, too.

Ya know … when you think about Enterprise IT, “the cloud” isn’t a destination there either … it is still just a method. The method being “self-service based, elastically-provisioned, natively resilient, etc.” method of delivering what we’ve always delivered … IT services. That’s all!

And ironically, while many IT folks may be pounding their heads on their desks from another CIO meeting about going “to the cloud,” their kids and spouses may already be happily consuming cloud services – and couldn’t care less how it works.

One reason that I am an admitted Microsoft fan is because they do have all 3 of those screens and some clouds. Do I think that Microsoft does them all well? No. While I love the Windows Phone experience and its integration with the other screens and cloud, there are parts of their go-to-market execution that are beyond frustrating. While I like the their server infrastructure components, their message seems to be too much “cloud”. At some point, IT Pro’s will need to put their hands on technologies – so I hope that we’ll see more technical depth behind the cloud as we get closer to the System Center and Windows Server 8 launches. I am a fan of some other companies and technologies too. As for Microsoft, while they certainly are not perfect, when those three screens and their clouds work together, good things seem to happen …

The company has moved everything except for some core networking gear to the service provider. He chose a local provider because of proximity to headquarters (the facility is 5 mins up the street), and the fact that the provider can also provide  geographical separation with multiple data centers for his critical applications.

I also asked about IaaS. I knew the service provider offered IaaS and was interested in how he may think about utilizing the service. Since the company is very application development-focused, he sees a great opportunity to leverage the service provider’s IaaS. Today he has the capacity to fulfill requests, but likes the option of being able to “rent” virtual machines and return them when he is finished. He already experimented once when an internal request came in for a VM with an enormous memory size and they needed to run a test. He contacted the service provider and within hours they had a VM they could work on to perform the test.

I liked his approach. Move existing systems as is and then start to look at IaaS. I think regional service providers have some good opportunities ahead to work with companies like this one to develop regional and industry specific expertise to help IT departments like this one focus on the priorities that accelerate the business.

You can read Mark’s other blog entries at Liquefying IT.

Petfood.com or Furniture.com didn’t fail because the Internet didn’t work. They failed because they had stupid business models. There are plenty of stupid business models wrapped around cloud. There also are some that are beginning to stand out as viable.

People crap all over Amazon‘s services–but let me be the one to tell you–their model works. They are light years ahead of most of the world in providing IaaS services that (importantly) people actually want. They provide them in ways people want them. Are they perfect for everything? Of course not, but where they fit the use case, they are in a class by themselves–and as such, continue to kick ass with no imminent threat to their model. The first guy to solve a real problem owns that market 99% of the time.

So why doesn’t everyone only use Amazon? Because they don’t solve ALL problems. They are awesome at renting transient compute resources, but they sort of stink at storage (economically at least). That may change, as they are proving to be super smart, in my opinion–but until then look who else is reaping the rewards.

Box, Dropbox, and Nirvanix are hot and heavy in the middle of a financial love affair. Why? Because they are storing stuff more effectively and economically than Amazon. Dropbox is cheap and dirty (and it works!) but folks aren’t putting BIG important data out there (or are they? they are certainly putting small important data out there). Box’s claim is that they are a “business class” version of Dropbox–and judging by their most recent valuation, they seem to be right. Box has built “TRUST” into their brand. Nirvanix has become the absolute darling of the media/entertainment archive world–and now they are moving to standard archives. USC just plopped an 8PB single order on them. 8PB! Wasn’t that more capacity than existed in the entire world just a decade ago?

Why do people use these services? Because A: doing it yourself SUCKS, and B: the cost of letting someone else deal with it is at the inflection point–it’s becoming inarguable when you know that A: it sucks to do yourself and B: it’s now cheaper to do it elsewhere.

To reach a broad market, you have to have both. A better way, and a cheaper way. Until it’s cheaper, people will fight to keep control even when it sucks. Once you hit both metrics, you can watch the market erupt. That seems to be where we are.

So why hasn’t Verizon or Comcast taken off yet when it comes to IaaS? Because it’s not what they do. They won’t be able to play here until the customer comes calling on them–which they will eventually. What those guys have is (enviably) access to the customer, and perhaps more importantly, a billing relationship. What they don’t have is a natural business disposition based on relatively complex topics like IaaS for a “business.” They all want it, but emerging markets require specialization and speed–not exactly what you think of when you talk about AT&T.

So while Cisco, EMC, NTAP, etc., have done a good job stuffing their gear into the big Telco/would-be IaaS providers, they have to wait for demand to occur from the ultimate end-user before that gear gets consumed. They will start to help their customer market services, to enable that consumption–but that’s tough to get going. Comcast does a trillion dollars selling video on demand, so getting them to learn a new language, no matter how great it can be for them, is brutally difficult and slow.

Ironically, it’s HP, Dell, and IBM that have the real ability to change the game on a grand scale in this space. Dell was early with a spillover cloud, but I haven’t heard all that much about it lately. HP is just gearing up now, but has the right things in place (imagine being able to sell cloud CONSUMPTION as a business model when you have that many customers globally!) and IBM (perhaps the most committed to cloud) is still moving pieces around–but have shown they see both the cloud consumption opportunity AND their own brand value. Like other behemoths, they aren’t specializing however, and as such need to orchestrate bigger, more elaborate moves–which will slow them down. (Possible exception is IBM, who did do a deal with Nirvanix so, at least in the storage space, has a place to go).

So the moral today? Specialize on a problem (that is real, and getting worse vs. better organically) and focus on driving the economics to a tipping point. Clear as a cloud.

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.