Cloud Ventures

The previous blog talked about Municipalities beginning to move into a mode where they not only buy in Cloud services, but they also become a seller of them too. Research analyst IDC calls these ‘Cloud Hubs’ in new insights they are revealing about how this effect is already occuring in the USA, with municipalities buying from ‘upstream’ State-level providers, and also selling to them too. It’s clear there is a very powerful story about the potential for new revenue sources and local economic development, as well as a new mode of IT. Government Cloud Hubs The fundamental building blocks of the type of platform required for this strategy include: Self-service portals and platform automation - For example Cisco has just made two acquisitions to fill out their products here, for their Cisco Cloud Portal, part of their Cisco Intelligent Automation for the Cloud program.... (more)

Shifting to Analytics-Driven IT Operations

by Sasha Gilenson Today Business Intelligence (BI) teams are applying analytics tools in order to provide business with a view into the massive amounts of data that is being collected throughout an organization. Companies apply these analytical tools to Big Data, in order to improve their competitive edge, by identifying the seemingly hidden trends, financial and operational patterns, customer relationships, business opportunities, buying opportunities and information that was has been out of view. On the IT side, BSM initiatives have been implemented to ensure that IT is well-... (more)

ITaaS – Jam Today, Not Tomorrow

The previous blog, on Private Cloud Recovery Services, is an example of ‘ITaaS’ – IT as a Service. This is referring to the utility computing nature of what Cloud services offer, and this effect has been underway for many years long before the term Cloud itself became popular. For example going back ten years now I wrote this piece ‘Web services – Jam today, not tomorrow‘ to summarize the opportunity that service-oriented IT presented, when XML Web services where the main flavour of the month. Even then people spoke of the Internet in terms of it being a programmable and utilit... (more)

GovCloud Part 3 : PaaS – Platform as a Service

The ‘first wave’ of Cloud Computing has predominately been about IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, most notably provided by Amazon. This is reflected in the USA Government having a procurement program for IaaS, a blanket purchase agreement that enables agencies to buy Cloud services from a pre-approved list of suppliers. NIST also defines additional Service Models including PaaS and SaaS – Platform and Software as a Service, and so we’re equally likely to see purchasing programs emerge for them too. Highlighting the value that PaaS and SaaS will offer will help quantify how the... (more)

Building GovCloud Services, Part 1 – Product Model

One of our primary focus and service areas is ‘GovCloud’ – Government Cloud Computing. In a nutshell this means building new Cloud services in line with the best practice models from NIST, the primary source of defining Cloud Computing reference architectures, comprised of the following main parts: Business Use Cases Product Model Cloud Identity Apps Store Business Use Cases As highlighted in the first introductory blog for this series the NIST solutioning process is based on the ‘Business Use Cases‘ they are developing. This includes scenarios such as Email hosting, E-Discovery an... (more)