http://lauriemccabe.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/dell-cloud-business-applications-one-stop-shop-for-smbs/
Dell Cloud Business Applications: One Stop Shop for SMBs?
September 9, 2011 — lauriemccabe
Last week at Dreamforce 2011 , Dell announced Dell Cloud Business Applications, a new integrated, single sign-on approach to business solutions aimed at small and medium businesses (SMBs) with 50 to 500 employees.
In the first release, Dell Cloud Business Applications include Salesforce CRM, Boomi technology to integrate Salesforce with financial applications (either on-premise and in the cloud) that SMBs are already running, including those from Intuit, Microsoft and Sage. The Dell solution also features an analytics dashboard (from an as yet unnamed partner) that provides SMB executives with an integrated view of their business by pulling in relevant information from both Salesforce and these accounting solutions. Dell will also serve as the single source of support–or “one throat to choke” for the applications in the Dell Cloud Business Applications portfolio. The offering also features a single invoice, monthly billing and financing plan.
Saleforce.com, Dell Boomi integration and Dell implementation services are included in the initial release, available now. Dell Cloud Integrated Analytics service will become available in the first half of 2012. Pricing for licensing is based on Salesforce monthly per user subscription pricing, plus a monthly Boomi subscription fee and reporting fee, as shown in Figure 1. Fixed scope, fixed fee services pricing ranges from $5,000 to $14,000 for Salesforce.com CRM implementation and from $2,000 to $10,000 for Boomi implementation packages. Additional services, such as custom reports/analytics, data cleansing and debugging and custom connectors are fee-based depending on requirements.
Figure 1: Dell Cloud Business Applications Licensing Pricing for 10 users
Module Description Annual Fee
Salesforce.com CRM, Professional Edition Salesforce CRM cloud application $7,800
Pre-built Boomi connectors (2 sources, fixed) Synchronize data between Salesforce CRM and accounting software $6,600
Reporting (10 users, 2 sources, fixed) On-demand reports and alerts $2,400
Over time, Dell intends to broaden this offering with additional cloud applications to satisfy requirements in other functional areas, such as marketing automation and financials, slated for the second half of 2012. The service will initially be available in the U.S., but Dell intends to expand it globally.
The offering is available direct through Dell, and through Dell Boomi partners certified to sell and implement the solution. Dell plans to recruit additional partners to sell and deploy the solution over time.
What’s Behind Dell’s Approach?
Dell Cloud Business Applications build on several core Dell strengths, including:
Increasing focus on offering solutions tailored to SMB requirements, such as its Vostro line and KACE appliances.
Expanding cloud footprint, including its announcement at VMWorld that it will launch its first public cloud offering later this year, hosting VMware’s new vCloud public cloud systems in Dell data centers.
Experience in designing, building and delivering cost-effective, standardized systems.
Expertise in Web-based and direct sales.
In addition, Dell is anchoring its Cloud Business Applications approach on a few key premises:
SMB adoption of cloud solutions is growing, but integrating cloud apps with both existing on-premise software and other cloud applications is still too difficult and expensive.
SMBs don’t have analytics and reporting tools that easily pull in data from across different business applications to provide visibility across different business functions.
Moving to the cloud and selecting the “right” cloud solutions is difficult for SMBs, who may lack the time and/or expertise to evaluate different cloud applications, integration technologies and analytics tools.
Dell Cloud Business Applications give SMBs a hand-picked set of cloud apps, turnkey services and built-in, cross-application analytics and support, designed to relieve SMBs from the hassles and costs of selecting, deploying and managing different solutions from multiple providers. By pre-selecting cloud solutions, Dell hopes to relieve SMBs from the confusion, time and effort necessary to evaluate the myriad of cloud solutions on the market, integrate them with existing accounting solutions. Dell’s analytics dashboard incorporates data from Salesforce and accounting, to give users a more complete picture of what’s going on in their businesses. Finally, Dell is providing a one-stop shop, both to buy new cloud solutions, get them integrated with the current accounting system, and support for Salesforce and the integration.
Who’s the Competition?
Dell Cloud Business Applications faces a lot of competition from several far-flung sources:
Application marketplaces, such as Google’s Apps for Business, Intuit’s Workplace App Center, Zoho’s Marketplace, and Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. In contrast to Dell’s curator approach, these markets offer hundreds of solutions to choose from–along with user reviews, ratings and requests. Earlier this year, for example, Intuit announced a pre-integrated version of the Salesforce CRM application, available in the Intuit App Center. In this case, data is automatically synchronized across QuickBooks and Salesforce, giving customers a real-time, unified view of the data, regardless of which application the customer is working in. While integration may not be as customized in some of these other services the Dell solution, or not as turnkey in other situations, these vendors and their marketplaces offer SMBs other, often lower-cost options.
Local VARs and SI partners, who offer SMBs integration (albeit typically one-off) and support. While Dell is trying to woo these partners to its fold, Dell has yet to disclose its strategy is to recruit and compensate partners. While the Boomi channel is a good start, Dell will likely need to grow the channel for this service significantly to reach the many SMBs who depend on local partners for IT infrastructure advice and service.
Traditional SMB business software vendors–including Microsoft and Sage–who offer hybrid solutions and pre-built integrations between their own front and back office solutions.
Integrated cloud suites, such as NetSuite and SAP Business by Design, which provide back and front office solutions built on the same code base and therefore integrated out of the box.
Will Dell Cloud Business Applications Hit the Mark with SMBs?
As structured today, Dell’s offering will appeal to SMBs who want to add Salesforce CRM, intend to continue using their existing accounting solution, and want a one-stop shop for both Salesforce CRM and integration with their accounting solution. Pricing for SMBs with more than 50 employees–which is where Dell is aiming–is reasonable as well.
And there’s no doubt that Salesforce wants to leverage Dell–and Intuit, for that matter–to help it sell and service the SMB market. However, for all of its CRM dominance, Salesforce isn’t they only game in town, and seems to becoming more focused on large enterprises. Though it says that the 100,000 companies using Salesforce are split evenly between large, medium and small business, large companies account for the majority of user seats. Do the math: of Salesforce’s one million users, 100,000 are from Dell, which is its largest account. Add in a laundry list of other big companies, such as Cisco, Sprint, Hitachi, NBC Universal and Prudential, stir in Salesforce’s recently announced one-off enterprise licensing plans, and its only natural to wonder if Salesforce is outgrowing SMBs.
In addition to be huge, the SMB market is also very diverse. How will Dell come up with a formula to pick the “right” for a large enough percentage of SMBs, across a myriad of solution areas, from marketing to HR to ecommerce? Let’s face it, one size does not fit all. It will become even more difficult to pick winners as Dell expands into new geographies.
In my opinion, while Dell doesn’t need to build out the portfolio to include hundreds or even dozens of applications, it does need to offer at least a handful of selections in each category to most effectively tap the huge SMB market potential. After all, most customers want a choice. It also needs to give customers a forum to provide input–to review apps and make suggestions for what they’d like to have.
Dell can further strengthen this offering by offering service and support for SMBs’ existing on-premise IT infrastructure and solutions in a remote managed services model. In fact, Dell already offers these capabilities in Dell Managed Services. This would truly straddle the hybrid world of computing that most SMBs will continue to occupy for the next few years.
Finally, Dell needs to clarify the value proposition for VARs and local and regional SIs to get them on board and reaching out to their SMB customers with Dell’s offering.
That said, Dell’s growing commitment to the SMB market is not to be underestimated—nor is it’s climb into the cloud (or as Dell puts it, “the virtual era”). Dell Cloud Business Solutions is a good first step into becoming an SMB cloud services provider. Over time, Dell can build on its core strengths and the benefits of a closed loop marketing and sales model to shape Dell Cloud Business Solutions to meet the needs of a wider swath of the SMB market.
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Thursday, September 22, 2011
top ten cloud mistakes
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/12297_3894891_1/Top-10-Reasons-Cloud-Computing-Deployments-Fail.htm
July 26, 2010
By Jeff Vance
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More Articles »
July 26, 2010
By Jeff Vance
Submit Feedback »
More Articles »
Top 10 Reasons Cloud Computing Deployments Fail
Lack of cloud computing vendor management and poor understanding of the risks are among the challenges that doom cloud deployments.
Email ArticlePrint ArticleComment on this article Share Articles
July 26, 2010
By Jeff Vance
Submit Feedback »
More Articles »
(Page 1 of 3)
Practically every cloud computing provider – from Google to Rackspace, Amazon to Salesforce.com – has suffered through an outage at some point. When outages happen, skeptics question the viability of cloud computing.
Talk to anyone invested in the cloud, though, and it doesn’t take long to understand that outages are just one of the costs of doing business in the cloud, and . . . well, so what?
Outages happen with pretty much every service we consume. Apple is enjoying record profits, even as the iPhone 4 drops calls at an alarming rate. Where are the stories questioning the viability of smartphones or the iPhone or Apple?
Outages happen in on-premise data centers everywhere. Where are the stories questioning the viability of in-house IT? (Actually, those stories are out there, but they all ask if cloud computing is making traditional IT obsolete.) When was the last time your power went out? Did you question the viability of utility-provided electricity?
There’s only so much you can do in an outage – backup generators (or in the case of the cloud, backed up data) help, but they don’t solve the problem. Outages are the service provider’s problem, not yours.
With other common failures, however, the customer takes a much more active role in determining success or failure. Here are some of the most common mistakes organizations make as they embrace the cloud.
1. Failing to define “success.”
Too many organizations regard cloud computing as a modern-day cure-all. Having problems with the bottom line? Turn to the cloud. Having trouble keeping remote workers productive? Trust the cloud. Are more of your employees working from home? Hey, maybe the cloud can help.
“Setting unrealistic expectations is the number one reason organizations have trouble with cloud computing,” said Robert Stroud, international VP of ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association), a non-profit IT governance organization, and VP of service management and governance at CA.
“Too many organizations believe that they can put in a request to a cloud provider, and, magically, everything will be working perfectly overnight.”
Related Articles
Monitoring Cloud Computing: One City's Story
Is Cloud Computing Security the Next Y2K Opportunity?
Can Microsoft Get Customers, Partners to Buy In to the Cloud?
Cloud Computing's Reach is Further Than Most Think
IT Survey Highlights Virtualization Challenges
If you were setting up a new application in house, would you be that naïve? If you don’t set concrete, realistic goals, don’t be surprised when the cloud doesn’t meet your expectations.
2. Failing to update computing concepts.
Early this year, startup Heroku was blindsided by an Amazon EC2 outage. Heroku provides a cloud development platform for Ruby on Rails that is hosted by Amazon. When weather caused an outage, Heroku saw its entire infrastructure disappear, along with the 40,000+ applications running on its platform.
The company had done everything it was supposed to in terms of failover and redundancy. What they hadn’t realized, though, was that everything resided in a single Amazon “availability zone.”
Amazon worked with Heroku to get their platform back on line quickly, but this incident shows how out-of-date computing concepts can undermine cloud efforts. Failover, backups and redundancy were easier to visualize in the on-premise computing world. If you backed up off-site, you were in good shape.
If everything is off-site, though, how do you know what level of failover capability you actually have? The whole concept of data being in a specific place is challenged by cloud computing.
“One of the things we’ve learned is that stability in the cloud is complicated,” said Byron Sebastian, CEO of Heroku. “One of the myths about cloud computing is that cloud infrastructure is a complete solution. It’s not. You need add-ons in the cloud as with any other IT system.”
As a result, Heroku has expanded its own platform to offer its customers such services as advanced failover, load balancing and redundancy, all tailored for cloud-hosted applications.
3. Failing to hold service providers accountable.
Heroku was lucky. Amazon immediately reached out to them and helped them solve the problem. Others haven’t been so lucky. Visit the user forums of any major cloud computing platform and you’ll see plenty of venting.
“X provider lost all of my data and won’t do anything about it!” is how these complaints often go (they’re usually in all caps and with many more exclamation points.) Some of the rants are obviously from people who screwed up and are looking for someone else to blame. Some are the rants of unbalanced lunatics. Others have the ring of legitimacy.
I’ve talked to plenty of people off the record who complained about service providers, but few will discuss the struggles they’ve had with customer service. (This isn’t unusual for any story, so don’t start imagining a broad cloud conspiracy.) Anecdotally, though, the scales are weighted in the service providers’ favor.
Michele Hudnall, solution marketing manager for BSM at Novell, emailed me to emphasize the importance of well-defined SLA’s. According to Hudnall, things you should watch out for are a lack of SLA’s, vague SLA’s and poor overall service management.
Organizations can easily lose 1-2% of revenues when mission-critical services go down even for a short amount of time. When that happens, it’s important to hold the service provider accountable. This may mean renegotiating your contract to include SLA penalties or seeking remediation.
Gartner recently drafted a list of customer rights that cloud vendors should honor. These included the right to SLA’s that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes; the right to notification and choice about changes that will affect the service of consumers’ business processes; and the right to understand the technical limitations of the system up front.
(Page 2 of 3)
4. Failing to hold yourself accountable.
Even if you have a solid SLA that has provisions for remediation, that doesn’t mean you are off the hook if something goes wrong.
For instance, what happens if you store sensitive customer data in the cloud and someone breaches it? Do you really think it matters what your SLA says? Who will your customers hold responsible?
You, that’s who.
Earlier this month a security breach at AT&T exposed the email addresses of more than 100,000 iPad users. Most customers blamed Apple, but the problem was with AT&T’s cloud service.
The breach was a minor one. After all, most people’s email addresses have been farmed by spammers many times over. However, had the leaked information been credit card or personal information, Apple would have had a problem that made the iPhone 4 antenna problems seem trivial.
“You can never abdicate responsibility to a service provider,” Stroud said. “The cloud provider may be a custodian of your information, but the reality is that it is your reputation that will suffer if something goes wrong.”
5. Failing to scrutinize vendors.
Pretty much every service provider, hosting company and ISP is rebranding itself as a “cloud provider.” However, not all cloud providers are created equal. While it’s a pretty safe bet that Google, Amazon and IBM will be around in the years to come, you can’t say the same about numerous cloud computing startups.
What happens if your cloud provider fails? The collapse of cloud startup Coghead last year shows just how dangerous skimping on due diligence can be. Coghead wooed customers with low prices. Then, when it ran out of money and failed to raise additional VC capital, it gave its customers a few short weeks to get their data off of its systems.
It could have been worse. What happens if your cloud provider shuts down with no notice? What happens if disgruntled employees smuggle servers out the back door after they get their pink slips? What happens if the local sheriff chains up the building under order from a bankruptcy judge?
If you don’t do your due diligence, you might find out.
6. Failing to understand the service supply chain.
Even if your cloud provider is stable, do you know how stable their service providers are? Cloud providers are increasingly outsourcing components of their services to third-parties. It’s important to understand the entire service supply chain in order to accurately judge the viability of the service you are signing up for.
If you’re dealing with a large, established cloud provider, at least you have a single neck to choke if something goes wrong, and you can bet that bad press will motivate them to solve the problem. With smaller vendors, you might be on your own.
7. Failure to manage and monitor applications.
Many organizations have made the mistake of believing that management and performance problems disappear when they move to the cloud. “With traditional applications, eighty percent of your time and resources are spent on management and monitoring,” Sebastian of Heroku said. “The cloud puts a big dent in that, but it doesn’t go away entirely.”
If your application performs poorly, your customers won’t blame the cloud provider, they will blame you. “There will be mistakes in your application. There always are,” Sebastian said. “With the proper performance management and monitoring tools in place, you’ll have a better chance of catching those mistakes before they become a disaster.”
(Page 3 of 3)
8. Failing to understand financial realities.
Many organizations embrace the cloud because it is sold as being cheaper than in-house IT. That’s often true, but even when cloud services are cheaper, organizations may perceive them as being more expensive.
Why?
“We have so little visibility into what we’re paying for various technologies today that it’s easy to get sticker shock,” Stroud of ISACA and CA said. “That’s not the cloud providers’ fault.”
It’s not necessarily your fault either. Financial visibility into IT systems is a tricky matter. Many costs are opaque. Who consumes what? Who pays for what? Who gets to consume how much? For many IT departments, the answer to those questions is fuzzy at best. With the cloud, though, those answers become painfully clear.
9. Failing to understand the legal complexities of the cloud.
When you outsource computing resources, your business, no matter how small, may have opened itself up to the legal risks of a much bigger company. You may have to comply with laws from different jurisdictions, and you may face different liabilities, depending on where your data resides.
According to Gartner, “Service providers have not done a good job of explaining which jurisdictions they put data in and what legal requirements the service consumer must, therefore, meet. The service consumer needs reassurance that the provider does not violate any country’s rules for which the consumer may be held accountable.”
Complying with industry regulations is also more troublesome. Even if cloud services limit your risk and technically make you more compliant, you may have a more difficult time proving that.
10. Failing to get off the sidelines.
Finally, the biggest reason cloud deployments fail is because they don’t get started in the first place. Too many organizations fret about issues that are not all that different from the ones they have in their own data centers. Outages, security breaches and compliance are all general IT challenges, not cloud-specific ones.
The vast majority of people I corresponded with for this story overwhelmingly advocated cloud computing. I received several emails saying that they’ve seen few, if any, cloud failures.
The truth is that the cloud solves more problems than it creates. The cloud eases your IT management and maintenance headaches and lets you turn your attention away from IT and back to your core business. Failing to understand that is a huge mistake.
July 26, 2010
By Jeff Vance
Submit Feedback »
More Articles »
July 26, 2010
By Jeff Vance
Submit Feedback »
More Articles »
Top 10 Reasons Cloud Computing Deployments Fail
Lack of cloud computing vendor management and poor understanding of the risks are among the challenges that doom cloud deployments.
Email ArticlePrint ArticleComment on this article Share Articles
July 26, 2010
By Jeff Vance
Submit Feedback »
More Articles »
(Page 1 of 3)
Practically every cloud computing provider – from Google to Rackspace, Amazon to Salesforce.com – has suffered through an outage at some point. When outages happen, skeptics question the viability of cloud computing.
Talk to anyone invested in the cloud, though, and it doesn’t take long to understand that outages are just one of the costs of doing business in the cloud, and . . . well, so what?
Outages happen with pretty much every service we consume. Apple is enjoying record profits, even as the iPhone 4 drops calls at an alarming rate. Where are the stories questioning the viability of smartphones or the iPhone or Apple?
Outages happen in on-premise data centers everywhere. Where are the stories questioning the viability of in-house IT? (Actually, those stories are out there, but they all ask if cloud computing is making traditional IT obsolete.) When was the last time your power went out? Did you question the viability of utility-provided electricity?
There’s only so much you can do in an outage – backup generators (or in the case of the cloud, backed up data) help, but they don’t solve the problem. Outages are the service provider’s problem, not yours.
With other common failures, however, the customer takes a much more active role in determining success or failure. Here are some of the most common mistakes organizations make as they embrace the cloud.
1. Failing to define “success.”
Too many organizations regard cloud computing as a modern-day cure-all. Having problems with the bottom line? Turn to the cloud. Having trouble keeping remote workers productive? Trust the cloud. Are more of your employees working from home? Hey, maybe the cloud can help.
“Setting unrealistic expectations is the number one reason organizations have trouble with cloud computing,” said Robert Stroud, international VP of ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association), a non-profit IT governance organization, and VP of service management and governance at CA.
“Too many organizations believe that they can put in a request to a cloud provider, and, magically, everything will be working perfectly overnight.”
Related Articles
Monitoring Cloud Computing: One City's Story
Is Cloud Computing Security the Next Y2K Opportunity?
Can Microsoft Get Customers, Partners to Buy In to the Cloud?
Cloud Computing's Reach is Further Than Most Think
IT Survey Highlights Virtualization Challenges
If you were setting up a new application in house, would you be that naïve? If you don’t set concrete, realistic goals, don’t be surprised when the cloud doesn’t meet your expectations.
2. Failing to update computing concepts.
Early this year, startup Heroku was blindsided by an Amazon EC2 outage. Heroku provides a cloud development platform for Ruby on Rails that is hosted by Amazon. When weather caused an outage, Heroku saw its entire infrastructure disappear, along with the 40,000+ applications running on its platform.
The company had done everything it was supposed to in terms of failover and redundancy. What they hadn’t realized, though, was that everything resided in a single Amazon “availability zone.”
Amazon worked with Heroku to get their platform back on line quickly, but this incident shows how out-of-date computing concepts can undermine cloud efforts. Failover, backups and redundancy were easier to visualize in the on-premise computing world. If you backed up off-site, you were in good shape.
If everything is off-site, though, how do you know what level of failover capability you actually have? The whole concept of data being in a specific place is challenged by cloud computing.
“One of the things we’ve learned is that stability in the cloud is complicated,” said Byron Sebastian, CEO of Heroku. “One of the myths about cloud computing is that cloud infrastructure is a complete solution. It’s not. You need add-ons in the cloud as with any other IT system.”
As a result, Heroku has expanded its own platform to offer its customers such services as advanced failover, load balancing and redundancy, all tailored for cloud-hosted applications.
3. Failing to hold service providers accountable.
Heroku was lucky. Amazon immediately reached out to them and helped them solve the problem. Others haven’t been so lucky. Visit the user forums of any major cloud computing platform and you’ll see plenty of venting.
“X provider lost all of my data and won’t do anything about it!” is how these complaints often go (they’re usually in all caps and with many more exclamation points.) Some of the rants are obviously from people who screwed up and are looking for someone else to blame. Some are the rants of unbalanced lunatics. Others have the ring of legitimacy.
I’ve talked to plenty of people off the record who complained about service providers, but few will discuss the struggles they’ve had with customer service. (This isn’t unusual for any story, so don’t start imagining a broad cloud conspiracy.) Anecdotally, though, the scales are weighted in the service providers’ favor.
Michele Hudnall, solution marketing manager for BSM at Novell, emailed me to emphasize the importance of well-defined SLA’s. According to Hudnall, things you should watch out for are a lack of SLA’s, vague SLA’s and poor overall service management.
Organizations can easily lose 1-2% of revenues when mission-critical services go down even for a short amount of time. When that happens, it’s important to hold the service provider accountable. This may mean renegotiating your contract to include SLA penalties or seeking remediation.
Gartner recently drafted a list of customer rights that cloud vendors should honor. These included the right to SLA’s that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes; the right to notification and choice about changes that will affect the service of consumers’ business processes; and the right to understand the technical limitations of the system up front.
(Page 2 of 3)
4. Failing to hold yourself accountable.
Even if you have a solid SLA that has provisions for remediation, that doesn’t mean you are off the hook if something goes wrong.
For instance, what happens if you store sensitive customer data in the cloud and someone breaches it? Do you really think it matters what your SLA says? Who will your customers hold responsible?
You, that’s who.
Earlier this month a security breach at AT&T exposed the email addresses of more than 100,000 iPad users. Most customers blamed Apple, but the problem was with AT&T’s cloud service.
The breach was a minor one. After all, most people’s email addresses have been farmed by spammers many times over. However, had the leaked information been credit card or personal information, Apple would have had a problem that made the iPhone 4 antenna problems seem trivial.
“You can never abdicate responsibility to a service provider,” Stroud said. “The cloud provider may be a custodian of your information, but the reality is that it is your reputation that will suffer if something goes wrong.”
5. Failing to scrutinize vendors.
Pretty much every service provider, hosting company and ISP is rebranding itself as a “cloud provider.” However, not all cloud providers are created equal. While it’s a pretty safe bet that Google, Amazon and IBM will be around in the years to come, you can’t say the same about numerous cloud computing startups.
What happens if your cloud provider fails? The collapse of cloud startup Coghead last year shows just how dangerous skimping on due diligence can be. Coghead wooed customers with low prices. Then, when it ran out of money and failed to raise additional VC capital, it gave its customers a few short weeks to get their data off of its systems.
It could have been worse. What happens if your cloud provider shuts down with no notice? What happens if disgruntled employees smuggle servers out the back door after they get their pink slips? What happens if the local sheriff chains up the building under order from a bankruptcy judge?
If you don’t do your due diligence, you might find out.
6. Failing to understand the service supply chain.
Even if your cloud provider is stable, do you know how stable their service providers are? Cloud providers are increasingly outsourcing components of their services to third-parties. It’s important to understand the entire service supply chain in order to accurately judge the viability of the service you are signing up for.
If you’re dealing with a large, established cloud provider, at least you have a single neck to choke if something goes wrong, and you can bet that bad press will motivate them to solve the problem. With smaller vendors, you might be on your own.
7. Failure to manage and monitor applications.
Many organizations have made the mistake of believing that management and performance problems disappear when they move to the cloud. “With traditional applications, eighty percent of your time and resources are spent on management and monitoring,” Sebastian of Heroku said. “The cloud puts a big dent in that, but it doesn’t go away entirely.”
If your application performs poorly, your customers won’t blame the cloud provider, they will blame you. “There will be mistakes in your application. There always are,” Sebastian said. “With the proper performance management and monitoring tools in place, you’ll have a better chance of catching those mistakes before they become a disaster.”
(Page 3 of 3)
8. Failing to understand financial realities.
Many organizations embrace the cloud because it is sold as being cheaper than in-house IT. That’s often true, but even when cloud services are cheaper, organizations may perceive them as being more expensive.
Why?
“We have so little visibility into what we’re paying for various technologies today that it’s easy to get sticker shock,” Stroud of ISACA and CA said. “That’s not the cloud providers’ fault.”
It’s not necessarily your fault either. Financial visibility into IT systems is a tricky matter. Many costs are opaque. Who consumes what? Who pays for what? Who gets to consume how much? For many IT departments, the answer to those questions is fuzzy at best. With the cloud, though, those answers become painfully clear.
9. Failing to understand the legal complexities of the cloud.
When you outsource computing resources, your business, no matter how small, may have opened itself up to the legal risks of a much bigger company. You may have to comply with laws from different jurisdictions, and you may face different liabilities, depending on where your data resides.
According to Gartner, “Service providers have not done a good job of explaining which jurisdictions they put data in and what legal requirements the service consumer must, therefore, meet. The service consumer needs reassurance that the provider does not violate any country’s rules for which the consumer may be held accountable.”
Complying with industry regulations is also more troublesome. Even if cloud services limit your risk and technically make you more compliant, you may have a more difficult time proving that.
10. Failing to get off the sidelines.
Finally, the biggest reason cloud deployments fail is because they don’t get started in the first place. Too many organizations fret about issues that are not all that different from the ones they have in their own data centers. Outages, security breaches and compliance are all general IT challenges, not cloud-specific ones.
The vast majority of people I corresponded with for this story overwhelmingly advocated cloud computing. I received several emails saying that they’ve seen few, if any, cloud failures.
The truth is that the cloud solves more problems than it creates. The cloud eases your IT management and maintenance headaches and lets you turn your attention away from IT and back to your core business. Failing to understand that is a huge mistake.
Cloud Computing for Dell
http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/biztools/article.php/3939211/Dells-Approach-to-Cloud-Computing-for-SMBs
Dell's Approach to Cloud Computing for SMBs
By Laurie McCabe , September 12, 2011
Cloud computing was on display in full force last week at DreamForce 2011, the industry event celebrating anything and everything that routes through the cloud. Cloud computing is one of the driving forces that makes it possible for small business to afford and access enterprise-class technology and compete on a national and global scale.
Dell is no stranger to small business or to the cloud and took the stage at DreamForce to announce its new Dell Cloud Business Applications -- a collection of built-in, integrated cloud-based applications, services and support. Laurie McCabe, a small business analyst (and frequent contributor to this website) took note and provides a detailed rundown of the initiative -- that's designed to meet the needs of companies with 50 to 500 employees -- and what its one-stop-shop approach could mean for those small businesses.
Last week at Dreamforce 2011 , Dell announced Dell Cloud Business Applications, a new integrated, single sign-on approach to business solutions aimed at small and medium businesses (SMBs) with 50 to 500 employees.
In the first release, Dell Cloud Business Applications include Salesforce CRM, Boomi technology to integrate Salesforce with financial applications (either on-premise and in the cloud) that SMBs are already running, including those from Intuit, Microsoft and Sage.
Read the complete article: Dell Cloud Business Applications: One Stop Shop for SMBs?
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Cloud computing for smb
http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/news/article.php/3939301
Cloud Computing Tips for Small Business
By Jill Billhorn , September 19, 2011
Cloud computing technology offers both time- and money-savingbenefits, which makes it a great fit for small business. As cloud computing benefits become more tangible, more small businesses are moving to the cloud. Still, as with any technology, you don’t want to jump in without proper preparation.
First, it is important to recognize that there are several fundamentally different approaches to cloud computing, including:
- Public cloud: The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or to a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services. Most commonly used services here are application-specific -- for example, Salesforce.com or Microsoft Office 365 -- and pricing is often on a simple, cost-per-seat-per-month basis.
- Private cloud: The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for one organization. It may be managed by the organization itself or by a third party, and it may exist on premises or off-premises. CDW’s Cloud Computing Tracking Poll found that most IT decision makers, in SMB as well as other markets, would prefer the private option. However, the private option requires more knowledge and capabilities to manage, so getting there is a challenge for many organizations, and it is not for everyone.
Cloud computing has a lot to offer, and for small businesses with limited resources, public cloud services offer especially attractive benefits. For example, using applications in the public cloud can help address networking issues without requiring small businesses to invest in their own servers or expand their IT staff.
With public cloud services, businesses pay only for the seats or capacity they use at any given time, which is ideal for small business IT budgets. However, before making the move, small businesses need to be sure that they have a clear picture of all that the cloud entails, and then determine whether it is the right solution for them.
Make a Cloud Computing Plan
The availability and cost of public cloud services makes starting so easy that many IT departments discover some of their employees are using them before the IT team even has a plan. However, a plan -- even a simple one -- is essential to get the most value from cloud services. Look at how your IT staff spends its time and budget, and consider cloud services that will take pressure off them. For example:
• Software management: Is your business challenged by support and management requirements for widely used applications? A cloud-based service such as Microsoft Office 365 usually includes support and certainly eliminates the requirement to do patches and upgrades at every client device.
• What is the current state of your data storage? Are your storage needs close to exceeding your physical capacity? According to CDW’s Cloud Computing Tracking Poll, storage services are one of the most commonly used cloud applications.
Some businesses, as their servers near end of life, consider moving at least a significant portion of their infrastructure requirements to the cloud -- the variant of cloud called infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS. Comparing the cost of using IaaS versus the cost of owning and managing data center equipment is a more complicated calculation. But transferring less critical items, or backup data, to the cloud can help reduce the time you spend managing less important data and avoid having to upgrade onsite storage.
It’s important to understand that cloud computing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each business is unique, with varying budgets and capacities, so your business may need a custom solution. The unique requirements of small businesses make cloud computing customization a key selling point to companies that may be undecided about cloud computing.
Cloud Computing Tips for Small Business
By Jill Billhorn , September 19, 2011
Factor In Cloud Security
Cloud computing security is one of the big unknowns for companies. According to the CDW Cloud Computing Tracking Poll, 41 percent survey respondents noted “security concerns” as the top factor hindering adoption of the cloud. Data security breaches show no sign of slowing down; as a result, some businesses are reluctant to store sensitive, business-critical data in the cloud.
When it comes to security and cloud computing, small business owners and/or their IT professionals should consider layers of security. It may mean tightening up existing security or adding additional layers to match the cloud provider’s security measures.
The added security uniformly protects a company’s assets whether they are inside the public cloud or within the company's own domain. When an organization uses multiple cloud services, IT professionals may consider using single sign-on access to multiple cloud applications. Another critical security measure: organizations should always encrypt their data, both while it's in transit and at rest.
Another aspect of IT security to consider includes firewalls and proxies. Companies need to look at whether the security technologies being used within internal clouds match up to those of potential public cloud providers. It’s also important to consider how data flows through the firewall-based perimeter to the external cloud. In some cases, you may want your IT provider to deploy proxy servers that intercept sensitive data for local delivery rather than via the cloud.
If your business deals with highly sensitive data, a private cloud may be your best bet. A private cloud combines the benefits of a public cloud, such as scalability and metering, with the benefits of private “ownership.” In other words, businesses own the infrastructure (e.g., servers) in which their data is stored, and only authorized people within their network can access it.
Businesses that can’t afford going private can consider a hybrid approach, which combines aspects of public and private clouds, giving businesses the option of maintaining their more sensitive data on the private cloud.
Budget Carefully
In the face of economic realities, many small businesses have had to reduce both budgets and staff, but that doesn’t mean that a business’ IT needs or requests lessen. Cloud computing can deliver, augment and improve the round-the-clock service your organization relies on.
With guaranteed services from a cloud provider, small businesses can achieve the level of support their large enterprise counterparts have, without the additional costs. The bottom line is that cloud computing can ease the demands on smaller in-house IT departments, and let IT professionals focus on mission-critical projects.
The Cloud Computing Tracking Poll found that 35 percent of small businesses have a written strategic plan for the adoption of cloud. Furthermore, 76 percent of the small businesses implementing or maintaining cloud computing have successfully reduced the cost of applications by moving them to the cloud.
While the benefits of cloud computing are clear, don’t pursue the cloud on a whim. Take the time to have a network assessment done by a vendor-neutral service provider to determine your needs and whether a cloud solution is right for your business.
If your current IT infrastructure needs improving, cloud computing may offer a more cost-efficient option than rebuilding your entire infrastructure. Whatever your needs may be, the cloud’s customizable and flexible solutions are the perfect option for expanding small businesses, and even for companies just looking to consolidate and de-clutter.
Jill Billhorn is the vice president, small business at CDW.
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