I have a new blog post up now at The CA Cloud Storm Chasers – CA Technologies on the 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Service …

There is a persistent (mainly vendor-driven) meme going around the world of IT that building and running a responsible, secure, available, enterprise-quality cloud is simple. The theory seems to be that it just needs some server virtualization, adding automation, maybe dropping in some change control, and calling it done. Or that all you need to do is to log on to a public cloud provider, give them a credit card number, then click a button to migrate your workloads to the cloud.

(read the whole blog – 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Services at The CA Cloud Storm Chasers – CA Technologies)

Are you preparing your teenage cloud for the real world?

James Staten at Forrester recently published his Top 10 Cloud Predictions for 2012. In it, James talks about how cloud is maturing, and warns of the challenges as cloud enters, as he describes it, “the awkward teenage years” …

“Cloud technologies matured nearly across the board … but there’s much more growth ahead as the cloud is no longer a toddler but has entered the awkward teenage years.”

It is a great piece, and I really love this analogy. I have been using it myself recently, as it fits and resonates so well. It also perfectly highlights the growing need for ‘adult supervision’ in cloud computing.

As a toddler, cloud was not expected to have any maturity, discipline, self-control, or to understand the real world. So we all just did our best to help it grow, resigned in the process to just clean up after it and at least to prevent any life-threatening injuries.

However, as cloud becomes a teenager, I think a key to building real maturity (as in real life) is in giving our budding teen the benefit of adult experience and supervision, while expecting it to show a growing level of responsibility. We need to give our teens the benefit of our ‘grown-up’ experience in the real world, provide them with a positive role model, be a ‘responsible adult’ for them, and expect them to show an increasing degree of self-discipline.

In this analogy, the adult supervision is the discipline of management and security that we know so well at CA Technologies – discipline that we know works, and that we know is necessary, even if our rebellious teen doesn’t think so (yet!):

• It means providing discovery to find out about our teen’s ‘rogue’ activities – not to shut them down (though sometimes that may be necessary), but to be ready to support them when they come to us for help.
• It means providing security and compliance to help our teen stay out of trouble with the law, and (heaven forbid) to bail them out if they do get into mischief.
• It means giving them modelling and simulation capabilities, to help them learn how to drive in a safe environment, so they know exactly what to expect once they finally hit real streets, with real applications.
• It means providing automation and assurance so they stay focused on what is important and don’t get distracted – and if (or as James notes, when) they do crash, they don’t just stay alive but they recover quickly.
• It means helping to assemble credible capabilities to showcase their talent and advance their best abilities, not just grabbing the first ‘uncool attempting to be cool’ thing that comes along.
• And it means providing ‘grown-up’ financial management tools, so they learn how to fit their lofty goals within a real-world budget – and so they can learn to pay their own way when they leave home too!

We all want to help our teenagers become responsible adults. That means for our teenage cloud, it is rapidly approaching the time ‘to put away childish things’ and grow up. For better or worse, that means more responsibility, more maturity, more discipline, and more self-control.

Of course, we cannot expect our teen to do it all themselves, just as we cannot expect to do it all for them. But the grown-ups among us who have IT maturity need to at least provide the adult supervision to help them grow responsibly.

They may not do it exactly the same as we did (with mainframe, distributed, desktop) – but those of us with experience in the real world of IT need to give cloud some basic principles by which to find its own way. Like any teen, they may make mistakes despite our best guidance (and that is okay because that is how teenagers learn) – but those of us who have made the mistakes before need to be there to help pick them up when they fall over.

Bottom line – cloud is growing up, running mission-critical workloads, taking care of others, and soon enough will be driving itself to school. But if we want it to become a productive member of society, we need to provide adult supervision and be a positive role model. And that means it is time to provide ‘grown-up’ management and security, with the time-honored disciplines that we all know are needed.

Because without adult supervision, the teenage cloud may turn into a juvenile delinquent.

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Want to know more about a responsible ‘grown-up’ approach to managing and securing the cloud? Check out ca.com/cloud for more.

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This blog was originally published on the ca.com Cloud Chasers blog.

Logicalis Cloud In a Box!

While travelling back from VMworld EMEA last week, I stopped at London and visited with a fantastic CA Technologies customer and partner, Logicalis UK. Logicalis UK is an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services, part of a group that employs over 2,000 people worldwide, with annualized revenues in excess of $1 billion.

Logicalis is doing some amazing things to deliver both public and private hosted cloud using CA Technologies, alongside key strategic partners Cisco and NetApp. While visiting their site in the UK – just outside of London, I learned a lot about the real world of cloud service providers.

The top 10 things I learned about cloud from my visit to Logicalis UK were:

1. Cloudbursting is real & it is happening today

There is a lot of hubbub over whether or not cloudbursting – “the ability to shift an application from a private cloud into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes” – is actually achievable in the real world. Well, I have seen it, and it is real. Logicalis does it today with incredible efficiency, as close to real-time as most mission-critical enterprise applications would realistically need.

2. Cloud in a box is real & exists today – literally

With the unique capabilities of Cisco UCS and NetApp storage, alongside CA Technologies automation and a lot of their own special sauce, Logicalis has literally put a cloud in a box. Wanna see it? Here it is! They have also solved a range of portability and security issues with some very clever solutions, even including the perennial “but what about administrators’ physical access in a public cloud?” dilemma. And they make it look sexy as hell!

3. Expert partners make CA Automation Suite amazing

CA Technologies alone could not have made this unique solution happen without Logicalis – or vice-versa. Nor could we have made this solution work without other great partners, like Cisco and NetApp. Great partnerships like this bring people, process, and technology together to create unique and valuable solutions that are more than the sum of their parts – which is exactly what Logicalis delivers to its customers.

4. Cost savings from cloud can get real, fast

How about two and a half million pounds (~= $3.8m USD) in savings? Is that real enough for you? Logicalis has the numbers, but bottom line: if you avoid building a new data center, or reuse existing office (or classroom, warehouse, cupboard) space instead of dedicated conditioned raised floor space, then the savings can be – and for Logicalis’ customers, are – substantial.

5. You don’t need server virtualization to do cloud

In the aftermath of the VMworld hype a lot of people are equating virtualization with cloud. VMware has a great cloud platform, which Logicalis and CA both support, but Logicalis and CA also deliver cloud services on a range of alternative virtual platforms (including Hyper-V and Xen), and even on bare metal x86 servers (as CA Labs on Demand has been doing in our own private cloud for years). And not just x86, because, as I have learned …

6. You can find public cloud providers that go beyond commodity x86

It is easy to find a public x86 cloud for Linux/Windows workloads; but the options for mission-critical UNIX servers are few and far between. CA’s Labs on Demand provided automated self-service for UNIX for private cloud, and soon Logicalis will be providing UNIX support in their public and on-premise hosted private cloud too, using the UNIX support in CA Automation Suite. There is more special sauce here, but UNIX support is no longer the roadblock to cloud it has been in the past.

7. You can run restrictively licensed apps in the cloud

Again, Logicalis brings some special sauce to migrate even software from large, intractable OS and application vendors from server to server, and even site to site, without license issues or roadblocks. If you have license issues today with cloud, you should talk to Logicalis about how they solved them. Crazy cool!

8. Great things happen when you combine great solutions

Logicalis is not just a CA automation customer, but combines the power of integrating CA Automation Suite for Clouds with CA Spectrum, CA eHealth, and CA ecoSoftware to deliver an incredible solution that is more than the sum of its parts. Alongside Cisco UCS  and NetApp storage, this adds up to a mission-critical, enterprise-grade cloud solution that is unique, differentiated, and truly remarkable.

9. Cloud does indeed make for amazing Disaster Recovery

Logicalis is providing site-to-site replication that automatically detects system failures and replicates the failing environment to a public cloud infrastructure, though not instantaneous, certainly faster than it takes to go grab a coffee. The demonstration of this is amazingly powerful, which leads me to my last learning…

10. Hitting a big red ‘power-kill’ switch still freaks me out a little

Part of the DR demo the Logicalis crew gave me simulated an emergency outage by inviting me to hit this big red kill switch – as seen in data centers everywhere. When I did, I immediately heard the sickening (lack of) sound as the cloud-in-a-box died mid-process. After working in data centers for over 10 years, that sudden silence still gives me a visceral reaction. Much credit to the Cisco and NetApp hardware though – Logicalis has done this hundreds of times, and the box is still running smoothly.

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Overall, it was a fantastic site visit for me. Logicalis UK is doing amazing things with CA Technologies and great partners like Cisco and NetApp. Their people were friendly, smart, and highly qualified. Their processes are sophisticated, proven, and automated.

The way they combine these critical elements of people, process, and technology to deliver unique and valuable solutions is an incredible revelation. Make sure to check them out.

This blog was originally published at the CA Technologies Cloud Storm Chasers blog.

I have been talking with many CIOs for some time about strategic adoption of cloud solutions. A key step in these conversations is always the review of the portfolio of services they provide to business users, so they can choose which clouds to adopt and why.

This has led me to describe a high-level taxonomy that segments the service portfolio according to the different cloud requirements, capabilities, and approaches in different types of applications and services.

Essentially, this work has segmented most (all?) service portfolios into four areas, which (roughly) follow the adoption curve of cloud computing

Cloud Service Taxonomy - Cloud-Free, Cloud-Migrant, Cloud-Native, and Rogue Cloud

Cloud-Free Services

For most of the large enterprises I talk to, some services will not be part of any cloud. These ‘cloud-free’ services may migrate from physical to virtual, but do not need elastic scalability and self-service, are too impractical or incomprehensible, are too locked into non-commodity (e.g. z-Series) hardware, or are too sensitive or mission-critical to migrate to (especially public) cloud environments. With apologies to the ‘pure cloud’ fantasists, it is a reality for many organizations, especially larger enterprises, many services will not be part of their cloud adoption plans – at least not soon, perhaps not ever. It is important to identify these ‘cloud-free’ services.

Cloud Migrant Services

As CIOs get a handle on cloud, they start proactively evaluating their service portfolio and migrating selected existing workloads – from the OS up – initially from physical to virtual, then to appropriate public or private cloud choices. These ‘cloud migrant’ services are not fundamentally changed, as they simply ‘lift and shift’ the same code, requirements, interconnections, users, data sources, etc. from traditional environments to (typically IaaS) clouds. Many benefits can accrue from running these services in a cloud – agility, flexibility, efficiency, cost reduction – but the services themselves are not specifically built in or for the cloud.

Cloud Native Services

As organizations embrace cloud computing, they start developing and using new ‘cloud-native’ services built in the cloud and for the cloud. Mobile and social services, for example, really blossom when built on cloud-native characteristics like self-service, mobility, scalability, and ‘big data’, while cloud-native development also allows business ideas to ‘fail fast’ or prove success with minimal upfront investment. Of course, rogue-cloud services (see below) can become cloud-native services when they move to ‘official’ production status; and SaaS applications are also cloud-native services, just delivered out-of-the-box by public providers.

Rogue Cloud Services

In many organizations, business users or developers have adopted cloud already, outside of the normal IT procurement process. The term ‘rogue’ may seem pejorative, but is not intended to be – I simply described a process that is outside of IT’s knowledge or control. As I wrote back in 2009, rogue cloud can be very positive, and there is no per se reason for IT should to shut it down. However, IT does need to establish visibility into rogue cloud to ensure security or compliance, avoid cost overruns, drive broader adoption of good cloud choices, or even to promote better cloud choices.

Why Does This Matter?

This segmentation came about not as an academic exercise, but to help CIOs with a taxonomy for service portfolio analysis and cloud choice. Each of these cloud service types has different needs, from both platform and management perspectives. By identifying cloud service types, a CIO can better adopt their choice of cloud as appropriate for different services at different times.

For example,

• A cloud-native service can be ‘designed to fail’, whereas a cloud-migrant service needs additional management (e.g. real-time replication) to maintain the same level of continuity.
• A cloud-migrant application that has been QA’d on a closed and proprietary hypervisor may need additional testing and QA before it can be moved to a different (or unspecified) hypervisor.
• A rogue cloud service must be discovered before it can be managed as part of a whole portfolio, whereas a cloud-native or cloud-migrant service will be catalogued as it is deployed.
• A cloud-free service needs none of the above, and specifically can fall outside the cloud portfolio and be exempt from new policies specifically designed to enable cloud services.

This segmentation is not meant to replace a thorough service portfolio analysis in making good cloud choices. In my session at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, for example, I presented analysis models from Visible Ops – Private Cloud, a CA Technologies quadrant framework, Forrester Research’s Evaluating Application Fit With Cloud model, and Freeform Dynamics’ model from Applied Cloud Computing: A practical guide to identifying the potential in your environment.

However, I do think it is a useful taxonomy to start making sense of your own service portfolio as you start to take stock of where you are in your cloud strategy, and where you want to go. So far, the CIOs I have worked with on this have agreed.

What do you think?

I had a great time at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas this year. As I predicted in my last blog post, I met with loads of amazing people – too many to list out here, let alone in 140 on Twitter! I also saw some great technology in the solutions exchange, dropped in on some fascinating sessions, and of course enjoyed some excellent meals, drinks, and parties!

I was also very pleased to present on Extending the Value of Your VMware Solutions to Design, Deliver and Maintain Reliable, Mission-critical Virtualization and Cloud Services. I certainly was not there to ‘pitch’ any CA Technologies products or solutions (after all, I know that no one wants a sales pitch at a tradeshow like VMworld). Instead, I tried to provide strategic advice to the audience on how to look at their migration to cloud, and especially how to extend VMware’s excellent virtualization and cloud technologies.

My VMworld 2011 Las Vegas Presentation Agenda

With a smattering of additional tips and content from ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps’, I talked about:

• how to match services with the right cloud using project and portfolio analysis based on models from Visible Ops – Private Cloud, a CA Technologies quadrant framework, Forrester Research’s Evaluating Application Fit With Cloud model, and Freeform Dynamics’ model from Applied Cloud Computing: A practical guide to identifying the potential in your environment
• how to think about your service portfolio, whether considering migrating existing services to a private VMware cloud, building new services on a public VMware cloud, dealing with business users who buy into 3^rd-party cloud themselves, or even services that you may never migrate to the cloud
• how to leverage VMware to deliver both evolutionary cloud models built with virtualization, optimization, automation, orchestration, and dynamic IT; and with revolutionary models that deliver exponential benefits with a virtual business service, built on a virtual service fabric
• how to integrate complex service workflows, skillsets, and technologies, as well as incorporating NIST best practices including cloud service management and service-aware end-to-end application assurance to continually improve service quality, predictability, and costs
• how to apply critical security disciplines including Identity Management & Provisioning, Identity Federation & Single Sign-On, Web Access Management, Privileged User Management, Identity Compliance, and User activity reporting, whether to, from or for the cloud
• how to approach cloud as a transformation opportunity, so you don’t just do the same things in different ways, but fundamentally transform business and IT, delivering a ‘cloud of clouds’ with a broad technology ecosystem stocked with key VMware partners (like CA Technologies!)

You can check out my slides at the CA.com communities site, or over at SlideShare.

Overall, my session seemed to be very well received. A lot of people came up to me there and afterwards and told me how much they enjoyed my presentation, and how useful it was for them. I also enjoyed a great set of questions from the attendees immediately after the session. In fact, we were chatting so much we had to be ushered out so the next session could start.

Immediately afterwards I headed down to the CA Technologies booth, and really enjoyed talking with various practitioners and others at the book signing for ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps‘ afterwards (with co-authors Jeanne Morain and Kurt Milne). I even had a professor in IT from NYU ask for a copy of my book! Cool!

All in all, I had a great time, made new friends, enjoyed great food, and even managed to avoid the possible downsides of VMworld!

I hope VMware Europe Copenhagen will be just as good – and I hope to see you there!

Is your IT as easy as a smartphone?

Consumerization of IT is not a really new concept. Consumers (as employees) have been bringing their technology to the workplace for decades, like the pre-HP Palm Pilots and the pre-Google Motorola ‘mobile’ phones. However, we are now facing a new wave of consumerization, and it changing the way business operates as consumers start to drive a new approach to using and providing information technology.

Please check the entire post over at the CA Community website – ‘Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT‘

Coming to VMworld 2011? Let me know so we can connect!

In my last post, I asked why you love going to VMworld, and gave you a few of my reasons – like the people, the technology, the announcements, the sessions, the labs, and the parties.

But like any business trip, it is not all fun and games, beer and skittles, rainbows and unicorns.

So why do you *not* like going to VMworld?

Like my last post, I’ll go first. Here are some things I really do *not* love about going to VMworld – as well as some upsides to take the sting off :

• Las Vegas – Moscone at San Francisco was great, but I have been to Vegas so much now that I am getting tired of it.
  • Upside: if it has to be in Vegas, I think the Venetian is the best venue in town, with the best casual dining on the strip.

• Copenhagen – Copenhagen is really expensive and hard to get to from the US, and the Bella Center is so far out of town, away from most hotels, with barely anything nearby.
  • Upside: Copenhagen really is a beautiful city, and if you have a spare day you can visit the fabulous Louisiana nearby.

• The internet access – WiFi (and 3G) at VMworld is always over-subscribed and under-provisioned, though this is not surprising for such a large event. Especially in Vegas, where the casinos don’t want you to do anything except eat, drink, and gamble, I don’t expect the Venetian to be any better than Moscone last year.
  • Upside: it is a great excuse not to answer that email/IM/DM from your boss!
• The conference food – let’s face it, conference food is rarely gourmet, and VMworld is no different. In their defense, when you are serving 15,000+ people you will never get Tetsuya’s, Moto, or Le Gavroche.
  • Upside: both Vegas and Copenhagen have some great food – albeit outside the conference – including what is currently considered the best restaurant in the world.
• The VMworld website – well, the less said about that the better. Suffice to say, it frustrated me so much this year that I spent an afternoon redoing the EMEA hotel listings in a usable format.
  • Upside: once you have registered and scheduled your sessions, you really don’t need the website anymore.
• The hangover(s) – I love the parties, but not the hangovers. So be careful what, how much, how early, and how late you drink. I try to alternate hard drinks with soft drinks  so I can stay longer and suffer less (my regular is vodka & lime; my change-up is lime and soda) . It keeps me hydrated and  you can’t even tell it is non-alcoholic.
  • Upside: a hangover means you probably had a great night at a great party with some great people.
• The main party – I know loads of people loved them, but aged rockers Foreigner (with just one original member) were not my bag. And having seen INXS live at Sydney pubs (like the famous Manly Vale) in the 80s, why would I want to see them old and busted with no Michael Hutchence?
  • Upside: This year The Killers are playing the party – at least they have had a chart hit this millennium!

But really, while I can complain about all these little things, in the end they do not really matter. I still love going to VMworld

That said – what do you *not* love about going to VMworld?

Coming to VMworld 2011? Let me know so we can connect!

I love going to VMworld. It may be my favorite conference of the year (after CA World, of course!).

If you love going to VMworld too, then I would really like to know why.

I’ll start …

For me, the best part of going to VMworld is the people, the technology, the announcements, the sessions, the labs, the parties, and the buzz:

• I meet great friends, colleagues, customers, analysts, tweeps, and journalists who I hardly see during the year – even though I never seem to have enough time to see everyone I want to!
• The labs are reportedly excellent, and it is hard to beat them for in-depth hands-on training. I’m hoping to finally attend these myself this year, if only I can find the time!
• There are always interesting announcements, whether from VMware or their partners (like CA) with a load of cool new tools. I can’t wait for the keynotes!
• The Solutions Exchange is always amazing. Every year it gets bigger, with even more cool new tech. As an übergeek, I totally love it, and typically spend hours just wandering the booths!
• The SWAG from VMware and the Solutions Exchange vendors is always neat. It is fun to see what are ‘the cool tchotchkes’ every year, and the fun games, contests, and things to do on the booths make it feel like a fun fair!
• The parties – oh my goodness, the parties! I never get to all of them (my competitors don’t invite me as much as when I was an analyst ), but especially this year in Vegas, the parties should be a lot of fun.
• There are always loads of great sessions, if I can get to them between meetings. I learn so much every year, and this VMworld should be no different.

Speaking of the sessions, I am really excited to be speaking again this year. In Las Vegas I am presenting  ‘Extending the value of  VMware solutions: How to design, deliver, and maintain reliable, mission-critical virtualization and cloud services‘ (session SPO3974).

I think this will be a really useful session, where I will explain how you can leverage your investment in great foundational technologies from VMware to design, deliver, and maintain mission-critical virtual and cloud services, including how to smooth your evolution and revolution to private, public, and hybrid cloud, with key excerpts from my book, ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From virtualization to private cloud in 4 practical steps‘. Please book SPO3974 into your online schedule builder for Wednesday, August 31 at 10:00 a.m. PT. I would love to see you there!

Plus, please don’t miss a couple of my CA Technologies colleagues speaking too:

• The Agony and the Ecstasy: Two Days in the Life of a CIO – Karen Sage, our vice president of Alliance Solutions, will present this Super Session on Monday, August 29 at 2:00 p.m. PT. Karen has incredible experience and insight into the world of the IT executive, and will discuss how converged cloud computing infrastructure is radically reshaping how organizations will use technology to increase innovation and improve business agility.
• Avoid Virtual Stall with Linked Clones – Allan Andersen, vice president of Product Management, will present this breakout session on Thursday, September 1 at 10:30 a.m. PT. Alan is a fascinating guy and really smart, and will explain how to extend VMware View Linked Clones to reduce storage costs, simplify management, and overcome virtual desktop stall, plus how other enterprise management technologies are critical for the success of VMware View deployments.

Also, CA Technologies will be giving away a limited number of free copies of ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud‘ at the CA Technologies booth (#439) in the Solutions Exchange. They will be there every day, so you can pick them up and have a chat with the great people on the CA booth. You might catch me there too, in between meetings. Even better, come along on Wednesday, August 31 at 11:15 a.m. PT (right after my session), when all three authors ‘of Visible Ops – Private Cloud‘ – Jeanne Morain, Kurt Milne, and myself – will be there to give away and sign copies too!

So if you are going to VMworld, let me know. I would love to connect, maybe hit a party or two together!

And let me know why you love going to VMworld too!

El Reg!

I spoke with Richard Chirgwin from The Register during my trip to CA World Expo in Australia, about the mammoth ‘Cloud Choices’ announcement, the release of 10 new and improved products from CA Technologies:

Speaking to a media lunch at CA World Expo in Sydney yesterday (July 25), CA’s VP of strategic solutions Andi Mann noted that enterprises that try to build a private cloud as a DIY project bump into a host of unexpected challenges, many of them legal or administrative rather than IT-related.

For example …

You can read the whole article here – CA, Unisys bring “private cloud” partnership to Oz.

There is a revolution happening with the rise of social, mobile, and cloud computing, the blurring lines between business and personal, and the proliferation of connected devices. This ‘consumerization of IT’ is forcing radical change on businesses (and governments), which are in turn forcing radical change on IT.

This is clear from a fascinating new research study conducted by IDC (PDF) , released this week by CA Technologies, into how the consumerization of IT is affecting business, and how IT is changing to accommodate this change.

And guess what …

It’s all about you!

Consider how you are driving demand for online technology.

This new IDC research shows that the majority of connected consumers (like you) regularly use e-mail, manage finances, pay bills, shop, use instant messaging, log into social websites, watch videos, download applications, and view photos – all online. Perhaps you also buy insurance, manage investments, video or voice chat, tweet, read the newspaper, book travel, check-in to your flights, and more – all online.

IDC’s data suggest you are probably sharing information too, not just consuming it. On social media alone, almost a third of consumers generate their own posts every day, and nearly three-quarters do so at least once a week. Over 60% of you are sharing photos, over half are sharing updates, and almost a third are sharing your location. Somewhat alarmingly, however, up to 80% are exposing personal information like credit card numbers, birthdays, location, finances, and more.

It’s also about your devices

Now consider how you are accessing online technology.

Consumers like you are connecting through an ever-expanding array of devices and platforms. IDC found that 80% of consumers regularly access the Internet with a smartphone (just 10% less than via a laptop), generating over one fifth of online transactions. Another 36% access the Internet with a tablet, driving almost 10% of online transactions. Then there are other connected devices like set-top boxes, gaming consoles, smart TVs, VOIP devices, and more.

This is in addition the expanding list of connected business devices, like elevators, electricity meters, check-in desks, information kiosks, ATM/POS units, railway switches, traffic lights, environmental controls, medical devices, cash registers, cooking equipment, doorway sensors, and more.

You Are Making Business Adapt

Businesses (and governments) must adapt to accommodate this consumer-driven revolution in two ways:

They must adapt to how employees (like you) mix business and personal technology. IDC shows a majority of employees use laptops, PCs, smartphones, tablets, and cloud services for both personal and business use. This mix will be even more profound as ‘digital natives’ – who take this mix for granted – make up an increasing percentage of employees. You are also working differently, as part of a newly distributed, telecommuting, mobile, and collaborative workforce.

They must also adapt to how customers (like you) enable new business models based on mobility, relationships, personalization, etc. Consumerization of IT enables new ways of working with customers (and partners) individually and collectively, across political, geographical, and social boundaries, extending markets and supply chains. The opportunities are incredible, so businesses are increasingly adapting to take advantage of them.

So You Are Making IT Adapt

The changing business environment is driving a fundamental shift in IT.

As a user of social, mobile, cloud, and other consumer technologies, you expect new capabilities faster, but with a familiar experience; personal, but non-invasive; accessible and available, but non-intrusive; ‘always-on’, but not inescapable; secure, but not locked down; connected with thousands, but retaining your personality.

To accommodate this, IT must deliver new capabilities faster, without upsetting existing customers; remember preferences without invading privacy; provide broad data access, yet still ensure security, audit, and control; deliver applications and data at massive scale, but with a personal touch.

The IDC study identifies security, privacy, and confidentiality as top of mind concerns for IT in adapting to these demands, followed closely by issues like cross-platform experience, cloud service levels, and fitting capacity to demand. It also explains how consumerization is forcing new approaches to traditional IT disciplines like data protection, identity, continuity, virtualization, performance, capacity, integration, automation and more.

The ‘Top 8 Characteristics of Leaders’ in the research is particularly revealing, showing how a handful of leading organizations are embracing social, mobile, and cloud computing to improve agility, drive down costs, compete better, get to market faster, attract new customers, improve customer satisfaction, drive higher loyalty, improve brand awareness, penetrate new geographies and segments, and more.

Bottom line – it’s still about you

The research has too much detail to review in full here. I highly recommend you download the whole document – it is available on the CA website (PDF).

The bottom line is that you — as a individual, as a consumer, as an employee, as an IT professional — are responsible for a radical change affecting business, government, and IT. You are both driving this change as a consumer of social, mobile, and cloud applications; and being driven by this change as an IT professional adapting to these new customer behaviors.

While a minority of leading organizations already ‘get it’, there is still a massive latent opportunity to establish new game-changing technologies, drive disruptive innovations, build exponential revenues, and beat your competitors.

To take advantage of this opportunity, you need to plan for new business and technology approaches, design new systems and applications (and/or redesign legacy systems), deliver new capabilities to enable new business opportunities, and both assure and secure the customer experience in new ways.

We are all at the forefront of a unique historical event, a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ chance that we cannot allow to pass us by. We must embrace it, or we will be history too.

Great Journal, The Register.

I had the great pleasure of talking with The Register’s Nathan Coates about my experience in what applications makes are a good fit for private cloud deployments. Nathan actually ended up quoting me in his article, which is excellent reading!

“The key environments for private cloud we are seeing now tend to be project-based,” says Andi Mann, vice-president of virtualisation product marketing at CA Technologies. There’s plenty that fits into this category, of course, from engineering systems and one-off analytics jobs through test environments to web and collaboration services.

You can read all of Nathan’s article here – El Reg guide to the Private Cloud.