The 'new normal' makes cloud mandatory, not optional.

Today I was published in one of the top cloud computing journals. In fact, it is the Cloud Computing Journal, part of the SYS-CON stable and the same organization that runs the excellent Cloud Expo events. The article is called “Eleven Tips for Successful Cloud Computing Adoption“:

Key issues can make or break an organization’s strategic cloud adoption. The intersection of cloud computing with business strategy, Big Data, vendor lock-in, globalization, collaboration, security, licensing, virtualization, confidence, and the ‘new normal’ can act as huge points of concern. So I put down some thoughts on this, and ended up – in no particular order – with the following 11 tips for the successful adoption of cloud computing:

Please read the whole article at the Cloud Computing Journal.

—

So what do you reckon? Are these tips useful for you? What tips did I miss? I would love to see your comments at Cloud Computing Jounal, in my comments section below, or as always on Twitter.

Thanks to CRN for the chance to speak with you!

I was interviewed for a great article published today in CRN titled, “CA Putting Cloud Pieces Together”. In it, Jack McCarthy writes:

CA Technologies has turned heads in the last two years with acquisitions of a string of cloud-based companies, marking its intention to be a major cloud player and cloud partner. Now CA is leveraging those deals to step up as a full-fledged cloud services provider, offering products, services and partnerships to help business move to the cloud through a variety of software lifecycle management and automation services.

Some partners are impressed, but say it may take CA a while longer to fully integrate its cloud services plan.

But CA nonetheless is confident it’s on the right track. “The core of our strategy is to help customers use the cloud to build a public or private or hybrid cloud, whether using our services or providing their own services,” Andi Mann, CA’s vice president of Strategic Solutions, said in an interview Monday.

Please read the whole article online here.

You may as well look in a crystal ball!

Welcome to IT prediction season! Again, I am inspired to throw my exceedingly fallible hat into the ring with my predictions, specifically for virtualization and cloud. I seem to have had a decent run of predictions last year, but I claim more luck than credit. I still think predictions are a mug’s game, and continue to eschew both the importance and reliability of predictions.

That said, here are my predictions for 2012:

1. Brands May Come and Go – But No Technology Will Die

Not only are we not living in a ‘post-PC’ world, we are not even living in a ‘post-mainframe’ world! Cloud will not kill data centers, virtual will not kill physical, tablets will not kill PCs, Mac will not kill Windows, Android will not kill iOS, streaming will not kill DVDs. The technology pie is growing, our choices are expanding, and almost every slice is getting bigger. So be prepared to manage an ever-increasing selection of technologies across public and private boundaries.

2. Hybrid IT Will Be ‘The Next Big Thing’

‘Hybrid cloud’ was soooo 2011! In this new world of choices, business will expect hybrid IT: a combination of on-site and off-site; cloud and legacy; private and public; physical and virtual; social and secure; enterprise and consumer; desktop and server; mobile and static. Business will also expect IT to make them work together, whether IT owns the service or not. IT must act as a trusted advisor, as a service broker, and as quality assurance for this brave new world of complex Hybrid IT.

3. Service Quality Will Be IT’s Responsibility Again

As hybrid IT proliferates, business owners will (again) realize they do not want to manage technology; they just want it to work. In 2012, end users will increasingly expect IT to take responsibility for service quality, regardless of who is buying, selling, or delivering that service. IT will need to eliminate the blind spots in hybrid IT, actively support an explosion of devices, deal with complex cross-boundary services, and find a way to deliver a 360-degree service assurance across all facets of end-user experience.

4. Public Cloud Adoption Will Slow

Given the results of this year’s Longhaus research from Australia – an early adopter market and a bellwether for business technology – I suspect the rest of the world is in for a slowdown of public cloud adoption. Issues (perceived or real) with security, compliance, service quality, skills, staffing, complexity, and good old politics will all put the brakes on. Whether ‘cloud stall’ will be as pronounced as ‘virtual stall’ is unsure, but 2012 will see a marked slowdown in public cloud adoption.

5. Public Cloud ‘Gets’ Security

Sad but true – many (most?) enterprise decision-makers still do not trust public cloud. In 2012, IT must do a better job of deploying and explaining cloud security – and I believe we will! In 2012, CIOs will see security as less of a barrier to cloud adoption as organizations adopt more and better cloud-oriented security solutions – including solutions designed for complex hybrid cloud services, as well as solutions that are delivered through the cloud with easily-consumed Security SaaS options.

6. Big Iron is Back – Part I

No, mainframe is still not dead. On the contrary, 2012 will see the rise of the mainframe as a *gasp* cloud platform. Massively scalable, hosting critical (and underutilized) ‘big data’, capable of running complex cloud workloads on a variety of architectures (z/OS, Linux, UNIX, Windows), mainframe is really an obvious cloud platform. It will not replace commodity clouds, but large enterprises and governments especially will leverage their investments and bring big iron into their cloud mix.

7. Cloud Gets Heterogeneous

Not only will mainframe become part of the cloud landscape, but public cloud providers will also start to offer UNIX and maybe even other non-x86 platforms. I have recently seen this in action (CA did it internally years ago), and most large enterprises are heavily dependent on heterogeneous systems for their mission-critical applications. Despite the common myth that cloud == commodity servers, heterogeneous servers will start to become more available for large enterprise deployments.

8. Big Iron is Back – Part II

Big iron concepts of integrated compute, network, and storage are resurgent – but this is not your grandpa’s mainframe. Deployment of integrated fabrics like Cisco UCS and VCE Vblock will accelerate rapidly in 2012 as IT changes the way it thinks about integrated infrastructure for virtualization and cloud – and realizes how amazing these integrated boxes are for diverse, dynamic, high-volume workloads like desktop virtualization, pop-up data centers, and cloudbursting.

 9. ‘Grown-up’ Cloud Service Management Comes To The Forefront

In 2011, the NIST Cloud Reference Architecture devoted a whole section to ‘Cloud Service Management’, and IT started to talk about ‘grown-up’ disciplines – planning, budgeting, performance, asset, inventory, service levels, audit, etc. In 2012, even ‘commodity’ cloud vendors will finally take cloud management seriously, as enterprises and governments demand these disciplines – and smaller providers differentiate on service and security, not just price.

10. Virtualization Management Becomes Irrelevant

In January 2009 I predicted, “in 3-5 years … niche [Virtual System Management] vendors will no longer survive, as virtualization becomes a core part of the enterprise compute fabric.” Three years later this trend has definitely started, and will accelerate in 2012 as IT turns instead to hybrid IT management, recognizing that silos of standalone virtualization management is a costly and inefficient burden. Maybe 2012 is not the end of Virtualization Management, but it is going to be the start of the demise.

—

So that is my punt on 2012. I have no idea whether they will come true, but they seem to make sense to me. Again, if you are reading this in December 2012, please feel free to e-mail me and let me know how I went. I won’t be surprised either way.

[this post was originally published at VMblog.com]

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.

—

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.

Education labs and classrooms are excellent use cases for private cloud

Not surprisingly, since the release of my new book, Visible Ops – Private Cloud, I have been talking with a lot of people about how to deploy private cloud, where to start, what to avoid, etc. So far, the most common question has been, “What type of existing workloads are organizations putting into private cloud environments today – and what are they avoiding?”

So I thought I would jot down some of my answers, specifically related to ‘cloud-migrant’ services, as opposed to ‘cloud-native’ services – and without getting too hung up on whether the use cases are 100% cloud or not!

One recurrent use case is to provide dynamic desktop allocation, especially for education and projects use cases. A number of schools, universities, training centers, and even some larger enterprises, have adopted private cloud to allocate servers, clients, applications and data for reusable desktop systems.

This seems especially prevalent for short-term learning facilities, repeatable one-off classroom systems, training/demo labs at conventions (or user groups), and contractor setup. It is also similar to the executive briefing centers and ‘demos on demand’ that many software sales organizations (like CA Technologies) use.

Another service-based use case I have seen in several universities is self-service access for students and faculty, using pooled resources, not only for application services but also for full VDI desktop allocation.

I have seen this in other enterprises too – most notably for home-source process workers (e.g. call center, data entry) – but mostly as a proof-of-concept, not a large-scale production deployment.

However, most cloud-migrant workloads I see deployed to private clouds today still tend to be server-based. Most of these are at ‘Phase 1′ in the Visible Ops Private Cloud – a reorientation of virtualization deployments to pilot a private cloud that works, proving results, gaining skills, and hopefully measuring opportunities. It is still focused on servers, not services, but provides a vital part of the learning curve toward private cloud.

For example:

• Dev/test/QA servers – 3-tier LAMP stacks (app/Db/WS), but also LAMP components, IDEs, source code management tools, etc. (which often results in applications that run on a private cloud in production)
• Collaboration servers – especially SharePoint, but also Web-based collaboration services like team chat servers, content repositories, blogs, wikis, and project management tools
• Engineering servers – I have seen a number of engineering firms move their design project systems (especially CAD tools) into private clouds so engineers can fire up new design projects on-demand
• Web servers – popular for marketing teams who can fire up their own Web servers, especially for short-term and/or localized promotions & campaigns
• Analytics servers – short-term number crunching of ‘big data’ (including BI applications) in medical research, social marketing, pharmaceutical research, higher education, financial, logistics, etc

The workloads that are less suited to private cloud deployment are harder to identify, because it requires positive evidence of absence, so my thoughts here are much more anecdotal. I do see CIOs push back on migrating ‘core’ applications, even to private clouds, citing lack of confidence, performance concerns, potential security and compliance issues, and lack of ROI. I would not agree these are always good reasons, but they can be, and are certainly understandable.

In my opinion, private cloud is not ideally suited to relatively large, static, predictable, and resource-saturating workloads – think ERP or Data Warehouse. After all, used internally such applications are almost never deployed ‘on demand’; they are rarely if ever ‘multi-tenant’; they have no real benefit from an ‘infinitely scalable’ infrastructure; and are mostly viewed as a cost of doing business, without any ‘resource measurement’ or chargeback.

(btw, there are certainly good arguments to deploy these applications on a public cloud, as ‘cloud-native’ services using SaaS, to outsource them to a non-cloud third-party, or to just virtualize them – even with 1:1 virtualization – without the other trappings of cloud. Such alternatives could deliver better cost savings, higher up-time, faster DR, and other benefits. However, I think the upside of putting such applications in a private cloud is less apparent.)

That said, I do think that we will see more and more strategic services – as opposed to project servers – deployed in both private and public cloud as it matures. In fact, recent IDC data suggests CIOs that are adopting private cloud will migrate many core applications in the coming years. Moreover, some of the more advanced customers I talk with are already doing this, although they are by far in the minority.

Either way, I will be very interested to see how this all pans out.

What do you think? What have I missed? What types of workloads do you see being deployed in a private cloud? What are CIOs passing over in their evaluations? Are they right, or wrong? What criteria should they use?

Please feel free to continue the discussion in the comments below, or hit me up on Twitter with your ideas.

This post was originally published on the CA Communities website.

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!

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!

What do you see - a cloud of crisis or a cloud of opportunity?

I saw an interesting post at Forbes.com last week titled ‘The Coming Crisis of IT Management,’ lamenting that “consumerization, virtualization, cloud computing, software as a service, mobility [sic] are all increasing the complexity of the job of managing IT by orders of magnitude.”

I certainly cannot disagree with that. I have written about these topics extensively, most recently tackling the impact of consumerization of IT.

By looking at the problem through the lens of the (perhaps less than) average CIO — the follower, the ‘lights-on’ manager, the order taker – Forbes.com contributor Dan Woods is painting doom and gloom instead of highlighting the potential for the innovative CIO to embrace and extend these trends to drive business advantage.

To me, this is missing the real story — that these changes are more opportunity than challenge.

Consumerization of IT

“End-users and departments are choosing their own devices, selecting and using Software as a Service applications and other cloud resources, and generally doing end-arounds [sic] to bypass the IT function whenever they feel like it.”

CA-sponsored research from IDC has shown this is true, yet it also shows how the innovative CIO uses this to their advantage. Embracing consumerization drives measurable benefits in customer attraction and retention, agility, cost, competitive advantage, satisfaction, loyalty, brand awareness, and more.

Software as a Service

“End-users just sign up for SaaS applications and starting using them without consulting IT. This leaves unaddressed the issues of security, reliability, compliance, and integration.”

Far from cringing at this, the innovative CIO will embrace and leverage so-called ‘rogue cloud.’ The rogue cloud exists for a reason, and the innovative CIO will leverage the learnings from rogue cloud to deliver what their users need (which IT had not been giving them before – and why they went around IT in the first place), faster and at lower costs, while still ensuring security, reliability, compliance, and integration.

Supporting Mobile Workers

“Which applications should be supported on mobile devices? How much of each application should be available? When does it make sense to craft custom mobile solutions? How can consumer apps become part of the picture? What is ROI for mobility? How much should be invested. [sic]“

Again the innovative CIO can embrace and leverage mobile to make their business more agile, flexible, and (obviously) mobile, so users can do business wherever their clients are, quickly, easily and profitably. As noted in the Forbes.com post, it is not necessarily easy, but solutions exist that can be applied today – so there is no excuse to hide behind fear and FUD instead of embracing the opportunity of mobile.

Virtualization and Cloud

“Virtualization and the cloud had [sic] caused an explosion in the number of assets that are being created. For the most part most data centers are operating in the pre-virtual world.”

For years I have dealt with the topic of how virtualization adds complexity (PDF). With most enterprises committed to hybrid models, cloud will also add to (rather than replace) existing complexity. I’ve also blogged about virtual stall for a long time. However, I have also spoken (as have other experts (PDF)) about how an innovative CIO can solve these issues, embrace virtualization and cloud, and deliver significant business benefits from truly agile, flexible, and dynamic IT.

Focus on Business Brings Management and Security to the Forefront

Forbes is certainly not wrong in its analysis. CIOs are facing an increased pace of change; they are losing control.

However, this is an opportunity for the innovative CIO to embrace change, allow complexity, give users more control, and move away from being the “Office of the C-I-No,” away from being a tactical cost center, and toward being the strategic asset that their business needs.

This means understanding the fundamental importance of management and security. Cloud computing and its many drivers — including social, mobile, virtualization, SaaS, and more — put management and security at the forefront, as they allow the innovative CIO to adopt, embrace, and extend these technologies, to drive incredible business benefits.

Without management and security at the forefront of planning, designing, and delivering services, IT may indeed be lost in “a state of worry” that will “keep CEOs up at night.”

However, with management and security at the forefront, the innovative CIO can rest easy, knowing they are delivering what their business needs.

They can move ahead of the curve, use public and private cloud with confidence, provide reliable and agile IT internally, and help their business to transform to take advantage of these new capabilities.

And as they “stop focusing on technology and start understanding the business they serve,” this will allow them to win new business, beat their competitors, keep their costs down, and delight their customers as IT becomes the strategic asset the business needs it to be.

ARN

Hafizah Osman from ARN was on hand for my Virtualisation and Cloud plenary session at the CA World Expo in Australia, and gave it a great write-up:

.

One of the problems that arises during virtualisation is virtual stall as management tipping points emerge between the different stages, according to CA Technologies vice-president of strategic solutions, Andi Mann.

“About 65 to 70 per cent of servers in Australia have been virtualised but it’s not just about the numbers. It’s about what you are doing with them – how well are you moving along this maturity curve,” Mann told delegates at CA World Expo 2011 in Sydney.

Read the whole article here – About 70 per cent of local servers have been virtualised but it’s not about the numbers.

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.