2012 : Happy New Year

Impact of Cloud on IT

I chanced upon a recent report on ‘Impact of Cloud on IT’ from Freeform Dynamics. Here are few highlights.

• Cloud is complementary to existing IT infrastructure and service delivery concepts
  • Few are contemplating a wholesale move into the Cloud, with the result that when Cloud is adopted it needs to integrate and interoperate with the existing IT infrastructure.
• External Cloud services will co-exist with existing third party services in the market
  • Traditional hosting and managed services providers are already starting to work Cloud options into their service portfolios, and the market will increasingly be defined by players who adopt an inclusive approach.
• Cloud will change the skills required to deliver IT services
  • From an IT skills perspective, this increases the demand for IT professionals that are comfortable working across traditional operational silos and domains of expertise.
• Cloud may make life easier in some areas, but also creates challenges elsewhere
  • Improvements in provisioning and operating services are countered by the challenges of implementing security and information management across in-house and (often multiple) service provider environments, and making sure the network communications are up to the task.
• Without integration, Cloud is more plug-and-pray than plug-and-play
  • Once Cloud becomes a core part of the business then architectural challenges arise that need time, planning and investment to solve. This negates the “easy on ramp” advantage claimed for Cloud over traditional IT applications and services, and essentially places Cloud on a level footing with the rest of IT.

http://www.freeformdynamics.com/

Cloud vs Enterprise IT : Competition View

Few days back I blogged about a trend where Cloud is posing an entirely different kind of challenge for Enterprise IT, which is Competition .

Cloud and Enterprise IT : Partners or Competitors

I posted the same thought on Forrester community forum and here are few thoughts from there :

“The trend you are seeing may be related to the fact that IT may already have established outsourcing relationships with consultancies that do not have cloud capability. In this scenario, it is more efficient if the business does an end run around IT to avoid previously sane SLAs but now seem archaic.”

“I've certainly spoken with some firms that regard cloud service providers as competitors to their established way of doing things. In fact, at least a few want to stay away from a "pay by the drink" chargeback model because it put them in direct competition with various infrastructure as a service alternatives.”

“I think this thinking has been going on long before cloud came along, it's just another in a line of approaches that have potential for reducing the headcount in a corporate IT department.  In my opinion, any enterprise IT department that is seeing IaaS or PaaS providers as competition wasn't a partner with the rest of the business to begin with.”

You can read complete set of thoughts here http://community.forrester.com/thread/5875?

So what are your thoughts on this ?

Consumerization of IT : CITE conference and expo

Few days back I blogged about it CIO vs Millennials : Blurring Corporate IT firewalls

Key Topics on the CITE agenda include:

• Cost-effective, business-smart mobile application strategies
• Mobile device procurement, management and policies
• The latest strategies and policies for Bring Your Own Technology to work
• Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
• Cloud services and governance
• Where unified communications with video offers business benefits
• User interface/gamification
• Data Access and integration
• Organizational, skill and role shift
• Managing service providers, contracts and SLAs

http://www.citeconference.com

Free eBook : Claims based Identity and Access Control

Here is an interesting free eBook released by Microsoft’s patterns & practices team which covers the topic of claims based identity in detail.

With ever increasing mobility scenarios and focus on user experience, the need for SSO also increases.

It starts with discussing basics of Claims based identity and moves to Claims based architectures.

It also discuss the topic around various Microsoft technologies and mainly around cloud and Windows Azure.

Following industry standards are also discussed :

• Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)
• Security Association Management Protocol (SAMP)
  and Internet Security Association
  and Key Management Protocol (ISAKMP)
• WS-Federation
• WS-Federation: Passive Requestor Profile
• WS-Security
• WS-SecureConversation
• WS-Trust

Download the eBook

CSC Cloud Usage Survey Report

Here are the highlights from recent CSC Cloud Usage Index:

• Cloud-Adoption Drivers: Connecting Employees Through Multiple Devices
• Accelerated Results: Upgrading IT Performance
• Cost Savings: Reducing IT Costs — Modestly
• Workforce Strategies: Preparing Employees for the Cloud
• Another workforce finding is that few organizations downsize IT after cloud adoption. In fact, only 14 percent of companies downsize their IT departments after adopting cloud while 20 percent of organizations hire more cloud experts. 
• Emerging Areas: Tracking Sustainability, Government Clouds
• Future Outlook: Committing to Cloud for the Long Term

Full Report

CIO vs Millennials : Blurring Corporate IT firewalls

I was going through Accenture’s research report on Millennials and the challenges they are bringing to CIOs. Its an interesting research which highlights some challenges which can be considered as one of the drivers for cloud adoption and mobility. Overall the trend it shows is called Consumerization of IT (CoIT).

Most of the new workforce entering corporate firewall belongs to Millennials generations and CIOs belong to one prior to that. Clearly, there is a generation gap. CIOs have mandate to protect the enterprise data and comply to regulatory and audit requirements while workforce wants following:

• While entering into workplace, they do want to feel as if they are entering a prison and still want full view to outside world. They want technology at workplace which is latest and unrestricted.
• While leaving workplace, they want to take it with them. They want flexibility to work from anywhere using any device.

Here are some interesting infographics from the report:

They feel technology is must to perform at workplace.

Here is the shocker .. technology available plays an important role in selection of employer.

CIOs must be prepared for all of this. While the above points highlight only internal challenges, soon similar kind of expectation will start coming from customer, partners, etc as they are also overtaken by Millennials.

Next is Strategies for Embracing Consumerization.

The Outlook for Energy – A view to 2040

Apart from discussing topics related to Enterprise Architecture, Industry specific outlooks and architecture is also something which every CIO or EA should be aware of.

ExxonMobil has recently released their outlook on Energy – a view to 2040. Here are some interesting details:

• Global energy demand will be about 30 percent higher in 2040 compared to 2010.
• In the countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – including countries in North America and Europe – we see energy use remaining essentially flat, even as these countries achieve economic growth and even higher living standards.
• The need for energy to make electricity will remain the single biggest driver of demand. By 2040, electricity generation will account for more than 40 percent of global energy consumption.
• Oil, gas and coal continue to be the most widely used fuels, and have the scale needed to meet global demand, making up about 80 percent of total energy consumption in 2040.
• Gains in efficiency through energy-saving practices and technologies – such as hybrid vehicles and new, high efficiency natural gas power plants – will temper demand growth and curb emissions.
• Global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will grow slowly, then level off around 2030.
• Read full report : http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/energy_outlook.aspx
• Read IEA (International Energy Agency) Energy Outlook here : http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/

Learn Windows Azure - Free, Live Online event

On Tuesday December 13th Microsoft will be holding a special Windows Azure event for developers. Join us LIVE from the Microsoft Redmond Campus to learn how to get started building applications for the cloud from Microsoft technical leaders Scott Guthrie, Dave Campbell, and Mark Russinovich. All of the sessions will be broadcast live thanks to your friends from Channel9.

The Learn Windows Azure Event will be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST on Tuesday December 13th. Add this time to your calendar and come back to Channel9 on December 13^th to watch the live stream. We also have a limited number of seats available for the in-person studio audience. Register now if you would like to reserve a seat to attend the Learn Windows Azure event for free at the Microsoft Redmond Campus.

Open Group Conference, San Francisco

Gain the tools and knowledge you need to introduce meaningful Enterprise Transformation....

The Open Group Conference in San Francisco will focus on the role played by IT and EA within Enterprise Transformation. Through practical learning opportunities based on real-life experiences and case studies, attendees at the Conference will have the opportunity to gain a valuable insight into:

• The differences between EA and Enterprise Transformation, and how they relate to one another
• The use of EA to facilitate Enterprise Transformation
• How EA can be used to create a foundation for Enterprise Transformation that the board and business-line managers can understand and use to their advantage
• How EA facilitates transformation within IT, and how does such transformation support the transformation of the enterprise as whole
• How EA can help the enterprise successfully adapt to ‘disruptive technologies’ like Cloud Computing and ubiquitous mobile access.

These and other questions about Enterprise Transformation will be answered at The Open Group Conference in San Francisco.

http://www3.opengroup.org/sanfrancisco2012

Is Enterprise Architecture losing interest ?

Google Trends is an interesting tool to measure general interest in any topic based on the number of search queries made for that topic. So, today I decided to try for ‘Enterprise Architecture’ and was surprised seeing the results.

The interest in Enterprise Architecture as a topic has been constantly decreasing over a period of last few years based on queries submitted. Though the news published related to EA has increased.

So what this signifies ?

To understand the above trend I tried correlating it with Gartner’s Hype Cycle on EA and things were much clearer.

Yes, EA as topic has moved from Peak of Inflated Expectations to Trough of Disillusionment. People know that it is not a magic wand and requires lot of hard work to get value out of it. It is important and so it is getting institutionalized instead of just being a buzzword. I am sure from here we will only see rising interest in it in coming years.

Is Cloud ready to hold your money ?

Here are few excerpts from web which shows how Financial Industry is approaching the Cloud computing. It includes Financial Institutions, Cloud Providers & Banking software providers.

Financial Institutions

“Boston branch of the Wall Street Technology Association remain wary of public cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon's EC2, but some have started building out the private cloud.”

“It's understood in Boston financial circles that State Street Bank was ahead of the curve in adopting virtualization and was about 72% virtualized by the time the topic of cloud computing became popular two years ago. State Street now operates seven racks of virtualized servers as its private cloud, with users able to provision servers for themselves.”

“startups are skipping the data center investment .. directly going to cloud”

“Robert Hegarty, global head of market structure-enterprise for Thomson Reuters, said the biggest challenge for IT staffs in financial services is the changing regulatory climate”

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/articles/231902472?printer_friendly=this-page

Cloud Providers

“Data intensive processing is a common early uses case for financial services customers, including risk analysis, algorithm and model testing and financial simulations. Web and mobile applications and storage and content distribution are also common use cases.”

“Security is top of mind for many customers”

http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/231901838

Banking Software Provider

“PaaS is where the future and true value in cloud lies for the financial services industry. PaaS is about the use of intelligent software infrastructure and programming capabilities to enable the convergence of applications, structured and unstructured data, dynamic processing power, and connectivity with intelligent devices.”

http://www.temenos.com/temenos-online/Function/Technology/Moving-To-The-Cloud/

Online Workshop on Enterprise Architecture

EACOE is conducting Enterprise Architect Certification workshops which includes distance learning workshop too.

Catch all the details here : http://eacoe.org/workshop_outline.shtml

Architecture Description confirming to ISO Standard

This is the third post of the series discussing the recently released ISO standard for Architecture Description.

Post 1 : Understanding ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011 : Standard for Architecture description

Post 2 : Communicating Architecture : Key Terms of 42010

While the standard defines various elements of Architecture Description and their relationships, it also specifies requirements which should be complied with for conformance.

The Standard defines four cases of conformance:

1. architecture description (AD)
2. architecture framework
3. architecture description language (ADL)
4. architecture viewpoint

Here are the primary requirements for each component:

Architecture Description (AD)

1. AD Identification & Overview
2. Identify stakeholders and their concerns
3. Include Viewpoints addressing those concerns
4. Create views satisfying those viewpoints
5. Connect views with conformance
6. Putting down decisions and rationale behind them

Architecture Viewpoint

1. Identification of stakeholders and their concerns
2. Model kinds used
3. Details for model kinds like languages, notations, modelling techniques, etc.
4. references to its sources

Architecture Description Language

1. Identification of stakeholders and their concerns
2. Model kinds implemented
3. Viewpoints & correspondence rules related to above model kinds

Architecture Framework

1. Identification of stakeholders and their concerns
2. Architecture viewpoints that frame those concerns
3. Correspondence rules integrating those viewpoints