Cloud computing aims to bring new flexibility to enterprise IT: the idea of virtualizing computing resources removing them from physical hardware opens up many possibilities, not just in terms of cost cutting, but also in security and availability.

Security, availability, and integrity are all essential for enterprise IT and cloud computing promises to help businesses have access to data and applications at all times. Instead of thinking about business continuity in terms of disaster recovery, where the focus in on how quickly enterprises can restore operations, cloud computing could make the traditional concept of backups and recovery obsolete. Instead, the idea of totally-resilient operations becomes much more feasible, in which cloud-based resources are constantly replicated between sites to protect applications and data in the event of a physical incident.

“We used to focus on internal data centre redundancy. Now we’re seeing it as remote redundancy. So this idea of instantaneous remote backup is gaining traction,” explains Al Berman, executive director at DRI International, which trains professionals in business continuity. “I just came back from a meeting at the White House, and all they wanted to talk about was cloud computing and why no-one was talking about it. I said, ‘in the private sector, we’re not talking about it – we’re just doing it’.”

Mitigating risks

However, while enterprises embrace cloud computing’s ability to protect business operations, they should not enter into cloud computing relationships without first assessing and mitigating risks. Enterprises need to assess the security issues associated with virtualizing one’s data so that it becomes independent of a physical computing platform. Where is the data is to be kept? Who will have access to it? What access controls are in place to prevent the wrong people seeing it? And what technical measures are in place to prevent it being misappropriated?

“Cloud computing can be risky, which is why we are seeing the emergence of trusted intermediaries,” explains Alexandre Rigaldo, cloud computing program director at Orange Business Services. He identifies several broad risks that customers should consider when engaging in cloud computing relationships. “We are talking about a shared infrastructure, so that we have data from different people shared on the same physical machines. Also, you don’t know where your data is located, and this can be an issue in specific sectors.”

This emphasis on location stretches beyond where the data is stored into the area of accreditation. Certifications used by cloud computing providers may differ between one region and another, and what is acceptable from a regulatory perspective in one region may not be acceptable in another, he warns.

Finally, the data may be at risk if the communication mechanisms used to get it into the cloud and out again are not secure. Using the public Internet to communicate that data without encrypting it, for example, could incur regulatory risk.

“To mitigate this risk is not rocket science. The goal is to apply some basic IT security principles, and not believe in Santa Claus,” Rigaldo says. “Cloud computing doesn’t solve all of your issues. You have to be as careful when you buy cloud computing services as with traditional IT.”

One crucial step is to look at the life cycle of your information, says Rigaldo. Defining the sensitivity of specific types of data, based on the business processes that it serves, and the legal liability that it incurs, is vital when it comes to understanding how to deal with it.

Different approaches to the cloud

How an enterprise tackles these tasks will depend partly on the type of cloud computing model it is employing. Cloud computing models can be split in different ways. For example, platform as a service differs from software as a service, which is in turn a separate proposition to infrastructure as a service. All of these carry different risks in varying proportions.

It is also possible to slice the model along organizational lines. Some may prefer private clouds, where individual companies host their own data, while others may prefer a publicly available cloud service in which everything is hosted by a third party and runs from a shared platform. Alternatively, it’s possible to combine the two with a hybrid model that allows enterprises to retain some control, while still taking advantage of the economies of scale of the shared platform. All of these choices will have a bearing on the risk analysis process.

With such a bewildering array of options, how can an enterprise begin to make sense of it all?

Different organizations have published their approaches to securing cloud computing. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) recently published an information assurance framework as part of a broader report entitled “Cloud Computing: benefits, risks, and recommendations for information Security”. This framework is designed to help customers understand which questions to ask potential cloud suppliers.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) also published its “Security Guidance For Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing” in December, which discusses different cloud architectures and assesses how each of them can be best managed in the context of information lifecycle management, data portability, and application security. Governance featured heavily in the document, which laid out each party’s roles and responsibilities in areas such as lawfulness of content and incident response.

As enterprise IT moves firmly in the direction of a more virtualized world, in which logical resources are shunted between sites for maximum efficiency, guidelines such as these will be vital for enterprises looking to tackle the process of due diligence with service providers, or attempting to automate cloud processes within their own, private networks. In spite of the name, cloud computing should be about transparency and enterprises need to stress accountability and openness in all of their service relationships.

This article first appeared in the email newsletter we help produce for Orange Business Services called Enterprise Briefing: http://www.orange-business.com/en/mnc2/footer/news/enterprise_briefing/feb2010/technology.jsp

Little nugget I stumbled upon: 90% of the world’s population is now covered with a mobile network. And the airwaves are being sopped up – back in February, a report stated that two-thirds of the world’s population were mobile subscribers.

So that leaves roughly one-third of the world (about 2.2 billion) without a mobile phone. Two thirds of the unconnected live within a mobile network coverage – so they could be a long tail for the mobile communications industry?

It’s hardly likely. According to the World Bank, 1.3 billion people lived on under $1.25 a day in 2005. We’ve had global economic growth since then…and massive economic meltdown so the likelihood is that billions are still too poor to download a $1 iphone app, let alone purchase a $30 handset. Countless more people live within the next band of under $2 a day.

Whether super poor, that probably lack adequate nutrition, sanitation, healthcare and property, will ever be an attractive market to service providers, remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: those that do get access to mobile communications have a much better chance of improving their health and wealth than those without, as this recent Ericsson research of the impact of mobile communications in the Millennium Villages illustrates.

The world’s leaders met in New York at the Millennium Goals Summit this week to discuss poverty reduction. Top of the agenda was the role that broadband (fixed or mobile) plays.  The Broadband Commission report posits a universal access programme with advice for how governments can implement it. As always with these things,  the public sector must create the demand first and then the private sector will come up with supply. In my view, governments do not have deep enough pockets to be able to fund this through to critical mass – but what they can do is focus on deregulation and licensing.

The cost of new fixed and mobile telecoms infrastructured is amortised over many years, which means service providers need a stable regulatory environment. They need to know which technology they can invest in, what competition they will face, the tax regime and that licenses cannot be revoked by warring political parties. Getting the balance right is extremely tough and way beyond my ken. If you want to dig a little deeper into it, try Impact of taxation on the development of mobile broadband by Telecom Advisory Services for the GSMA.

And even if the networks get built, and services rolled out, will the poor be able to afford them? According to current broadband costs, its likely that the poorest will be punished most, as my colleague Ant highlighted in a recent post on the disparity in broadband subscription costs in poor and wealthy countries. So prices will need to be regulated….just not too much.

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Google made a move recently that redefines the company as a provider of voice telephony services. It enabled users of its Gmail online email service to call telephones directly from within their email inbox.

Gmail already featured PC-to-PC calling thanks to the integration of voice and video chat into the service, but this is the first time that the service has integrated calls to telephone numbers. Moreover, it has even made calls anywhere within the US and Canada free for at least the rest of the year, and calls to other countries are available to users at low rates.

This is more of a significant breakthrough than people may have at first realised. There have been various types of player in the world of IP telephony. Vendors of traditional PBX equipment have worked hard to integrate their old legacy devices with new, IP-based telephony equipment. Other companies, which come from an open computing background, have produced their own IP-based telephony ecosystems from the ground up, usually incorporating unified messaging elements that enable them to serve a whole range of customer communications needs. These companies are finding it relatively easy to expand their services into online video communication, as well.

But the Googles and the Skypes (which now has tens of millions of downloads on smartphones) represent yet another generation of IP telephony players, that could radically change the business communications landscape. These players require no hardware, aside from the PC or smartphone that a person is using, an Internet connection, and – optionally – a good audio headset. Google has such command over its users’ information, and publicly accessible data in general, that it can create exciting new communications experiences. Being able to call a business contact directly from email can make business users incredibly productive, encouraging them to get tasks done quickly and efficiently as soon as they arise.

It is easy to see how this telephony capability could be integrated into other services, such as Google Maps and even Google Docs, for example. As soon as this makes it into the mobile space, and users find themselves able to call email contact directly from their phone via 3G data, a whole new world will open up.

We are shifting from an environment in which hardware-centric vendors embrace IP telephony, to one in which software and online services vendors lead the charge, with hardware as little more than an afterthought. No wonder, then, that users placed more than 1 million calls from their Gmail screens in the first 24 hours of launch.

How soon this works its way up from a consumer-focused solution to something more appropriate for business users remains to be seen, but Google has committed to roll this out to Google Apps users soon, many of whom are small business users. Could this be the start of something significant for the enterprise, as larger companies begin to embrace cloud-based services?

In a weird echo from Friday’s post, Point-Topic has confirmed that there are now half a billion fixed broadband lines worldwide. Not that this is any surprise – this landmark has been expected for some time now, and in any case, the exact figure that Point-Topic has from the end of June 2010 is 498 million. It extrapolates that with 1 million new lines a week, this point will have been hit in the third week of July.

What is noteworthy though is the speed that these lines have been added. At the end of the last century, there were only 1.3 million broadband lines around. Most of these were in North America and much of the rest of the world had to make do with modems and ISDN if they were lucky. Remind yourselves of the joys of modem technology with this little trip down memory lane!

Just over 10 years later, the total figure is now north of 500 million. The market spark was really provided by the commercialisation of DSL technology which helped operators use their existing infrastructure – even if many appeared reluctant at the time! China is now the biggest market for broadband and fiber is also starting to make some serious inroads. In fact here at Futurity Towers we have recently had fibre installed and are pretty impressed so far.

So to go back to Friday’s post. To get the next half-a-billion subscribers, we are really going to see prices reduced in emerging markets, so that they can also enjoy the undoubted benefits that broadband brings.

Although shocking, it’s not surprising that a recent study from Ovum has shown that broadband costs in emerging markets remain punishingly high. For example in Nigeria broadband costs were around $2,000 per year, compared to an average per-capita GDP rate of just over $1,000. South Africa had the highest broadband costs of Ovum’s sample, with the annual costs of some services clocking in at a staggering $5,000 per year – and its average GDP per capita is under $6000. According to Ovum – this is three times as high as the rest of the world. Compare this to the UK, where my home broadband costs less than $400 per year.

This cost disparity needs to be addressed, and hopefully will be a topic covered in this week’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development meeting in New York. They are producing a report, which will be available shortly – I’ll report back when I’ve read it.

An interesting article in the latest McKinsey Quarterly has identified 10 technology-enabled business trends that it says is reshaping enterprises worldwide. Many of the trends are close to our heart at Orange Business Live! and the article follows on from a similar piece from McKinsey written two-and-a-half years ago. The 10 technology trends it has identified are:

• Distributed co-creation moves into the mainstream: using the web to bring communities of interest together and collaborate for product development, marketing or customer support. This trend has grown out of the success of initiatives such as Open Source software development andWikipedia;

• Making the network the organization: opening the borders of the enterprise or functional groups to enable wider collaboration towards common goals. Other networks include online labor markets such as Mechanical Turk or advertising contest services such asZoopa;

• Collaboration at scale: the increasing importance of collaboration technology and tools to help knowledge workers increase their efficiency and boost overall “organizational capital”;

• The growing ‘Internet of Things’: we cover this topic regularly in the blog – most recently in an interview with Geoffrey Zbinden from Orange. It is where objects are equipped with sensors and communication capability and can make processes more efficient or create new business models;

• Experimentation and big data: with the amount of data captured and processed by enterprises ever increasing there is a potential to glean business intelligence and redesign business processes on the fly or keep on top of rapidly changing market trends;

• Wiring for a sustainable world: this trend refers to the continuing importance of green IT and the push towards IT for green, which has been extensively covered by Orange blogger Axel Haentjens, for example here;

• Imagining anything as a service: there’s little doubt that cloud computing is a major trend in enterprise computing and software as a service and infrastructure as a service have entered the general lexicon. Network service providers have been tipped as future leaders here by analysts Ovum as I wrote last week in the blog;

• The age of the multisided business model: this refers to new business models that don’t fit into the neat B2B or B2C categories, such as the “freemium” model, where some customers get free services supported by those who pay a premium for special use – Flickr is an example of this;

• Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid: the increasing importance of innovation in developing markets, such as rural Africa, where mobile banking is taking hold in a big way. Again covered in Live!;

• Producing public good on the grid: the final trend is the role of technology in imporving public service, such as e-Government or even initiative such as FixMyStreet.com, where citizens can report problems such as flytipping.

This article first appeared in Orange Business Live! http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2010/09/mckinsey-indentifies-collaboration-internet-of-things-and-cloud-as-key-business-technology-trends.html