The commoditization of technology has reached its pinnacle with the advent of the recent paradigm of Cloud Computing. Infosys Cloud Computing blog is a platform to exchange thoughts, ideas and opinions with Infosys experts on Cloud Computing

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May 26, 2009

How enterprises have benefited from the cloud ?

It was an interesting question by one of our Manufacturing clients, when we were discussing an opportunity to leverage Microsoft Azure .Net Service Bus for their innovative SaaS product offering.  The intent of the question was loud & clear from the tone backed-up by the data-points from recently published, highly debated McKinsey report – Clearing the Air on the Cloud – where the cost effectiveness of cloud for large enterprises was questioned.

We presented a bunch of case-studies to our client - some executed by Infosys and some publicly available on internet. As a most trusted transformation partner & technology advisor, we shared our viewpoints on each-one-of-them.

We also presented the counter argument from Booz Allen Hamilton on the referred McKinsey report. It helped turn the table – we were able to shape the discussion in the comfort zone to every stakeholder on the call – you know how difficult this is in short meetings!

NASDAQ

We constructively debated with our client about using cloud storage, the pros & cons and enterprise concerns on data security and ownership. The client was finding this case-study most innovative, we had interesting technology oriented and pricing model related discussion on it.

Eli Lilly

We presented to our client our viewpoint on how Eli Lilly was able to accelerate deployment time multi-fold using on-demand infrastructure provisioning without any large CAPEX investments.

We had an interesting exchange of ideas around the concepts of virtualization and cloud computing in context of this case study to see which one is most cost effective in client’s IT infrastructure (datacenter) environment.

GlaxoSmithKline

With this context, we presented our viewpoint on Lean IT Transformation for realizing IT cost savings leveraging cloud computing. The client was instantaneous to react to this one – “Yes; we know about it, it is on the roadmap”.

Federal Agencies

  • We also talked about latest buzz by the Obama’s TIGR (Technology, Innovation and Government Reform) team on cloud computing as a catalyst to reduce cost on YouTube - Inside the Transition: Technology, Innovation and Government.
  • We highlighted the availability of Federally Compliant Trusted Cloud Computing offering by ServerValut and Apptis as FedCloud to various Federal Agencies for IT compliance.
  • We also shared a case-study for Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) where Federal Agencies are using Azure to store publicly available data. The developers, ISVs or enterprises can use APIs to consume these data and build mash-up for better citizen services, improve collaboration & networking.

We were able to answer many of security and privacy related questions by presenting the FedCloud and OGDI case-study, we acknowledged the current perceptions and limitations w.r.t security on the cloud. We also highlighted data ownership, penalty on SLA, cloud interoperability and cloud service provider lock-in related issues.

Microsoft & Amazon Case Study Depot

We also presented few more selective case-studies from Amazon and Microsoft to showcase the applicability of cloud computing technology, related solutions & services in different business scenarios. At broad level we briefly covered the business scenarios where cloud computing can be used for hosting, storage, content delivery and commerce:

  • Infrastructure as a Service
  • Platform as a Service
  • Software as a Service
  • Storage as a Service
  • Datacenter as a Service
  • Private Cloud as a Service

Personally, I am impressed around storage service offerings from cloud, especially the digital media content stored on cloud delivered to various subscribers creating a next generation content delivery architecture for e.g. read Sony Pictures Imageworks case study. You can find similar case studies on Amazon (Content Delivery / Media Hosting section) and Microsoft Azure Case Study Resources.

What Infosys is doing?

We also discussed the Infosys capabilities with the client in terms of various case studies, credentials, IP (solution accelerators), solution and service offerings and Cloud Computing CoE activities - some of these are published on Infosys web site and some I cannot share it here, respecting the Infosys IP. You can reach-out to us for more information through our micro-site feature request for services.

We did not discuss the below over the short meeting, but shared URLs offline with our client to support our claims with specific data-points. This is the mantra of success from our Chief Mentor - “In God we trust, everybody else brings data to the table”.

  • Infosys Case Study published on Microsoft Azure Case Study Resources
  • Forrester Report - Should Your Email Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis
  • Cost Benefit Analysis of On-premise Vs Cloud Hosting Vs Managed Hosting for Microsoft SharePoint, read my blog titled Business Case @ Cloud
  • Cost Benefit Analysis of On-premise Vs Cloud Hosting Vs Managed Hosting for Enterprise Datacenters, read my blog titled You gonna buy a house, or rent one?

What your enterprise is doing?

Tell us what you think about cloud computing, what your enterprise is doing or planning? Share your thoughts with us.

May 25, 2009

How do we ensure availability of our cloud enabled applications?

Being one of the concerns we have often heard from customers who are seeking early adoption of Cloud within their enterprises. 

Cloud technologies being fairly nascent and the space evolving rapidly with the emergence of new players and re-positioning of leading platform players honing their products for the cloud has given way for several new and innovative opportunities to be explored but then its rapid adoption is being hindered due to several concerns primarily revolving around data privacy, loss of control, reliability etc... I shall touch upon reliability here.Read on.

May 22, 2009

Cloud Computing - Security Concerns - pt1

The role of cloud in making available infrastructure, software or even business processes as a service is definitely getting mainstream.

Notwithstanding the adoption, a key concern in minds of enterprise architects and CIOs in adoption hover on the security concerns. In this series, we shall highlight some key issues surrounding the diverse security issues and shall try to invoke a debate around some of these topics to generate some serious solutions and answers.

 

To begin with, the notion of a web addressable interface to any of the services in the cloud brings to the forefront the question of, will the web based security attacks be also applicable to cloud?

 

The answer is a clear Yes. To address these concerns primarily around possibility of Denial of Service Attacks (or even DDoS) in the cloud, as web is the front end, Hence cloud providers need to enact appropriate security policies, and right access control mechanisms to minimize such possibilities.

A range of relevant distributed systems security attacks/solutions have been addressed in the recent book Distributed Systems Security: Issues, Processes and Solutions

 

, by Wiley Press, accessible at http://www.wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780470519882 

More issues discussed in following posts..

May 21, 2009

Hands On: Building a Private Cloud using Open Source Solutions Part 1: Setting up Cloud Infrastructure using Eucalyptus Open Cloud Platform

 In this series, I'll blog mainly on our experiences with open source technologies encountered in the course of setting up a fully functional private cloud, using open source technologies, inside Infosys SETLabs, Bangalore. I'll take you through analysis, deployment details and problems encountered while using technologies ranging from Distributed FileSharing Systems to Open Source Cloud Computing Infrastructure Solutions.

For ease of explanation I've divided this blog into parts:

  • Setting up Cloud Infrastructure using Eucalyptus Open Cloud Platform

  • Building Images with different flavors

  • Hadoop on Eucalyptus

This is not a complete list and I'll keep adding the new stuff that we are implementing.

1. Setting up Cloud Infrastructure using Eucalyptus Open Cloud Platform

     The private cloud that we planned to setup was to be completely based on open source solutions. Any enhancements, tools that are to be used for supporting the solution are also open source. While using open source has its huge advantages like ease of avaliablity, ability to freely modify the code to fit your purpose and ofcourse "cost"Cool ; it doesn't come gift wrapped with detailed documentation or support.

 So I'll take you in detail on our approach:

a. Setting up the base environment:

     Networking

  Infosys has a strong and vast intranet spread over multiple continents. This provided a strong networking foundation to our endeavor, taking care of issues like i.p address allocation, bandwidth, security(only upto an extent)etc. We wanted the private cloud to be a part of this intranet(ie: instances accessible to intranet users; installation, mantainence etc can be done remotely etc.) but then there was to be a layer of authorization required to work on the cloud. Just being a part of the intranet shouldn't give you access to the private cloud. Eucalyptus managment console took care of this part very well. Eucalyptus manages user authentication based on ticket generation. Only users with registered tickets can use the cloud infrastructure.

 Operating System and Hypervisior

 Xen was the primary choice for hypervisior layer mainly because that was the only one that Eucalyptus supported at the time(Eucalyptus 1.5 supports both xen and kvm). CentOS is a community-supported, freely-available operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It provides a free enterprise class computing platform and maintains 100% binary compatibility with its upstream distribution. The main catch point was that it came bundled with xen. So with a single installation we had our job cut by half. We had the base set to begin Eucalyptus installation.

b. Installing Eucalyptus Open Cloud Platform

 A lot has already been said about Eucalyptus: 1, 2, 3. So I'll just skip over that part and go directly to the deployment part.

  Installing

 The source can be downloaded directly from their site(Eucalyptus has started providing binary installables for popular distributions which makes the job much simpler. But we stuck to the source installation so that the full power of open source like applying patches, upgradation etc could be tapped.). The installation documents provided are pretty straight forward.

But certain assumptions are made in those documents, like unrestricted access to the internet from terminal, absence of firewalls etc. But one of the factors that needs to be considered while setting up a private cloud is that access to the internet may prove to be a security breach. So we planned to setup the whole infrastructure from machines with limited or no access to the internet. The solution that we found was to manually download the packages required and host it on a local Apache server and make the installation point to our server instead of the internet.

 Configuration

 Networking Mode: Due to the fact that we were deploying Eucalyptus on the Infosys Intranet, we decided to use the SYSTEM Networking mode. In this mode Eucalyptus relys on an external DHCP server for address allocation. So an instance created using Eucalyptus will aquire i.p address like any other machine from the DNS server.

 Turning Firewall Off: Firewall configuration present in CentOS didn't allow the Eucalyptus services to be visible outside. So I followed janispike's blog, to turn firewall off.

 Adding Nodes: Nodes were added using the command

$EUCALYPTUS/usr/sbin/euca_conf -nodes "<nodehost1> ... <nodehostN>" $EUCALYPTUS/etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf
$EUCALYPTUS/usr/sbin/euca_sync_key -c $EUCALYPTUS/etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf
 Now the Eucalyptus Cloud is setup and ready for use. In the next section I'll talk about Creating Images to be hosted on Eucalyptus.

 

May 18, 2009

Catalysts influencing the emergence of Cloud Computing

What makes up the cloud? Is it a product or a technology? What are the catalysts that have hastened the formation of the cloud?

Continue reading here

Financial implications on the Cloud

Cloud computing is a new style of computing which packages computing resources such as processing power, storage, connectivity etc as a service and delivering the same to the consumer in a scale-free, cost efficient and timely manner over the web. Applications get into production much quicker than the traditional models by which applications are provisioned. This entails a shift in the way applications would be built, executed and also managed in the future.

In an attempt to understand the financial implications of the new cloud based model used for deploying and running web applications over the traditional client server web application model a little better, we shall discuss this in the context of a hypothetical scenario which would highlight differences one would observe in both the cases.

Continue reading here

Open Source Cloud Computing Solutions - Part1 : Enterprise Private Clouds

        In this blog series, I will briefly describe a few areas we are looking into and a few interesting open source solutions that our team has been experimenting with recently and why they are of interest to us. There will be more blogs with details of our experiences with these solutions in the next few weeks. In this blog, I will briefly describe why enterprises will be looking at Private Clouds and then I will talk about Eucalyptus, one of the open source solutions we have been experimenting with.

 

Why Enterprise Private Clouds?
        I think there will always be some enterprise applications for which public clouds may not be a good choice. The reasons could be security concerns or compliance\governance requirements that can’t be met with public clouds or performance\latency requirements. Besides, there is so much investment made by the enterprises in their existing data centers which are not going away overnight. It’s a no-brainer that the first thing someone who has already made investments would look for, is to figure out how to extract more out of it which is where private clouds come in.
        As this article http://www.pcworld.com/article/162679/it_pros_private_clouds_a_good_first_step_to_cloud_computing.html says, I too believe “Deploying a private cloud network is a good way for enterprises to ease into cloud computing before deploying applications on the infrastructures of companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft..“ so, I believe there will be organizations looking for private cloud solutions. From what I read, average data center utilization in a typical organization is less than 20% and virtualization can help improve that to around 30-35% so, over the next few years virtualization is going to become main stream. Forrester predicts that two-thirds of IT organizations will be using virtualization by 2009.
        Currently the target for virtualization is to reach a stage where nodes can be provisioned on-demand with the basic OS stack.The way I look at it, a natural extension to this (virtualization of the infrastructure) is virtualization of the platforms and applications. So, I believe setting up private clouds will be the next logical step in this evolution (towards PaaS  & SaaS). I think the platform vendors will soon start offering virtual appliances for their platforms (like storage, application servers, collaboration & communication platforms etc) so that they are available as services. See the categories and offerings at http://www.vmware.com/appliances/ to get an idea of the potential platforms amenable for this. So, as these offerings from the vendors mature, platform virtualization is the next step that enterprises will be looking to go towards as that is going to help increase the data center utilizations further. I don’t think we are too far from where once an application is ready to be deployed, there will be a repository of virtual appliances that a infrastructure architect\administrator will be able to pick from and provision the hardware and platforms needed. The next step from there would be application virtualization. See the diagram at http://www.infosys.com/cloud-computing/images/solutions.gif for our view of how we believe the cloud computing stack is going to look like.


Eucalyptus Framework (http://open.eucalyptus.com/)
        There are a few open source solutions we looked at for creating enterprise private clouds. I will briefly talk about Eucalyptus here which was our first choice to experiment with. Eucalyptus is an open source solution that helps create private clouds. The reason this is interesting is because, it provides API compatibility with EC2 and S3. One more reason why I got interested in this is because most of the code is written in Java and since most of the team I am working with is proficient in Java, it will enable us dig deeper if we get stuck and also it will be easier if we need to add more features. We have setup an 8 node private cloud in the lab and have been experimenting with it.
        Eucalyptus still lacks some of the enterprise features like failover support for some of the key components, management and monitoring etc that are needed for creating large enterprise private cloud networks. We are looking into adding some of these capabilities. One of the usecases that I think it could be useful for is creating Virtual Appliances for other open source solutions. It provides all the building blocks needed to create virtual appliances. We are checking how we can leverage it to add on-demand capabilities to some of the other open source solutions like Hadoop and create say a HDFS virtual appliance that adds storage on demand with commodity hardware.

May 15, 2009

Hybrid Approach for Cloud Computing Adoption

Concepts of private and public clouds came into existence when cloud computing was an emerging trend trying to lay its roots into the large scale enterprise’s IT environment. The multi-tenant model of public clouds succeeded in attracting numerous small-scale organizations, which found the CapEx savings and reduced development time as alluring.

But large-scale enterprises see the public nature of cloud as a potential issue for adoption.  Moreover, the fact that the IT is out of the limits of their control further alleviates the threat to public cloud’s adoption.

With an aim to tackle the challenges of public cloud a concept of in-house private clouds caught pace. However though private clouds are supposed to emulate the public cloud functionalities, they introduce their own shortcomings of scalability and up-front costs.

Hybrid model combining best of both worlds can be a solution.

Hybrid be the way:

What can help enterprises is a hybrid approach that allows them to adopt the public clouds partially, deploying only those services which they see suitable. No doubt, the success of this hybrid approach is, defined by how seamlessly the underlying public and private clouds can interact and work together in unison.

One typical use case where the hybrid approach does sound beneficial is in making sure the performance is unaffected in case of sudden load spikes. Instances of same application can reside on both private and public cloud. A cloud integration manager directs the request to the public cloud the moment internal infrastructure underlying the private cloud fails to handle the increased load. This allows the limited usage of the massively scalable environment of public clouds. At the same time, it also allows enterprises to use their existing infrastructure.

 Hybrid Approach for Cloud Computing Adoption

Simple it may sound but..

Although this integration of public and private cloud looks alluring, it brings forth some of its implementation challenges. Moreover the basis for this integration is how close the private clouds can emulate the public clouds. As put forth by Google's

Go Green with the Cloud!

For the next generation business corporation, reducing carbon footprint is no longer a matter of ethics, it has become a necessity. Maintenance and service of huge, power hungry data-centers is a labiality that is no longer viable. Studies have even shown that customers tend to opt for greener corporations with reduced carbon footprints. So going green not only boosts the organization’s image in the market, but also reduces direct financial overheads.

Cloud computing removes the traditional limitations for computing power imposed by physio-geographical boundaries. Now high quality computing power is available on-demand and with a significantly lower overhead. Service and maintenance shifts off your backyard onto specialized server farms in remote locations. So what are the ways to harness cloud computing power to reduce carbon footprints?

Shift your Infrastructure onto the Cloud:

                Workload modeling of typical e-commerce sites shows significant increase in load during the holiday season. This means systems with increased capacity at the back end. Overheads associated with maintaining these resources are many:

·         Power required for running the system.

·         Service infrastructure: UPS, network, data storage etc.

·         Cooling Mechanisms:  both inside the systems and the area outside.

       These are overheads that don’t just disappear after the peak load season, but are constant and repeated all year-round.

                     "If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin." Luiz Andre Barroso, Digital Equipment Corp ->

                        Cloud computing brings with it the concept of on-demand scalability. Infrastructure scaling is available at your fingertips, on-demand. Increased computing power is available with increased load. After the high-traffic season the extra resources are released back. This will bring about a drastic reduction in carbon overheads associated with idle, power hungry server farms running all year round.

Pool extra resources on an enterprise private cloud:

                What virtualization did to reduce resource consumption on a limited scale network, cloud computing takes to the next level! Now the benefits of virtualization are no longer confined to the local clusters but can be accessed on-demand through the cloud.

                Imagine a corporation spread over different time zones with its infrastructure up on a private cloud. Computing power lying idle at one geographic location (during off-work hours) can be harnessed over the cloud at a location in a different time zone. This reduces not only the power consumption but also the amount of physical hardware present.

May 14, 2009

Google App Engine – Where to start?

In my first blog Down pour or Drizzle to Enterprise?   I wrote how large enterprises can take a drizzle in the Cloud.

In this let us look one of the Cloud providers – Google App Engine (GAE).

Is Google App Engine ready for the Enterprise?

Where enterprises can start the adoption?

Google App Engine was launched in Apr. 2008. New Biz start-up and Small & Medium enterprises were the early adopters.

The initial version had only support for Python programming with Non relational database support.
Recently Java support has been added and this can accelerate the enterprise adoption.

The question now, where enterprises can start taking a drizzle in the GAE cloud?

  1. Lite weight applications which involves enterprise customer/consumer participation.
    One good example is Giftag a Web 2.0 gift registry sharing application by Best Buy, Consumer electronics retailer.
  2. Applications which mainly involves Mash-ups and Aggregations (programmable web kind of stuff) and also, requires millions of users scaling in quick time.
    BuddyPoke a start-up was able to provide 3-D avatar creation environment which can be used in social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace.
  3. Application which would have limited shelf life with higher scalability need with consumer participation (e.g. a social marketing campaign application around Christmas event)

Applications which are more Intranet & B2B in nature with higher data, transaction and security management needs are not suitable as on now.

Is your enterprise using Google App Engine to any of the above scenarios?

May 13, 2009

You gonna buy a house, or rent one?

Yes, you can consider this as second EMI of Business Case @ Cloud series, that I started sometime back.

We all have faced this question - is it a good idea to buy a house or stay on rent or stay as paying-guest. It is a very simple question; however the answer is extremely difficult for one.  Everyone will have done some homework and analysis to make a decision suitable to one’s needs. The key trade-offs are “luxury Vs liability”, “flexibility Vs stability” and “cost Vs savings”.

We will take this analogy to cloud and discuss the case for datacenters @ cloud and explore if “private clouds” will make sense to enterprises with some illustrative cost benefit analysis. We will also capture various trade-offs in the decision making process to understand when to apply what strategy.

Show me the money

The large enterprises need large datacenters - there are 3 options and there can be other optimized variants.

  • On-premise: it is a traditional practice to use colocation center (“colo”) with a preferred partner
  • Managed Hosting: it is picking-up the steam as SaaS becomes popular and more mature service offerings are available
  • Cloud Hosting: it is somewhat new, with high cost savings potential

Let us talk the numbers now, once again, as I mentioned in my previous post, take the numbers with a pinch-of-salt as it does not represent a real customer situation.

Cost

Colocation Center

Managed Hosting

Cloud Hosting

Capital Expenditure (CAPEX)

$600,000

$0

$0

Server Machines (50 Nos)

$250,000

-

-

Networking Equipments

$250,000

-

-

Software Licenses

$100,000

-

-

Operational Expenditure (OPEX)

$420,000

$410,000

$320,000

Bandwidth

$40,000

$40,000

$20,000

Staff Salaries

$210,000

$70,000

$100,000

Infrastructure Maintenance

$50,000

-

-

Power

$120,000

-

-

Service Fee

-

$300,000

$200,000

Pay-per-Use Savings

-

-

-$50,000

Total Cost 

$1,020,000

$410,000

$270,000

 Let me just note-down the assumptions and resources I used for cost comparison.

Does private cloud make sense to enterprises?

We need to first be clear about what is private cloud – is it something that an enterprise will by as “infrastructure” and manage and maintain it? To me it does not make real monetary sense at a first glance - enterprises will still have to spend on cloud hardware maintenance and also pay for the software licenses. If we have to add the cost of infrastructure maintenance and related support staff, the cost benefit illustrated above might just go-away completely.  So what makes a case for the private cloud? Let us explore the thoughts, share yours.

In my opinion, there are two options – the cloud service providers should be able to provide “cloud infrastructure-on-lease” to address enterprise concern on security and data ownership that demands private cloud. It will be an agreement and negotiation that gives mutual benefits to both the parties. The other option for an enterprise is to consolidate all the IT hardware and create a virtualization wrapper on the infrastructure that will act as a “virtual private cloud” for an enterprise – it might facilitate cost & infrastructure utilization optimization.

What Next?

Yes, I promised a case for CRM @ Cloud, wait for it, it will come soon. Don’t forget to check our blog series on Make Money @ Cloud and Eyes on the Sky, Feet on the Ground, or subscribe this feed.

May 06, 2009

Eyes on the Sky, Feet on the Ground

I am sure I have tried to be more practical, realistic, relevant and reasonable so far with my blog postings on Business Case @ Cloud and Make Money @ Cloud series. I understand the real cloud implementation and broader industry adoption is farfetched, and there are challenges on the way – maturity of platform & services, standardization & interoperability, data security & ownership, and so on.

Assuming all these tactical or technical issues gets resolved, assuming that it becomes a default IT infrastructure standard - where the world will go say after 5 years, 10 years or beyond that on cloud horse? How long is the life-cycle of Cloud? How long is it going to stay?

These are the kind of questions that can be answered if we capture the ideas related to the solutions and services “beyond obvious clouds”. In this series we will capture “visionary cloud solutions & services” - of course - some of them could be easy wins and some of them could be just dreams. I will start with cloud stereotype – “The Vertical Clouds”.

Let us explore the concept of Vertical Clouds

We have heard enough about public cloud, we have also heard about the term private clouds to a large extent. In a vague mean, I would map the Industry Verticals to Vertical Clouds. I have been observing the latest trends and influencing factors that will emerge and make sense out-of “vertical clouds”. There are people who are willing to buy; there are people who are willing to develop and sell – so business can be done – full stop – the rest is modality & formality. Let us take some examples of trends & influencing factors:

 Vertical Cloud

Buyer

Seller

 Federal Cloud

  • In the recent times Obama and the TIGR (Technology, Innovation and Government Reform) team considers cloud computing and related technology innovations as key means for Government Transformation & IT cost savings in the current economic conditions.
  • You can enjoy the video on YouTube titled – “Inside the Transition: Technology, Innovation and Government”.  Does it click like - we have a buyer in place with enough funds!
  • The next level focus is on creating standards relevant to cloud computing that can be subscribed by the various Government agencies.
  • Yes, it is easy to find Seller as always.
    The various players such as Apptis and ServerVault have created an offering targeted for the key Government Vertical (!) – “Federally Compliant Trusted Cloud Computing” - through FedCloud.com.
  • The claim is that the offering will provide on-demand infrastructure in compliance with federal mandates – you can consider looking at various FISMA compliant checklists, whitepapers and other relevant artifacts.
  • The idea is excellent & visionary and also aligned with the recent moves for creating or extending standards (FISMA, DITSCAP/DIACAP, OMB, etc) for cloud computing through focused organizations such as NIST, NCOIC and so on. So we have a seller in place!
Legal Cloud
  • You have come across the term Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) for cost optimization by leveraging economical talent (cheap labor!) across the globe.
  • As you are aware, there are multiple variants of BPOs in terms of Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO), Knowledge Process Outsourcing and so on.
  • Does it click like a buyer for Legal Clouds?
  • Now the seller - nScaled offers Legal Cloud solutions specifically designed to meet the needs of international law firms.
  • The solution could be a combination of Shared Data Centers on Cloud, Business Process Automation Tools on Cloud and Talent staffing as like normal BPO consuming the Legal Cloud Platform.
  • There might be more players and more variants of solution / service offerings too, you can find out.

Share your thoughts beyond business – Does this idea make sense? Is it the step in the right direction? Will it really help, to what degree? How long will it take, is it sustainable? And of course, how big is this opportunity and what are the innovations possible?

How does this trend impact Cloud Computing Roadmap?

Isn’t cloud computing visualized as more-of horizontal offering with unlimited IT infrastructure so far? How does the concept of Vertical Clouds matter to the current cloud computing technology roadmap? Does it really matter OR these are independent to each other and both can have their own progression roadmap?

Yes, answer is more than obvious, if you ask an expert – both have to align to some degree and can progress independently beyond that. To a large extent, what I think the answer is - it lies in the unknown so far – which is – “cloud standardization & interoperability”. We have more mature industry standards in various business verticals – be it Legal, be it Finance, be it Insurance and so on. The next step is to figure-out “how do we align both for maximizing the business benefits”?

Let us explore the thoughts, share yours.

What Next?

Think about Finance Cloud or Insurance Cloud and we might have our next discussion around it, wait for it or subscribe this feed. We invite your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, corrections, comments or brickbats.

Don’t forget to check our blog series on Make Money @ Cloud and Business Case @ Cloud or subscribe this feed.

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