IT Trends & Technology

Tim Stephenson is working on big things at First National Technology Solutions. For one, he’s trying to incorporate elastic cloud storage into the FNTS data center. 

When cloud first hit the market, some buzz words surrounding it were security, on-demand, lower costs, scalable and bursting. As technology evolved, and more companies implemented cloud solutions, some additional benefits started surfacing as well:

Meet Dan Kurtz. As a Business Development Manager at First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) his role requires him to work with partners. This includes resellers, channel partners, and strategic vendors such as EMC Cisco or IBM. Currently his biggest project has him working with CISCO to make FNTS a CISCO certified cloud provider. 

IBM recently announced its new z13 mainframe.  Pretty amazing in the new world order of cloud everything.  It seems as if cloud is the great elixir.  I hear it all the time – “just put it in the cloud” or “just back this data up to the cloud”.  Poof, it’s done!  Magic!  

We hear it every day – technology is continually changing and there is no sign of it slowing down any time soon.  With the continual change comes the high price of keeping technology up to date to meet demands and upgrades.  More and more businesses turn to cloud providers to help them with these rising demands and help keep the rising costs under control.  So you are off to the race with planning, design, development, testing and finally implementation.  But the race doesn’t stop there; it has only begun.

Platform 3 is the latest topic from an IT perspective – the new development platform for the development of new applications.  What I find the most interesting about this new platform is how it fundamentally changes the traditional approach for application development. No longer will there be purchasing hardware, server provisioning, traditional application development and middleware deployment.  This new platform involves having a platform that developers are able to access and push their new application code to.  You can continuously develop this application with continual enhancements and updates.  Behind the scenes, the infrastructure is deployed based on what the application requires.  The infrastructure than continues to scale as required based upon the application demands.

More with less. Economics is a key driver to implementing change within organizations.  In today’s economy there are two terms heard regularly – do more with less; and what is the impact to the organization.  The role of the CIO is changing – demands to implement applications, manage more websites and add new software, are increasing at an alarming rate.  These requests are not only the demands of the customers but internal business units.  Meeting these demands quickly and efficiently without adding staff or seeing an increase in budget can put a tax on any CIO and their employees.  

Implementing a Cloud solution, like many IT projects, requires careful planning, thorough testing and requires continual assessment.    It is not like the rotisserie chicken commercial where you can just “set it and forget it”.  So what are the important steps of managing the cloud service provider ongoing relationship and what should you expect from your cloud provider.

As a nearly empty nest father of six I find myself relating cloud economics to home economics.  When my family lived at home we shopped at wholesale stores.  The idea was that I could get massive quantities of something for a lower per unit cost, thus saving money on the overall budget, even if a little bit would sometimes go to waste or spoil before it could be consumed by the ravaging teenagers.  This compares nicely with the pre-defined public cloud models.  With these models you pick from pre-packaged configurations of servers that might not fit exactly what you need but it will work, usually leaving you with some amount of un-used CPU, RAM or Disk that goes to waste.

Identify. Plan. Solve. Every organization has problems or issues that require solvency – the key is correctly identifying the problems.  You know you want to implement a cloud solution; however, you cannot create a business case to move forward if you are only solving general issues – it won’t work.  Exactly define each business or technical problem in an honest and upfront fashion.  Doing so will help you accurately plan for the best solution within the cloud. By limiting scope to what business problems you are solving, you can focus on each issue independently, thus not biting off more than you can chew. 

One of the advantages of working for, and being a customer of, an “Enterprise” Cloud Service Provider is the ability to test and use the latest, best-of-breed, technologies available in the marketplace. 

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!  This is what pops into my head in reviewing the various pricing models that exist for cloud providers.  Unfortunately, I have found that what appears to be pretty straightforward and inexpensive pricing at first glance, from some of the major cloud providers, ends up being extremely complicated, unpredictable, and a much higher cost overall.  In working with various clients and completing our own research, we have found there are various pricing models and several elements that impact the pricing.  The important thing to remember is to do your research and make sure you are reading all of the fine print and asking questions, as what appears to be straightforward, may not be.

“Cloud” has been marketed for the past several years; however, I find there is still confusion around the various flavors of “Cloud”.

Private cloud solutions make sense when they make sense. One of the challenges for the CTO of a company is trying to determine if their strategic IT direction will be to utilize a private cloud.

Do you ever reach a point in your life where and unexpected opportunity arises and you can’t help but think it is the forces of nature that presented it so you might as well take advantage of it? That is exactly how I ended up on a plane thousands of feet in the air getting ready to tandem skydive.