For the first 2010 installment of our Experts Corner Q&A series with industry thought leaders, we interviewed Clive Longbottom, founder and service director of Quocirca, to get an European perspective on where the industry is heading, especially regarding the Cloud. Clive Longbottom is a highly respected and globally recognised industry analyst, covering a range of business and technology areas. Clive’s primary coverage area is business process facilitation, which covers the need for companies to understand their core processes across their value chains, and the technologies that should be used to facilitate them in the most flexible and effective manner. He also brings an understanding of how the collision of existing and emerging technologies requires full business involvement to decide on the best direction forward for an organisation’s current and future needs. Clive has worked with a range of large and small analyst companies, including META Group (now Gartner) as VP Europe.

i365: Your main focus at Quocirca is business process facilitation. Obviously, IT as an industry plays an integral part in maximizing business efficiency, but more specifically what roles, if any, do you see the Cloud and virtualisation playing in streamlining business processes?

CL: To my mind, the age of the application is coming to an end, albeit a “long tail” one. I’ve seen far too many organisations where IT has become a constraint on the business, where the business has to change its processes to fit in with the way the enterprise applications work, rather than the other way around. Now, as we see approaches such as SOA (Service-oriented architecture) based upon web services mature and standards emerge that make cloud computing viable, we are in a much better position to move towards a more responsive IT platform. By breaking business processes down into tasks and supporting each task with targeted technical capabilities, we can build a “composite application” that can change to meet the changing needs of the process. Virtualisation gives us the capability to dynamically alter the resources provided to any single technical aspect, so ensuring that the peaks and troughs of daily business are adequately dealt with. The cloud gives us the capability to choose the right technical function at the right time – without having to own and manage the underlying platform, deal with licensing, provisioning and maintaining the functionality ourselves, and to change with the times as needed by swapping in and out different functions as required. I am not claiming that we have everything perfect just now: the capability to dictate technical contracts between what an organisation needs and what cloud services can provide needs to be in place, the capability to provision services on the fly is not quite there as yet, and the capability for a business person to discover and optimise a business process and then visualise that in such a way that the right mix of internal and external technical functions can be rapidly and effectively pulled together to facilitate the process is still not there. But for organisations that have fairly well-defined and static or semi-static “commodity” processes (e.g. payroll, purchasing, vacation booking, etc.), these can be an excellent starting point for moving towards a cloud- or hybrid-based solution for facilitating and managing such processes.

i365: You have a webinar coming up on human error in IT and the importance of automation to deal with change in IT departments. Where do vendor managed services such as online backup and/or remote disaster recovery services fit in? Organisations are in effect trusting their IT needs to other vendors for cost savings and resource maximization – in your mind is this safer/smarter than splitting multiple tasks and technologies between one’s internal IT department?

CL: Firstly, on disaster recovery: If you reach the point of needing to enact a disaster recovery plan, you’ve already lost. At this stage, the business is being heavily impacted, and the chances of a successful business recovery wanes with every passing second. Research has shown that around 30% of organisations will fail within 12 months after having to enact a full disaster recovery plan. The focus has to be on business continuity, ensuring that at least a modicum of capability is maintained throughout any failure of the IT function. This can be done internally through an “n+m” redundant capability – a clustering of n assets plus a number of extra assets (m) to make up any shortfall when anything fails. This has to be looked at from a highly granular level right up to a macro level: not only power supplies, servers, network capabilities, storage all have to be mirrored so that any failure can be failed over to a live environment, but also the data centres themselves, as a building failure for a data centre that is massively internally redundant will be just as bad as an item failure in one where there is no redundancy.

However, as real estate and energy prices remain volatile, building an internally provisioned and managed business continuity-based IT platform is not cost-effective, and this is where the online environment can come in. Firstly, for business continuity, the mirroring of systems can be done in the cloud, and the failure of any capability at the internal environment can then be taken over by capabilities in the cloud. The cloud provider should be able to use thin provisioning via virtualisation, so the day-to-day physical resources needed for this should be low (and the cost should therefore also be manageable). As soon as a workload is needed to be shifted over, extra resource is provided as needed in the cloud, and the function is taken over. Obviously, the main aspect here is the live data – this will need to be continuously mirrored to the cloud, so that on failure, there is a live and working set of data available to fall back to.

As to whether things should be split between internal groups, I’d look to ensuring that the IT department is there for one main thing: ensuring that as much of the IT budget is used for investment. Far too much of the existing IT budget tends to get used in just fire fighting and keeping the lights on: this “grunt work” should be outsourced – someone else can deal with configuring Active Directory, in recovering that one email that the CEO deleted and then found they needed, in setting up a new server with RedHat Linux and Apache. IT should be there to ensure that these jobs are done to the satisfaction of the business – but not to do them. IT should be there to advise the business on what the options are, so that the business can make decisions based on the organisation’s corporate risk profile, available funds and commercial need. IT should be there to take the “unique” processes (those that define an organisation as that organisation and no other) and make sure that the technical capabilities are available to make these work so that the revenues, margins and capabilities of the business are far better than the competition. Everything else can and should be outsourced – either at just a management level, or at a complete functional level by using outsourced hosting capabilities – i.e. the cloud.

i365: You were recently quoted in a CRN article about an ISV opening up its on-premise data protection application to third-party Cloud storage services, and said the feature wouldn’t drive additional software sales. How can organisations benefit from connecting their on-premise applications to Cloud storage and what advice would you give them in choosing/managing the Cloud storage component?

CL: Here, we have to look at the benefits and issues around the cloud itself. If an organisation was to consider moving all its prime storage to the cloud, it would not work. Organisations have spent large amounts of money in ensuring that their data is available in the shortest period of time: massive SAN-based arrays of very expensive disk systems, highly tuned databases and in-memory systems all there to improve the data access time. Why then would any organisation choose to introduce latency, often measurable in the tenths of seconds, to something where they have been investing heavily in trying to press out thousands of seconds? However, using the cloud for non-prime storage is not such an issue: mirrored backup allows end users to claw back files that they lose themselves, enables images of PCs and laptops to be stored so that on failure, loss or theft of a device, the user can be back up and running again rapidly, no matter where they are in the world. As a business continuity service, cloud storage can be used: yes, everything will be slower, but at least it will work. For customers already coming to an ebusiness site over the web, the latency is already present, and cloud-based storage will not have the same impact, provided the solution is architected correctly.

As to how choose a supplier, the first thing is to look at existing customers. Talk to them if you can and see why they decided the provider was worth going for. Look at the basics – where is the provider’s main data centre, what continuity and disaster recovery plans do they have in place?  How do they deal with data security? Do they understand the legal aspects of dealing with your data?  Do they vet all employees, and how do they deal with employee access to your data?  How do they deal with service levels? Is it plain bronze, silver and gold, or are they using virtualisation in a manner which enables them to be far more flexible in how they respond to your needs, ensuring that they provide the optimum support for your needs, not trying to force any specific approach on to you?  What is their approach to physical assets lifecycles? The last thing you want is to go with a provider whose whole estate is based on the latest, greatest hardware and then find out that the idea is to sweat all of this for the next 10 years. There’s nothing wrong with taking today’s tier one storage and making it next year’s tier two to sweat the assets, but you do want the capability to take advantage of new technologies as they come through.

i365: What level of awareness, interest and adoption of cloud services are you seeing amongst European organisations? Are there any specific barriers/challenges holding them back from utilizing cloud services?

CL: The main issue in Europe is still a high degree of cynicism as to what cloud actually is, and that the messaging coming from vendors is just aimed at jumping on this passing bandwagon. However, the in-built aversion to outsourcing that was prevalent across Europe has gone away, and the majority of organisations and geographies are now open to seeing certain functions and capabilities outsourced to an external provider. The messaging is key: cloud as a silver bullet certainly won’t sell, but the removal of the need for grunt work to be funded and carried out directly by an organisation, so enabling more effort to be put in to IT investment is a point that resonates quite well. Indeed, many of the more canny organisations are seeing that the age of the enterprise application is reaching an end, and see that the future will be built around composite applications, and that this will necessitate the use of a more dynamic platform – one which is a hybrid between an internal data centre and a set of externally provided functions.