Thursday, October 09, 2014

ITSM Adoption Forces a Streamlined Operations Culture at Desjardins that Paves the Way to Better Cloud Use

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a Canadian cooperative banking organization is using ITSM to put best practices in place and deliver higher IT value to the company.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better business results.

This time, we're coming to you from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Desjardins Group in Montréal is improving their operations in IT through an advanced IT services management (ITSM) approach.

To learn more, we are joined by Trung Quach, ITSM Manager at Desjardins in Québec. Welcome.

Trung Quach: Thank you very much, Dana, for having us.

Gardner: First tell us a little bit about your organization, for those who aren’t familiar. You're in Canada and you have a large network of credit unions.

Quach: It’s more cooperative banking. We are around 50,000 people across Québec, and we've started moving into both Canada and the US.
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Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your IT organization, the size, how many people, how many datacenters? What sort of IT organization do you have?

Quach: We're around 2,500 and counting. We're mainly based in Montréal and Lévis, which is near Québec City. Most of them are in Montréal, but some technical people are in Lévis. 

Gardner: Tell us about your role. What are you doing there as ITSM manager?

The ITIL process

Quach: I joined Desjardins last year in the ITSM leader position. This is more about the process, the ITIL process and everything that's invloved with the tool, as well as to support those overall processes.

Gardner: Tell us why ITSM has become important to you. What were some of the challenges, some of the requirements? What was the environment you were in that required you to adopt better ITSM principles?

Quach
Quach: A couple of years ago, when they merged 10-plus silos of IT into one big group, Desjardins needed to centralize the process, put best practice in place, to be more efficient and competitive -- and to give a higher value to the business.

Gardner: What, in particular, were issues that cropped up as a result of that decentralization? Was this poor performance, too much cost, too many manual processes, all of the above?

Quach: We had a lot of manual processes, and a lot of tools. To be able to measure the performance of a team, you need to use the same process and the same tools, and then measure yourself on it. You need to optimize the way you do it, so that you can provide better IT services.

Gardner: What have been some of the results of your movement toward ITSM? What sort of benefits have you realized as a result?

Quach: We had many of them. Some were financial, but the most important thing, I think, is the services quality and the availability of those services. So one indicator is a reduction in major incidents of 30 percent for the last two years.

Gardner: What is it about your use of ITSM that has led to that significant reduction in incidents? How does that translate?

Quach: We put our new problem management approach to work as well with the problem processes. When we open tickets, we can take care of the incidents in a coordinated way at an enterprise level. So the impact is everywhere. We can now advise the line of businesses, follow up with the incident, and close the incident rapidly. We follow up with any problems, and then we fix the real issues so that they don’t come back.

Gardner: Have you used this to translate back to any applications development, or custom development in your organization? Or is this more on the operations side strictly?

Better support

Quach: We started all of this on the operations side. But then we started last year on the development side, too. They're involved in our process slowly, and that’s going to soon get better, so we can support the full IT lifecycle better.

Gardner: Tell us about HP Discover. What's of interest to you? Have you been looking at what HP has been doing with their tools? What's of most importance to you in terms of what they do with their technology?

Quach: I can tell you how important it is for us. Last year we didn't go to HP Discover. This year, around eight in my team and the architecture team are here. That shows you how important it is.

Now we spread out. A lot of my team members went to explore tools and everything else that HP has to offer -- and HP has a lot of offer. We went to learn about the cloud, as well as big data. It all works together. That’s why it was important for us to come here. ITSM is the main reason we're here, but I want to make sure that everything works together, because the IT processes touch everything.
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Gardner: I've talked to a number of organizations, Trung, and they've mentioned that before they feel comfortable moving into more cloud activities, and before they feel comfortable adopting big data, analytics platforms, they want to make sure they have everything else in order. So ITSM is an important step for them to then go to larger, more complex undertakings. Is that your philosophy as well?

Quach: Yes. There are two ways to do this. You use that technology to force yourself to be disciplined, or you discipline yourself. ITSM is one way to do it. You force yourself to work in a certain manner, a streamlined manner, and then you can go to the cloud. It's easier that way.

Gardner: Then, of course, you also have standardization in culture, in organization, not just technology, but the people and the process, and that can be very powerful.

Quach: If asked me about cloud -- and I have done this with another company -- in a 30-minute interview about cloud, I would use 29 minutes to not talk about technology but about people and processes.

Gardner: How about the future of IT? Any thoughts about or the big picture of where technology is going? Even as we face larger data volumes, perhaps more complexity, and mobile applications, what are your thoughts about how we solve some of those issues in the big picture?

Time to market

Quach: IT more and more is going to have a challenge for meeting the speed demanded for improved time to market. But to do that, you need processes, technology, and of course, people. So the client, the business, is going to ask us to be faster. That’s why we'll need to go in that cloud. But to go in the cloud, we need to master our IT services, and then go in the cloud. If not, it would be like not going to the cloud and not having that agility. We would not be competitive.

Gardner: Looking back, now that you have gone through an ITSM advancement, for those who are just beginning, what are some thoughts that you could share with them?

Quach: In an ITSM project, it's very hard to manage change. I'm talking about the people change, not the change-management technology process. Most of the time, you put that in place and say that everybody has to work with it. If I would redo it, I would bring more people to understand the latest ITSM science and processes, and explain why in five or 10 years, it's going to really help us.
You always have to be close to your clients. Even if they are IT, they are your client or partner.

After that, we'll put in the project, but we'll follow them and train them every year. ITSM is a never-ending story. You always have to be close to your clients. Even if they are IT, they are your client or partners. You need to coach them, to make sure they understand why they're doing this. Sometimes it’s a bit longer to get it right at the beginning, but it’s all worth it at the end.

Gardner: Thanks so much. We’ll have to leave it there. We've been talking about how Desjardins Group in Montréal has been embarking on an ITSM journey and we've been learning how that's helped them improve their quality and reduced incidence of IT problems. So thank you to our guest Trung Quach, ITSM Manager at Desjardins Group.
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Quach: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And thank you, too, to our audience for joining this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a Canadian cooperative banking organization is using ITSM to put best practices in place and deliver higher IT value to the company. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, October 07, 2014

MIT Media Lab Computing Director Details the Virtues of Cloud Computing for Agility and DR

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how MIT researchers are reaping the benefits of virtualization.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you directly from the VMworld 2014 Conference. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of BriefingsDirect IT strategy discussions.

Gardner
We’re here in San Francisco the week of August 25 to explore the latest developments in hybrid cloud computing, user computing, software-defined data center (SDDC), and virtualization infrastructure management.

Our next innovator case study interview focuses on the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts and how they're exploring the use of cloud and hybrid cloud and enjoying such use benefits as speed, agility and disaster recovery (DR)

To learn more about how the MIT Media Lab is using cloud computing, we’re joined by Michail Bletsas, research scientist and Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab. Welcome.

Michail Bletsas: Thank you. 

Gardner: Tell us about the MIT Media Lab. How big is the organization? What’s your charter?

Bletsas: The organization is one of the many independent research labs within MIT. MIT is organized in departments, which do the academic teaching, and research labs, which carry out the research.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~mbletsas/
Bletsas
The Media Lab is a unique place within MIT. We deviate from the normal academic research lab in the sense that a lot of our funding comes from member companies, and it comes in a non-direct fashion. Companies become members of the lab, and then we get the freedom to do whatever we think is best.

We try to explore the future. We try to look at what our digital life will look like 10 years out, or more. We're not an applied research lab in the sense that we're not looking at what's going to happen two or three years from now. We're not looking at short-term future products. We're looking at major changes 15 years out.

I run the group that takes care of the computing infrastructure for the lab and, unlike a normal IT department, we're kind of heavy on computing. We use computers as our medium. The Media Lab is all about human expression, which is the reason for the name and computers are one of the main means of expression right now. We're much heavier than other departments in how many devices you're going to see. We're on a pretty complex network and we run a very dynamic environment.

Major piece

A lot has changed in our environment in recent years. I've been there for almost 20 years. We started with very exotic stuff. These days, you still build exotic stuff, but you're using commodity components. VMware, for us, is a major piece of this strategy because it allows us a more efficient utilization of our resources and allows us to control a little bit the server proliferation that we experienced and that everybody has experienced.

We normally have about 350 people in the lab, distributed among staff, faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students, as well as affiliates from the various member companies. There is usually a one-to-five correspondence between virtual machines (VMs), physical computers, and devices, but there are at least 5 to 10 IPs per person on our network. You can imagine that having a platform that allows us to easily deploy resources in a very dynamic and quick fashion is very important to us.

We run a relatively small operation for the size of the scope of our domain. What's very important to us is to have tools that allow us to perform advanced functions with a relatively short learning curve. We don’t like long learning curves, because we just don’t have the resources and we just do too many things.

You are going to see functionality in our group that is usually only present in groups that are 10 times our size. Each person has to do too many things, and we like to focus on technologies that allow us to perform very advanced functions with little learning. I think we've been pretty successful with that.
We really need to interact with our infrastructure on a much shorter cycle than the average operation.

Gardner: So your requirements are to support those 350 people with dynamic workloads, many devices. What is it that you needed to do in your data center to accommodate that? How have you created a data center that’s responsive, but also protects your property, and that allows you to reduce your security risk?

Bletsas: Unlike most people, we tend to have our resources concentrated close to us. We really need to interact with our infrastructure on a much shorter cycle than the average operation. We've been fortunate enough that we have multiple, small data centers concentrated close to where our researchers are. Having something on the other side of the city, the state, or the country doesn’t really work in an environment that’s as dynamic as we are.

We also have to support a much larger community that consists of our alumni or collaborators. If you look at our user database right now, it’s something in the order of 3,500, as opposed to 350. It’s a very dynamic in that it changes month to month. The important attributes of an environment like this is that we can’t have too many restrictions. We don’t have an approved list of equipment like you see in a normal corporate IT environment.

Our modus operandi is that if you bring it to us, we’ll make it work. If you need to use a specific piece of equipment in your research, we’ll try to figure out how to integrate it into your workflow and into what we have in there. We don’t tell people what to use. We just help them use whatever they bring to us.

In that respect, we need a flexible virtualization platform that doesn’t impose too many restrictions on what operating systems you use or what the configuration of the VMs are. That’s why we find that solutions, like general public cloud, for us are only applicable to a small part of our research. Pretty much every VM that we run is different than the one next to it. 

Flexibility is very important to us. Having a robust platform is very, very important, because you have too many parameters changing and very little control of what's going on. Most importantly, we need a very solid, consistent management interface to that. For us, that’s one of the main benefits of the vSphere VMware environment that we’re on.

Public or hybrid

Gardner: Of course, virtualization sounds like a great fit when you have such dynamic, different, and varied workloads. But what about taking advantage of cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud to some degree, perhaps for disaster recovery (DR) or for backup failover. What's the rationale, even in your unique situation, for using a public or hybrid cloud?

Bletsas: We use hybrid cloud right now that’s three-tiered. MIT has a very large campus. It has extensive digital infrastructure running our operations across the board. We also have facilities that are either all the way across campus or across the river in a large co-location facility in downtown Boston and we take advantage of that for first-level DR.

A solution like the vCloud Air allows us to look at a real disaster scenario, where something really catastrophic happens at the campus, and we use it to keep certain critical databases, including all the access tools around them, in a farther-away location.

It’s a second level for us. We have our own VMware infrastructure and then we can migrate loads to our central organization. They're a much larger organization that takes care of all the administrative computing and general infrastructure at MIT at their own data centers across campus. We can also go a few states away to vCloud Air [and migrate our workloads there in an emergency].
We know that remote events are remote, until they happen, and sometimes they do.

So it’s a very seamless transition using the same tools. The important attribute here is that, if you have an operation that small, 10 people having to deal with such a complex set of resources, you can't do that unless you have a consistent user interface that allows you to migrate those workloads using tools that you already know and you're familiar with.

We couldn’t do it with another solution, because the learning curve would be too hard. We know that remote events are remote, until they happen, and sometimes they do. This gives us, with minimum effort, the ability to deal with that eventuality without having to invest too much in learning a whole set of tools, a whole set of new APIs to be able to migrate.

We use public cloud services also. We use spot instances if we need a high compute load and for very specialized projects. But usually we don’t put persistent loads or critical loads on resources over which we don’t have much control. We like to exert as much control as possible.

Gardner: I'd like to explore a little bit more this three-tiered cloud using common management, common APIs. It sounds like you're essentially taking metadata and configuration data, the things that will be important to spin back up an operation should there be some unfortunate occurrence, and putting that into that public cloud, the vCloud Air public cloud. Perhaps it's DR-as-a-service, but only a slice of DR, not the entire data. Is that correct?

Small set of databases

Bletsas: Yes. Not the entire organization. We run our operations out of a small set of databases that tend to drive a lot of our websites. A lot of our internal systems drive our CRM operation. They drive our events management. And there is a lot of knowledge embedded in those databases.

It's lucky for us, because we're not such a big operation. We're relatively small, so you can include everything, including all the methods and the programs that you need to access and manipulate that data within a small set of VMs. You don’t normally use them out of those VMs, but you can keep them packaged in a way that in a DR scenario, you can easily get access to them.

Fortunately, we've been doing that for a very long time because we started having them as complete containers. As the systems scaled out, we tended to migrate certain functions, but we kept the basic functionality together just in case we have to recover from something.
We are fortunate enough to have a very good, intimate knowledge of our environment. We know where each piece lies. That’s the benefit of running a small organization

In the older days, we didn’t have that multi-tiered cloud in place. All we had was backups in remote data centers. If something happened, you had to go in there and find out some unused hardware that was similar to what you had, restore your backup, etc.

Now, because most of MIT's administrative systems run under VMware virtualization, finding that capacity is a very simple proposition in a data center across campus. With vCloud Air, we can find that capacity in a data center across the state or somewhere else.

Gardner: For organizations that are intrigued by this tiered approach to DR, did you decide which part of those tiers would go in which place? Did you do that manually? Is there a part of the management infrastructure in the VMware suite that allowed you to do that? How did you slice and dice the tiers for this proposition of vCloud Air holding a certain part of the data?

Bletsas: We are fortunate enough to have a very good, intimate knowledge of our environment. We know where each piece lies. That’s the benefit of running a small organization. We occasionally use vSphere’s monitoring infrastructure. Sometimes it reveals to us certain usage patterns that we were not aware of. That’s one of the main benefits that we found there.

We realized that certain databases were used more than we thought. Just looking at those access patterns told us, “Look, maybe you should replicate this." It doesn’t cost much to replicate this across campus and then maybe we should look into pushing it even further out.

It is a combination of having a visibility and nice dashboards that reveal patterns of activity that you might not be aware of even in an environment that's not as large as ours.

Gardner: We’re here at VMworld 2014. There's been quite a bit of news, particularly in the vCloud Air arena. We've talked and heard about betas for ObjectStore and for virtual private cloud. Are these of interest to you now that you’ve done a hybrid cloud using DR-as-a-service? Does anything else intrigues you?

Standard building blocks

Bletsas: We like the move toward standardization of building blocks. That’s a good thing overall, because it allows you to scale out relatively quickly with a minor investment in learning a new system. That’s the most important trend out there for us. As I've said, we're a small operation. We need to standardize as much as possible, while at the same time, expanding the spectrum of services. So how do you do that? It’s not a very clear proposition.

The other thing that is of great interest to us is network virtualization. MIT is in a very peculiar situation compared to the rest of the world, in the sense that we have no shortage of IP addresses. Unlike most corporations where they expose a very small sliver of their systems to the outside world and everything happens on the back-end, our systems are mostly exposed out there to the public internet.

We don’t run very extensive firewalls. We're a knowledge dissemination and distribution organization and we don’t have many things to hide. We operate in a different way than most corporations. That shows also with networking. Our network looks like nothing like what you see in the corporate world. The ability to move whole sets of IPs around our domain, which is rather large and we have full control over, is a very important thing for us.

It allows for much faster DR. We can do DR using the same IPs across the town right now because our domain of control is large enough. That is very powerful because you can do very quick and simple DR without having to reprogram IP, DNS Servers, load balancers, and things like that. That is important.
That is very powerful because you can do very quick and simple DR without having to reprogram IP, DNS Servers, load balancers, and things like that.

The other trend that is also important is storage virtualization and storage tiering and you see that with all the vendors down in the exhibit space. Again, it allows you to match the application profile much easier to what resources you have. For a rather small group like ours, which can't afford to have all of its disk storage and very high-end systems, having a little bit of expensive flash storage, and then a lot of cheap storage, is the way for us to go.

The layers that have been recently added to VMware, both on the network side and the storage side help us achieve that in a very cost-efficient way.

Gardner: The benefits of having a highly virtualized environment -- including the data center, including the end user computing endpoints -- gives you that flexibility of taking workloads and apps from development to test to deployments. So there's a common infrastructure approach there, but also a common infrastructure across cloud, hybrid cloud, and DR.

So it’s sort of a snowball effect. The more virtualization you're adapting, the more dynamic and agile you can be across many more aspects of IT.

Bletsas: For us, experimentation is the most important thing. Spinning out a large number of VMs to do a specific experiment is very valuable and being able to commandeer resources across campus and across data centers is a necessary requirement for something like an environment like this. Flexibility is what we get out of that and agility and speed of operations.

In the older days, you had to go and procure hardware and switch hardware around. Now, we rarely go into our data centers. We used to live in our data centers. We go there from time to time but not as often as we used to do, and that’s very liberating. It’s also very liberating for people like me because it allows me to do my work anywhere.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been discussing the virtues of cloud computing and hybrid cloud computing with the MIT Media Lab. I’d like to thank our guest, Michail Bletsas, research scientist and Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass. Thanks so much.

Bletsas: Thank you.

Gardner: And also a big thank you to our audience for joining this special podcast series coming to you directly from the 2014 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect IT discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how MIT researchers are reaping the benefits of virtualization. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Cloud Services Brokerages Add Needed Elements of Trust and Oversight to Complex Cloud Deals

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner
Our discussion today focuses on an essential aspect of helping businesses make the best use of cloud computing.

We're examining the role and value of cloud services brokers with an emphasis on small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), regional businesses, and government, and looking for attaining the best results from a specialist cloud service brokerage role within these different types of organizations.
Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org
No two businesses have identical needs, and so specialized requirements need to be factored into the use of often commodity-type cloud services. An intermediary brokerage can help companies and government agencies make the best use of commodity and targeted IaaS clouds, and not fall prey to replacing an on-premises integration problem with a cloud complexity problem.

To learn more about the role and value of the specialist cloud services brokerage, we're now joined by our panel, Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio. Welcome, Todd.

Todd D. Lyle: Well hello, Dana. It's a pleasure to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in Northern Virginia. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin L. Jackson: Thank you very much. Looking forward to the discussion.

Gardner: Let’s start with you, Todd. Tell me little bit about why there's a difference between the good part of cloud, which is a commodity set of services, a utility approach to computing -- and the gulf between that and a company's culture of traditional IT acquisition? How do we get regular companies to effectively start using these new cloud services?

Lyle: Through education. That’s our first step. The technology is clearly here, the three of us will agree. It's been here for quite some time now. The beauty of it is that we're able to extract bits and pieces for bundles, much like you get from your cell phone or your cable TV folks. You can pull those together through a cloud services brokerage.

Lyle
So brokerage firms will go out and deal with the cloud services providers like Amazon, Rackspace, Dell, and those types of organizations. They bring the strengths of each of those organizations together and bundle them. Then, the consumer gets that on a monthly basis. It's non-CAPEX, meaning there is no capital expenditure.

You're renting these services. So you can expand and contract as necessary. To liken this to a utility environment, utility organizations that do electric and do power, you flip the switch on or turn the faucet on and off. It’s a metered service.

That's where you're going to get the largest return on your collective investment when you switch from a traditional IT environment on-premises, or even a private cloud, to the public cloud and the utility that this brings.

Government agencies

Gardner: Kevin you're involved more with government agencies. They've been using IT for an awfully long time. How is the adjustment to cloud models for them? Is it easier, is it better, or is it just a different type of approach, and therefore requires only adjustment?

Jackson: Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, I've been focused on providing advanced IT to the federal market and Fortune 500 businesses for quite a while. The advent of cloud computing and cloud services brokerages is a double-edged sword. At once, it provides a much greater agility with respect to the ability to leverage information technology.

Jackson
But, at the same time, it brings a much greater amount of responsibility, because cloud service providers have a broad range of capabilities. That broad range has to be matched against the range of requirements within an enterprise, and that drives a change in the management style of IT professionals.

You're going more from your implementation skills to a management of IT skills. This is a great transition across IT, and is something that cloud services brokerages can really aid. [See Jackson's recent blog on brokerages.]

Gardner: Todd, it sounds as if we're moving this from an implementation and a technology skill set into more of a procurement, governance, contracts, and creating the right service-level agreements (SLAs). These are, I think, new skills for many businesses. How is that coaching aspect of a cloud service’s brokerage coming out in the market? Is that something you are seeing a lot of demand for?

Lyle: It’s customer service, plain and simple. We hear about it all the time, but we also pass it off all the time. You have to be accessible. If you're a 69-year-old business owner and embracing a technology from that demographic, it’s going to be different than if you are 23 years old, different in the approach that you take with that person.

As we all get more tenured, we'll see more adaptability to new technologies in a workplace, but that’s a while out. That's the 35-and-younger crowd. If you go to 35-and-above, it's what Kevin mentioned -- changing the culture, changing the way things are procured within those cultures, and also centralizing command. That’s where the brokerage or the exchange comes into place for this. [See Lyle's video on cloud brokerages.]
Change management is a key aspect of being able to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.

Gardner: One of the things that’s interesting to me is that a lot of companies are now looking at this as not just as a way of switching from one type of IT, say a server under a desk, to another type of IT, a server in a cloud.

It’s forcing companies to reevaluate how they do business and think of themselves as a new process-management function, regardless of where the services reside. This also requires more than just how to write a contract. It's really how to do business transformation.

Does that play into the cloud services brokerage? Do you find yourselves coaching companies on business management?

Jackson: Absolutely. One of the things cloud services is bringing to the forefront is the rapidity of change. We're going from an environment where organizations expect a homogenous IT platform to where hybrid IT is really the norm. Change management is a key aspect of being able to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.

This is also driving business models. The more effective business models today are taking advantage of the parallel and global nature of cloud computing. This requires experience, and cloud services brokerages have the experience of dealing with different providers, different technologies, and different business models. This is where they provide a tremendous amount of value.

Different types of services

Gardner: Todd, this notion of being a change agent also raises the notion that we're not just talking about one type of cloud service. We're talking about software as a service (SaaS), bringing communications applications like e-mail and calendar into a web or mobile environment. We're talking about platform as a service (PaaS), if you're doing development and DevOps. We're talking about even some analytics nowadays, as people try to think about how to use big data and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud.

Tell me a bit more about why being a change agent across these different models -- and not just a cloud implementer or integrator -- raises the value of this cloud service brokerage role?

Lyle: It’s a holistic approach. I've been talking to my team lately about being the Dale Carnegie of the cloud, hence the specialist cloud services brokerage, because it really does come down to personalities.

In a book that I've recently written called Grounding the Cloud, Basics and Brokerages, I talk about the human element. That's the personalities, expectations, and abilities of your workforce, not only your present workforce but your future workforce, which we discussed just a moment ago, as far as demographics were concerned.

It's constant change. Kevin said it, using a different term, but that's the world we live in. Some schools are doing this, where they're adding this to their MBA programs. It is a common set of skills that you must have, and it's managing personalities more than you're managing technology, in my opinion.
It's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these changes so that the companies actually can speed up.

Gardner: Tell me a bit more about this book, Todd, it’s called Grounding the Cloud. When is it available and how can people learn more about it?

Lyle: It’s available now on Amazon, and they can find out more at www.groundingthecloud.org. This is a layman’s introduction to cloud computing, and so it helps business men and women get a better understanding of the cloud -- and how they could best maximize their time and their money, as it associates to their IT needs.

Gardner: Does the book get into this concept of the specialist cloud services brokerage (SCSB), as opposed to just a general brokerage, and getting at what's the difference?

Lyle: That’s an excellent question, Dana. There are a lot of perceptions, you have one as well, of what a cloud services brokerage is. But, at the end of the day -- and we've been talking about this in the entire discussion -- it's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these changes so that the companies actually can speed up.

We discuss it here in the "flyover country," in Ohio. We meet in the book with Cleveland State University. We meet with Allen Black Enterprises, and then even with a small landscaping company to demonstrate how the cloud is being applied from six and seven users, all the way up to 25,000 users. And we're doing it here in the Midwest, where things tend to take a couple of years to change.

User advocate

Gardner: How is a cloud services brokerage different from a systems integrator? It seems there's some commonality. But you are not just a channel, or reseller, you are really as much an advocate for the user.

Lyle: A specialist cloud services brokerage is going to be more like Underwriters Laboratories (UL). It’s going to go out, fielding all the different cloud flavors that are available, pick what they feel is best, and bring it together in a bundle. Then, the SCSB works with the entity to adapt to the culture and the change that's going to have to occur and the education within their particular businesses, as opposed to a very high-level vertical, where some things are just pushed out at an enterprise level.

Jackson: I see this cloud services brokerage and specialist cloud services brokerage as the new-age system integrator, because there are additional capabilities that are offered.

For example, you need a trusted third-party to monitor and report on adherence to SLAs. The provider is not going to do that. That’s a role for your cloud services brokerage. Also you need to maintain viable options for alternative cloud-service providers. The cloud services brokerage will identify your options and give you choices, should you need the change. A specialist cloud services brokerage also helps to ensure portability of your business process and data from one cloud service provider to another.

Management of change is more than a single aspect within the organization. It’s how to adapt with constant change and make sure that your enterprise has options and doesn't get locked into a single vendor.

Lyle: It comes to the point, Kevin, of building for constant change. You're exactly right.
Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org
Gardner: You raise an interesting point too, Kevin, that one shouldn’t get lulled into thinking that they can just make a move to the cloud, and it will all be done. This is going to be a constant set of moves, a journey, and you're going to want to avail yourself of the cloud services marketplace that’s emerging.

We're seeing prices driven down. We're seeing competition among commodity-level cloud services. I expect we'll see other kinds of market forces at work. You want to be agile and be able to take advantage of that in your total cost of computing.

Jackson: There's a broad range of providers in the marketplace, and that range expands daily. Similarly, there's a large range of requirements within any enterprise of any size. Brokers act as matchmakers, avoiding common mistakes, and also help the organizations, the SMBs in particular, implement best practices in their adoption of this new model.

Gardner: Also, when you have a brokerage as your advocate, they're keeping their eye on the cloud marketplace, so that you can keep your eye on your business and your vertical, too. Therefore, you're going to have somebody to tip you off when things change and they will be on the vanguard for deals. Is that something that comes up in your book, Todd, of the public service brokerage being an educated expert in a field where the business really wants to stick to its knitting?

Primary goal

Lyle: Absolutely. That’s the primary goal, both at a strategic level, when you're deciding what products to use -- the Rackspaces, the Microsofts, the RightSignatures, etc. -- all the way down to the tactical one of the daily operation. When I leave the company, how soon can we lock Todd out? How soon can we lock him down or lock him out? It becomes a security issue at a very granular level. Because it's metered, you turn it off, you turn Todd off, you save his data, and put it someplace else.

That’s a role that, requires command and control and oversight, and that's a responsibility. You're part butler. You're looking out for the day-to-day, the minute issues. Then you get up to a very high level. You're like UL. You're keeping an eye on everything that’s occurring. UL comes to mind because they do things that are tactile and those things that you can't touch, and definitely the cloud is something you can’t touch.

Jackson: Actually, I believe it represents the embracing of a cooperative model of my consumers of this information technology, but embracing with open eyes. This is particularly of interest within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their adversarial attitude toward industry. Cloud services brokerages and specialist cloud services brokerages sit at the same the table with these consumers.
This is particularly of interest within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their adversarial attitude towards industry.

Lyle: Kevin, your point is very well taken. I'll go one step further. We were talking up and down the scales, strategic down to the daily operations. One of the challenges that we have to overcome is the signatories, the senior executives, that make these decisions. They're in a different age group and they're used to doing things a certain way.

That being said, getting legislation to be changed at the federal level, directives being pushed down, will make the difference, because they do know how to take orders. I know I'm speaking frankly, but what's going to have to occur for us to see some significant change within the next five years is being told how the procurement process is going to happen.

You're taking the feather; I'm taking the stick, but it’s going to take both of those to accomplish that task at the federal level.

Gardner: We know that Duncan, LLC is a specialized cloud services brokerage. Kevin, tell us a little bit about the GovCloud Network. What is your organization, and how do you align with cloud brokerages?

Jackson: GovCloud Network is a specialty consultancy that helps organizations modify or change their mission and business processes in order to take advantage of this new style of system integrator.

Earlier, I said that the key to transition in a cloud is adopting and adapting to the parallel nature and a global nature of cloud computing. This requires a second look at your existing business processes and your existing mission processes to do things in different ways. That's what GovCloud Network allows. It helps you redesign your business and mission processes for this constant change and this new model.

Notion of governance

Gardner: I'd like to go back to this notion of governance. It seems to me, Todd, that when you have different parts of your company procuring cloud services, sometimes this is referred to as shadow IT. They're not doing it in concert, through a gatekeeper like a cloud broker. Not only is there a potential redundancy of efforts in labor and work in process, but there is this governance and security risk, because one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.

Let's address this issue about better security from better governance by having a common brokerage gatekeeper, rather than having different aspects of your company out buying and using cloud services independently.

Lyle: We're your trusted adviser. We’re also very much a trusted member of your team when you bring us into the fold. We provide oversight. We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way, but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business resources. You don’t want to leave a window open at night. You certainly don't want to leave your network open.

There's a lot going on in today's world, a lot of transition, the NSA and everything we worry about. It's important to have somebody providing command and control. We don’t sit there and stare at a monitor all day. We use systems that watch this, but we can tell when there's an increase or decrease out of the norm of activities within your organization.
We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way, but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business resources.

It really doesn't matter how big or how small, there are systems that allow us to monitor this and give a heads up. If you're part of a leadership team, you’d be notified that again Todd Lyle has left an open window. But if you don't know that Todd even has the window, then that’s even a bigger concern. That comes down to the leadership again -- how you want to manage your entity.

We all want to feel free to make decisions, but there are too many benefits available to us, transparent benefits, as Kevin put it, to using the cloud and hiding in plain sight, maximizing e-mail at 100,000 plus users. Those are all good things but they require oversight.

It's almost like an aviation model, where you have your ground control and your flight crew. Everybody on that team is providing oversight to the other. Ultimately, you have your control tower that's watching that, and the control tower, both in the air and on the ground, is your cloud services brokerage.

Jackson: It’s important to understand that cloud computing is the industrialization of information technology. You're going from an age where the IT infrastructure is a hand-designed and built work of art to where your IT infrastructure is a highly automated assembly-line platform that requires real-time monitoring and metering. Your specialist cloud services brokerage actually helps you in that transition and operations within this highly automated environment.

Lyle: Well said, Kevin.

Gardner: We've talked about this a little bit in the abstract, and it's made a tremendous amount of sense to me. A powerful way to cement understanding is to show examples and understand what others have gone through.

Todd, you mentioned that you have some examples in your new book. I’d like to hear in more detail about when someone has used a specialized cloud brokerage attuned to their business, their industry, or their vertical. What do they get for it and how has it worked out for them? Can you run us through a use case of where this works well?

Three narratives

Lyle: Okay, in my book, we have three narratives, as I mentioned earlier. I talk about Cleveland State University (CSU) and education because this is what this whole program is about, education. It's not offensive -- it's not business, it's not government, it’s education.

With technology, there are so many options out there today as we’re discussing. It's so exciting, but we have to get "Iris" to change her way of thinking.

A couple of things occurred at CSU, cementing my theory on demographics and change in speaking computing as a first language. CSU switched to Microsoft 365 from onsite Lotus Notes, and for anybody who's been on Lotus Notes, it's always been a challenge to use. To get to 365, some education had to occur, and some heads-up had to occur.

People need to be involved in the process at some point, and others excluded for business reasons, and I don't mean that a bad way. I mentioned Iris, because Iris was a lady who works on the third floor of Rhodes Tower at Cleveland State and was very unhappy about losing her desktop printer.
What we do as a specialist cloud services brokerage is making sure that people are included in the process, being educated, giving access to communication and then being available when the time comes.

They went from 2,100 printers down to 300 with the help of not only Bill Wilson and the IT team, but Xerox. Xerox was able to bring tremendous savings at the granular level, but it took a great deal of education and patience, because Iris wasn't happy about losing her printer. She wanted to know why Bill Wilson wasn’t going to lose his.

It really discusses it at a very personal level, because we can all relate to printers and ancillary equipment and our way of doing business. It discusses again, on the great Lake Erie, how change has occurred and how they were able to address it from a human element perspective, again, Iris.

What we do as a specialist cloud services brokerage is making sure that people are included in the process, being educated, giving access to communication and then being available when the time comes. Make sure you answer that phone for the person who needs someone on the phone and make sure that you have the Wiki available and up to date for the person who is going to reach out to that Wiki.

Gardner: Kevin, any examples from your vantage point on the role of the cloud services brokerage and some concrete ways that it’s helped a specific organization?

Jackson: Absolutely. About three years ago I responded to a requirement from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where they were having issues working with allies with respect to exchange of geospatial information and data. Everyone had their maps and everyone had their own system for distributing and sharing that, but they didn't work together. The NGA wanted to have a more effective and efficient means for exchanging geospatial information.

So they reached out to the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) to see if this industry organization had any good ideas for addressing this mission-critical requirement. I was serving as the head of the cloud-computing working group, and the team came up with an idea of using cloud as an inner-space in order to translate different types and formats of geospatial information and data amongst the participants.

Brokered platform

We did this by use of a brokered cloud platform that came to be known as the Geospatial Community Cloud. The cloud services brokerage acted as an intermediary to allow for a real-time change or identification of capabilities for geospatial interoperability. It's a very successful demonstration.

The Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board also leveraged a cloud services brokerage paradigm when they were required to stand up very quickly to manage their hundreds of billions of dollars during the financial crisis. The CIO there, Shawn Kingsberry, knew that he wouldn't be able to respond to the requirements of monitoring, metering, and managing these large sums of money without an IT infrastructure.

Instead of taking the traditional acquisition process within the Federal Government, which would take years, he instead became a cloud services brokerage for his own agency and adopted multiple cloud services. This also was a very successful implementation. So even the Federal Government can adopt cloud services brokerage and respond in a very quick and efficient and effective manner.

Gardner: Todd, we spoke earlier about how we're moving from implementation to procurement. We've also talked about governance being important, SLAs, and managing a contract across variety of different organizations that are providing cloud type services. It seems to me that we're talking about financial types of relations.
So even the Federal Government can adopt cloud services brokerage and respond in a very quick and efficient and effective manner.

How does the cloud services brokerage help the financial people in a company. Maybe it's an individual who wears many hats, but you could think of them as akin to a chief financial officer, even though that might not be their title?

What is it that we are doing with the cloud services brokerage that is of a special interest and value to the financial people? Is it unified billing or is it one throat to choke? How does that work?

Lyle: Both, and then some. Ultimately it's unified billing and unified management from daily operations. It's helping people understand that we're moving from a capitalized expense, the server, the software, things that are tactile that we are used to touching. We're used to being able to count them and we like to see our stuff.

So it's transitioning and letting go, especially for the people who watch the money. We have a fiduciary responsibility to the organizations that we work for. Part of that is communicating, educating, and helping the CFO-type person understand the transition not only from the CAPEX to the OPEX, because they get that, but also how you're going to correlate it to productivity.

It's letting them know to be patient. It's going to take a couple months for your metering to level up. We have some statistics and we can read into that. It's holding their hand, helping them out. That's a very big deal as far as that's concerned.

Gardner: Let's start to think about how to get started. Obviously, every company is different. They're going to be at a different place in terms of maturity, in their own IT, never mind the transition to cloud types of activities. Would you recommend the book as a starting point? Do you have some other materials or references? How do you help that education process get going. I'm thinking about organizations that are really at the very beginning?

Gateway cloud

Lyle: We've created a gateway cloud in our book, not to confuse the cloud story. Ultimately, we have to take in consideration our economy, the world economy today. We're still very slow to move forward.

There are some activities occurring that are forcing us to make change. Our contracts may be running out. Software like XP is no longer supported. So we may be forced into making a change. That's when it's time to engage a cloud services brokerage or a specialist cloud services brokerage.

Go out and buy the book. It's available on Amazon. It gives you a breakdown, and you can do an assessment of your organization as it currently is and it will help you map your network. Then, it will help you reach out to a cloud services brokerage, if you are so inclined, through points of interest for request for proposal or request for information.

The fun part is, it gives you a recipe using Rackspace, Jungle Disk, and gotomeeting.com, where you get to build a baby cloud. Then, you can go out and play with it.
This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most important part, because you’re going to read it then.

You want to begin with three points: file sharing, remote access, and email. You can be the lighthouse or you can be a dry-cleaners, but every organization needs file sharing, remote access, and email. We open-sourced this recipe or what we call the industrial bundle for small businesses.

It's not daunting. We’ve got some time yet, but I would encourage you to get a handle on where your infrastructure is today, digest that information, go out and play with the gateway cloud that we've created, and reach out to us if you are so inclined.

We’d love for you to use one of our organizations, but ultimately know that there are people out there to help you. This book was written for us, not for the technical person. It is not in geek speak. This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most important part, because you’re going to read it then.

Jackson: I would urge SMBs to take the plunge. Cloud can be scary to some, but there is very little risk and there is much to gain for any SMB. The using, leveraging, taking advantage of the cloud gateway that Todd mentioned is a very good, low risk, and high reward path towards the cloud.

Gardner: I would agree with both of what you all said. The notion of a proof of concept and dipping your toe in. You don't have to buy it all at once, but find an area of your company where you’re going to be forced to make a change anyway and then to your point, Kevin, do it now. Take the plunge earlier rather than later.

Jackson: Before you're forced.

Large changes

Gardner: Before you’re forced, but you want to look at a tactical benefit and where to work toward strategic benefit, but there is going to be some really large changes happening in what these cloud providers can do in a fairly short amount of time.

We're moving from discrete apps into the entire desktop, so a full PC experience as a service. That’s going to be very attractive to people. They're going to need to make some changes to get there. But rather than thinking about services discreetly, more and more of what they're looking for is going to be coming as the entire IT services experience, and more analytics capabilities mixed into that. So I am glad to hear you both explaining how to do it, managed at a proof-of-concept level. But I would say do it sooner rather than later.

I'm afraid we have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on helping businesses make the best use of cloud computing. We've seen how the role and value of a cloud services brokerage brokerage -- with an emphasis across the different types of businesses, whether it's small to medium, regional, government -- makes a tremendous amount of sense.

This is going to help companies and government agencies make the best use of the commodity and targeted-cloud services, but not fall prey to replacing on-premises integration problems with cloud complexity and management problems.

So a huge thank you to our guests, Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio. Thank you, Todd.

Lyle: You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Dana.
Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org
Gardner: And thanks also to Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in Northern Virginia. Thanks, Kevin.

Jackson: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.

Gardner: And also a huge thank you to our audience for joining. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for being with us, and don't forget to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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