Cloud Catalyst

Whilst enterprises today understand the importance of Cloud Computing, their journey to cloud computing is hardly ever easy. Adopting the right cloud strategy for an organization can be quite a daunting task. Add to this all the hype and myth around the abilities/inabilities of the cloud and enterprises start running the risk of making incorrect investments, often falling short of achieving the benefits they had originally envisaged from the cloud.

The Cloud Center of Excellence at THBS has been paying close attention to the challenges faced by customers and has been steadfastly working on a tool that enables enterprises to expedite their cloud adoption… a tool that helps them catalyze their journey to the cloud. The result, a tool aptly named “Cloud Catalyst”

You could try this out at www.thbs.com/cloud_catalyst_programme.html

This tool from Torry Harris has won its rightful place as one among the Top 3 for the Cloud Computing World Series Awards by the prestigious Cloud Computing World Forum! The selection was made under the “Best Enterprise Solution” category.

To know more about our cloud initiatives and other ways in which we can help your organization succeed, log on to our website www.thbs.com

- Bharat Kesheorey

Adapt to the changes around you or perish and be history. At the onset, it might appear to be a harsh rule, but it has in fact been driving nature over the past million years, eventually resulting in us humans.

Interestingly, these concepts of adaptation and evolution, which are intrinsically woven into nature, are equally applicable even to fiercely competitive industries such as the banking sector… With constant change in socioeconomic behaviour and the ever increasing pressure from regulatory bodies, banks must ensure that adaptability is woven into the very structure that holds them, and defines them.

Agility is the key to thrive; it is the key to survive…

Fortunately, when it comes to agility in the banking business, there is an answer in the IT world, it’s called SOA or Service Oriented Architecture. SOA enables you to envisage your business as consisting of processes built out of simple and basic blocks. Blocks that can not only be shared and reused but more importantly as situations and environments change, put together to create an entirely new structure, a new species that is best suited to the adapt to the new conditions.

Since a core banking solution or CBS is at the very heart of any banking institute, a SOA enabled CBS will ensure that banks are taking the right steps towards evolutionary success.

SOA and a lot more at www.thbs.com

- Bharat Kesheorey

One might think that that the significance of information in the IT industry is evident by the very first letter used in its nomenclature. Yet it is surprising how much of it (or how little) is actually made available to the testing teams during a typical SDLC!

In an article on some of the trends in Software testing for the year 2011, one of our senior test managers, Sentheel Kumaran shares the companies approach and views. Learn more at http://tiny.cc/l87ra

Today, THBS  kicks off a ‘Week of Fun’, to make this time of the year wonderful and pleasant

We have lined up a plethora team based events which will teleported the techies to a whole new world….

We expect the competition to be fierce with each Team vying for the Judge’s attention and favor. Each of the teams will be given a chance to present themselves in a way so as to outdo the other competitors.

The first one on the card is ‘Retro Day’ – Here we are expecting people to come out directly from a 70’s or 80’s movie replicate with – bell bottoms, overpowering sun glasses, polka dots, big collar shirts, garish clothing to hint a few…..

The next event is ‘Hand Painting’ – Now we have all heard of face painting, house painting but you read it right its Hand painting! Teams can blow their heads off to come up with any kind of idea… who knows… there might be a talented M.F Hussain hidden in the techie.. who might choose paint the Taj Mahal on his team mates hand!!!!

Having said that, close on heels is the ‘Rangoli’ competition – No, this is definitely not just for the women folk out there… Guys are also welcome to show off their artistic skills and prove that they are equal competitors! They say that you can make rangoli out of anything…. Yes Anything… so we are expecting to be surprised here….

Next we move to the arena where techies spend most of their time [coding] ….. any guesses?? their CUBICLES…  Keeping in mind the spirit of the season – Christmas & New years eve, we are hoping to see some exceptional decoration ideas for their cubicle… who knows one spirited team might just simulate Newyork ‘Times square’ for us.. the possibilities are just endless…

The cherry on the the cake, the grand finale for the week long celebration will be ‘Secret Santa’. This season epitomizes the spirit of giving, keeping that in mind we want people to play it, enjoy it and be a reason for someone’s smile.

Going retro!

Hand Painting !

Torry Harris Business Solutions (THBS) has been recognized as one among the Top 20 IT services companies impacting the market place by SiliconIndia.

SiliconIndia publishes si100,  an annual listing of the top 100 technology companies founded and managed by Indians in the U.S. The si100 not only represents the continuing rise and glory of Indian entrepreneurship in high-tech but also recognizes companies impacting the market place.

A distinguished panel comprising of accomplished Indian CEO’s & CIO’s of public companies, VC’s, analysts, founders of other VC funded companies including siliconindia editorial board decided on THBS as being in the Top 20 among the top 100 companies listed.

Commenting on this achievement, Shuba Sridhar, Regional Manager (Technical Services) said, “This recognition is very timely and reaffirms our commitment to customer delight”.

Find more at: http://www.siliconindia.com/SI100_2010/it.html

The Four piece Orchestra

Cloud, SOA, BPM and BI – While there is much written individually about these four hot topics of the day, there is perhaps less published as to the roles each play with respect to the other. While each of the four can play a significant role in improving the service capability and reach of a business, with possible reduction in costs and time to market, working together, the impact is vastly compounded.

The Cloud provides assets. It impacts business in two ways: it offers more to all and thereby reduces the value of proprietary assets. It is perhaps the second aspect that is understated but has had a greater impact on systematically eroding the bottom lines of organizations which have come to rely on their leading edge products or services around these products. Market share resulting from decades of huge investments to facilitate development, implementation and innovation is now being challenged by upstarts, because never before has so much been spent by many towards making more available for consumption in small parts, at will, without restrictive commitment. The term “barrier of entry” may well become passé. What started as simply providing excess hardware to others on demand, either by renting out tin or idle processors, has now extended to a ‘pay as you consume’ model that now spans virtually every component of the value stream. Platforms, software and even people are available on demand and increasingly, worryingly native. Worrying to those who depend on a traditional asset base of connections, tin, brick and mortar to protect them.

Service Oriented Architecture, SOA, is constructed on the principle of ‘ease’. The whole idea is to make it easy to invoke technical assets. Functional code is constructed knowing that it will be used, changed, reused and made available to many in a simple, standardized manner. Where possible, the intent is to model a ‘plug and play’ environment. The assets themselves may lie inside the enterprise or outside in the cloud. SOA represents a means to assemble them at will, put together components in different combinations and processes as meets the business need. The principal benefit of SOA is perhaps just this, the ability to change the offering fairly quickly, and thereby demonstrate a shorter time to market.

It is important to recognize that cost savings by itself may not make the business case, especially in the short term. However it is becoming evident that SOA, at least in part, may be necessary to meet competitive pressure and stay in business.

Business process management (BPM) nowadays enjoys an environment where it becomes an enriched conductor of action and sequence, choosing from a wider array of choices that are made available from the Cloud through the use of SOA centric services.

Business Intelligence, BI, is the trigger that sets the symphony moving. While the others can be considered as the means, BI, through the automated interpretation of data acts in real time and starts the music without human intervention!

End-User Experience

With SOA, BPM, BI and Cloud, Enterprises can offer their customers…

• Innovative product offerings that are ahead of the competition
• Customized offers created by analyzing user patterns in real time
• Seamless user experience across different mediums – PC & Mobile devices

Concluding thoughts and The Beginning

There have been certain trends that consistently emerge, irrespective of industry, as durable, fostering allegiance amidst users and producing wealth for those who incorporate them in their offerings. Amongst them, the principle of self-service, transferring power to the user, is perhaps significant. Countless examples of incredible commercial success resulting from followers across varied cultural domains prevail, Facebook, Google, Twitter are examples.

Why? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that they appeal to the age old values of liberty and freedom of expression, home building, ownership of domain and design to satisfy individual desire. The opportunity to provide a structured blank canvass, to build, enrich and provide restricted entry, was realized by Facebook and the value was created by the users themselves. This kind of self governance, that panders to the desire for independence and control, yet with belonging in a greater community, is critical towards widespread acceptance. The quartet plays music of this genre. The choice of content is determined by the user, the options unlimited by the Cloud, and incredibly a means to generate instant gratification without deliberate action, but simply by setting data triggers.

It may be the beginning of a whole new era.

Cloud Computing – as it is termed, is the most apt name for one of the highly fashionable words in the technical world – like the real cloud, it is nearly transparent, cost-effective (not free unlike the real clouds!) and available in abundance. Every internet based IT business now proudly wears a ‘cloud tag’.

Yes, Cloud can yield real juicy stuff for the production applications which are maintaining customers and fighting the competitors out. But this article is trying to address as to how it can benefit in pre-production environments? What aspects of Cloud computing will lend a hand while making an application production ready?

Pre-production is a phase in SDLC which stands immediately before production environment, mirroring the live system. It is often used for ensuring correctness of the application before taking the aplication live. Pre-prod in a broader sense can also include User Acceptance Testing phase.

The pre-prod challenges and how Cloud can help

When we see the pre-prod phase through ‘cloud’ glasses, we see the following challenges drawing our attention.

• Requirements for resources in shorter bursts of time

Often pre-production is a relatively shorter phase when compared to the lifespan of the application itself. It will be needed often but not for long. Acquisition of the required hardware resources for the necessary phase will make incurring high expenditures for relatively shorter period of time. Purchase and maintenance of servers, server rooms, cooling and other supporting infrastructure will shoot up the project cost by leaps and bounds. To avoid this, more often than not, the companies do away with pre-production phase altogether, which is a very vital phase for the project!

How could Cloud help?

Cloud enables on-demand acquisition of computing resources. The team can acquire and retain the machines only as long as the need exists and release the same, once done. Acquisition, setup and release of the resources are done with a few clicks of buttons without requiring physical activities. Paying only peruse and avoiding initial capital investment yields huge cost savings and soars up the profits.

• Acquire more resources for faster delivery, when needed

During the project development, more often than not, the timelines are shrunken to achieve faster delivery. However the amount of available infrastructure remains the same. This causes a rush to acquire the environments among the team members and makes the delivery process difficult. Higher load on the same old computing resources may cause hiccups resulting in reduced performance of the machines and unrealistic statistical values.

How could Cloud help?

Procuring new hardware resources is a child’s play in Cloud Computing (Yes, it is!). More importantly, the new hardware resources could be launched with pre-built ‘machine images’ (taking Amazon Cloud as an example), making the environment setup dramatically easier. Image (or template) of a fully prepared environment can be used as a base which could have all the necessary softwares, application servers and database servers pre-installed.

This lets the project team scale up as per the demand in a very short time period and helps meet the delivey timelines. Since procurement of new hardware does not involve capital investment on the physical infrastructure itself, such a scale up will not adversely affect the project cost.

• Ensuring application portability on different Operating Systems

If the application should function on all the operating systems, cost of furnishing the hardware shoots up. Along with the hardware, platform support and maintenance costs will also be much higher

How could Cloud help?

Every cloud provider gives plenty of options when it comes to choosing computing resources. Amazon lets us use any flavour of Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows Server. Based on the preference, the user could choose any or all of these platforms and use for development / testing purposes, all with the help of just a few clicks!

Seeing is believing

Today, a lot of enterprise strategists are envisaging their production applications to be migrated to Cloud. However, the industry is still apprehensive about the suitability of Cloud and foresees extreme risk in migrating a successfully running application to Cloud. To avoid any suicidal fiasco, one of the safest ways out is to test the pre-prod environment(s) on Cloud and subject it to all aspects of testing. This does the ‘ice breaking’ and helps the enterprises take a firm step forward towards gaining elastic, transparent, unlimited computing powers at a lesser cost!

Why waiting? Go ahead, before you miss the bus, rather flight to reach the Cloud!

Cloud computing has proven its benefits in business processes and has gained wide spread recognition. To see Cloud as an integral part of any enterprise, it requires an understanding of how Cloud helps a business perform far greater than others.  This blog aims to dispel some of the common myths to enable better understanding of the capabilities of  Cloud.

Auto Scaling is a standalone feature provided by the Cloud Infrastructure

Auto scaling feature in Cloud enables the application to scale up and down easily to meet the demand. For instance, In Amazon AWS, the common misconception is that the auto scaling feature is automatically applied once the user signs up for EC2 service. In reality, auto scaling is enabled by Amazon Cloud Watch. Once the user is signed up for Amazon EC2 service, the user is registered to use auto scaling and can only begin to use the feature via the auto scaling APIs or Command Line Tools. The scalable infrastructure in Cloud can be optimally utilized if the architecture of the application that is deployed on the Cloud is also designed to be scalable. Increasing the resources should proportionally increase the performance of a  scalable application. The application in itself should be resilient and operationally efficient by leveraging the elasticity of Cloud to the maximum. Traditional applications were structured for a fixed, rigid and pre-provisioned infrastructure. Time and resources were never invested in optimizing the architecture of the application for proper hardware utilization. This approach has to change while using Cloud. The application hosted on Cloud needs to be designed in such a way that the resources are used only when the application needs it and released when the work is done. With this, the elastic feature of Cloud can be leveraged effectively.

IT infrastructure isolated from the cloud

A common assumption in using Cloud is that the Cloud usage would isolate the enterprise’s existing IT infrastructure from the data and applications hosted on Cloud. On the contrary ,it is quite easy to integrate the rest of the enterprise with the applications on Cloud. Amazon’s VPC (Virtual Private Cloud ) is one such service which provides a bridge between the company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS Cloud.  The VPC and the IT infrastructure can be bridged via an encrypted VPN connection.

Cloud is inherently secure

Another common misconception about Cloud is with respect to the application security. The  misconception in this area is that the security provided by the Cloud vendor is in itself sufficient for the applications deployed on Cloud to be completely secure. But the fact is , though the basic security and authentication mechanisms are available out of the box from the vendor, there is also a need for application security which is becoming a major area that requires comprehensive programs and effective management. Apart from the physical security and access controls provided by the vendors, it becomes mandatory for the application to take into account the security aspect in the architecture and code of the application. For example Clickjacking  is a new type of attack where an attacker hides a frame that enables an attacker to transparently collect user clicks allowing the user to change the user settings to steal user credentials. Certain other application bugs like buffer overflows also continue to be a threat to all the user’s applications.

Systems on Cloud automatically recover on unprecedented disasters

Imagine a condition where there is a sudden and unrecoverable loss of the entire data center (eg:lightning on the data center or data center fire). Disaster Recovery (DR) in Cloud Computing can help recover the data in such cases provided the user has taken appropriate measures to handle the disaster. For instance , Amazon allows the users to take advantage of the geo-distribution of the disaster recovery servers [Availability Zones] to replicate the environment in another location within minutes. The point to be noted here is that DR is not automatically given to the user, instead the user is allowed to leverage this feature in the application architecture. By mounting an EBS [Elastic Block Store] volume in an availability zone that is in a different from the zone hosting the production environment and by setting up machine images that mirror the production environment , one can rapidly recover into the Cloud during disasters. Regular synchronization of production environment and  DR environment would be necessary in this case. Doing so avoids the expensive burden of relying on physical tapes and tape management for data back to address any unforeseen conditions.

Before using Cloud, a clear understanding of the architecture of the Cloud and designing the user application to leverage the maximum benefits of Cloud computing would clear the air of the misconceptions in the user’s mind.

Mission-critical applications are those where system or application failure causes damage to organization’s reputation and revenue. The definition of a mission critical application changes depending on the industry vertical one is operating with. The parameters which define the core offerings of the industry are usually considered as to be a part of the mission critical applications. As an example, for the banking sector, the applications involved in defining the revenue parameters are considered as being mission critical. In the same way, applications dealing with defining the operational efficiency for an electronic trading system are considered to be mission critical.

Mission critical application when deployed on Cloud, like any other application, enjoys the  key benefits of  Cloud computing which includes flexibility,cost reduction and  scalability. In the due course of strategizing the placement of mission critical applications on the Cloud, taking care of a few parameters discussed below can make a difference to the end-end operation and stability of the IT architecture. This reduces the complexity involved in decision making during the organization’s technical strategy towards Cloud migration.

Security – For any application on Cloud, security becomes an important parameter to be considered. As a minimum necessity, careful examination of the compliances that the Cloud vendor is authorized for is required. For instance, In order to be HIPAA compliant, enterprises must design their systems and applications to meet HIPAA’s privacy and security standards and related administrative, technical, and physical safeguards. Any Cloud vendor supporting the deployment of health care businesses should compulsorily be HIPAA Compliant.

Service Level Agreements – The agreement that the Cloud user makes with the vendor should concentrate on schedules for service levels and pricing. It should address the vendor’s obligations to assist the customer in transitioning to another vendor .The customer may also want the agreement to allow for periodic benchmarking to compare the services to the marketplace and require the vendor to meet the market.

Reliability – How reliable is the service is a common question that needs to be answered by the Cloud vendors. Reliability comes from the Cloud vendor’s transparency of information like customer’s ability to access stored data, the support response time and a regime for calculating credits based on the vendor’s failure to meet the service level standards. The data hosting location information becomes mandatory for specific government regulations in certain countries like the United Kingdom. Data center location information is also required to understand if the enterprises are residing physically in high risk areas like the ones prone to natural disasters

Fault tolerance – Imagine a situation where there is a power failure, generators fail to start at the data center or even worse, imagine a fire break out at the data center where your businesses is hosted. This would turn hazardous for any mission critical applications. Hence the Cloud environment hosting the business should ideally be a clear fault tolerant system. Amazon’s Availability Zones is a fabulous example where users assign instances to locations that have very high bandwidth between each other. A failure in one zone does not disrupt the service in another and hence the businesses are unaffected.

Disaster recovery plan – Disaster recovery plays a crucial role in case of a disaster like a sudden and unrecoverable loss of an entire data center. A rapid recovery and minimal data loss after a disaster is needed for mission critical applications. For example, by regularly synchronizing the production environments with Amazon S3 and by setting up machine images that mirror the production environments, one should be able to rapidly recover into the Cloud without paying to run an entirely redundant data center 24×7.

As in the case of any other business agreement, a deliberate effort of the service provider along with a carefully drafted mutually agreed service level agreement specifying each parties’ rights, obligations, and liabilities are perhaps the most critical parameters an organization can adopt before deploying mission critical applications into the Cloud.

Jayapriya.K

A recent news article in Computerworld mentioned “As Cloud Computing Grows, Customer Frustration Mounts”. The reason for the fears mainly revolves around the concerns involving Cloud computing. Some of the key concerns of the customers range from as technical as Data transparency and Security to the intangible factors involving trust. Many business concerns like Vendor lock-in also play a very important role in determining the association of organizations with the cloud.

A survey produced by the non-profit Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and the IEEE professional association suggests that security aspects identified as data privacy and encryption are some of the most important concerns of Cloud users. This means that there is an absence of a compliance environment and in-turn a need to create one. Data information like the location of the data, owner of the data and the data after termination of the contract are some of the expectations of a user while adopting Cloud. Hence, it calls for openness and transparency from the Cloud provider.

Another major concern includes the fear of vendor lock-in. Availability of the Cloud provider and the ease of data migration are necessary for Cloud adoption. Hence a clear exit strategy needs to be thought of by the users in case the Cloud providers themselves go out of business. This demands an extra effort from the cloud users to refine the strategy in terms of offering to the end customers. This extra effort may lead cloud users to think twice about exploiting the humongous benefits offered by the Cloud. The problem of vendor lock-in can be solved if there are common data formats, APIs and protocols in place so that the application running on one Cloud provider is easily ported to another.

In choosing a Cloud provider trust plays an important role. I came across an analogy which compared the use of Cloud to the use of bank. One trusts the bank and deposits the money in it because one is sure that the money is safe there. Similar trust is needed to place the business on Cloud, which means there is a need for a “concern-free” Cloud computing environment. If we consider the bank, there are a lot of regulatory bodies which control the standards and regulations and hence the user is sure that even if something goes wrong, the bank is liable for it and an appropriate compensation will be provided if an adverse situation arises. Similar standards and regulations shall ease and accelerate Cloud adoption. The security concerns call for open Cloud standards. Thanks to CSA, a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing has been successfully initiated.

Apart from implementation of the existing standards, a thorough analysis to fill the gap identified in the existing framework will surely contribute towards addressing the major concerns of the cloud adoption. Though these concerns still haunt the market while deciding over the adoption of Cloud computing, the key drivers including cost effectiveness, lesser time to market and optimized scalability remain the benefits of Cloud computing. A proper ROI calculation by considering the intangible parameters plays a key role in the decision making for adopting Cloud as an integral part of the IT infrastructure.

 Jayapriya.K