Cloud computing is widely seen as the new wave, the next big thing, and the realization of a vision of computing as a utility like electricity, delivered out of a plug in the wall and billed based on how much you use. From inside the industry it can be either a promise or a threat. Like it or not, however, it will be a reality.

What is Cloud Computing?

Gartner defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.”

In general, everything in computing seems to be getting the as-a-service tail.

Why Cloud

Cloud computing offers several major advantages to users,

• First, it avoids capital expenditure (CapEx) on IT.
• Second, consumption is usually billed on a utility (e.g. resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (e.g. time based, like a newspaper) basis with little or no upfront cost, eliminating all the complexity of trying to predict what the organization will need three years hence.
• Third, the organization does not need to recruit, pay, and retain people with sometimes rare skills that have nothing to do with the core business.
• Fourth, it gives the business huge flexibility to respond very quickly to business changes compared to the months that it takes to purchase and install a new server and sometimes years to implement an ERP system.
• Fifth, cloud service vendors also can provide a level of disaster recovery capability that many businesses simply cannot afford to build into their internal systems, simply by the nature of the Cloud.

Other benefits of this time sharing style approach are low barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead, and immediate access to a broad range of applications. Users can generally terminate the contract at any time (thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty) and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties

The Buzz

Forrester Research advises CFOs to take a close look at cloud computing for messaging and collaboration and enterprise applications. Gartner Says Cloud Computing Will Be As Influential As E-business. Gartner also says that cloud computing is very much an evolving concept that will take many years to fully mature.

Issues with Cloud

The first of these to surface in most conversations is data security and loss of control over data. The second is quality-of-service (QoS), including network latency issues. Hence while the buzz is there, Enterprises are slow in embracing the Cloud initiative.

How Solix EDMS helps Enterprises launch into Cloud

Solix offers several products that have direct application to Cloud Computing:

• Solix EDMS Data Masking can provide much greater security by masking the sensitive data as it leaves the organization to go to the Cloud and then unmasking that data as it is retrieved. This ensures that data can only be read by authorized individuals and not by hackers on the Web or dishonest employees of the Cloud service provider.
• Solix EDMS Data Archiving can improve network latency by archiving off the least active data and improving the application performance, potentially that can offset the network latency time lag.
• Solix EDMS Application Retirement can be the first Enterprises should target by relocating least business active data to the cloud. With this, they can start evaluating the cloud offering and analyze the benefits of cloud with least business risk. Reviewing application portfolio can help Enterprises identify underperforming or redundant systems where maintenance outweighs business value. By retiring these applications, companies can optimize their portfolio, reducing cost and risk. Application Retirement is removing a system, application, database or platform from service, while retaining access to the business-critical data. Solix EDMS Application Retirement provides this vital data management functionality of relocating and making the business-critical data available via Cloud offering.

Overall, Enterprise Data Management is an important part of the planning in any move from the data center to the Cloud. If issues related to Cloud are not tackled before the cut-over to new Cloud services, that can undermine the advantages of the Cloud and in extreme cases, force the organization to return to its older, more expensive internal environment. Well, we have lot to do, exciting times ahead…

Sai Gundavelli with John Brust of Oracle Corporation discusses on how Solix EDMS is utilizing Oracle 11g to help lower storage costs for its customers while meeting data retention and compliance requirements.

I am pleased to announce that Solix has signed an OEM agreement with Oracle Financial Services Software, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, world’s largest enterprise software company. With this –

• Oracle Flexcube customers will be able to buy the Solix EDMS Archiving functionality from Oracle
• By selecting Solix from among the several current competitors, Oracle effectively endorses Solix as a technological leader in its field

This could not come at a better time for Oracle Flexcube customers, given the turmoil in the financial services industry. With budgets slashed and layoffs common, the challenge for their CIOs is to get the best value for the money left in the budget. Their priorites need to be:

• Doing more with less
• Ensuring compliance in the most cost-efficient manner

Solix EDMS helps meet both these goals by automatically managing archiving of data that is no longer in active use but which is required for compliance. This improves Oracle Flexcube performance while decreasing costs by moving older data to inexpensive, inactive media, which decreases storage costs while making the infrastructure more agile. By decreasing the amount of data that needs to be backed up and restored, it also improves DR system performance. It also can accelerate data migration when implementing or upgrading Oracle Flexcube. This is particularly important for multi-national banks that cannot afford long Flexcube down times when upgrading or recovering from an outage.

Solix EDMS can also have a positive impact on Basel II compliance. Published in June 2004, Basel II is intended to create international standards on which banking regulators can base reserve requirements for capital banks to help protect the international financial system from the impacts of the collapse of financial institutions. In practice Basel II imposes rigorous risk and capital management requirements designed to ensure that banks retain appropriate levels of capital reserves, based on the risk level of their lending and investment practices. In general, the greater the risk to the bank, the greater the reserve required to safeguard its solvency and overall economic stability. The final version aims at:

• Ensuring that capital allocation is more risk sensitive
• Separating operational risk from credit risk, and quantifying both
• Attempting to align economic and regulatory capital more closely to reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage.

Compliance requires that banks upgrade their risk management processes, technology, and corporate guidance. Information Lifecycle management can make a positive impact on achieving those goals while decreasing overall IT capital and operational costs. For instance, Basel II requires that financial institutions apply an EU-formulated Risk Assessment Model at the end of each day of trading to demonstrate the institution’s solvency. If it fails that test, it must inform the authorities immediately and cease trading. By reducing the amount of data involved, Solix EDMS lifecycle management can streamline the analysis process, delivering the results faster at less cost.

Overall, this agreement is a four-way win: A win for Solix, because it is now allied with the world’s largest enterprise software company; a win for Oracle because it can now provide Information lifecycle management to its Flexcube users; a win for Flexcube users because this is the moment where they need this most. And most important, a win for existing Solix customers who now can be assured that Solix EDMS is a very advanced solution and endorsed by Oracle.

Last week, I flew from New York to North Carolina on Jetblue. My seat mate was a financial analyst who makes this trip weekly and was focused on his seat TV. He was curiously watching a television show on CNBC and something about South Africa. During a break he said he was a South African and was watching an interview about electricity rationing there, which started a discussion of conservation and economics.

Electricity rationing is becoming a trend worldwide. Brazil and Cuba now ration electricity, and New York and New Jersey are threatening to restrict power allotments for data centers. Anybody who does not think this is a world crisis should look back to 1973 and 1979, when the phrase “energy crisis” entered the English language. The parallels to today are striking: Oil prices are soaring, touching $118 a barrel recently. The dollar is weak; the political situation in Venezuela, a major oil supplier to the United States, is destabilizing; the United States is entangled in a seemingly endless war in the Middle East, the stock market is fading, and inflation is high (the price of food has doubled in the last year). But unlike the 1970s, when the economy was robust, today economic growth is slowing and the economy is threatened by the sub prime and credit card debt crises. The United States, with 5% of the world’s population, consumes 23% of the total energy produced in the world, far more per capita than any other country. That 5% of the world’s population has as much environmental impact than the 51% that live in the other five largest countries. And the cost of that energy, whether it is gasoline at the pump or electricity at the meter, is going up rapidly.

All of that suggests that enterprises need to focus on energy management both to find major savings in their operational budgets and to cut their carbon footprints, and that we are on the verge of seeing the appearance of Corporate Energy Officers in businesses. Organizations need to know their energy use, its cost over time, and how that energy is used and what it produces for the enterprise. And it needs to manage those costs and conserve energy wherever they can. IT can make a major contribution to this by embracing virtualization, ILM based tiered storage, Data Subsetting for Test/Dev instances, which reduces storage, consolidates the server population, cuts both power and cooling needs in the data center, and adds up to a significant drop on energy use. How significant? BT has cut 3,100 physical Wintel servers to 134 and eight data centers to three across the United Kingdom. This had a significant positive impact on the corporation’s bottom line and its carbon footprint, and improved its service to users, all while BT itself continued steady strong growth. It is time that we stop thinking of conservation as tree huggers versus business. The fact is that energy and carbon reduction are good business, and those who realize it now can position themselves to be the leaders in the next financial era.