December 2010 ~ Techno-Pulse

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

In Absence of Dedicated Privacy Law & Data Protection Law - Is India Ready for Cloud Computing?

“…The real problem is that India does not have any dedicated Privacy Law, Data Protection Law and Legal Enablement of M-Governance in India informs Praveen Dalal, a Supreme Court Lawyer and leading Techno Legal expert of India. With the proposed use of Cloud Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and M-Governance by Indian Government, more “Privacy Violations”, “Cyber Security” and many more “Regulatory Issues” would arise in future. These “Initiatives” cannot succeed in India in the absence of adequate and strong Laws in this regard…”

--- CJNEWS - India Is Not Ready For M-Governance And Cloud Computing

Though Privacy is our fundamental right yet I wonder how many times it is violated frequently on a daily basis; be it three-four unsolicited telemarketing calls or scores of SMSes & spams. Even the finance minister of India is not spared – a telemarketer offered him home loan while he was attending a high profile meeting with leader of opposition. It seems Do Not Call Registry & Do Call Registry have failed to curb the nuisance. (Come January 1; 2011 & you can at least identify (not prevent) the telemarketer’s call as they will be starting with the prefix 70)

The recent controversy of phone tapping of a top industrialist & the subsequent leakage of tapped conversation in public domain raises a serious privacy concern. Currently, though it’s a honeymoon period for the cloud customers & providers as almost everything is going fine with a little or no hiccups at all. But with the ongoing state of affair, a business owner in India may have to think twice before migrating to the cloud

Trust is intact till it’s broken…

What if someone sold your trade secret, customer list or business plan to your rival?
Is there a law in India to protect your privacy & data in the cloud?

Cloud by its basic architecture is decentralized & location independent (cross border data transfer). India along with US, EU & other tech-leading nations must come up with some mutually agreed basic framework of legislations to safeguard privacy & data protection across national boundaries but without impeding innovation. A dedicated privacy & data protection law in place will considerably reduce the fear & friction & in turn might go a long way in creating a favorable cloud ecosystem.

Optional Info: Though not full-proof yet European Union & US customers/vendors enjoy a fair degree of privacy & data protection. The New York Times shared the following on an upcoming bill - balancing between national security & protecting privacy:

“The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.”

In absence of dedicated Privacy Law & Data Protection Law - Is India Ready for Cloud Computing? What’s the opinion of leading cloud experts? Check…

Disclaimer: I am NOT associated with any of the companies mentioned here.

[Opinions published in the order they were received]

Suresh Sambandam - Founder & CEO of OrangeScape, a pioneer Platform as a Service(PaaS).

The only Indian company listed in research reports of Gartner and Forrester on PaaS. OrangeScape's patent pending rule engine based PaaS platform enables entrepreneurs to build scalable SaaS based business applications easily.

I believe 'Law' should always play a catch up role with evolution for new industries, new businesses etc. It is too early days and things are changing rapidly. The law makers wouldn't even know what should be the constituents of the law. I am worried about Law makers creating more confusion than regulation. I feel the economy will regulate itself in many ways - just like the SAS70 certification other things will evolve from the industry to protect the industry. I feel this is much more practical and sustainable. Ultimately Customers will abandon providers who are not adhering to standards.

Narasimhan (Kishore) Mandyam - CEO of PK4, a company that delivers a SaaS Impel CRM for India.

Started as a developer at Infosys in 1986, Kishore has built and run companies in software services and in products in India and the US. Prior to PK4 he has lead many successful ventures viz. Ampersand, Aprisa & zeroCode. In 2006, he co-founded PK4 with the objective of changing the way traditional software is built and sold. Impel CRM is the first large software system from that effort. Kishore is an Electrical Engineer from UVCE, Bangalore.

If businesses had to depend solely on laws to make decisions, there’d be no innovation whatsoever. In fact, India is a terrific market for Cloud Computing, since this is one of the few countries on Earth there access to and the growth of network infrastructure has far outstripped access to basic infrastructure like electricity and water. People and companies can access sophisticated services without having to worry about electricity back-up and air conditioning for their servers, since the infrastructure is all “out there somewhere”. Further, without an “installed base” of in-premise computing, Indian managers have less to worry about in terms of legacy.

The legal issues will get resolved over time, but businesses will have come on board Cloud Computing long before that.

Sunny Ghosh - Director Wolf Frameworks, a browser based On Demand Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for rapidly designing and delivering database driven multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

Sunny is responsible for developing & evangelizing the business model embedded inside the WOLF Platform. A COBOL, RPG, CL programmer by origin, with strong career foundation with Motorola, Sunny started his career in the Telecom domain & holds an honors degree in Mathematics with specialization in Competitive Product Strategies, Intellectual Capital & Software Business Management from NSRCEL, IIM-Bangalore. A voracious reader, core committee member of the prestigious CII - Knowledge Management Community of India, he has published series of papers on how Digital edge empowers large Diasporas & communities, “Mobilizing knowledge management towards digital rights” in assistance from World Bank & UNPAN and dreams of a world filled with choice, service, freedom and optimism.

With the internet becoming an integral part of personal and corporate life, Indians have long been accustomed to the usage of Cloud services such as email and have warmed up to the idea of internet banking, online conferencing & related services. The increasing adoption of web-based services that add significant value and save time, money and effort, indicates a trend which is fast becoming the norm.

When considering Cloud services, most organizations acknowledge that security, customer privacy, data backups and risk mitigation are a part of a Cloud vendor’s core competency and service offering. Moreover, the need for a secure web-based service and the gap needed to fill it leads to the realization that building a security arrangement similar to that of a Cloud vendor would be prohibitive in terms of cost as well as implementation skills.

Importantly, the growing adoption of Cloud services by global clients and their resulting benefits is a clear indicator of the competitive difference and savings that come from adopting these services.

Jamal Mazhar is Founder and CEO of Kaavo. He possesses 15+ years of experience in technology, engineering and consulting with a range of Fortune 500 companies including GE and ING.

He has BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and MBA from NYU Stern School of Business. Kaavo Inc. provides solutions for managing distributed applications in the clouds. Kaavo’s core product, IMOD, takes an application centric approach for managing infrastructure and makes it easier for businesses to run secure and scalable services and applications in the clouds.

Privacy and related issues will be resolved with the increase in cloud computing adoption not before it. The adoption will happen first in use cases where privacy is not a concern. Ready or not there is already a wide spread use of social networking sites in India and people are actively sharing and putting personal information on these sites in the Cloud. Every time there is a big technological shift, it creates social, economic, and managerial friction and it takes time for all these forces to sort out. Carlota Perez has done an excellent evaluation of the forces that are in play during any major technological shift in her book (Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital); I highly recommend reading it to get a better understanding of the social and economic aspect of new technologies.

What’s your opinion? As a business owner will you wait for the law to refine & arrive with dedicated privacy & data protection regulations? Or do you trust the self regulation & standard followed by your cloud service provider?

Cloud Computing Articles & Interviews at Techno-Pulse

Is Multi-Tenancy an Essential Attribute of Cloud Computing Service?

Though heavy weights like Gartner, NIST and Forrester have thrown their weight in favor of Multi-Tenancy camp yet there are technology evangelists who think otherwise. Check the following excerpt from an interview published at Cloud Computing [source]:

Cloud Computing Journal: Does an app need multi-tenancy to be SaaS-enabled on the Virtual Ark SaaS Application Management Platform?

President & CEO of Virtual Ark, *Marty Gauvin: No, not at all. Virtual Ark can manage dedicated instances of the application for specific customer needs as if they were "one" application instance. In our view, the security, integration and performance requirements of our target market, large enterprise customers, are ill-suited to multi-tenant solutions. We think this is a key reason why SaaS has not been taken up more strongly by this market segment, and why many ISVs have not modified their applications to be multi-tenant. Virtual Ark sees this as an important differentiator in its value proposition.

*Marty Gauvin is a successful, visionary serial tech-entrepreneur. Prior to Virtual Ark he has founded & lead many successful ventures viz. Tier5, Hostworks. Also a member of many advisory & government innovation committies.

Let us check the opinion of a few of the who’s who of Indian Cloud Service Arena. The following content is based on the opinion shared exclusively with Techno-Pulse…

Disclaimer: I am NOT associated with any of the companies mentioned here.
[Opinions published in the order they were received]

Suresh Sambandam - Founder & CEO of OrangeScape, a pioneer Platform as a Service(PaaS).

Multi-tenancy is about sharing of set of infrastructure resources be it hardware or software across multiple clients to cross leverage utilization and hence drive cost efficiencies. The dilemma on multi-tenancy is no different than the dilemma between choosing a FLAT and a INDEPENDENT House. A multi-storied apartment complex a perfect metaphor of shared infrastructure like lift, swimming pool etc for all the tenants in the complex. Individually most tenants can't afford to buy a house with swimming pool. However, as a builder once has to provision for a lift as a high raised building brings in new challenges of reaching the higher floors. Hence lift becomes a mandatory feature. I see similar things happening in the cloud computing space. Once you have to share common infrastructure among many clients you also end up building some additional infrastructure to take care of volume of customers etc. While mostly it is a vendor phenomena, customers also have to understand multi-tenancy (very similar to the way they understand FLATS today)!

Narasimhan (Kishore) Mandyam - CEO of PK4, a company that delivers a SaaS Impel CRM for India.

Multi-tenancy, IMHO, is an essential part of any SaaS service (which can be considered a subset of Cloud Computing Services). That’s the only way today for a customer to be confident that the Service s/he signed up for will actually be there when s/he wants it. And that's the only way for a vendor to provide it at an affordable price-point.

Alok Misra - Cofounder & Principal at Navatar Group, a global Cloud service provider.

Navatar is a longtime partner and one of the top resellers of salesforce.com. Alok spent his early career in senior roles at Deloitte Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers. In addition to driving the go-to-market strategy for Navatar and other ISV clients, he writes for several Cloud publications and blogs. He is also the co-author of the recently released cloud computing book, "Thinking of ... Force.com as your key to the Cloud Kingdom."

It may be hard to argue with Marty when he says “large enterprise customers, are ill-suited to multi-tenant solutions.” Large customers, usually, are too “high-maintenance,” both in terms of their unique requirements as well as their highly political environments. Had they been simple to deal with, consulting firms like Deloitte or PwC, that make most of their money from organizational complexities, would have gone out of business by now. No wonder, it’s hard for a vendor offering a multitenant solution to convince a large customer to buy.

So if you’re an ISV targeting large enterprise customers, an easier option may be not to be multitenant, so you can tailor for each customer’s unique needs. It’s a perfectly valid (and maybe lucrative) business model. The issue is that eventually you will turn into a services company – or, in other words, most of your revenues will come from services.

If you want to be a viable cloud vendor selling products, you have no choice – your product must be multitenant in order to survive in the cloud world.

Sahil Parikh - Founder & CEO of DeskAway a Cloud based Project Collaboration & Management software. He is the Author of The SaaS Edge

Sahil has been involved with the web since the last 10 years. He is passionate about the fusion of design & technology and that of building scalable web businesses

Yes, to be a true SaaS player you need to be multi-tenant and manage one code-base so that you can scale and improve your product faster. Without multi-tenancy you are like a web development service company managing multiple codebases and servers for each client - which is a huge headache!

Sunny Ghosh - Director Wolf Frameworks, a browser based On Demand Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for rapidly designing and delivering database driven multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

A multi-tenant Cloud architecture permits a vendor to service its customer base effectively using shared operational instances of the infrastructure. In addition to significantly lowering service delivery cost as well as operational expenses and efforts, this model brings several benefits to the customer.

The obvious benefit is the lower TCO for customers. With optimal utilization of its infrastructure, the vendor can deliver higher value at lower cost. Applying the economies of scale, a growth in the customer base would enable the vendor to offer further benefits.

An important feature of this model is that it affords portability and helps minimize risk for customers. By maintaining identical instances, the vendor can easily shift a customer, in case of unexpected failure or growth, from one instance to another without the need for major architectural changes.

Eliminating the need to maintain individual instances (code bases, infrastructure, etc.) for customers equates to frequent upgrades and easier maintenance.
Dennis Howlett summarizes it perfectly: “Long term, I believe the ability to powerfully slice, dice, form and reform data out of multi-tenant systems will become the place where customers see huge value that is way beyond TCO.”

Jamal Mazhar is Founder and CEO of Kaavo. He possesses 15+ years of experience in technology, engineering and consulting with a range of Fortune 500 companies including GE and ING.

For the cloud computing services two critical things are elasticity and on-demand delivery. Arguments about multi-tenancy are often simplified, unless you are running one application on one physical server and no network connectivity, every application shares some resources (network, compute, storage) with other applications.

The core issue here is to understand the trade-offs between flexibility and resource requirements; fundamentally this is a cost vs. agility trade-off. Based on your requirement you have to pick the right model. For example I was speaking with a provider that offers web hosting platform to customers, most of the web applications running on their platform get only few hits per day, so it doesn't make sense for them to give a dedicated virtual server to each application. Because of the shared platform they can offer better pricing to customers and in return customers give up some flexibility. If you have custom applications requiring special tweaking and your specific middleware, shared platform model wouldn't work for you. This what Marty Gauvin of VirtualArk referred to in his comments.

IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS represent various level of sharing of resources. To understand these trade-offs better, I recommend watching this 5 minute on IT evolution and benefits and challenges of cloud computing. To see how SaaS, PaaS, IaaS fit in the overall big picture refer to this 4 minute video.

Hope, after reading the Cloud Expert opinions, as a Provider or Customer, now you know what to expect from a Cloud Service in terms of multi-tenancy.

Is Multi-tenancy a prerequisite for a Cloud based Service? Do share your views…

Cloud Computing Articles & Interviews at Techno-Pulse

5 Essential Attributes of a Cloud Service

What do Gartner’s technology Hype Cycle Report of 2009 and 2010 have in common?

Did you answer that both reports include that cloud computing is at the peak of expectations?

Correct. As in the 2009 Hype Cycle Report, cloud computing is still at the peak of inflated expectations for two consecutive years. The buzz around cloud services has not diminished, and with every global IT major launching some sort of cloud service, the hype continues to grow. There are many cloud success stories making the rounds. But the vast opportunities offered by the cloud, especially in the SMBs/SMEs segment, have also led to chaos. Within this confusion, many IT vendors have taken undue advantage of the situation, which has in turn resulted in what the experts call:

Cloud-Washing [It seems the it was 1st used by James Staten of Forrester Research]
SaaS-querade [I 1st read this in an article by Brian, CEO of TechVentive at ZDNet blog]
Pseudo SaaS
Quasi Cloud
Fake SaaS

All the above terms have the same meaning when it comes to cloud computing, and the modus-operandi is simple:

Take an on-premise hosted service or application and rebrand it as a cloud service. This almost effortless scheme allows pseudo cloud vendors to ride the hype of cloud computing without offering, or maintaining, a true cloud service.

Even I receive numerous e-mail requests from many of these so-called cloud service vendors to include their services in Techno-Pulse Cloud Service Providers Directory.

So, amidst all the chaos and opportunity galore:

How do you identify a true cloud service or a true SaaS?
What are the must-have attributes/characteristics of a cloud service?
Are there any essential or fundamental elements of a cloud service?

To some extent, the debate is still going on as what should be termed a true cloud service. Here, I provide my input based on papers published by Gartner (the world’s leading IT research and advisory company) and by*NIST (an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce). These two organizations have explicitly defined the following 5 essential attributes/characteristics of a Cloud Service:

1. On-Demand Self-Service: Any cloud service is ready to use and serve some specific need of consumers. Computing capabilities can be provisioned by the end user (consumer) without any help from the support team of the service provider. The self service process must be simple and friendly. Most of the changes should be achieved by simple configuration changes. Here, configuration is the key, as opposed to code customization.

2. Scalable and Elastic: Any cloud service must size up or size down (i.e. scale capacity up or down) based on application’s demand and the user’s base. In simple terms, Scalability is the ability to automatically grow or shrink whereas Elasticity is how instantly an application can add or remove resources. An application is scalable by virtue of its architecture whereas Elasticity is implicitly achieved by deploying on a cloud infrastructure.

3. Resource Pooling: This is achieved by Multi-Tenant application architecture. What does this mean?

*Yefim Natis (vice president and a distinguished analyst in Gartner Research) says:

Multi-tenancy refers to the ability of software to be offered to multiple user entities (tenants) in a way so that each tenant operates as logically isolated, while, in fact, using physically shared resources. A tenant can be an organization co-using an application with other tenants. It can also be an application co-using underlying resources with other applications.

Whether Multi-Tenancy should be a mandatory characteristic of a cloud service is a debated topic by certain cloud experts. But I don’t think there’s any point in debating it, because if your service is not providing multi-tenancy it will be at a disadvantage in long run. The maintenance and up-gradation cost will likely become too high to bear.

Read some interesting inputs from Cloud Experts - Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances and Cloud Definition

Note: Resources means storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth and virtual machines.

4. Metered by Use: Cloud services are measured in a way similar to electricity or mobile phone usage. Also, apart from measuring and monitoring, the resource usage can be controlled as well. The tariff plans are solely based on the amount of the service used by the consumers, which may be measured in terms of hours, data transfers or other use-based attributes delivered.

5. Uses Internet Technologies: A cloud service must be accessible through the internet on thin or thick client platforms (laptops, smart-phones, tabs or other hand held devices). Also, to commence using a cloud service the consumer should not require any

Installation
Extra hardware
Software License specific to the service.

Beware of Pseudo Cloud Services and Providers! Take informed Cloud decisions. Ask your service provider about the above 5 cloud characteristics before investing in any service…

References

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Tuesday, December 21, 2010

In Absence of Dedicated Privacy Law & Data Protection Law - Is India Ready for Cloud Computing?

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Is Multi-Tenancy an Essential Attribute of Cloud Computing Service?

Friday, December 3, 2010

5 Essential Attributes of a Cloud Service

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