cloud market
Where Are the Telcos?
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BuzzBy Ellen Rubin
This week’s Verizon announcement about their new CaaS offering for SMBs highlights a strange situation in the cloud computing market. While Amazon has been growing explosively and MSP/colo providers like Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis have rushed to embrace cloud in their business models, the telcos have been slow to enter the fray.
Telcos in many ways seem like the most likely players to lead and ultimately win in the land-grab of cloud computing. They’ve got the huge scale, geographic coverage, existing enterprise relationships and experience in service delivery that would appear to give them unfair advantage. As noted in the Verizon announcement and some recent blogs, telcos have a “unique opportunity to position cloud computing as an extension of their managed networking solutions (such as MPLS-based VPNs), by offering ‘on-net’ cloud computing capabilities backed up by end-to-end service-level agreements (SLAs).” In fact, the networking infrastructure and ability to offer dedicated and secure access is one of the telcos’ greatest strengths since it addresses some of the key concerns about cloud security and bandwidth.
So it’s worth considering why the telcos aren’t yet a dominant force in the industry. To a certain extent, it’s taken a couple of years for them to perceive the threat of Amazon et al to their core businesses. The response has been primarily a defensive one, as noted by IDC’s Melanie Posey: “Right now they’re concerned with, ‘If our existing customers want cloud in addition to the traditional hosting we’re offering them, we have to have something too or they’ll take that incremental business to somebody else.’” Marketing announcements and pricing model changes have so far been the fastest and lowest-cost response to this threat. For example, some telcos are now offering per-month pricing instead of the traditional annual or multi-year structures.
In parallel, the telcos are doing the heavy lifting required to build new cloud services. A lot of the real spending so far in the cloud market is being done by these players: buying new gear from the server, storage and networking vendors; installing new software and management tools from the hypervisor and service management players; designing new architectures with the help of consulting firms; leveraging existing infrastructures from Terremark, OpSource and others, etc. This all takes significant time and money.
While this investment is taking place, there’s relatively little to see in terms of live customer deployments. But in the meantime, the first-mover cloud providers and customer early adopters are moving full-speed to test and improve their offerings and cloud footprints. They’re shaping and defining cloud requirements and best practices based on real-life customer engagements. The risk for the telcos in being late to the party is that they’re not getting the customer insights first-hand and are missing the direct experience needed for successful scale-out and service delivery. Without this, they could end up delivering too little, too late. Still, given the size and projected growth of the cloud market opportunity, there’s no doubt it would be a mistake to count the telcos out.
Three Ways to Do Web Apps in the Cloud
By Ellen Rubin
Web apps were born to run in the cloud. With endless flexibility, on-demand scaling and great pricing, the cloud meets the business and technical needs of many enterprises’ web-based applications for e-commerce, collaboration, marketing, CRM and dozens of other functions. With their ‘spikey’ needs for compute resources around peak periods, web apps are often corporate data center hogs and/or hosted at colos and MSPs at high cost.
As we work with many enterprise customers, we consistently hear the desire to host web apps in the cloud to reduce data center costs, footprints and headaches. There seem to be three major use cases emerging in the cloud market, reflecting the ways in which specific web apps are architected, and the comfort levels of the customer in exposing some or all of their app stacks outside the corporate firewall:
- Build the entire web application to run in the cloud. Launch some raw servers in the cloud and create your application using simple templates so that all tiers (user-facing, business logic, and database) run in the cloud. If you are putting up a new public web site, this is a great way to get into the cloud, and is particularly useful if you do not need to access data or systems that already exist within your data center. Many new companies and start-ups already also use this approach since they don’t have any legacy infrastructure to integrate with!
- Move parts of the application to the cloud. Keep some of the app components internal and move others to the cloud. For example, put the user-facing portion of the application stack in the cloud for scaling and access by large numbers of users, and let it reach back to the data center to access your business logic and/or database tiers. Some of our customers put the user-facing and business logic in the cloud and reach back for the main database, while others put just the public access portions into the cloud. The key considerations are what kind of data the application needs to access, how much data is required, and the application’s sensitivity to latency between the tiers. If data is very sensitive, the pull is to keep it in the data center, but if the application is susceptible to database latency, the desire is to move data to the cloud to be near the computation servers. Even when all tiers are moved to the cloud, there is often a need to access data center resources (for management, user validation, or ancillary data).
- Use the cloud for peak-period scaling. This approach involves scaling portions of the web application into the cloud during peak periods, such as for a Mother’s Day sale or when the tax filing deadline approaches. Based on a peak-workload trigger, move base images of the app into the cloud and let them scale away. Add the new cloud resources to your load balancers to keep response times low during peak usage. When you need occasional access to massive compute resources, the cloud provides a great alternative to buying and maintaining expensive equipment. The cloud essentially becomes an extension of your data center for on-demand scenarios.
Which of these approaches will work best for you? Many enterprises are testing more than one approach with different web applications as they define their cloud strategies. CloudSwitch technology lets you get started now with no risk, moving applications (or selected portions) to the right cloud, and keeping cloud resources in seamless integration with your data center. Put your web apps where they belong and free yourself from endless infrastructure heavy-lifting.
