A FAST Alternative to IT Consulting

Migrating Customer Applications to the Cloud

2011-05-24T14:53:00.006-05:00

Recently, I acquired a new medium-sized customer with no on-site IT support. Previously they outsourced their IT services to a very capable group. But as I started working with this company, it became evident that management wanted to take a serious step towards minimizing internal services and IT management. In the past, I would have been hesitant to undertake this operation as I was not fully comfortable relying on a company in the cloud to host a business in its entirety. The organization was completely sold on moving their services and I wanted to make sure they had every need taken care, so we signed an agreement to get them moving forward.

I did my research on all of the hosted services available, but specifically looked at services for providing email and file sharing. There are many solutions available for providing email and most of them around the same cost. I looked at the organizations needs and we were able to quickly narrow the selection. As for hosting file services, this would be a little more tricky. Do the end users need access to files simultaneously? Will they be using a product like Quickbooks where multiple users may be entering data at the same time? How large are the individual files that the organization will be hosting? What kind of backup service is offered with the package? What kind of security (HIPAA/Sarbanes Oxley/FISMA) compliance would they need?

After sorting through the organizational needs, I decided on a solution and have gone through the process of creating the appropriate data shares and securing them to the company's needs (determining this was an undertaking on its own) and synchronizing data between the local server to the cloud. If you are to go through this process, I highly recommend buying a version of GoodSync so that both versions of the data are being updated while you migrate users over to the new service. One of the features that made our choice a little easier was the ability to use mapped network drives to the cloud making the transition easier for the end users. Definitely lowers the learning curve and they will be able to take their time learning about the other advanced features without affecting their production.
The end goal is to remove their internal servers, GoToMyPc applications, and the need for VPN services. The migration to outside services will be saving this organization almost 90% of their monthly cost for IT services/hardware. Current projections for this project put it in a two week period to accomplish these feats.

Soon on the horizon: getting into some of the data extraction/manipulation projects that FAST has been working on.

A First Look at Azure in the Cloud

2009-10-02T14:30:00.007-05:00

I spent some time yesterday at a Microsoft presentation for their soon to be released Azure Cloud Services. I came away with mixed feelings. Firstly, the concept of cloud computing is a promising foundation for removing hardware acquisition costs for an enterprise organization. The ability to virtualize a company's applications on virtually unlimited hardware resources will definitely benefit organizations where constant resources are not required for suitable application uptime. On the reverse, I do not see an increased advantage for users whose applications are not being utilized in a non-normalized pattern. With the advent of in-house virtualization, most smaller applications can achieve the same dynamic resource boosting as seen from a cloud computing environment without recurring costs.
Another big disadvantage to adoption of this technology is the inability to meet any protocol standards, ie data hosted on a cloud environment will not be able to be proven within HIPAA guidelines. Many markets will not be able to adopt the technology specifically for this reason. Both the medical and financial industries will find it hard to comply with any regulatory guidelines. It will work well for online commerce sites, but with the increasing governmental involvement, how long before regulations will limit the usefulness of holding data in the cloud?
As for Microsoft's foray into the cloud foundation, I came away both skeptical and intrigued by what they have put together so far. As with a lot of Microsoft products, they seem to be in their infancy in terms of offerings compared to competitors. They are promising a November release to the public, and I highly doubt that much needed technology will be included by that time. Foremost, the ability to manage the web and worker instances is nowhere near completion. The interface for managing the instance numbers is very simplistic, but can use a little work. The bigger disadvantage they have is not having a utility to show current performance versus increased performance of adding instances. Right now, it is purely a guessing game on how many instances will handle an application's traffic and processing requests. Microsoft definitely needs to develop a workload simulator in the staging environment that provides real feedback to determine instance usage.
Microsoft also needs to work on the SLA portion to allow users to automatically increase/decrease the number of instances based upon acceptable performance standards. How many of us want to wake up in the middle of the night because our application is being over-utilized just to update an XML file to deploy more instances for a two hour period? It would make more sense for the fabric controller to sense the utilization levels and increase to meet the demand up to a specified point, either a price point or utilization point.
That all being said, I look forward to learning more about the other cloud foundations at the Day of Cloud conference in two weeks. Hopefully I will be able to provide more feedback on the Amazon, Google, and SalesForce.com initiatives then.

Blogging and Marketing for the IT Consultant

2009-08-16T23:59:00.002-05:00

I have been trying to find more ways to market my IT consulting business without spending a lot of capital. We have been very successful using the word-of-mouth and quality-of-service approach for the past 5 years, but I am always looking for new ways to gain footholds into businesses that need quality programming and architectural direction. A colleague mentioned that using blogging with social apps as a front end marketing tool is highly successful means of gaining a wider audience. I started this blog late last year and with the business being brisk, i find it hard to maintain a daily or weekly blog. So I figured out I would ask the community a few questions and determine if this is the best course of action.
Firstly, how long does one commonly spend updating their blog? How often are most executives updating their blogs, daily, weekly, monthly? Are most bloggers from a marketing perspective touting theirs wares and skills or are they giving input into general IT topics that are relevant at that time? And I think most importantly, what kind of return for new opportunities are bloggers seeing in the consulting field?