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Also Noted: MobileHelix
Spotlight On... MIT tackles network congestion
Multitenancy not just for network isolation; Apple's dev website hacked and much more...
Today's Top News 1. Bottom-up change hits enterprise networks
The so-called "consumerization of IT" is most widely observed through the lens of smartphones and cheap cloud services. On Enterprise Networking Planet, Arthur Cole examines this phenomenon from a network perspective instead. Cole describes the impact of bottom-up corporate demands in three buckets: - Flexibility over throughput While big pipes are still valuable, Cole quotes a Brocade executive saying "Speeds and feeds aren't really where the action is." What users value more is increased flexibility in applying compute and network resources to any given business need at any time. - Specialized hardware over general-purpose equipment Cole cites Infonetics research that finds a decline in sales of general-purpose networking gear, while 'purpose-built' or custom hardware sales are ratcheting up. Much of this new, specialized equipment is bound for the mega-data-centers of large cloud providers. "As Dell'Oro Group's Alan Weckel noted recently, the arrival of cloud computing will consolidate IT infrastructure into large regional behemoths that cater to customers around the world. This transition could happen in as little as three years," Cole writes. - Building-block converged systems over traditional architectures Instead of soldering an enterprise architecture together with communication protocols, Cole expects companies to seek converged computing "modules" that can be added or subtracted quickly, in the manner of building blocks. This meets growing demands for scalability and ease of management, especially inside cloud service providers. Read more:
- Cole's article More about enterprise networks and data centers:
Torrents of SDN coverage – is it hope or hype?
Global data center market to increase through 2016
Your data center fabric checklist Read more about: Data Center, Enterprise Networks
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| This week's sponsor is Kony. |  | White Paper: Mobilizing the Entire Enterprise
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2. SOA lessons from Twitter, Netflix
It's easy to find theoretical write-ups on service-oriented architecture (SOA), but harder to find good real-world case studies. Happily Joe McKendrick, writing on ZDNet, recently found two such case studies posting reasonably detailed advice from the trenches at both Twitter and Netflix. Jeremy Cloud, leader of the Tweet service team at Twitter, notes the challenge of testing the integration of SOA services in complex production environments. (Cloud presented on the topic at the QConNY conference.) Two takeaways follow: 1. Always make the smallest change possible. 2. In your architecture, always emphasize the ability to "degrade gracefully." Cloud says "you really need to spend most of your development time thinking about failure cases--implementing failure scenarios and actually testing them in production." In the Twitter writeup, McKendrick headlines this point as "Failure is always an option." At Netflix, in contrast, his writeup says "Failure is not an option." The details on Netflix are drawn from a column on SOA and resilience posted on book publisher and IT training vendor O'Reilly's website. Netflix software engineer Ben Christensen says the company strives to isolate problems from the rest of the system. The company uses its Hystrix tool for this purpose; last year the company made Hystrix an open-source application. Read more:
- about Twitter
- about Netflix More about service-oriented architecture:
Beware the lock-in potential of PaaS [FierceCIO]
Union-Pacific's strategy for building in-house IT [FierceCIO] Read more about: SOA
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3. The communication-enabled business process
You might think of Unified Communications in terms of bringing voice, email, IM, video and other connections seamlessly into a single channel or presentation layer. Writing on UC Strategies, Art Rosenberg helps expand that vision beyond simply making it easier for employees to manage incoming streams of communication. Rosenberg writes of "the convergence of all forms of person-to-person and process-to person contacts to accommodate UC-enabled, IP-based, BYOD mobility and CEBP." Hidden under a heavy wet blanket of acronyms, this refers to a view of communications centered around business processes. The column advises organizations to start with a given business process and use that as a lens for viewing each involved employee's communication needs--who will interact with whom (or with which systems and applications) at each stage of the process? In other words, your unified communications needs for each employee can be identified and prioritized by looking at their role and the business processes they're involved in. "In addition to making and responding to contacts, end users involved in a business process will also need access to contextual information… Finally, start planning on IP-based 'click-to-contact' people for all involved end users," Rosenberg writes. Read more:
- Rosenberg's column More about unified communications:
The quest for the enterprise communications hub
How will iOS7 boost unified communications?
Measuring the impact of a social business project [FierceContentManagement] Read more about: Unified Communications, Business Process
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4. Service Level Agreements - getting the details right
Contracts, service-level agreements, paperwork--bah humbug. Really, is there any aspect of work less appealing than scouring over contractual details? But contracts and service-level agreements (SLAs) are facts of life, and never more so than in today's era of cloud services. On No Jitter, Gary Audin, president of consulting firm Delphi, notes a few imperatives in setting up SLAs that incentivize both the provider and the buyer to work together. Beyond the obvious need for good financial structure, Audin writes that "poorly defined SLAs can even distort the service operations and thereby create fake goals and striving to meet useless targets." Audin includes a number of specific contractual details that are commonly overlooked. One example: Noting that disasters and other service interruptions do happen, he advises buyers to "discover whether scheduled maintenance, emergency maintenance, network upgrades etc. that would impair performance are excluded from the SLA measurements. If so, then the availability number--say, 99.9%--will not represent the true availability that the enterprise actually experiences." And speaking of disasters, here's the view from the other side of that handshake: the service provider's perspective on disaster recovery and "setting customer expectations on SLAs," as written up on MSPmentor.com.
Read more:
- Audin's column More about service-level agreements and contracts:
The CIO toolkit for optimizing IT procurement [FierceCIO]
How to get the most out of your SaaS provider [FierceCIO]
Cloud migration and unused software license fees Read more about: service level agreements
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5. Money hidden in the clouds
Michelin sells tires--and pay-per-use cloud services. As Joe McKendrick suggests on Forbes.com, one of cloud computing's less-touted benefits is the possibility of an end-user organization to turn its cloud services into a product offering. Michelin steps up to the plate in just that manner. The tire manufacturing company has announced that it will offer "mobility services" such as fuel monitoring and tire management to automotive fleet managers. Michelin is developing these pay-per-use service offerings in partnership with Accenture using the Accenture Cloud Platform, which the tire company will also use to automate some of its own business processes including billing and contract management. Notably, the two companies have also created a joint "change management team" to help facilitate Michelin's move to the cloud. Read more:
- CloudPro's article on Michelin
- McKendrick's post on cloud benefits More about cloud services:
Companies wrestle with 'multicloud' complexity
The cheaper clouds get, the more we buy
IBM, Amazon cloud competition chops prices, opens products Read more about: cloud computing
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Also Noted | This week's sponsor is MobileHelix. |  | Mobile HTML5 For The Enterprise: The Optimum Path to Seamless and Secure Enterprise Mobility
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SPOTLIGHT ON... MIT tackles network congestion Researchers at MIT have unleashed Remy, a TCP-algorithm-writing robot that runs on an 80-core computer and appears to be better than humans at cutting network traffic congestion. On one network simulation, the researchers report that Remy's work doubled network throughput. (Hopefully the same concepts will be applied to DC's beltway traffic.) > Multitenancy is not just network isolation and RBAC. [Gartner] > Apple's developer website hacked. [Network World] > Protecting your data from… yourself. [InfoWorld] > VMware can handle rough seas. [InformationWeek] And Finally… Enterprise cloud apps? Not so fast. [ZDNet] > BYOD Fuels Need for Mobile Application Management - Thursday, August 29, 2pm ET / 11am PT With BYOD in the workplace fueling demand for mobile application management (MAM) products, robust application management is critical to the success of an enterprise's mobility strategy. Join FierceMobileIT and our panel of experts as we explain how to implement an effective MAM solution to address the BYOD challenge in your enterprise. Register Today!
| > TIA 2013 - October 8-10 - Washington D.C. TIA 2013 will address disruptive technologies and changing business models as companies position themselves for success with wireless, the transition to all-IP networks, Cloud, M2M, smart buildings, and more. The conference will offer ideas for thriving in the changing ICT environment. www.tia2013.org. Registration opens June 2013.
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