First came software as a service (SaaS) powered by dedicated data centers. All of a sudden enterprises had another way to solve their IT needs. Let’s call this SaaS 1.0. SaaS took off in CRM (safesforce.com), collaboration (hosted Exchange, Google Apps, etc.), file sharing (Box.net, SendUIt) and a myriad of more niche offerings that were typically less expensive and easier to use than on-premises software + hardware installations. This first wave of SaaS to hit IT shores also started the industry conversation about how to keep SaaS vendors accountable to their customers. Thus service level agreements (SLA’s) were introduced into the common enterprise IT lexicon.
With SLA’s, SaaS vendors could publish their expected “uptime” and be measured on performance. SLA’s could also be used to compare and rank one SaaS vendor over another within the same product space (for example does salesforce.com have better uptime than Netsuite.com?). The IT industry became comfortable with SLA’s as a quality measurement to help IT buyers make good decisions on which SaaS vendors can be trusted to manage a service that might normally been provided by in-house IT department.
The common SLA measurement for SaaS 1.0 is “levels of availability.” 99.9% available is called “three nines”, 99.99% is “four nines,” etc. It’s measured as “unplanned downtime” against 100% up-time, which means that if the SLA was anything less than a 100%, a SaaS customer was not able to use the system to it’s full capabilities (and thus entitled to compensation.) See the chart below for correlation of SLA availability percentage equated in downtime per week, month and year.
SLA’s also helped SaaS 1.0 vendors compare their service to the on-premises equivalent. For example, SaaS vendors could show an IT decision maker that a hosted version of Exchange could deliver more “nines” in up-time compared to an equivalent in-house Exchange server.
With SaaS 1.0 and SLA 1.0, one vendor typically was on the hook for delivering the service and meeting the SLA. However, this all changes in cloud computing world.
Starting in 2008, cloud computing infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) started to be used to power the next generation of SaaS offerings. Let’s call this SaaS 2.0. With cloud computing, software developers had a tremendous amount of “on-demand” power and a whole new class of SaaS offerings began to emerge. With cloud computing SaaS could now be used to economically and reliably solve “big data” problems like information archiving and analytics, business intelligence, and backup/recovery.
But with “cloud-powered SaaS 2.0” the old SLA model didn’t quite fit. Instead of one single vendor (SaaS 1.0) on the hook to deliver a service with a pre-defined up-time guarantee, cloud computing and SaaS 2.0 is the combination of two separate companies working together to deliver a service.
Cloud and SaaS 2.0 means inherited responsibilities for an up-time SLA. Two or more vendors work in concept- this is a positive not widely discussed. Each cloud vendor, let’s use AWS as an example, publishes an SLA for the major services offered. In our example we’ll use core services like storage and compute. Amazon’s S3 storage offering has an incredible 99.999999999% (eleven nines!) guarantee.
Amazon’s EC2 compute offering has a very respectable 99.99% SLA. These are great building blocks to host a SaaS 2.0 service. So great in fact that Amazon has emerged as the leader in cloud computing and attracted many leading edge companies to host their SaaS 2.0 applications.
The advent of cloud computing powering SaaS 2.0 applications has expanded the thinking about SLA’s. Vendors see software SLA’s and infrastructure SLA’s de-coupled, but customers don’t care, and just want to work with one vendor. The SaaS vendor selling the service is the responsible party, and the SaaS vendor can use the positive attributes of cloud computing to deliver a service that builds upon the infrastructure SLAs. The result should be a more reliable, more available, service powered by the cloud than a legacy dedicated data center.
In summary, cloud computing has changed the way SaaS vendors think about measuring SLAs, with the concept of inherited responsibilities. The cloud vendor provides a SLA on core infrastructure, and the software vendor builds upon that SLA. The end result to the customer is a more reliable service and SLA that will far exceed on-premises capabilities.
Starting this year, and until 2013, Hybrid IT will help enterprises harness cloud computing. Hybrid IT is a new paradigm for IT management, enabling organizations to benefit from cloud computing's low cost, infinite storage, and powerful and flexible central processing unit (CPU) platforms. All of these positive capabilities are accessible while still preserving the idea of maintaining control of data as if it were stored on premises. Hybrid IT is a "win/win" scenario for both the IT manager and the chief financial officer.
From small to mid-size enterprises (SMEs) to the Fortune 1000, organizations will move parts of their IT infrastructure to the Cloud. For the SMEs, Hybrid IT will level the playing field by enabling organizations to adopt strategic hierarchical storage management (HSM) and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) features without breaking the technology budget. For larger enterprises, Hybrid IT will introduce new cost savings by allowing them to allocate portions of their storage environments to the Cloud and eliminate the hardware, software and management costs previously associated with keeping those activities on site.
New software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications built specifically for the Cloud will act essentially as an extension of the customer's own data center. These Cloud-powered SaaS services enable organizations to strategically and tactically meld SaaS functions with on-premise servers. This is an important development on two fronts. First, the ability to use hybrid functions allows the enterprise to on-ramp into the Cloud without making a wholesale conversion. Second, the Cloud is perfect for back office applications that subsets of employees use. As businesses get more comfortable with the Cloud they can migrate more of their data processing needs to Cloud CPU and storage.
As a result of these technological advances, organizations will leverage the Cloud’s on-demand CPU to power through terabytes of content for large searches or deep analytics. With better business intelligence culled from employee generated content across the organization, businesses will unlock the previously inaccessible value of their data and gain new insights to their customers and operations.
Cloud-powered archiving will help organizations focus on long-term growth initiatives. Cloud-powered archiving is an example of Hybrid IT service. The customer retains their existing messaging server on-premises, but uses a Cloud-based SaaS service to provide data archiving and analytics capabilities.
Hybrid IT is ushering in a new wave of computing that will be as profound as the change from mainframes to minicomputers or client-server to the web. Hybrid IT will also help leverage the Cloud in a way that is comfortable to the early adopters, while also satisfying a valuable IT goal: Do more with Less. Hybrid IT requires new software development skills and technology frameworks to build SaaS applications that can use the Cloud's positive attributes: scale and low cost. To leverage the Cloud also requires new IT management skills for the individuals who manage SaaS applications, which will result in an enormous payoff for end users.
When we were getting ready to launch the Sonian hosted email archive service, we spent some time briefing Amazon’s Jeff Barr about Sonian. Jeff posted a great summary on how Sonian works with Amazon Web Services to achieve fantastic reliability and scalability for our hosted archive service. This means all our customers benefit from the Amazon data center technology advances in virtualization, reliability, performance and security.
It’s clear SaaS will play an ever larger role in IT deployments. And it’s also crystal clear that cloud-compute infrastructure is the best way to deploy a SaaS system. Sonian is leading the way to the future in how SaaS should be created and managed.
Watch the Gary Green Interview.
"We sat down with Gary Green, the Vice President of Technology for the National Kidney Foundation, to talk about his experience with a SaaS-based hosted email archiving service"
We sat down with Gary Green, the Vice President of Technology for the National Kidney Foundation, to talk about his experience with using a hosted email archiving service for his Novell Groupwise mail system. Below is an excerpt from the interview, or you can view the full Gary Green Interview on SaaS-based Email Archiving.
*Transcript*
Sonian: What is your role at the National Kidney Foundation?
Gary Green: My title is Vice President of Technology and I have responsibility over most things involving technology in the organization, which in a broad sense includes: web services, our web site, our data base, and - for lack of a better term - user services, such as our network, desktop, and support for our users.
Sonian: How did you choose between an on premise solution and a cloud powered SaaS solution?
GG: I guess the easiest way to explain it is: we looked for the best way to get everything done. It seems today that everyone is being asked to do more and more with less and less, and in our case an internal reorganization for our organization left me assuming the responsibility for many remote offices, and unfortunately there wasn’t a simultaneous increase in staff. We ended up with many more users, and much more data to be stored, much more email information to be dealt with, and with no real reasonable way to do it. We looked around. We looked at an on premise solution but felt that it would be too expensive and would add to the workload our staff already had, so we decided we wanted too look for a solution that we take away some of the day-to-day headaches we deal with. We wanted to focus more on running things, as opposed to trying to put fires out.
Download the Free ESG Market Report: SaaS-based Email Archiving Momentum Continues.
"Recent ESG research suggests e-mail archiving is becoming a "must have" technology and all indicators point to SaaS-based solutions growing in popularity for companies of all sizes..."
How can your company get started with cloud computing?
According to a recent Forrester research survey of current cloud services consumers, these are the top 5 cloud computing benefits in order of importance:
#1:
Improving
time-to-application deployment
#2:
Aligning IT
budgets with application demand
#3: Accommodating
peaks in demand for data center capacity
#4: Delivering
applications without raising the budget
#5: Sharing
without putting the data center at risk
Before choosing a cloud provider, Forester recommends that you ask each cloud provider the following questions:
- What are your
enterprise references and what kinds of applications do those
organizations run in your cloud?
- For which application
scenarios does your cloud environment deliver the maximum flexibility and
scalability?
- What security and
reliability commitments do you make to your customers?
You may find the full article here.
If you would like to see how Sonian is able to provide these benefits, please watch our downloadable "4 Advantages of Cloud Powered E-mail Archiving" webinar.
If you have been reading the paper this week, you may have noticed that the Bush Administration’s most recently uncovered blunder involved losing over 22 million e-mails. An immediate reaction might be the question: How it even is possible to lose and then recover 22 million e-mails?
The Bush White House failed to implement a proper archiving system for e-mail. Instead, they were backing up e-mails on tapes and manually labeling them. 94 days of e-mails were mislabeled, therefore unsearchable, and effectively lost. The e-mail archiving problems apparently came to light in 2006, and it has taken over 3 years of litigation work to find the data on backup tapes. It is now speculated that it will take the National Security Archive until 2014 to sort through these backup tapes before releasing the information to the public. (Years of work could have been prevented if the Bush White House had archived with a company like Sonian.)
What can you learn from this dilemma? Archive your e-mail in the cloud. Backup tapes are not sufficient. There is a lot of misinformation about the difference between archiving and backup. Regular backup does not meet most compliance regualtions such as HIPPA, Sarbonnes Oxley, or SEC 174A to name a few. These regulations require multiple records, specific organization, random sampling, and advanced search methods. Satisfying these requirements is simply not possible with regular backups.
Beyond just meeting compliance regulations, an archiving solution like Sonian increases worker productivity. Mislabeling tapes is common, and even if labeled correctly, searching through backup tapes is time consuming. Quick access to information can be the differentiator in a legal case, a sale, or interactions with clients.
The advanced search functions allow employees to search for e-mails within certain date ranges, between certain employees, through simple or complex keywords, by attachment type, and through many more venues. The repositories allow users to search by over 400 different attachment file types: pdfs, .xls, .doc, wav, jpg, etc. Its even possible to search in the text in an attachment of an e-mail. The near infinite power of the cloud makes it possible to find a specific e-mail of say, 22 million e-mails in seconds instead of years.
How to Explain Cloud Computing and Hosted Email Archiving to the Computer Illiterate.
Over the holidays, you will do a lot of catching up with old friends and family, and if you work anywhere near "the Cloud" (which you should if your business uses computers), then you might find yourself trying to explain "the Cloud" to the technologically ungifted. Even people who work with "the Cloud" have a hard time explaining it to colleagues. I attended the America's Growth Capital 6th Annual East Coast Emerging Growth Conference back in October, and the moderator for the "Virtualization and Cloud Computing Panel" asked the industry experts to "define the cloud because I am sure not everybody in here really understands what it is."
(If I remember correctly) Michael Crandell from RightScale answered first, "Well I don't think anybody really knows how to define the cloud." Nobody on the panel, which included CEOs and Vice Presidents from emerging Virtualization and Cloud Computing companies such as Akorri, Fortisphere, LeoStream, and Silver Peak Systems, could disagree with him. I am not saying that these people aren't at the top of their game, I am simply showing that the idea of cloud-computing is so new, and evolving so rapidly that even industry leaders who are creating the very "cloud" above us have difficulty defining "it." So does this mean you should just give up trying to explain "the Cloud?" When your brother-in-law asks "what are you doing these days?" should you just tell him that you "make it rain" instead of getting into the complexities of a Web 2.0 profession? The answer is no, you should not.
I have devised a simple analogy for "the Cloud" that even your (great) grandparents could understand. I know this because I used this analogy when, over Thanksgiving, my grandparents asked me, "What are you working on these days."
-where do you think I got the idea for this blog post?
How I Explained Cloud Computing To My Grandmother:
Nana,
Cloud Computing is the idea that you will be able to access all of your work, from anywhere, on any computer with an internet connection.
For example, what we do at Sonian is Email archiving. So we archive your email to the cloud. What is email? Email is electronic Mail. So it is just like the mail the postman brings you, only through the computer. For the purpose of this analogy, suppose email is mail brought to you by the postman. You follow me, Nana?
And what we do is store that mail so you can access it anywhere from anytime. In the case of our analogy, this means that instead of storing all your old mail in a big pile in the basement, you store it in a helicopter that follows you wherever you go - CloudCopter. Yes, Nana, a helicopter just like Jim flew in the war.
And the beauty of it, Nana, is that if you ever want to find an old email - excuse me - if you ever want to find an old letter, then you just tell the, we'll call them, CloudCrew what you need and they bring it right to you. Anywhere in the world. Even if you are at your timeshare in Florida:
And if your house burns down, CloudCopter has your letters stored safely in the sky. Perhaps even high enough to say that they are being stored in... "the Clouds."
To recap, Nana: At Sonian, the email we archive is like the letters you keep in laundry bins in the basement. And "the Cloud" we archive them to would be like storing your old letters in a lightning-fast super helicopter that has infinite storage space that you can access anywhere.
I could go on to talk about how operating CloudCopter miraculously costs less than storing her letters in the basement but Nana is asleep, and I think she is drooling a little bit.
So if you are confused, just remember: Cloud Computing is like a super lightning helicopter - called the CloudCopter - operated by a team of ninja-fast mail dudes called the CloudCrew. If you have any questions please feel free to email me at alec@sonian.net.
*Photos courtesy of cbc.ca, corbisimages.com, and minihelicopter.net
This week’s Goldman Sachs Report “A Paradigm Shift for IT: The Cloud,” gives us a view into IT decision maker attitudes about cloud computing and where enterprise workloads will be processed in the future.
Over the next three years a majority of compute workloads will migrate from non-cloud on-premises infrastructure to a hybrid public/private cloud ecosystem. Cloud means scale up in real-time to process data and then scale down when the work is done. No wasted compute power sitting idle.
The winners will be the companies that early on figured out how to harness the cloud infrastructure as a service for SaaS delivery and those that provide enabling technologies to help IT buyers get more value for their IT budget dollars. Sonian’s Universal Data Management cloud-powered platform is one such example of putting the cloud to good use today, solving the information governance pain point in a modern, secure, reliable and efficient manner.
Learn more about Sonian's email archiving solutions with a Free Email Archiving Demo!
Sonian manages “big data” using cloud-powered SaaS technologies designed to capture all your universal data. The cloud and big data are the perfect match for use case needs andcloud state of the art.
Periodically we’ll post interesting statistics about the cloud, universal data management, and where Sonian sees all this new technology heading.
This week’s interesting number: 5 Million.
In the Fall of 2009 an estimated 5 million students returned to educational institutions that migrated their collaboration systems (email, IM, etc.) to a cloud-powered hosted service.
Recently I have represented Sonian and cloud computing on a several panel discussions and conference keynotes. The number of questions from the engaged audience, as well as their in-depth thoughtful nature, are a leading indicator we are entering the era of “Hybrid IT.” This means more and more organizations will be strategically and tactically melding cloud-powered SaaS functions with on-premise servers.
The great economics and SaaS ease of use are driving this increased adoption curve. And SaaS powered by cloud infrastructure can be a virtual secure extension of your own data center. but running from reliable infrastructure maintained by experts whose only goal is to keep cloud servers and storage running 24×7x365.
It’s exciting and enormously fulfilling to be at the beginning of this 4th wave of computing era.