Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

There is a two-pronged battle going on today for the soul of the cloud. It involves a struggle for cloud infrastructure supremacy and control of the network pipes, and it involves many of the biggest names in tech, from old (IBM, Microsoft) to new (Amazon, Google). As organizations move more data center infrastructure to the cloud, the results of these battles will have a profound impact on your business.

Like every other technology battle we have witnessed over the last 25 years — whether it was AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy in the early early ’90s; Netscape versus Internet Explorer in the browser wars in the early days of the Web; or the ongoing client computing platform battle among Apple, Microsoft and Google — the story is the same. We have several dominant players trying to be the one company.

For now, Amazon maintains a sizable lead in the cloud infrastructure business. In fact, some have suggested that Rackspace, unable to compete, could be a takeover target soon.

But Amazon can’t rest easy. Last year IBM bought SoftLayer, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider that gives it serious chops, so much so it actually landed in second place in revenues behind AWS with 7% of the market, based on numbers provided by Synergy research group. Even if you lump IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) numbers together, Amazon appears to have a sizable lead despite its lack of PaaS offerings.

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This is a guest post by Patrick Eaton, Software Engineer and Distributed Systems Architect at Stackdriver.

Stackdriver provides intelligent monitoring-as-a-service for cloud hosted applications. Behind this easy-to-use service is a large distributed system for collecting and storing metrics and events, monitoring and alerting on them, analyzing them, and serving up all the results in a web UI. Because we ourselves run in the cloud (mostly on AWS), we spend a lot of time thinking about how to deal with faults in the cloud. We have developed a framework for thinking about fault mitigation for large, cloud-hosted systems. We endearingly call this framework the “Four Hamiltons” because it is inspired by an article from James Hamilton, the Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services.

The article that led to this framework is called “The Power Failure Seen Around the World”. Hamilton analyzes the causes of the power outage that affected Super Bowl XLVII in early 2013. In the article, Hamilton writes:

As when looking at any system faults, the tools we have to mitigate the impact are: 1) avoid the fault entirely, 2) protect against the fault with redundancy, 3) minimize the impact of the fault through small fault zones, and 4) minimize the impact through fast recovery.

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A key frustration of CIOs and IT managers is the inability to articulate risk to the organization’s senior managers and corporate decision-makers who may not have the technical background to fully appreciate the scope and breadth of weaknesses in their own data environments. Often, company decision-makers rely on IT leaders to set budgets, recommend operational solutions and generally “keep the lights on” without fully understanding the complexities surrounding any given project.

When a project is critical to the business, however, these IT leaders face tremendous pressure to deliver results to management.

Even more challenging is when a crisis occurs, and questions surface about what happened and how it occurred. In these situations, IT leaders often find themselves explaining complex problems to an unsympathetic audience.

The ability to uncover and correct weaknesses in a data environment may be less about what resources are available to the IT department and more about the willingness of the business to truly embrace good data governance. The fact is, poor data governance is generally not the result of some single breakdown attributable only to the IT department. Rather, it is often a failure of the business to support specific risk-mitigation measures and initiatives—both inside and outside of IT—that create an environment in which positive data governance can flourish.

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App stores are the mobile equivalent of desktop Web browsers in many ways. They are the predominant mechanism for delivering content and functionality in the mobile world. They provide much more control than traditional browsers and the direct ability for developers and administrators to deploy, monitor, manage and monetize apps and the content that passes through them. This, along with being end user-facing, has made them the cornerstone of the outside-in view for users and developers. Within the enterprise, they will soon be the final manifestation of application management and device management capabilities for end users and IT administrators, and become as ubiquitous as the intranet.

Let’s take a look at the outside-in view and the key characteristics of app stores so we can evaluate them for the enterprise.

User and Device Identity. One of the most important characteristics of app stores that differentiate them from regular Web browsers is the fact that app stores have identifiable users with strong identities. App stores play an integral role in the mobile ecosystem of devices, developers, publishers and end users by identifying the users they provide services to, blocking usage when required and ensuring security. In an enterprise, user identity elements span not just employees, but also partners, vendors and resellers so having the right level of access and functionality for each stakeholder is critical to its success.

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The cloud is cheaper than standard IT infrastructure. This has been a given for so long that hardly anyone questions its veracity. And after all, who would argue the cost advantages of leasing resources from an outside provider vs. building and maintaining complex internal infrastructure?

Well, some very bright minds in the IT industry are starting to do just that.

Rob Enderle, writing for CIO.com, for one, notes that speed and flexibility, while important, do not necessarily translate into lower costs. The hard truth, of course, is that spending on IT is dropping while spending on cloud services is increasing, but this has more to do with timing and availability rather than simple economics. Indeed, recent analyses show that once internal infrastructure begins deploying cloud services of its own, it can meet enterprise needs for about $100 per user while Amazon and other providers come in at around $200 per user when purchased individually or in small groups, as is the practice with many business units. And a proprietary platform like Oracle can run as much as $500 per user.

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One in every nine people on earth is an active Facebook user, and mankind created 1.9 trillion GB of data in 2013. The growth of social sites and the proliferation of information are two trends that Emerson Network Power captures in its “State of the Data Center 2013” infographic. These trends have a huge impact on the communications network, IT department and, most importantly, data centers.

In 2011, Emerson Network Power introduced our “State of the Data Center” infographic, a scan of major trends that affect data centers. We also researched the number of outages and the cost of downtime. This infographic provided a baseline for comparing future trends.

We recently completed “State of the Data Center 2013,” which we developed as an infographic that illustrates the facts of the year. To sum up the results in a few words, the global dependence on everything digital is pushing IT to the forefront of the organization. Data centers increasingly are relied upon in areas that were traditionally offline pursuits, and consumers have high expectations of speed and performance. I’ll share trends that support these findings, and I’ll also discuss a significant consequence of IT being in the spotlight.

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