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DS&A
6. User Experience. Despite cost, user experience has to be as good or better.For example, if you can’t surf a YouTube video from your virtual desktop, then you’re probably not going to think it’s terrific. Find strong security mechanisms that work well at the desktop but are nearly undetectable to the users. Security that is obvious is easily mapped for workarounds by hackers and is a source of endless complaints from those we try to protect.
7. Mobility. If you can’t get to your virtual desktop from your Windows or Mac OS, iPad, iPhone, Android, Linux, or whatever else comes next, then you’re not going to use it. Without such functionality, BYOIT really doesn’t mean anything since anything less equals minimal functionality. Plus, if you don’t go the virtual desktop route via your mobile devices, then you are stuck navigating a mobile device strategy to secure data and other things you really don’t want on those devices to begin with. The simple yet unpopular CIO decision so far? Ban them all! But you don’t have to. Combine a virtual strategy with some mobile armor techniques to control these endpoints and you’ll strike a happy medium with your corporate users.
8. Voice/Video. In an everything-virtual world that is quickly going cloud, CIOs realize that their voice system needs to follow them into the cloud or half of their business is going to be down. Plus, being tied to costly physical PRI and analog lines can be very limiting. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks and instant Direct Inbound Dial (DID) range provisioning and mobility are quickly becoming par for the course now. But when it all goes IP, who is listening in? And even when encrypted, who holds the keys?
9. User & Application Metrics. Particularly around cloud desktops and applications, the need to improve the user experience or application response time is top of mind. A few innovative cloud providers offer amazing dashboards and functionality around this and it’s a huge lure because normally such systems with that amount of eye candy are costly, thus putting them far beyond the reach of anything less than the most sophisticated enterprise corporations. Like anything cloud, it’s what you can do with something that is most appealing. So naturally, being able to see in near real-time – via a remote web dashboard -- all of the processes running on your 50,000 desktop users deployed in 12 countries worldwide is too good to pass up. Granular metrics also lend themselves to spotting anomalies quickly and easily. Such anomalies are usually security risks waiting to be mitigated.
10. Professional Services. Even the large corporations with tons of staff and huge budgets are finding they can’t execute fast enough. IT was built in silos,where, for ages, a server team, desktop team, application team, storage team, and others all operated independently. But today’s technologies must leverage all of these technologies simultaneously or they just won’t work. Cloud architects are a rare breed of multi-certified individuals who usually have one or more certifications in each of these technology silos so that they can deliver a comprehensive solution that scales beyond enterprise to cloud-sized infrastructures wherein an infinite number of even the largest enterprises are hosted. Don’t be afraid to get a second pair of eyes and a new range of tools to parse the vast amount of security logs and other data your infrastructure produces. This could save your business a lot of public humiliation later.
Cloud Standards or Wild, Wild West?
Open Stack, Microsoft Federation, Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and other emerging standards are increasingly being adopted by various cloud providers. Keep an eye on how agnostic, open and API friendly your cloud provider is. Open standards are often the most secure since they are tested by a wide community of people with a vastly diverse set of skills.
Posted in: Cloud Computing,Computer techonology
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