Special Focus
Cloud Computing
The CRN Test Center focuses on hosted applications and services from Amazon, Salesforce.com and Trend Micro
By Edward Moltzen & Samara Lynn
Our Test Center has reviewed hosted applications and services in the past, including the likes of Google Apps, Data Deposit Box hosted storage and hosted security. This month we focus on several more—Amazon.com’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), Salesforce.com and Trend Micro’s hosted security. Overall, we believe hosted applications, when deployed where it fits with a customer’s needs, can be a powerful solution to vault an enterprise into high levels of operation in short order at a limited cost.
But let’s be clear: Don’t expect ‘the cloud’ to provide 24/7 availability and don’t expect it to be the default solution for those wanting cost-competitiveness. Expect the unexpected. Before stopping to count all the profit you or a customer could make by deploying a cloud-based solution, consider that just one outage for the span of a few hours could eat up a measurable piece of a company’s profit for a quarter. Could never happen, right? It did, though. On July 20, 2008, Amazon.com suffered a catastrophic outage in its S3-hosted storage business. While Amazon managed to get the service up and running in several hours, it impacted thousands of businesses and individuals who had gone to S3 as an easy and cost-effective way to store lots of data.
And, over the past several months, search and online advertising giant Google has suffered notable outages in its Gmail and Google News offerings—outages that the company has left largely unexplained.
The health of the broader, global Internet should also be on your checklist. Based on our review, which includes examining Internet performance, cloud product performance and discussions with experts, when considering whether a cloud application or service is the right approach, these practices should be deployed:
- A complete audit and forecast of the business involved to develop a cost-benefit-risk analysis, on an application-by-application basis for a move to a hosted computing model vs traditional client/server models.
- An audit of the cloud service with a focus on issues including geographic redundancy, latency, packet
transport performance and uptime guarantees.
- An audit of the business’ own ISPs, including performance at connecting points between different carriers to determine potential future performance issues.
While researching this story, we turned to Keynote’s free, over-the-Web Internet Health Report at internetpulse.net. This report is a real-time look at the health and performance of several Internet backbones around the world, and, importantly, backbone-to-backbone connecting points.
Another free Keynote product, the Keynote Internet Testing Environment, is a separate, rich desktop application that can also be used to monitor the performance of individual Web sites. The CRN Test Center likes it, and recommends it, for use by solutions providers (SPs) working with customers in the earliest stages of evaluating a move to cloud-based services or solutions. Here are several solutions we looked at and believe could fit in well in a nascent, cloud buildout.
Amazon.com
Amazon.com has been among the most aggressive companies in building out a cloud computing offering, beginning with its S3 storage service and building out several more offerings including its Elastic Cloud Computing—a pay-as-you-go, Web-based, hosted server solution.
Like most Amazon Web Services, EC2 is turnkey-simple. Within minutes, we were able to take a prewritten image (an Amazon Machine Image, or AMI), upload it to Amazon hardware, and turn on a server running Windows 2003 Server with Eclipse 3.4, Tomcat Server 6 and Java 6. Amazon makes scores of other images available in the same turnkey fashion, ranging from servers running IBM’s DB2 to servers running Linux or OpenSolaris and a variety of different databases, including Sybase and Oracle.
Amazon also connects EC2 to other services, including its S3 storage service. For example, you can customize one of its system images, take a snapshot, and store the snapshot and other data on S3. Amazon charges for storage space and data transfer, in rates ranging from 12.5 cents per hour for some AMIs based on Windows to about 10 cents an hour for some systems using open source.
When we tested our server, we noticed no latency or performance issues; however, we didn’t run anything that could be considered an intensive workload for many companies. Generally speaking, Amazon.com is given credit by many for the ‘geographic redundancy’ of its infrastructure in that it maintains high-performance data centers in geographies around the world. That not only provides for redundancy in the event one site suffers an outage or performance issue, but also ensures that if a catastrophic event hits one geography the basic service doesn’t suffer.
Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com displays a graphical image of the word ‘software’ behind a red circle and slash on its Web site. The image represents the company’s mantra of ‘No Software.’ Indeed, this CRM giant has made good with the offering of cloud-based CRM. Nothing needs to be installed.
Salesforce.com offers several hosted products. The most widely used is Salesforce CRM Sales. Another product is Salesforce CRM Service, tailored for customer-service-based industries, and a third is the Force.com platform. Force.com can run ERP and other modules from human resources to asset tracking. Developers can use the platform for running their custom applications, or customers can opt to install or test the more than 800 applications readily available from Force.com’s online marketplace.
There are also products designed for marketing and partners. Salesforce.com offers a 30-day trial with all of the features and functionality. Signing up for the trial is a snap; you can also add more users to get them involved in the testing. We opted to test-drive the CRM Sales product. Logging on as an administrator, the site opens up to a dashboard displaying information about the users logged in, the number of completed activities in the past 30 days, and any information added, such as new records or accounts. All this information pertains to the organization.
The dashboard page is customizable. For instance, it can be set to display company information such as closed-sales-to-date or marketing leads. From this home page are links to quickly create new objects. For testing we created a new contact. The page opens up to a form; a user can populate fields on the form with data pertaining to the contact. The workflow between fields and forms is set up well. We were able to create a new account to associate with the new contact—all from the same area of the interface.
Contacts must be associated with accounts to be shared among its users within an organization. But no privileges are set in stone. Salesforce.com has granular mechanisms to grant permissions and roles throughout an organization. Users designated as system administrators can establish a role hierarchy. This determines how an organization reports on and accesses data. There are sample role hierarchies, including territory-based, which places executive-level staff at the topmost level and then breaks down sales staff according to the region for which each staff member is responsible.
Reporting, document creation and tools for companies to do forecasting are all included. CRM, as a hosted solution, saves on the amount of infrastructure and internal resources that would otherwise be needed to add a complete CRM system to an existing network.
Trend Micro
Security is another market to embrace cloud computing. It seems almost contradictory: Why would anyone trust the security of their data to an off-premise network that they may really have not much control over?
Trend Micro offers a cloud-based security solution that still places the customer in control. Its Worry-Free Business Security Advanced (WFBS-A) 6.0 with InterScan Messaging Hosted Security (IMHS) Standard is a cloud client/server security solution that offers Web, e-mail and malware protection for laptops, desktops, servers and SMTP/Exchange servers. WFBS-A combines the power of Trend Micro’s hosted Security Server with agents that are deployed locally in an organization. The power of this product, however, lies in the cloud. Trend Micro’s in-the-cloud Reputation Services stops Web threats before they reach an organization’s network. The File Reputation Services is another Trend Micro cloud-based technology, and is a cloud-client antimalware solution.
The Security Server installs and hosts the centralized WFBS Web Console, the interface from which the solution is managed. The Security Server also installs the security agents to the client computers on an organization’s network. These agents establish the client/server relationship. The Security Server provides a centralized location to view security status information, downloading and updating components, and for storing log files. IMHS is a component that redirects a client’s e-mail to Trend Micro’s network. Spam is stripped away from e-mail messages and then sent back to the client’s SMTP or Exchange server. Trend Micro claims a 99 percent detection rate of spam using IMHS. The Web Console is crisp-looking and easy to navigate. It was simple to add machines to be protected and to remotely install the required agent to each of them.
The management interface has several key menus: Live Status, which displays the current security health of an organization; Security Settings, the area in which actions and responses to security threats are configured; Outbreak Defense, where users can set up a Vulnerability Assessment; Scans, where manual or scheduled scans are initiated; and Updates, where users can configure the update schedule as well as roll back Security Server agents and components to previous versions. WFBS-A is an innovative way of harnessing the power of the cloud with on-premise software. Although the heart of the technology is cloud-based, a SP or network security administrator is still given the reins of control to ensure safety.
The bottom line
Between basic server and storage infrastructure (Amazon.com), business application (Salesforce.com) and security (Trend Micro), these three vendors provide cloud-based services and solutions we can recommend. Add to that the services that Keynote provides, and we believe SPs are set up to begin talking to customers about moving IT to the hosted model in areas where it can bring measurable ROI with acceptable levels of risk.
As with managed services, it’s important to build in realistic expectations on both the savings side as well as the performance side for those running an enterprise that moves to hosted technology. If a company’s sales team finds itself routinely frustrated with how long it takes to call up a customer’s data, it will have implications for that company’s performance. On the flip side, a well-performing cloud-based application can save a business money while providing performance and a competitive advantage.
The difference maker, we believe, will be well-informed and well-trained SPs that follow best practices with an eye toward the reality that even pretty clouds can turn gray and threatening in the right conditions. |