Agenda for the Space Coast Cloud Circle - April 19, 2012

Agenda

Moderator: Ray Osborne
Rusty's Seafood – Out on the deck.
Contact number 321-345-1513

Please note we will be having our luncheon out on the deck of Rusty's Seafood. If you are
sensitive to sunshine you may want to consider a hat or other head covering. Everyone is responsible for their own bill.

Noon – Arrive be seated and order your own food. Note there is a buffet with a variety of food choices.

12:15 Introductions; Opportunity to give your 3 minute elevator speech. What company
or business you are with? How you are involved with cloud computing? What's your favorite cloud app (SaaS)? Go around clockwise starting from moderator Ray Osborne

12:30 start discussion “Migration Issues: From Legacy IT to the Cloud.”

Define what cloud computing is. What is SaaS? What is IaaS? examples

What are the top concerns of companies when they consider moving their data to the
cloud.

Quotes from interviews I have conducted. (for discussion fodder)

>The three areas of consideration and solution comparison are Cost, Value and Risk. If there is an unlimited budget, I guess cost doesn't matter, but I haven't seen that yet. There may be cases where simply employing a gateway that exposes the exisitng application or data to the new cloud infrastructure contains high value and low risk, but also has lower cost than a wholesale re-write or migration to a new platform.There are many nuances and the first two question that need to be answered are "what do you have?" and "what are you trying to do?". Then research the options and make the final determination based on CVR.

>The main "concerns" when migrating from legacy to Cloud, in my experience with my customers are:
1. Security -- will my application be secure and my data be private (nobody except my users should be able to access them.
2. Availability -- Despite the incredible SLAs touted by cloud providers, I have heard of severe downtimes of the public cloud (sometimes a few days). Will my users experience such outages, and will I lose customers due to things which are then not in my control?
3. Licenses -- Should I just take my licenses and move to an IAAS (btw, is that legal?) or should I dump the existing licenses and go for SaaS versions of the softwares (e.g. Office, CRM, etc)
4. Regulatory compliance -- If I move my data to the cloud, will I still be compliant with all the regulation or is there a chance I might be in violation, unwittingly?

1:30 Close out, any news items that would interest this group?

Survey Says

Information Technology Goes Green with Cloud Technology

IT (Information Technology) is going green with cloud technology. Follow the technology leaders and you will see many using cloud technology to achieve green savings. This new way of IT platforms is enabling Corporate America to consolidate their data centers to not only achieve economies of scale for powering and cooling their IT centers but to also turn on and turn off complete servers when they are needed for peak work loads. And of course with power savings, comes lowering their carbon footprint.

Going beyond data center consolidation, some companies are actually powering these data centers with renewable energy; IBM is building a data center in India with cloud technology that is powered by solar energy using photovoltaic cells, a Wyoming cloud provider actually uses wind farms to power its data center, and even Facebook is building a cloud computing data center in Sweden which is cooled by the arctic air and powered by hydroelectric dams.

“The carbon emissions reducing potential of cloud computing is a thrilling breakthrough, allowing companies to maximize performance, drive down costs, reduce inefficiency and minimize energy use – and therefore carbon emissions – all at the same time,” said Paul Dickinson, executive chairman of the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project).

The savings and green power continues on, with the day to day business dealings of vertical industries. Health care is one such area that is rapidly benefiting from this technology. Using computing clouds, paperwork and printing is reduced by using EHR (Electronic Heath Care Records) between health care organizations. Even medical radiology is being transformed , now with computer clouds CDs do not have to be burned and shipped to different locations. Now a doctor can view the image of their patients medical image through a remote viewer from anywhere in the world, share it with another specialist and even share it with their patient. Not only is the carbon footprint and costs being reduced by cloud technology but the quality of patient care is increasing.

To find out more about how computer clouds are used in various industries attend a meeting of the Space Coast Cloud Circle. Email rko@industrycorrespondent.com or call 321-345-1513.

Survey of Discovery for Space Coast Cloud Circle: Topics of Interest