Sky Car, 1979 / Felhőautó by Geoff Hendricks
The cloud has been a source of inspiration for many years. (Here my uncle poses in a car from his cloud period. He once rented a billboard in New York to paint clouds on it. The space was cheap because it faced the wrong way on a street recently made one way. I bet it made pedestrians smile.)
These days, it is hard to tell how much of the cloud is transformational and how much is hype. The media and investors are always looking for the next big thing, and are thus inclined to extol the promise of new technologies. As a software company, we have to predict whether and how quickly new ideas will be adopted. (Anyone remember the perennially proclaimed “Year of the LAN” in the 80′s?) Make the wrong bet, and either miss a market shift or waste years of development. Microsoft and other vendors are always touting the latest technology ‘revolution’. If you adopt all, you consume all of your resources and get nowhere. So we have passed on some technologies. One was client-side Java, which never lived up to its cross-platform, common-UI promise. It turned out to be a lowest-common-denominator approach that could be beat in both speed and elegance by single-platform development. It has an important role today, especially for server and mobile applications, but still has not achieved cross-platform prominence.
The cloud for our markets, we believe, is real. It is a well-known success for some applications like CRM – witness SalesForce.com. But our customers face different issues. For WhatsUp Gold to monitor devices and applications, our software needs access to customers’ networks. Not something many customers so far want to trust to an external application. For WS_FTP, MOVEit and Messageway, we are guardians of an organization’s most sensitive data. Where data resides and how it is protected are of critical importance. How network management and secure file transfer applications are made available via the cloud is about much more than hosting an important application. We must determine what customers are comfortable with, while recognizing that this will constantly change. Our plan is to keep talking to our customers about their plans and offer them a choice of shrink-wrap or cloud applications, plus software and services to manage the cloud. Today, we offer MOVEit DMZ as a hosted service and are talking about using file transfer to govern and manage cloud services. We also have a hosted offering for IMail Server. We are convinced the cloud is real for our markets. We will release more cloud-based products and services. But we will let the market decide the timing, pace and extent of the transition.
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It’s possible to map any hosted solution on a well-defined continuum of cloud capabilities to get a feel for where you are. The heart of this taxonomy is NIST’s current definition of cloud service*, which covers five crucial elements:
1) On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities such as server time and network storage as needed automatically, without requiring human interaction with a service provider.
2) Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed
through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client
platforms (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and PDAs) as well as other traditional or cloudbased software services.
3) Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple
consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources
dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand.
4) Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned — in some cases automatically — to quickly scale out; and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.
5) Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource usage by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, or active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported — providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the service.
Under this taxonomy, I’d rate the current MOVEit DMZ hosted service as:
1) None (live interaction with salespeople and manual setup required)
2) OK (no native device clients, but people use web interface there nonetheless)
3) OK (storage and number of nodes are fixed, rest is dynamic)
4) Poor (limited scalability, large quantities are top-ended)
5) Poor (usage is measured but not well reported)
Conclusion: Hosted service=yes, SaaS=not really, cloud=no.
…and the current Sendable service as:
1) Good (touchless provisioning)
2) Fair (100% interactive web interface)
3) Poor (storage and number of nodes are fixed, single application server)
4) Poor (limited scalability, large quantities are top-ended)
5) OK (some usage is reported to customer)
Conclusion: Hosted service=yes, SaaS=barely, cloud=no.
I think a revision of your offerings that combined the “cloudiest” attributes of the Sendable application (touchless provisioning and self-service reporting) with the existing reach of your MOVEit DMZ Hosted service might be worth exploring**. That course of action would allow you to lay full claim to a SaaS-based MFT solution, and could be a stepping stone to full a cloud solution someday (though you’d also need to address at least #4 and probably #3 to get there).
* To see NIST’s five essential cloud attributes in context, go here: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/guidance/csaguide.v2.1.pdf
…and turn to page #14.
** Sendable’s current capabilities are essentially a subset of MOVEit DMZ’s: Sendable has MOVEit DMZ’s manual person-to-person send capability but lacks folders, an Outlook plug-in, delegated administration, an API, etc.
I went to charge my phone today and I plugged it into an outlet. And then my phone was charged. If I cared I looked at the meter on the side of the garage but typically I don’t. I don’t particularly care about the underground pipes and wires, or the transformation box outside my community. The power junction I only care about because of their proximity to a nature preserve but the functionality? Nope.
What’s the point? Simple. The very nature of a service is something that a consumer consumes without having to know the details of how the functionality (or capacity) is provided to them. So how a company implements their services and platforms is not of much interest unless:
1) I’ve experienced outages… (in which case I usually drop the service.)
2) I’m an industry analyst… (in which case I rarely plan to consume rather I just analyze.)
Amazon’s architecture, as well as Google’s isn’t really elastic, they keep those servers running all the time. But one would not disqualify them from a Cloud service discussion.
IMO the true way to have an honest discussion about the quality of any cloud service is to get feedback from customers and to understand adoption rates of that service. Of all the discussions I have had with consumers of Cloud services, these are the things that matter. The points you list are useful but only to the provider themselves (you can send me an email directly) or competitors, who would use the analysis to create FUD. In the end I can use my browser to send files securely through Sendable and Hosted DMZ. I’m charged a fee as agreed and the whole experience is within my expectations.