The cloud based university - Day 2

Day 2 kicked of with some reflections from day 1. Among them the trust issue.  

Microsoft

Microsoft then  presented their vision and strategy for productivity in the future. Different aspects of that future are unified communication, Business Intelligence, Content delivery, Collaboration and Enterprise Search. These aspects can be delivered either on premise or online.

The presentation then focused on Office 365 which includes Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online.

In conjunction with Office 365 Microsoft's adopts a new type of release cycle. It will have a 90 day cyckle for the Microsoft Online offerings.  But Microsoft  keeps a larger buzz (launch etc) when a new wave of products arrives. An example will be Office 2013 (or under which name it will be sold).

The audience had a huge discussion about security. First talking about physical security. But the physical security seems not to be the issue (most cloud vendors are likely secure enough) but rather the discussion started to revolve around logical security. How can we as customer be certain that there is no leakage of data? Or how can we be certain that support personnel in the US (or where ever) access our data without a support request. It boils down to a trust issue. Which naturally can be regulated in a contract. But even with a contract eventually you have to trust the vendor.

In Microsoft's offering for Office 365 there will be a special education version that will include various templates. Unfortunately we didn't see any examples of these templates.

Before a short demo the Swedish pricing was presented. The most interesting is  A3 which is offered at 94 SEK per user, i.e. around $14 per month per user. And that lies in line what was presented earlier this year.

Cisco

Our last speaker for the day was from Cisco and he also started with the statement "Trust is the key to cloud adoption". According to Cisco the trust is built on four pillars: Security, Control, Compliance and Service Level Management. 

The presenter claimed that todays infrastructure is trusted, controlled, reliable, secure and that the cloud offering are flexible, dynamic, on-demand and efficient. Cisco's solution is  trusted clouds that try to bridge the gap between internal IT and cloud services.

A Cisco slogan: "The network is the Cloud Experience! " and that the cloud computing is just a journey that has started.  Foundations for the journey ahead is consolidation and virtualization. After that the crux is  automation and self service.

The presenter then outlined different types of clouds: Private cloud, Community cloud, Public cloud and hybrid clouds. Most interesting is the term community cloud which makes sense in a university and public sector perspective.  

Cisco identify candidate application for cloud by three characteristics: Non-Core, Standardized and Dynamic. Examples are Multimedia services, Grid computing, virtual desktops, e-mail, storage & backup.

Cisco can see that different NRENs (national research and education networks) offering off-site backup for entire datacenters.

Cisco's concept of the trusted cloud infrastructure is built on three building blocks: Platform (network, compute, storage), Services (security, virtualization, optimization), Architecture (Secure, Multi-Tenancy Architecture).

Summary

The two days has been intense with lots of interaction and discussions. A conclusion that can be drawn is the huge trust issue, how to establish trust and how to make sure trust is there. As a fun comment Google has employed a Trust manager, which is to the point! I guess we will and must see more trust managers out there.

When it comes to technology the simple answer seem to be that everything is possible and given the rate of innovation the journey towards the cloud (or what ever it will be called in the future) has just begun.