Ecommerce Blog

Those who move their ecommerce systems to cloud computing typically take that path for the cost efficiencies and the on-demand scalability. Moreover, the hype is deafening. It almost feels like there’s a party going on and you weren’t invited.

While there are certainly benefits to move to the “Cloud,” there are also threats to your cloud computing implementation. It’s helpful to consider those threats before you journey into the cloud.

Threat 1: You’re way over budget.

Recent analysts’ reports have pointed out that cloud computing can provide significant cost savings to some organizations, but can actually cost many organizations more than their traditional on-premise or third party-hosted systems. The reasons for this will vary, but in most instances the cost of migration to the cloud and the ongoing operational costs were much higher than expected.

Threat 2: You get arrested.

One would think that moving to cloud computing is a technical challenge versus a legal challenge, but in many instances there are very strict laws as to where the data can reside and how it’s secured. In the world of ecommerce, you need to consider the laws around customer data and financial data, which cannot reside outside of the country in some cases, and has to live up to a certain security standard. Same goes with systems that interact with government systems, health care systems, and many banking systems.

Threat 3: You are hacked.

Cloud computing often gets a bad rap when it comes to security. However, there are many more security threats that must be considered when moving to the cloud since cloud computing systems are going to be easy targets for hackers. This was best demonstrated with the recent Gmail attacks that came out of China, where some mailboxes where compromised. The reality of cloud computing is that many cloud providers don’t have the degree of security required to protect your data for the existing, and more importantly, emerging threats.

Threat 4: You are locked out.

In most cases, companies will not find that they are harmed by hackers, but harmed by the cloud computing providers themselves. Just as you’re at the mercy of your cell phone provider around service cancellation policies, your cloud computing provider could consider a missed payment, or a spike in processing load, as an excuse to cancel your service. You need to consider all policies going into a relationship with a cloud computing provider, including what can cause you to be locked out. Moreover, many cloud providers will have new owners in 2010. In many instances you could find your new cloud landlord has new rules and policies, and lockouts could be more commonplace.

While it’s not a good idea to become paranoid around the use of cloud computing for your ecommerce systems, it’s definitely a good idea to have a healthy understanding of the existing threats and how to circumnavigate them.

This post was contributed by guest columnist David Linthicum. David is a cloud computing and SOA expert and author of several books on Information Technology.

Original post by David Linthicum

How does one deploy cloud computing for ecommerce systems? It’s really about the architecture, understanding your own requirements, and then understanding the cloud computing options that lay before you. Here is a quick and dirty guide for you.

Step 1: Understand the business case.

While it would seem that moving to the cloud is a technology exercise, the reality is that the core business case should be understood as to the potential benefits of cloud computing. This is the first step because there is no need to continue if we can’t make a business case. Things to consider include the value of shifting risk to the cloud computing provider, the value of on-demand scaling (which has a high value in the world of ecommerce), and the value of outsourcing versus in-sourcing.

Step 2: Understand your existing data, services, processes, and applications.

You start with what you have, and cloud computing is no exception. You need to have a data-level, service-level, and process-level understanding of your existing problem domain, also how everything is bundled into applications. I covered this in detail in my book, but the short answer is to break your existing system or systems down to a functional primitive of any architectural components, or data, services, and processes, with the intention being to assemble them as components that reside in the cloud and on-premise.

Step 3: Select a provider.

Once you understand what you need, it’s time to see where you’re going. Selecting a cloud computing provider, or, in many cases, several, is much like selecting other on-premise technologies. You line up your requirements on one side, and look at the features and functions of the providers on the other. Also, make sure to consider the soft issues such as viability in the marketplace over time, as well as security, governance, points-of-presence near your customers, and ongoing costs.

Step 4: Migrate.

In this step we migrate the right architectural assets to the cloud, including transferring and translating the data for the new environment, as well as localizing the applications, services, and processes. Migration takes a great deal of planning to pull off successfully the first time.

Step 5: Deploy.

Once your system is on the cloud computing platform, it’s time to deploy it or turn it into a production system. Typically this means some additional coding and changes to the core data, as well as standing up core security and governance systems. Moreover, you must do initial integration testing, and create any links back to on-premise systems that need to communicate with the newly deployed cloud computing systems.

Step 6: Test.

Hopefully, everything works correctly on your new cloud computing provider. Now you must verify that through testing. You need to approach this a few ways, including functional testing, or how your ecommerce system works in production, as well as performance testing, testing elasticity of scaling, security and penetration testing.

If much of this sounds like the process of building and deploying a more traditional on-premise system, you’re right. What does change, however, is that you’re not in complete control of the cloud computing provider, and that aspect of building, deploying, and managing an ecommerce system needs to be dialed into this process.

This post was contributed by guest columnist David Linthicum. David is a cloud computing and SOA expert and author of several books on Information Technology.

Original post by David Linthicum

While most people understand cloud computing, and perhaps understand enterprise architecture, few have made the links to understand the fit. If you don’t understand where cloud computing meets your enterprise, and how each can benefit from the other, it’s unlikely the enterprise will realize the value of cloud computing, including how cloud computing can enhance any number of applications such as ecommerce.

Backing up a bit, cloud computing is any IT resource, including storage, database, application development, application services, etc., that exists outside of the firewall that may be leveraged by enterprise IT over the Internet. The core idea behind cloud computing is that it’s much cheaper to leverage these resources as-a-service, paying as you go and as you need them, rather than buying more hardware and software for the data center. There are other advantages as well, including elasticity, or the ability to rapidly scale up cloud computing-based systems, rapid provisioning of cloud computing assets, such as storage and database services, and a much more cost efficient model than on-premise systems.

Thus, cloud computing allows you to expand and contract your costs in direct proportion to your needs. Moreover, it shifts some of the risk around expanding your IT resources from the enterprise to the cloud computing provider. Also, cloud computing abstracts those who use the cloud computing-delivered IT resource from the management of those resources.

But how do you manage cloud computing assets? Traditional enterprise architecture concepts and best practices are important to cloud computing for a few key reasons:

First, you need enterprise architecture to deal with the proper formation of the information systems using mechanisms that make them work and play well together, inside and outside of the enterprise. Cloud computing becomes part of the enterprise, in essence, even though cloud computing assets are actually shared with other independent organizations.

Second, in order to take advantage of cloud computing, you need to have interfaces and architectures that can reach out and touch cloud computing resources. While many believe they can simply create quick and dirty links between core enterprise information systems and cloud computing resources, the fact of the matter is that you really need a cloud-compatible architecture inside of the enterprise to make the most of cloud computing. What I’m seeing today are organizations that look at cloud computing as a mechanism to provide a quick tactical advantage. While that will work in some cases, a deep architectural context of cloud computing is always going to be the best long term approach.

Finally, you need some sort of architectural discipline with guiding principles to document and organize your architecture. Most have ignored this over the past several years to focus on ad-hoc hype-driven stuff, which I call “management-by-magazine.” We need to get back to leveraging the best solution for the problem, and a holistic enterprise architecture is a good approach for doing that.

This post was contributed by guest columnist David Linthicum. David is a cloud computing and SOA expert and author of several books on Information Technology.

Original post by David Linthicum

Most think cloud computing is about the ability to save operational costs. That may or may not be the case, depending upon your enterprise or ecommerce problem domain. Indeed, there are many dimensions to consider here, including:

• Ongoing operational cost reduction.
• The value of preserving capital.
• The value of upsizing on-demand.
• The value of downsizing on-demand.
• The value of shifting the risk.
• The value of agility.

Let’s explore each:

Operational Cost Reduction

We all know that cloud computing is cheap…okay, cheaper…okay, it can be cheap. Thus it’s a good idea to figure out the actual cost reductions that cloud computing can bring to your enterprise IT. The trick here is not only to figure out how much money can be saved, but how much it will cost to save that money.

Preserving Capital

It’s money in the bank which allows the business to run. The more money we have in the bank, the more we can purchase things for the core business such as inventory that can be sold, or new plant equipment that will save the company money during production. In any event, it’s good to keep as much capital as possible on hand to invest in the business, and not into infrastructure such as data centers, hardware, and software.

Upsizing On-Demand

Core to the ability to preserve capital is the ability to upsize your IT infrastructure on demand, or simply pay more operational dollars for additional computing capacity which would traditionally require a capital expenditure. Many cloud computing providers call this being elastic, or the ability to grow or contract to accommodate the business. For example, you can call upon the cloud computing provider to support an additional user and processing load through the holiday, when considering ecommerce solutions.

Downsizing On-Demand

Like upsizing on-demand, you need to consider what it will take to reduce computing capacity and dollars paid. What does it take to scale down in case you no longer need the computing resource and want to reduce costs as well? Such is the case within many ecommerce systems with capacity requirements that are seasonal.

Shifting the Risk

Another core value of cloud computing is the ability to shift the risk from your enterprise to the cloud computing provider. This concept refers to the fact that, since it’s up to the cloud provider to handle the computing processing load and you’ll pay by use, then it’s possible to reduce the risk that you’ll run out of capacity to support your customers and core business processes. The risk functionally shifts to the cloud provider who is better suited to accept that risk.

Agility

Agility means the ability to change the IT infrastructure faster to adapt to the changing needs of the business, such as market downturns, or the introduction of a key product to capture a changing market. This, of course, provides a strategic advantage and allows the business to have a better chance of long-term survival. These days many enterprises are plagued by IT infrastructures that are so poorly planned and fragile that they hurt the business by not providing the required degree of agility.

This post was contributed by guest columnist David Linthicum. David is a cloud computing and SOA expert and author of several books on Information Technology.

Original post by David Linthicum

Came across this humorous video via Storefront Backtalk. Check out Hitler’s reaction to cloud computing security problems:

Can’t see video? View it on Youtube.

Original post by Linda Bustos

Those moving to cloud computing are doing so around the promise of more effective and efficient computing. Indeed, cloud computing is not a revolution in computing, but a simple platform change that holds the potential to reduce our need for a huge amount of software and hardware to support our ecommerce systems. However, the intersection is a bit more difficult to find.

First, since this is really the first blog to explore the value of cloud computing within the world of ecommerce, let’s put forth a general definition of cloud computing. For the most part I like to go with the National Institute of Science and Technology, or NIST, who defines cloud computing as having the following characteristics:

• On-demand self-service.
• Broad network access.
• Resource pooling.
• Rapid elasticity.
• Measured service.

Cloud computing’s value is the ability to expand access and provision resources as you need them, and then have those resources expand as the application (in this case, ecommerce) needs to expand to support an increasing or “bursty” processing load. In the world of ecommerce where the margins are typically razor thin, the use of cloud computing provides on-demand access to application servers, databases, even middleware as needed. If deployed correctly, the use of infrastructure hosted in cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, should function as if it’s in your own data center.

While the value proposition of cloud computing is generally clear, the use case for eCommerce can be…well…cloudy. The value as I see it would be in the “rapid elasticity” that cloud computing brings, allowing those who need the extra capacity to get the extra capacity without driving waves and waves of software and hardware purchases, or worse, having to acquire more data center space. When using cloud computing, the extra capacity is on-line and ready for use minutes after you need it, which is perhaps the most compelling reason to leverage a cloud computing model.

Those who move portions of their ecommerce systems to cloud computing have to evaluate their own requirements. I see the need for cloud computing arising when the answer is “Yes” to at least two of the following questions:

1. Do you have excess capacity standing by (e.g., idle servers and databases) for the time when your ecommerce systems need the additional processing power, such as the holidays?

2. Are security requirements around the information you retain and/or process low to medium?

3. Will your business benefit by the preservation of capital?

4. Will cost reductions have a direct benefit when considering the profitability of the company?

It’s interesting to note that the questions above are more about the business benefit of cloud computing than the technological advantages, and that’s the way those who maintain and deploy ecommerce systems should look at them. Clearly the goal is to be more effective and efficient with the same architecture, technology, and deployment models you support today. Perhaps therein lies the intersection of cloud computing and ecommerce.

This post was contributed by guest columnist David Linthicum. David is a cloud computing and SOA expert and author of several books on Information Technology.

Original post by Linda Bustos

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Original post by Stacey Higginbotham

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Original post by Robert Scoble