Is BYO Already D?

As in Done, Dead, Doomed...Defeated. 

About a year ago I wrote BYOD–The Hottest Trend or Just the Hottest Term just when #BYOD was burning up the #trendingtopics.  Since then, BYOD has become one of the most talked about IT challenges and at the top of many enterprise initiates for 2013.  Most industry pundits and analysts alike believe BYOD is here to stay and will have a major impact both on business and how we use our personal mobile devices.  Now, as more organizations investigate and deploy BYOD solutions, some unforeseen costs are starting to toss BYOD for a loop.

A number of recent surveys, research and analysis indicate that the perceived cost savings might be a mirage.  The Aberdeen Group says BYOD could cost organizations 33% more than a IT owned mobile device plan.  iPass' Q4 Mobile Workforce Report, suggests organizations are not considering long term costs of BYOD and Damovo UK's survey of 100 IT Directors, 73% feel that BYOD costs will 'spiral out of control,' with 69% skeptical that the BYOD shift will actually reduce support costs.  And Xigo, a provider of cloud-based expense management, reported that while cost savings is a top goal for BYOD programs, most respondents (67%) said their mobile expenditures had not changed with 25% saying their costs rose. Finally, in a survey by Lieberman Software, most respondents (67%) said BYOD would increase IT and security costs.

Why all the gloom?  Many of the cautions involved the basics: airtime, data plans, volume discounts, network capacity, support (staff & software) and ongoing compliance.

Obviously, if a mobile device has now added 'work productivity tool' to it's list of duties, it might need to move into a higher monthly service plan, which might be expensed back to the company (along with the cost to process that report).  The device itself was probably acquired at retail or discounted with a term contract verses part of some corporate volume discount.

Another area is pure bandwidth.  In essence, everyone gets to add another node to the network.  A powerful device at that.  Network usage, WiFi connections, access rules, overall access management and the rest, most likely will go up.

Support - in all areas - is yet another conundrum.  The devices and unique configuration of each; the software required to secure, manage and often license the device; AAA management; IT bodies focused on BYOD; policy & risk management; overall complexity; loss of data; enter your own challenge here _________.

As with all technology trends, there will be hiccups along the way.  Remember that thing called The Cloud?  We are in the BYOD 1.0 realm and need to move into the BYOD 2.0 era -  a shift from managing the entire device to only managing the corporate data and applications on the device.  My guess is that BYOD will go thru some growing pains but will eventually settle in as just another way we use our devices and access data.  While 'cost' might be the initial bait, over time the benefits will look more like productivity and flexibility rather than TCO/ROI.

What do you think?  BYO Done or Dawning?

ps

Related

• BYOD a waste of money?
• Will BYOL Cripple BYOD?
• Freedom vs. Control
• 'BYOD' Issues Creating Headaches in the Enterprise
• BYOD: Where the costs are
• Are BYOD firms heading for 'bill shock'?
• BYOD: 10 reasons it won't work for your business
• The Hidden Problems of BYOD: What You Don’t Know Will Cost You
• BYOD will push up IT costs, say tech chiefs
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 1: Liability
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 2: Device Choice
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 3: Economics
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 4: User Experience and Privacy
• BYOD Policies – More than an IT Issue Part 5: Trust Model

 

Technorati Tags: f5,byod,smartphone,mobile,mobile device,risk,research,silva,security,compliance

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16 Racks (16 Tons Parody)

F5 can streamline your flow. Emulating Tennessee Ford's 16 Tons.

L. MacVittie: Lyrics, K. Salchow: Vocals, Produced by PSilva.

 

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Related:

• Load Balancers Are Officially Dead: Refocus on Application Delivery (Gartner Market Research - Registration required)
• F5's YouTube Channel
• In 5 Minutes or Less Series (23 videos – over 2 hours of In 5 Fun)
• Inside Look Series
• Life@F5

Technorati Tags: f5,big-ip,parody,16 tons,16 racks,video,silva,security,music,ddos,v11.3

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The Cloud’s Hidden Costs

Survey says…and many companies believe that moving architecture, resources or other IT infrastructure pieces to the cloud will save them money.  That’s been one of the biggest selling points of cloud computing – pay as you go, metered service, pay what you use – the internet as a utility offering.  And while simple deployments can be cost effective, complete architectural maneuvers often put pressure on the cloud’s main value proposition according to a recent Information Week article.

Burning through metered service when you think most everything is off can easily happen, as any of us are aware with lights, water, electricity and gas in our own homes.  In the IT world, a development team may have spun up some servers for testing and forgot to decommission; another group may have commandeered some servers for a specific campaign; or, the overflow/burst/DR model went into play due to some holiday and the servers are still running well after the wrapping paper is stuffed in the garbage recycle bin.  The ability for anyone with a credit card to procure cloud infrastructure services can lead to that same someone also forgetting to turn off the lights, spigot, stove and internet.  We’ve all done it.  And when that bill arrives, the envelope suddenly drops and the paper insert slowly floats to the floor as we attempt to understand ‘what the heck was left running!?!’

Visibility seems to be the primary culprit.   As cloud providers continue to expand and grow, often their visibility into and control over usage patterns decreases.  And CIOs can’t take full advantage of cloud economies since they may not know the who, what, where, when and how of the application(s) running in the cloud and thus, the overall cost implications.  Cloud management tools, which are also evolving, primarily focus on provisioning, capacity, utilization and workflows but not always the total cost of ownership.  Most organizations are not even fully aware of the costs until that big envelope arrives and they might not deal with or have a plan for ‘overages’ until it happens.  In addition, as more companies look to the cloud for business continuity/disaster recovery scenarios, as the recent disaster planning study from AT&T suggests, those ‘deer in the headlights’ gazes may become more common.

According to the article, these four situations account for cloud's most common hidden costs:

1. Runaway VMs: One of the key tenets of the cloud is self-service, making it easy for users to gain access to compute power wherever and whenever they need it. Often what happens, though, is users are so empowered to spin up compute resources that they overprovision or go over budget because there are no guidelines or caps in place to limit their usage.

2. Zombie VMs: This is something referred to as the "living dead" concept. Think back to the group of developers who spun up a bunch of clouds for load testing, which they never brought down, or even a handful of licenses for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application purchased on credit cards by a lone business group, which after a period of brief usage lies dormant. While individually these expenses may not account for much, cumulatively they can add up, especially if there's no visibility for tracking, and months, even years, go by without turning off the spigot.

3. Choosing the wrong pricing model: Cloud providers price their services differently and often, the costs are a moving target.  Many organizations will opt for more expensive on-demand pricing because they don't want to make a long-term commitment to the provider, but they do so without having the proper context.

4. Maintenance costs: A move to the cloud means support and maintenance comes off of IT's plate. Well, that's the idea, but not necessarily the reality.  Also, all of the groups that have tapped cloud resources on their own (so-called shadow IT) come calling on IT, not the support folks at the Amazon cloud, when something goes wrong.

At one point or another, we all have forgotten to turn off a light, the water, a heater, the AC or any other item that uses the traditional utilities.  The new Smart meter Edison installed on the side of my house is supposed to give me visibility into my usage for proper cost analysis.  Organizations need something similar as part of the cloud management tools to give them the ability to properly plan if and when sticker shock hits their system.

ps

References:

• 4 Causes Of Cloud Bill Shock
• Google Apps Clears Key Security Hurdle
• Study: Mobile, Cloud Computing Factoring Into Disaster Recovery
• Cisco Survey Tracks Top Cloud Concerns
• Hey You, Get Off-ah My Cloud!
• Cloud Security With FedRAMP
• Surfing the Surveys: Cloud, Security and those Pesky Breaches
• Audio White Paper - Application Security in the Cloud with BIG-IP ASM
• Successfully Managing VDI Services with the BIG-IP System (pdf)
• F5 Desktop Virtualization Solutions

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Orbital Sciences Corporation Case Study - F5 Networks

One of the world's leading space technology companies, Orbital Sciences Corporation has pioneered new classes of rockets, satellites, and other technologies that help make the benefits of space more affordable, accessible, and useful to millions of people on Earth.

Watch this interview with Orbital Sciences Senior Director, Information Services, Tom Hall and Senior IS Manager, Bryan Pretre to learn how implementing F5 ARX helped the organization boost operational efficiencies, minimize disruptive downtime and significantly reduce overall storage costs. As the business has grown, its use of complex engineering applications and the need to keep increasing amounts of data accessible for up to 20 years was pushing its storage environment to the limit.  Printed case study can be found here (pdf).

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Technorati Tags: F5, integration, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, storage

twitter: @psilvas

CloudFucius Asks: Will Open Source Open Doors for Cloud Computing?

There has been a lot of press already about OpenStack’s announcement yesterday about their new open source cloud computing software.  OpenStack says that the goal is, ‘to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware.’  The software is intended to to allow companies to automatically create and manage large deployments of virtual private servers and remove the concern of vendor lock-in since the software will allow customers to span multiple cloud providers.  Customers and service providers alike can use their own physical hardware to create large cloud environments, public or private, across the globe.  It is also positioned to give customers more choice in how they want their specific cloud environment designed and deployed.  Almost 30 companies are participating with the folks at Rackspace and NASA (Nebula cloud computing platform) leading the charge.

Certainly, there are several attractive pieces to this, including the notion of cloud-standards, but will it finally open the flood gates for mass adoption of Cloud deployments?  Maybe not for the enterprise, at least initially.  Openstack honestly admits, ‘OpenStack is probably not something that the average business would consider deploying themselves yet. The big news for end customers is the potential for a halo effect of providers adopting an open and standard cloud: easy migration, cloud-bursting, better security audits, and a large ecosystem of compatible tools and services that work across cloud providers.’  This means that Openstack is really aimed at *very* technical enterprises (very large with lots of resources) and service providers.  Thus, the play for the enterprise does not exist (yet) here, *except* for management layer players who could leverage it to build something they could sell to enterprises to “make it easy” for them.  (thanks Lori!)

In addition, as Ted Julian of the Yankee Group points out in this story, security is still the great unknown since there doesn’t seem to be a security vendor on the list of Openstack participants.  I’m sure that list will grow over time, especially with the press that it’s getting, and the ever present cloud security concerns will eventually be addressed.  This project is in the very early stages and will continue to evolve as folks pick up the code, test it and decide how it might work for them.  Maybe it’ll also help push along and enable the whole Inter-Cloud notion.

And one from Confucius: The cautious seldom err.

ps

The CloudFucius Series: Intro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Resources:

• The Recipe for Clouds Goes Open-Source
• Open Stack Launches
• NASA and Rackspace part the clouds with open source project
• Rackspace's Risky Open Cloud Bet
• Rackspace Launches Open-Source Cloud Platform Called OpenStack
• NASA drops Ubuntu's Koala food for (real) open source
• NASA and Rackspace open source cloud fluffer
• All for One Cloud and One Cloud for All
• Rackspace, NASA launch OpenStack: Can it prevent cloud lock-in?
• OpenStack is great, but Clouds need security. Meet the Clean Cloud.
• OpenStack Wiki
• Openstack Code

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, cloud, context-aware, web, internet, openstack

twitter: @psilvas

Audio White Paper - F5 And The 8 Ways To Virtualization

F5 pioneered the concept of breaking up data center virtualization technologies into eight unique categories within the data center. Any virtualization products or technologies implemented in the data center will fall into one of these eight categories. With this paper, F5 discusses how it has implemented these same technologies within its own product line, helping enterprises get closer to achieving their goal of a implementing a complete Virtual Data Center with F5’s Application Delivery Networking products.

  
Download now or listen on posterous

AudioWP_-_F5_and_the_8_Ways_to_Virtualization.mp3 (10793 KB)

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twitter: @psilvas

Technorati Tags: F5, infrastructure 2.0, integration, cloud connect, Pete Silva, security, business, education, technology, application delivery, intercloud, cloud, context-aware, infrastructure 2.0, automation, web, internet,

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Audio White Paper - Reducing Storage Costs With F5 ARX

F5® ARX® solutions dramatically reduce capital and operating expenses associated with managing file storage environments. Companies that have deployed ARX solutions have realized significant cost savings in several ways, including through greater use of lower cost storage with storage tiering, reduced backup media consumption from backup optimization, improved resource utilization, and simplified storage administration.

The white paper can be downloaded from: reducing-storage-costs-arx.pdf

  
Download now or listen on posterous

AudioWP_-_Reducing_Storage_Costs_with_F5_ARX.mp3 (9639 KB)

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