Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Help me to understand. We have several camps going on in this movement, the email to collaboration to Intranet movement. There’s, as you said, the Microsoft camp. There is the IBM camp, which is struggling right now because of Lotus Notes. But there are some other camps, like Salesforce.com. Where do you see them fitting into this landscape? Where do you see Google fitting into this landscape? Google has actually won because of their collaboration features. What happens when it goes to the Internet? What happens when there are more applications to be developed on their app engine? That’s already four different camps. Are there other camps that we need to be aware of? Could you give a high-level directional view on this? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 2)

SM: Given that vantage point, tell me about the organization’s cloud computing philosophy. Where are you coming from? What is the overall guiding principal that you are bringing to your clients?

MP: That’s a great question again. I think from an Ernst & Young point of view – again we have to realize we are not an IBM or Accenture. We are different. For us, it’s around the cloud risk and assurance. Cloud is a new paradigm shift. We had main frame. We went to client server. We went to Internet. Now, we’ve gone to cloud. Everybody knows that kind of stuff. But fundamentally, going forward, we’re saying, well, there’re certain things around cloud risk and assurance, whether it’s the compliance, the security, business continuity, the overall risk. We are, as a brand, really good at understanding risk and assurance. And to be honest, the cloud part of this assurance is one extra part. It’s not a new part. It’s an evolutionary part of what we’re doing. The second part is around the whole technology and operations. There’re different architectures. There’re different standards. There’re different ways you look at doing systems development. Systems development, I think, is a real key area. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mal Postings, CTO, IT Advisory Services, Ernst & Young (Part 1)

Arthur Young and Alwin C. Ernst never met in life, and their companies didn’t merge to form Ernst & Young until 41 years after they died within days of each other in 1948. But both men were innovators who believed in globalization. Today, the company provides professional services for its customers but on a much broader and, thanks to the advent of the cloud, more complex scale than anything that Ernst or Young could have imagined.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Mal. Let’s start with some context about the scope of your work, the scope of the cloud computing footprint that you are dealing with, then we’ll go to your philosophy around it and so forth. >>>

IBM Looks Solid

Market analysts do not foresee a steep recovery in IT spending as both the U.S. and European markets continue their struggle to come out of the economic crisis. According to RBC experts, IT spending will grow a mere 4%-5% over the year in 2011. Gartner also expects slower growth in the coming years. Their recent study estimates IT spending in 2012 to grow 3.9% over the year to $2.7 trillion in 2012. For the current year, Gartner expects IT spending to grow 5.9% over the year.

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Apple After Steve Jobs

Fourteen years ago, Apple was going through a rough patch and its stock was trading at below $5 levels. Steve Jobs took the reins again and made Apple the most valuable company on the planet. Sadly, Apple’s former leader passed away this month. Though Jobs had been away from Apple’s daily affairs for a while, he remained a major influence for the company. A spiritual leader of sorts, almost.

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Brightcove’s IPO Prospects

Market reports estimate the outsourced online video platform market to be worth $5.8 billion by the year 2015. For 2011, the market is estimated to be worth $2.3 billion. A study by Cisco Systems revealed that Internet video will amount for 40% of all consumer Internet traffic worldwide during the year. By 2015, that percentage is expected to grow to 62%, making the online video market a booming one.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jon Freeman, CIO of MyCroft, Inc. (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The iPad in particular is a device that’s being used by multiple people in a household. Let’s say it’s an iPad that belongs to a Fortune 500 employee but is also, in the evening or on the weekend, being used by the same person’s five-year-old son for completely different purposes. There needs to be a policy for that.

Jon Freeman: Absolutely. The funny thing is – to your point – what we’ve found that just the scenario you just painted with an iPad being at home, we had a great situation where the managing director of a large investment bank was checking his online assets and online portfolio with his portfolio management company. He logged out – thought he logged out – from his own organization’s asset management website. [He] hit the “log out” button, got confirmation that he’d logged out, and put the iPad down. His 17-year-old son picked up the iPad, hit the backspace key, and was brought right back into the system. So, the 17-year-old son is very happy because he now knows what his father is going to be leaving him, but these devices have forced people to understand there’s a new way of doing computing that is not the same established model as when you’re dealing with a device that just sits on your desktop. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jon Freeman, CIO of MyCroft, Inc. (Part 6)

Jon Freeman: The next thing I would like to understand is the relationship of organizations, the users within the organizations to usage flow, and where people go. I see that people are moving, and I what I would like is to perceive wall and break them down. Is a user my employee, or is a user someone who is now working for an affiliate or for a different organization? This is important because what I [want] in identity access management is that people, because they change roles, their access to systems at some point, do not become restricted based on their role changes. I need to be able to effect a set of changes that would allow both my users and those policies to move.

If I have to sum it up, I would be happy to, within a department, division, or line of business, to get the ability to translate and move policies from security domain to security domain so that as a user moves, some of those policy definitions move with him. >>>