Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 6)

DF: Continuing with that thought, if we go buy an app from a packaged app vendor, we try and buy so that it runs on the one of the internal platforms that we use on our internal IT. If it’s a product, we have to make sure it works across platforms, so when we use the internal infrastructure to build or test our products, we have to test it on every stack that the customer might have.  It’s a funny decision tree in that our software manages the private cloud. Then the question is, when you go down, what are you running on the private cloud? It falls into two cases. Is that an internal application?  For example, is it our internal portal or our employee portal? If so,  we try and standardize on common technology. If it’s software that we are selling to a customer, we have to test on the small number of stacks that are required. >>>

Large Enterprises: To Be Or Not To Be In The Clouds?

By guest author Shaloo Shalini and Saurabh Mallik

As a niche technology chaser, I have been working closely with several cloud-based technologies in the past three years. It amazes me to see the ease and agility with which startups and small and medium enterprises deal with the question of adopting cloud-based technologies. Contrast this with the measured yet tentative approach that larger enterprises have toward cloud computing. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

SM: That must be having a huge impact on the IT organization as well, right? You don’t need all these different capabilities. I guess you can dramatically reduce the size of the IT organization with that decision alone. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

SM: What is the state of the industry in terms of standardization? What standards exist, and how mature is that ecosystem of standards? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

SM: In the discussions we just had, it sounds like there are external vendors involved in your deployment of cloud-based solutions. What is the process, or what are you looking for in terms of key requirements for adoption and deployment of cloud computing solutions within CA? What do vendors need to be aware of? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, Harvard Medical School (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Would it be fair to conclude that it means the work applications that are being run on the cloud at Harvard Medical School (HMS) on the data sitting on the cloud storage are actually being accessed over the browser? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

SM: So, you are supplementing your internal infrastructure with Amazon EC2 and so forth?

DF: Yes. You can basically set policies that define which conditions allow you to do that [spill over]. Obviously, some application or tests you may not want to run in the cloud. So you set the policies [to deal with those], but we have a variable capacity cloud, and we get some capacity from places like Rackspace and Amazon EC2. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, Harvard Medical School (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: If I were to ask you a question, given what you know of your situation at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the industry in general, what are some of the opportunities that you would point entrepreneurs toward in the context of research done at HMS? We have discussed this to some extent already, but I would like to know more. What kinds of off-the-shelf solutions are required such that your researchers at HMS don’t have to reinvent the wheel? Can you give me some examples of specific areas where you would like solutions? >>>