tracking the cloud computing landscape in the enterprise it

Tracking the cloud computing landscape in the enterprise IT Case studies revealing potential bumps and surprising benefits in the cloud computing adoption process

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Tracking the cloud computing landscape in the enterprise IT

Contents

Early enterprise adopters seek cloud computing storage, PaaS

Interest in cloud disaster recovery blossoming in the enterprise

Cloud shops misled with high SaaS data integration costs

Breaking through the barrier: Interest in cloud BI and analytics grows

Cloud data storage services popular among SMBs, enterprises

Can cloud computing cure enterprises' BYOD woes?

Office 2013: Designed for the cloud computing generation

Cloud services face-off: Comparing Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and Cubby

Learning from the mistakes and successes of others is one of the best ways to move forward with any new technology. This special report details the results of a TechTarget survey designed to examine the use of cloud computing in enterprise IT. Discover the major factors contributing to the rise of cloud computing adoption, and gain insight into real-life case studies of your peers integrating cloud technology into their organizations. Learn about the advantages and mistakes to avoid when implementing this technology from those who have gone before you.


Cloud computing adoption goes far beyond the choice of public, private or

hybrid models. Enterprise IT pros and administrators also need to decide on

the specific services each cloud model provides. And certain trends are

starting to emerge with regards to how IT departments are utilizing cloud

services. Storing data in the cloud, as well as SaaS and PaaS, are the clear

winners so far.

Enterprises see potential in cloud storage

At one time or another all businesses have encountered storage capacity

problems. Cloud-based storage has the clear benefit of elastic provisioning,

allowing consumers to access additional storage space on demand. But

costs of cloud data storage could turn any benefit on its head. Since

corporations can expend major intellectual and financial capital to deploy and

manage storage resources, it's hardly a surprise that storage has emerged

as a major use for cloud services.

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Slide 1.

Data that changes regularly but is accessed infrequently is the first type of

data that survey respondents are cloudsourcing (Slide 1), with top data types

being nearline storage, disaster recovery (DR) data and archive data. Far

less growth is expected in primary storage, which underscores the reluctance

to rely on cloud providers for production data in real time where security and

availability concerns exist. Backup data growth remains flat, which isn't

surprising considering the broad acceptance of cloud services for backups.

Additionally, DR and backup data are perceived as two distinct items, with

69% of respondents reporting DR data is stored separately in the cloud from

regular backup data.

Despite the emergence of cloud-based storage, survey results suggest even

though respondents are using cloud-based DR services, 39% also ship data

to another physical DR site and 33% still put DR data on tape. Even more

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alarming, only 46% of respondents say they can recover using cloud-based

storage services, and just 28% have actually tested recovery.

Currently, most businesses use cloud storage to support less than 25% of

available business workloads. The number of business applications housed

in cloud storage is expected to increase dramatically in the next six months,

reflecting reported increases in nearline and archive storage (Slides 2 and 3).

Slide 2.

Slide 3.

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CRM, collaboration top SaaS uses

Software as a Service (SaaS) allows users to access business applications

that third-party providers in the cloud own and support. Of respondents using

SaaS apps, 59% use CRM/sales tools and 52% use collaboration tools.

Numerous other SaaS apps are being used to a lesser degree, including

business analytics tools, human resources (HR) applications, marketing

tools, ERP systems and financial apps.

Enterprises are adopting SaaS for a variety of reasons. Approximately 23%

of respondents cite SaaS enables faster app implementation times and 23%

like the SaaS pricing model. Additional considerations include easy end-user

app deployment, competitive features and functionality as well as the ability

to reduce dependence on IT resources.

However, SaaS tools pose some challenges for business users. For

example, more than 34% of respondents say SaaS applications can cause

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integration challenges with other cloud-based or on-premises apps. This

echoes the concerns of application suitability and integration found in public

cloud adoption.

The convenience and cost control the SaaS model creates allows clients to

worry less about software development or acquisition, installation and

ongoing maintenance. So while SaaS tools are generally confined to a small

minority of business functions, survey respondents expect SaaS products to

compose a larger percentage of enterprise applications in the next six

months (Slides 4 and 5).

Slide 4.

Slide 5.

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Money talks with PaaS respondents

Platform as a Service (PaaS) allows companies to upload and run business

workloads from complete cloud service providers. More than 63% of survey

respondents that report using cloud computing use PaaS to develop and

deploy cloud-based applications. PaaS also plays a role in extending SaaS

offerings, with 43% of these respondents using it to expand tools like SAP.

About 40% of respondents use PaaS to develop and deploy mobile

applications, while 36% rely on PaaS for application testing. The four top

PaaS providers are Amazon Beanstalk (32%), Google AppEngine (28%),

Microsoft Windows Azure (26%) and Salesforce Force.com (21%), according

to survey responses.

Why are companies building cloud-based applications from the ground-up

using PaaS, which requires more in-house development know-how than

other cloud models? There are several compelling reasons.

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About 25% of respondents consider PaaS to be a cost-effective computing

alternative to building and maintaining in-house IT resources; 20% use PaaS

as a vehicle for more effective deployment of in-house IT resources; 16%

expect better service scalability and 11% see PaaS as a shift from traditional

systems administration to application development, or DevOps.

Choosing a PaaS provider is no easy task; it requires a modicum of

familiarity with the vendor. About 49% of survey respondents said the chosen

provider was already part of the company’s current cloud ecosystem and

36% said the PaaS provider supported a current application development

language.

PaaS provides significant flexibility for companies that update or change

workloads frequently. Most current PaaS deployments are confined to a

small minority of the business' IT infrastructure, though respondents expect

PaaS deployments to compose a larger portion of enterprise infrastructure in

the next six months (Slides 6 and 7).

Slide 6.

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Slide 7.

Cloud computing has made inroads into enterprise data centers, allowing

organizations to mitigate some burden of hardware and support. The result is

more scalable computing with predictable per-usage costs. But cloud

computing service providers still have a long road to plow.

Many IT professionals are still satisfied with a more traditional data center

infrastructure. Thirty-eight percent of respondents say their current IT

investment is enough, 24% feel the benefits of cloud are inadequate and

18% feel virtualization offers enough of an advantage. Other issues, such as

security and a fear of losing control of IT, also factor into the decision to hold

off on cloud computing. Ultimately, the benefits will outweigh the problems,

making prospects for future cloud adoption bright.

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Jessica Carroll, managing director of IT and digital media at the United

States Golf Association in Far Hills, N.J., was something of a pioneer in her

embrace of cloud disaster recovery and business continuity.

In 2008, when cloud computing was still a blip on the technology horizon,

Carroll was faced with the challenge of bringing her '90s-era IT shop into the

21st century. She knew that tape rotation and colocation weren't going to be

the wave of the future. Higher expectations for disaster recovery -- quick,

seamless, gap-free -- led her to consider and ultimately adopt a cloud

disaster recovery solution from IBM. "It enabled us to port our data to an off-

site location without adding strain to the administration of managing the

backups, without adding huge amounts of infrastructure and without

unreasonable costs," she said.

With the cloud-based data backup solution in place, the United States Golf

Association (USGA) set up a secondary site at an IBM facility in Sterling

Forest, N.Y., with servers and personnel prepared to recreate the

organization's IT environment in the case of an emergency.

The IT world is now catching up with Carroll. In the recent 2012 TechTarget

Cloud Pulse survey, a majority of respondents from the 926 companies that

reported using cloud for some aspect of their business said they now are

using a cloud disaster recovery solution (20%) or plan to in the next six

months (31%).

These numbers don't surprise Alan Berman, president of the Disaster

Recovery Institute (DRI) International, a disaster recovery and business

continuity (DR/BC) nonprofit educational organization headquartered in New

York. He recently returned from speaking engagements throughout North

America, South America and Asia. At every stop, cloud-based disaster

recovery was what audiences came to hear about.

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"We've already seen more and more use of [cloud disaster recovery] on a

personal level, and we're going to be seeing more and more on a business

level," Berman said. The most recent numbers he's seen at DRI International

show that 25% of businesses are using cloud-based disaster recovery now,

and 35% plan to in the near future.

Money a major driver of cloud disaster recovery trend

The biggest adopters of cloud-based DR/BC are the business entities that

have been in the forefront of cloud computing, Berman noted: small and

medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Ease of use is certainly a factor for

smaller businesses with smaller pools of IT expertise, but cost is the biggest

draw. "It's the perfect thing for small businesses," he said. "It gives them full

portability, and it's relatively cheap, especially the backup storage -- 100 gigs

costs about $100 a year, and you never have to worry about backup."

Larger businesses reap the same benefits of nearly automatic recovery and

freedom from a dedicated recovery site, in Berman's view, and money plays

an even larger role in the decision to utilize the cloud for disaster recovery. In

the current economy, companies don't want to invest in hardware and don't

want the responsibility of having to increase the size of their server pool

when they need to expand, he said; a cloud solution takes care of these

issues. Also, from a financial perspective, using cloud can increase return on

investment by removing disaster-recovery-related assets off the books. "Real

estate is expensive; electricity is expensive; hardware is expensive and has

to be replaced. I think the fact that businesses can knock all that from capital

expenditures is an important part of what's driving this," he added.

Cloud-based disaster recovery evolving

The interest from both enterprises and SMBs in cloud-based disaster

recovery solutions reflects an appetite for cloud solutions in general.

According to the Cloud Pulse survey, 61% of 1,497 respondents said they're

now using some type of cloud service. Among the 39% of respondents not

using cloud services, 19% plan to use a cloud service in the next six months,

and 35% plan to in the next year.

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Inquiries about cloud disaster recovery are something Gene Ruth, analyst at

Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., gets from clients with increasing

regularity. He said it's natural for IT organizations already using the cloud to

investigate moving DR/BC to the cloud.

But, he cautions, businesses -- especially larger ones -- need to realize this

is a technology that's still evolving. For IT organizations looking to move to a

cloud DR/BC solution in the next six months, he advises they proceed with

caution until an array of mature solutions become available.

"I'm very bullish on cloud storage in general, but I don't know about the six-

month time frame," Ruth said. "You need to be patient, because it's an

evolving industry." In particular, the infrastructure that allows access to the

cloud to begin with is still developing, as are cloud gateways and software

that supports disaster recovery in the cloud. "Customers need to get

comfortable with it."

After almost five years of using a cloud disaster recovery strategy, the

USGA's Carroll believes any CIO would do well to at least consider the

option. As technology has evolved, so has her recovery solution, particularly

the hot-site architecture. The increased virtualization in the USGA data

center and the ability to capitalize on this type of infrastructure with the IBM

solution have both helped streamline and expedite potential recovery times.

Today about 1 GB of mission-critical data goes to the cloud service each

night. Tapes remain part of the backup and recovery process, but for on

campus backups, Carroll's team is more focused on SAN to SAN backup and

recovery and less focused on tapes than it was in 2008. The solution has

been trouble-free, she said, and fairly recently performed well in a potential

disaster situation.

"When Hurricane Irene was bearing down on our location in late 2011, we

were able to accelerate some unplanned backups to the cloud in case our

campus took a direct hit," Carroll said. "While we luckily sailed through the

storm, the cloud solution meant we could administer on-the-fly changes like

this very quickly and remotely." That said, every business has its own special

considerations, she added. Being aware of bandwidth and data volume and

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knowing how much of your entire data set it makes sense to backup is

paramount to a viable strategy.

"Focus on the information that is most critical to your business and that you

will absolutely need in order to get your business up and running in a

disaster," Carroll said. "And at the end of the day the best answer to comfort

with cloud DR/BC is test, test, test."


With its promise of lower costs and simplified management, Software as a

Service can be appealing in the enterprise -- until it comes time to integrate it

with on-premises applications and data.

That's when enterprises looking for an easy solution to application

management problems might end up spending more time and money than

they bargained for.

"[Some companies] think, 'Well, I don't have to hire developers anymore,

because I have a SaaS solution,' and that's not true," said Sean McDermott,

CEO of Windward IT Solutions, an IT service management and systems

engineering firm based in Herndon, Va.

Given the customization work that's involved in integrating on-premises apps

and their data with Software as a Service (SaaS) apps, it can cost between

$80,000 and $100,000 to switch between SaaS apps.

"There's this expectation that moving to a SaaS-based solution … is going to

solve all [their] problems, and they're shocked when they see the bill,"

McDermott said. "So you better make your decision right the first time

around, because it can be a very costly mistake."

Some 34% of 1,497 respondents to TechTarget's Cloud Pulse Survey

completed in August, cited SaaS application integration as an inhibitor to


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SaaS deployments -- and one that is often overlooked until it's too late.

Another 26% cited SaaS data integration problems. For example,

incompatible database formats between SaaS and on-premises apps.

Fighting SaaS data integration problems with more SaaS

Some longtime users of SaaS services have found some cloud-based third-

party tools helpful, but there's no substitute for in-house developers with a

deep knowledge of applications to put those tools to use, they said.

"The key in any kind of integration implementation is that you need some

highly skilled, knowledgeable people to make it happen," said Lien Chen,

corporate director of IT for San Jose, Calif.-based RAE Systems.

RAE, a global manufacturer of chemical radiation detection systems, uses a

SaaS offering called Informatica Cloud to integrate data between its on-

premises Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, on-premises

FileMaker Pro system, and Salesforce.com in the cloud.

"The Oracle system has so many layers and so many different tables … and

you have to know where to pull [data] from," Chen said. "That was a

struggle."

RAE deployed Informatica during the cleanup of 2010's Deepwater Horizon

oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, when demand for its products suddenly

increased. It needed a more streamlined, less error-prone way of getting data

from the Oracle ERP system into Salesforce, which its customer service

personnel uses. After installing a lightweight agent on-premise, developers at

RAE used a drag-and-drop Web interface to set up a link between the two

systems, which is refreshed automatically multiple times per day.

Previously, the customer service personnel had to juggle Salesforce and

Oracle, as well as a separate serial number database in FileMaker Pro, Chen

said. Now that all three programs have been integrated with Informatica, the

personnel can just focus on the customer, she said.

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Meanwhile, there's a plethora of other products on the market that claim to

aid in application and/or data integration between on-premise apps and the

cloud, including Dell's Boomi, MuleSoft, Jitterbit, Adeptia and IBM's Cast

Iron. Third-party tools aren't necessarily a panacea, however, McDermott

said.

"I'm a big believer in SaaS solutions, but there's a lot of stuff under the hood

that you've got to think about," he said.

For example, multiple objects in one application might need to be

concatenated into one on the other side. Users should make sure to ask

integration vendors detailed questions around these kinds of issues,

McDermott said.

"The devil's in the details," he said.

Fireclay Tile, a manufacturer headquartered in San Jose, Calif., uses another

SaaS tool called Data Integrator from Pervasive Software to integrate a

QuickBooks accounting system with Salesforce.

"What we were doing before was double entry, where you'd enter the sales

order in one place, then go over to the accounting department and they'd re-

enter all that information," Fireclay Vice President Eric Edelson said.

With the two systems integrated through Pervasive's SaaS, Fireclay was

able to consolidate headcount and put those freed-up staff into sales and

marketing roles.

There were some sacrifices Fireclay was willing to make to integrate

Salesforce, however, Edelson said. For example, the company migrated

customer records when it first started using the service in 2009, but it didn't

integrate historical transaction information, instead leaving an archive on an

older system.

"Most companies have years and years of data, and that's a really big

nightmare to integrate all that information," Edelson said. "We made the

decision that we don't need all that information."

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They've barely used the old computer since then, and it's just not that

important, Edelson said.


Hurricane Irene threatened to pummel New York, Phil Green couldn't have

known that what was about to happen would change his perspective of the

technological landscape forever.

His biggest concern centered on a park called Flushing Meadows, home to

the U.S. Open. The tournament, the final of the four tennis tournaments that

make up the Grand Slam each year, was well underway. But Green wasn't

worried how high winds and heavy rain might affect the game. Instead, as

senior director of advanced media for the United States Tennis Association

(USTA), he was focused on something much more basic: electricity.

"We were hearing things like, 'no power for days,'" he said.

For an employee who helps to oversee USOpen.org, a power outage was

like a death sentence. During the two weeks of competition, the website

experiences its peak traffic for the year. Those visits are dependent on fresh

articles, photos, videos and analytics. Irene was quickly becoming a kink in

the plan.

But there was a potential solution. Green agreed to allow representatives

from IBM, a technical support provider for USTA, to move the infrastructure

and tools to the cloud until the storm passed, enabling employees to continue

updating the site.

"There was no hesitation," he said. "Was I a little bit on edge? Of course."

Unlike Green and the USTA's leap of faith, many businesses have been

reluctant to embrace cloud computing. To be fair, most organizations don't


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experience a do-or- potentially-die moment when faced with the decision.

Nor do they have a vendor at the ready to provide the product and support.

Still, new research suggests cloud computing is gaining ground, especially

for business intelligence (BI) and analytics, with significant numbers planning

deployments in the not-so-distant future.

The key is elasticity

According to the recent 2012 TechTarget Cloud Pulse survey, more than half

of the respondents are using cloud IT services and applications today. Of the

643 respondents who detailed what tasks they were currently using cloud IT

services for, 32% said BI and analytics.

While that number may seem high, the results don't surprise William

McKnight, who said both BI and analytics are broader in meaning and more

decentralized in practice these days.

"We are indoctrinated to think we're running the company on analytics," said

McKnight, president of McKnight Consulting Group LLC, based in Plano,

Texas. "But it could be shallow [rather than] predictive analytics."

Terminology aside, the cloud has its good side, McKnight said. It can save on

staffing and infrastructure cost and time to deployment, but a key

characteristic is its elasticity.

"One of the nice things about the cloud is that you don't have to predict

ahead of time exactly how much you're going to need," he said. "The solution

scales out. And, if you go with a public cloud provider, they will have the

hardware at the ready when you've tapped out your current allocation. And

you can continue to scale."

The cloud can also be an asset for organizations embarking on a "big data"

analytics journey, according to Mark Theissen, CEO of Cirro Inc., which

provides a product that connects data from Hadoop to BI tools. Big data

tends to include multistructured data such as text, which multiplies quickly

and can be difficult to load into traditional databases. Businesses faced with

this challenge are left seeking a workaround, and some have turned to the

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cloud in the form of a technology called Hadoop. An open source software,

Hadoop is known for its quick consumption and storage of large amounts of

data -- regardless of format -- across a distributed computing environment.

Still, Hadoop isn't a mainstream technology, and the use cases can be tough

to find.

"It's really the leaders of your large corporations that I've seen doing the most

when it comes to working with these challenges," said Theissen. "They have

the money, the data, and they certainly are looking for these competitive

differentiators."

Private or public cloud

Businesses may increasingly be embracing the cloud, but, Theissen said,

they tend to gravitate toward a private rather than a public offering, citing

security and availability concerns.

"We're in very early days for BI and analytics in the public cloud," Theissen.

"Everyone's more focused on the private or hybrid implementation."

That was precisely the case for USTA, which continues to use IBM's private

cloud offering. But, according to the Cloud Pulse survey results, even that

may be changing. When asked what services respondents will be using in

the public cloud or the public portion of the hybrid cloud in six months, 24.5%

of 351 respondents said BI and data management.

That response proved to be the most popular when measuring where

respondents are now compared with where they plan to be six months from

now, gaining a 17.1% increase. The next closest -- hybrid cloud integration --

saw a 15.1% increase.

Part of the increase may be due to a maturing market. Razorfish Inc., a

marking analytics service provider based in Seattle, Wash., moved to a

hybrid cloud two years ago when the company was sold by Microsoft to

Publicis Groupe. It was a transition the company had to explain to its

customers, a conversation that tended to go pretty smoothly, according to

Matt Comstock, vice president of BI at Razorfish.

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"We sold it on the fact that it was going to be less expensive and more

reliable than what we had," said Comstock, though he added his clients

typically reside in the marketing rather than IT department.

Today, Razorfish is an Amazon Web Services customer, performing almost

all data and analytics functions in the cloud. The company utilizes Hadoop to

pull in unstructured data and Teradata-Aster to transform that data into

structured information they can then analyze.

As for the common cloud concerns, such as security, Comstock said it's

never been a problem.

"We've had an outage or two," he said, pointing to this week's Amazon

outage as one that affected his company. "[But] you're getting a lot of good

practices … that would take time and money to get done internally. That's

definitely an additional benefit."


Cloud storage services for data protection and other applications are

currently used by 44% of companies that responded to a recent TechTarget

survey. That number should grow over the next six months or so, as 46%

said they plan to increase their use of cloud data storage services. For the

most part, cloud storage users are quite satisfied with the services they're

using: 17% rate their experience to date as "outstanding," 59% said it has

been "good" and only 3% expressed disappointment.

Similar cloud storage usage statistics were reported in a Purchasing

Intentions survey conducted earlier by TechTarget's Storage Media Group --

29% of respondents were using cloud storage for non-backup applications,

and 33% noted the use of cloud backup services.

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Following backup, the leading application for cloud storage is disaster

recovery (DR). Thirty-eight percent of cloud storage users said they use it for

DR, and 52% plan to expand their current use of cloud storage for DR or plan

to start using it for that purpose in the next six months. Data archiving is often

cited as a potential "killer app" for cloud storage, and 28% of our respondents

said they're using cloud storage for archiving now. That number is likely to

grow fairly quickly, as 39% are planning to add/expand cloud storage

services for archiving over the next half-year.

At this time, it appears that most companies using cloud storage for DR do

so in conjunction with another DR methodology. For example, 39% ship data

to a separate physical recovery site in addition to using the cloud for DR; for

30% of those surveyed, DR data also goes to tape. Right now, 46% of cloud

DR users can use cloud-based computing services in conjunction with their

cloud storage to recover and resume operations in the cloud.

On ramp to cloud data storage services

Most cloud storage users (57%) still rely on service provider-supplied

software to access their cloud storage services. Another 18% use locally

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installed software that can link to cloud storage, while a similar number use

on-premises appliances to create a more seamless hybrid cloud

environment. The appliance market is largely populated by startups, but

Microsoft's recent acquisition of StorSimple, one of the pioneers in this field,

should spur even greater interest in this access alternative. While the overall

number of appliance users is still relatively modest, 29% of larger companies

and 39% of midsized companies currently use appliances.

Backup still app No. 1 for cloud storage

While cloud-based DR and archiving are on the rise, backup is still the most

popular app among cloud data storage services. On average, companies in

our survey reported having approximately 8.5 terabytes (TB) of backup data

stored in the cloud. Seventy-five percent of cloud backup users have less

than 10 TB of cloud backup data, but 11% have more than 20 TB of their

backup data stored in the ether. Assuming the data is deduplicated and

compressed, that figure is likely to represent 100 TB or more of source data.

Thirty-four percent of reporting companies have more than half of their

company's total backup data stored in a cloud backup service. On average,

cloud backup users have 41% of their backup data tucked away in the cloud.

If companies carry through with their plans, those numbers will grow in the

next six months, resulting in half the companies keeping more than 50% of

their backup data in the cloud.

The type of data companies are backing up to the cloud varies considerably,

with user files accounting for the most backup data (72%), closely followed

by data from the main data center (66%), mobile users (41%) and remote

offices (41%).

http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240167484/Microsoft-cloud-storage-plans-expand-with-StorSimple-pickup

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/tip/The-pros-and-cons-of-cloud-backup-technologies

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But not just backup

Backup may be king of the storage cloud with DR closing the gap, but

companies are using cloud storage for other applications. Survey

respondents said that on average, 35% of their companies' applications are

currently tapping into cloud storage. An eye-opening 25% of those users tell

us that 50% or more of their companies' apps have data stored in the cloud.

Here, too, you can expect those numbers to rise in the short term, with 42%

of respondents expecting that more than half of their apps will be hooked into

cloud storage within six months.

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Right now, companies have an average of approximately 7.5 TB of non-

backup data stored with a cloud data storage service, and they anticipate

that figure to rise to 10.9 TB over the coming months.

Can cloud computing cure enterprises’ BYOD woes?

BYOD may be a top trend in businesses today, but those four letters may

ultimately spell trouble for a company if the proper mobile policies are not in

place to handle the expanding number of mobile devices.

There is a 'diversity explosion', notes Rohit Mehra, Director of Enterprise

Communications Infrastructure at International Data Corp. (IDC), pointing out

that by 2015 close to 17 million 'smart' devices of all types will be shipping

worldwide as compared to nearly 12 million today. This creates challenges

for companies of all sizes as IT managers struggle to implement new controls

and safeguards that may be lacking in current mobile user policies.

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Security still tops the list of most IT administrators, while the cost of mobile

applications development is usually dead last in terms of key challenges,

according to IDC research.

There is no question that using mobile devices do increase the productivity of

workers and sharpens a company's competitive edge. Roughly 94 percent of

small business users report their mobile devices make them more efficient,

while 67 percent say their companies would lose competitive ground without

the use of such devices, according to recent survey conducted by CDW, a

leading technology services and products provider.

A Cure in the Cloud

As a testament to bring your own device (BYOD) trends, of the 752 U.S.-

based mobile device users and IT professionals polled, nearly 90 percent of

the managers taking part in CDW's Small Business Mobility Report survey

say their employees use personally-owned mobile devices in their daily work.

This flood of personal mobile devices can create headaches in terms of

mobile device management (MDM) practices, although evolving technologies

may mitigate some of these concerns.

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One of these technologies is cloud-based applications and services, which

shift the bulk of critical information that resides on a mobile device to a

centralized or virtual resource that is available to all types of devices via

wireless networks and the Internet. This not only provides a specific and

easily managed target for security and mobile policy safeguards (especially if

it is a personal cloud that provides limited and non-public access to data and

applications) but can also clearly separate personal from business

applications and data.

Personal information can reside on the client's device or public clouds such

as Flickr for a user's family photographs. Roughly 70% of the companies that

took part in IDC's smart device study, released in March, reported their

companies were involved in cloud-based activities at some level. A little more

than 8% already launched projects, close to 25% launched a project, and

nearly 40% planned to launch an initiative in 12-18 months, noted IDC

analyst Mehra.


Despite the fact that it's a client software package you install on your PC,

Office 2013 will be a productivity suite for the cloud computing generation,

and that's reflected in its services, features and design.

"This is designed from the get-go for Office as a service," said Microsoft CEO

Steve Ballmer at the new conference to introduce the new suite. Its naming

alone is a bit confusing, but that reflects the area of emphasis. While

Microsoft has formally named the product "Office 2013," Ballmer referred to it

as "the new Office" or "the new Office 365" during the event.

Office 365 is the Office suite subscription program that it's been offering to

small businesses for about a year. At the San Francisco event, Microsoft also

introduced previews of several editions of Office 365, expanding it from just

small businesses to home users and enterprise users.

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Also, current subscribers to Office 365 will be automatically upgraded to

Office 2013 when it ships. The new version will support up to five PCs, Macs

or mobile devices. When Office 365 Home Premium officially launches, it will

include an additional 20GB of SkyDrive storage space and 60 minutes of

Skype credit each month, as well as free future upgrades.

There is a lot of online support in Office. Besides SkyDrive for saving files,

once you sign into Office, your personalized settings, most recently used

files, templates and even your custom dictionary will move with you between

devices. So you won't have to take your work computer home, you can work

from home on your own system and everything will be available to you.

In addition to the SharePoint and Skype support, Microsoft is also adding

Yammer, a secure, private social network for businesses. Microsoft only

announced plans to acquire Yammer late last month. Yammer is not in the

consumer preview of Office, however.

Office 365 will support both tablets and PCs running Windows 7 and 8. It

should not surprise anyone that Office 2013 won't support Windows Vista

and Windows XP, since Microsoft is trying its best to put those two operating

systems out to pasture.

Still, Microsoft is taking a pass on a large portion of its installed base.

Windows XP and Vista still account for 54.6% of Windows PCs still in use,

according to statistics compiled by Web analytics firm Net Applications.

Windows 7 has ramped quickly, but is still hovering at 45% market share.

The public beta is available now and will function for 60 days after the final

product ships. Microsoft has not given a release date, and with so many

products shipping this fall, including Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 and

Visual Studio, Microsoft may very well wait on shipping Office just to avoid

overload.

In the meantime, the company has launched an Office blog to keep in touch

with users about Office 2013 developments.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

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"I'm quite impressed," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal analyst with

Enterprise Application Consulting. "I think they've done a really good job. The

blending of the touch and cloud experience are pretty well done and a good

way for Microsoft to get The Ball rolling in terms of understanding what

Windows 8 can do."

Greenbaum is an Office 365 subscriber and said Office 2013 fixes a lot of the

problems he had with it. "The preview showed us cloud and desktop are now

the same thing with the same license. That works really well. One of the

problems with Office 365 is it doesn't have the same user experience as

desktop. There were a number of contentions between the two that had to be

sorted out. Office 2013 has really broken down those barriers," he said.


In today's highly mobile world, it wouldn't be at all unusual to check your

email on your tablet before you even got out of bed in the morning, finish up

a presentation for your boss on your home desktop PC, and even update the

sales figures on that business plan from your smartphone late that night. Yet

how can you keep all of those files available and in sync no matter where or

how you're accessing them?

In the olden days, you might have relied on USB thumb drives, or perhaps

you just emailed files back and forth to yourself. Things have gotten a lot

easier now with the advent of cloud-based online storage services. Still, how

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do you choose the one that's best for meeting your own needs, whether

those are more related to photo sharing, file sync, or group editing, for

instance? Here's the lowdown on four services that you might consider:

Dropbox, Box, and the newer Cubby and Google Drive.

Dropbox (2GB for free, up to 18GB total with referrals, up to

100GB for $199 yearly)

Dropbox is the current market leader, and with good reason. It's incredibly

easy to use and very reliable. The service monitors one particular folder on

your computer and automatically uploads files in that folder to your Dropbox.

You can then access those files either from within Finder on a Mac, the

standard Windows file system on a PC, any web browser, or the free apps

available for mobile devices. Those apps run on Android smartphones and

tablets, as well as on Apple's iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Once you sign in to your Dropbox account on your mobile device, you'll find a

simple interface which looks just like a traditional computer file system. If you

mark individual files as favorites, you'll be able to access those files offline

when you don't have an Internet connection (when service goes down,

during an airplane flight, etc.).

The Android and iOS tablet apps are relatively bare bones, but they work just

fine. No matter what mobile platform you're using, you can view some file

types within the Dropbox app itself, most notably plain text, PDFs, and both

JPEG and PNG photos. Other files -- such as Microsoft Office documents

and ePub eBooks -- are opened in helper apps like Polaris Office on Android

devices or Documents to Go, GoodReader, iBooks, or Stanza on the iPad.

http://www.dropbox.com/

http://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3141&review=new+apple+ipad+ios

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If you want to edit your files from directly within the Dropbox app, you can do

so only on Android devices, and even then only for plain text files. Other

document types can be edited by external apps such as Polaris Office on

Android devices, and with apps such as Pages or Documents to Go on iOS

devices.

Dropbox, though, needs to keep innovating or it runs the risk of falling behind

some of the "younger" services such as Google Drive and Cubby. As things

stand, Dropbox is an excellent backup and file storage/synchronization

service. Yet it doesn't offer any real editing or collaboration tools. It also

forces users to keep all of their files in a single Dropbox folder for

synchronization. The smartphone and tablet apps are straightforward and

easy to use, but they could be more feature-rich.

Box (5GB for free, up to 50GB of total storage available for $19.99

a month)

Box is similar to Dropbox in its cloud storage and synchronization services.

However, Box adds some clever collaboration tools to the mix, as well. For

example, you can share individual files or entire folders with a few clicks. You

can also embed files on a web page for public viewing, with full control over

whether users can print, download, or share the file.

If you're working with a group, you can add collaborators to each folder in

your Dropbox, share direct links to individual files, and add comments as

well, instead of needing to send a flurry of email messages back and forth

each time a document warrants discussion.

http://www.box.com/

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The Box mobile apps are available for Android and iOS, plus BlackBerry

PlayBook and the webOS TouchPad. They don't offer much in the way of

built-in editing features, but they do work with external helper apps such as

Quickoffice, PaperPort Notes, and PDF Expert to make the editing process

as seamless as possible.

Box also places a strong emphasis on security, with the mobile apps

optionally requiring a four digit unlock code each time the app is launched, in

addition to the regular login information. You can optionally cache all recent

files as they are accessed within the mobile app, or you can mark individual

files as favorites for offline access.

The Box smartphone and tablets app also offer some unique features. For

instance, there's an Update tab that lets you know what the latest activity

was and exactly when it happened, including the name of the person who

accessed each file. You can also create batch uploads of photos and videos

directly from your smartphone or tablet, instead of uploading one at a time, or

-- as with the other file sharing apps covered here -- only allowing the upload

of individual new photos taken from within the app.

Box is more expensive overall than Dropbox, but it provides more

collaboration and workgroup features. Arguably, the mobile apps are more

polished as well, with better security and real time notifications regarding who

has accessed your files.

Box might be overkill for someone who just wants to back up his or her files.

Yet for groups and enterprise customers, it offers some compelling features.

Moreover, it's the only one of the four services covered here to

provide mobile apps for all four tablet platforms: Android, BlackBerry, iOS,

and webOS.

Cubby (5GB for free)

Cubby isn't quite on the scene yet, although it's almost there. Currently in

beta, Cubby is the new file sharing service from LogMeIn, the popular remote

desktop application that allows you to access your home computer from

http://www.cubby.com/

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anywhere. I've only been using the service for a few days, and I'm already

quite impressed.

Cubby is more flexible than Dropbox in that any folder can be designated as

a "cubby." Consequently, you don't need to change the way you've already

organized your files. Cubby also offers strong file sharing tools, allowing you

to create public links for either individual files or for an entire cubby folder. On

the other hand, Cubby doesn't have the emphasis on collaboration and group

editing which you'll find in Google Drive.

One of Cubby's more interesting concepts is unlimited peer-to-peer syncing.

If you've been struggling for a long time to keep multiple computers in sync

and you haven't found a good solution, Cubby has you covered. Once you

set up the service on two computers (such as home and work, or the home

desktop and your laptop), you can designate specific cubby folders to sync

between the two. The service will then work seamlessly in the background to

keep them both in lockstep.

Even better, there are practically no GB limits. If you have 20GB of vacation

photos on your desktop that you also want on your laptop, Cubby will do that

for you. The only limit which applies is 5GB total for Cubby folders that are

synced to the cloud for use with mobile devices. Both the Android and iOS

apps are already available in their respective stores.

As with Dropbox, you can mark individual files as favorites for offline access.

You can also upload files or photos from your mobile device to Cubby,

making the service a great way to share photos if you'd rather send the pics

directly instead of publicly uploading your life to Facebook and Flickr.

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If you're the forgetful type, or the sort to delete first and realize later that you

needed a particular file, you'll be glad to know that Cubby has the ability to

restore deleted files from the archive. Cubby also keeps multiple versions of

each file, just in case you later decide that you liked chapter 8 of your novel

better before you revised it.

Even though it's currently only a beta offering, Cubby already gets a lot of

things right. The Android and iOS apps are well polished and extremely fast.

The service deserves close attention, especially if you are concerned more

about synchronization and sharing than with group editing and collaboration.

Google Drive (5GB for free, additional storage available for

purchase)

Although Google Drive is the newest player in this group, Google has been

storing documents and allowing folks to work on them from any web browser

for quite some time with Google Docs.

So Google Drive is the spiritual successor to Google Docs. This becomes

readily apparent when you access it for the first time. You'll see that anything

you've previously stored in Google Docs is already available in your Google

Drive.

You'll also encounter a short introductory video, after that, you'll be prompted

to download and install the Google Drive app on your PC or Mac. Google

Drive will then create a folder on your computer.

Anything dragged to that folder will sync with your Google Drive, as well as

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with all of the devices associated with your Google account, such as tablet

computers and smartphones.

Google hasn't yet released any iOS apps for Google Drive, but the Android

OS tablet and smartphone experience closely mirrors the desktop

experience. Once you download the free Android app from the Google Play

store, you'll find that the main screen of the Google Drive app looks almost

exactly like what you'd see on a regular computer. You can easily navigate

from folder to folder, and you can star your most important documents to

make them easier to find. Sharing with one of your Google contacts is a

snap. It takes just a couple of taps.

If you want to make individual documents available for offline viewing, you'll

need to go through and mark them each individually ahead of time. You can

also create new documents by taking a photo of any printed text and

uploading it to your Google Drive (although that service is somewhat hit-or-

miss at the moment, and it doesn't work at all if you take the photo in

landscape mode instead of portrait).

There are a few gotchas with Google Drive that you will want to think about

carefully before completely switching over to the service. It's a hybrid file

backup/online collaboration tool designed to help you share and collaborate

with others more easily. So there's no encryption.

Also, there's no offline editing of Google Docs files. You can view Google

Docs files when you're offline, but editing them is not possible even if you've

configured offline access in Google Chrome. You can, however, edit

Microsoft Office documents offline, and they'll be synchronized back to your

Google Drive the next time you're connected.

Google Drive is a no-brainer option for those who are already heavily

invested in Google services like GMail and Google Docs, for those who need

extensive collaboration tools, and for those who own Android tablets and

smartphones. Unfortunately, there is no word yet on when iOS apps for your

iPad and iPhone will be available. They have been announced, but Google

has not rolled out a timeline for when that will happen.

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