A Head in the Cloud, A Heart in NMS

While announcing the TM Forum’s new cloud computing initiative last month, Martin Creaner called the technology “a universe in formation” and acknowledged its outrageous hype factor. But hype aside, he believes the technology is real and coming fast and could stand a little standardization. He spoke with B/OSS Editor in Chief Tim McElligott at Management World in December 2009 about the cloud initiative and his pet project — good old-fashioned network management.

Tim McElligott: Cloud services seem to be coming on fast. What role will the forum play?

TM Forum's Martin Creaner

Martin Creaner: I chaired an executive roundtable in cloud computing yesterday (December 9, 2009) and three things jumped out as key issues that need to be tackled. The first is cloud security. It is interesting to hear suppliers tell you cloud is as secure as your own IT department and there’s not a problem there. But the purchasers say “Read my lips. I have a worry. I have a fear.”

You won’t solve that with logic or by battering me with an argument about how good your firewalls are. The second issue is around transparency. Even if the service is secure, can I as a buyer see everything I need to see? Can I move things around when and where I want to? Can I see if there’s been phishing attempts on my data? And then there’s governance. It is about making sure, for example, that within a company you don’t have 300 different versions of Salesforce.com or some other software or that key data isn’t sitting in different places around the world because 22 different departments all made their own purchases. How do you stop that from spinning out of control in a cloud environment?

Those are the three big issues, but underpinning those are things like benchmarks, metrics and SLA agreements. And as you know we announced the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC), which will help drive a new ecosystem of cloud buyers and sellers.

TM: Is the cloud monetizeable now?

MC: It’s absolutely monetizeable now for small to medium enterprises. Large enterprises will be dealing more with a hybrid cloud, which is using your own internal private cloud scaled for your average use and then having a way of bursting out into the public cloud for peak usage needs. Small- to medium-sized enterprises will use the cloud in a pretty straightforward fashion. The larger enterprise will be more cautious. They are going to want those big problems solved first.