Cloud Integration

About a month ago, I started a series of blog posts regarding some basic implications impacting software vendors and enterprises that can arise from cloud computing market, mobile, and virtualization trends. These implications are relevant to expansion stage software companies, venture capital investment funds, and strategic consulting services focused on the cloud market.

In the past, I blogged about access control and identity management, resource provisioning, and security.The other area I mentioned was integration.

As people set up private clouds in addition to or in place of their legacy data center, move some of their workloads to different public cloud vendors, continue transition to SaaS applications, and buy an increasing diverse set of mobile devices, the following points arise, and some already have pretty good and improving solutions:

• The most basic point of integration is identity management, which was already discussed. Basically, you want your internal IT policies and permissions to be the same and managed from one location across all applications: internal, external and mobile, from an administrative perspective, and ideally single sign-on across all systems from a user perspective.
• You should be able to exchange data seamlessly and securely between different SaaS providers, cloud services and internal data centers, including private clouds. As a result, we have companies like Boomi, acquired by Dell, and Cast Iron, acquired by IBM. Also, it’s crucial for enterprise public cloud providers to offer secure VPN connections into their environment from customer environments.
• IT people and developers need the ability to interact with SaaS and cloud services via rich API’s.
• Cloud services need to support heterogeneous environments, meaning different hypervisors and a different OS, so that people can easily port their internal workloads to the cloud and back regardless of hypervisor or OS.
• SaaS and Cloud services need to make it increasingly easier to export and import data or workloads, both from internal machines and other 3rd party services. 
• Companies should write mobile applications and websites so they efficiently operate on multiple mobile platforms, which necessitates work for developers and opportunities for multi-platform developer tools. 
   

And those are just some of the high level issues to consider.