Cloud World Forum

I attended the rather grandly titled Cloud World Forum in London yesterday. Have to say that it was an excellent event, certainly more business focussed than other events such as Cloud Camp (which is always good fun if more IT oriented) or the rather disappointing CloudStorm event a couple of weeks ago.

Highlights and interesting tidbits from the event:
o Kate Craig-Wood of Memset, Intellect and the BCS is now co-leading the technical architecture stream of the Cabinet Office data centre consolitation work
o Asite are a public cloud service that have apparently obtained HMG accreditation for use by the Environment Agency. Unfortunately the presenter left before I had a chance to quiz him on the accreditation aspect!
o Lots of good presentations from the likes of Gartner and BT and some interesting panel sessions, particularly interested in the Gartner research that showed security was still the leading concern with organisations yet to adopt cloud computing. Also interesting that the main drivers for those organisations that have adopted cloud computing were cost and functionality. Who'd have thought it? ;-)
o If you have an interest in collaboration then certainly check out www.huddle.net - collaboration tools, video conferencing etc all in one user-friendly cloud-based offering.
o BT's virtual data centre is an interesting proposition - they do not run VMs for more than one customer on a physical blade. Of course, from a paranoid perspective you may still have de-commissioning concerns when the blade is returned to the wider resource pool. Not dug into the real low-level details here.
o Mimecast have released a Forrester Consulting report into the "total economic impact" of their solution. Yes, the report is specific to Mimecast, however the methodology of the report is of interest and it's useful to have a (vaguely) independent, albeit funded, report showing a detailed ROI argument for a cloud-based service. The report should be downloadable from the Mimecast web-site but I don't think it's there yet.


Downsides:
o Terribly dull presentation from VMWare, Cisco and EMC. Everybody else talking about business benefits, these guys droning on for a long time about IT and infrastructure issues. Bored everyone to tears. Content was actually not bad from a technical perspective but was wrong for the event and the delivery was way too dry. [Example of the problem with the presentation, when talking of moving to cloud services "...got to start with server virtualisation" - well, only if you're talking IaaS and I'd personally start with identifying what you want to do from a business perspective!]
o Still a general ignorance with respect to security - lots of mentions of it during the day but no real understanding of how to manage risk in a cloud environment. [One panellist even described escapes from VMs as 'a bit of a myth' - a bit problematic given that exploits have been published which do just that...]
o Slightly disappointing presentation on cloud security from Cryptocard which was basically yet another demonstration of using Cain and Abel to intercept passwords (*yawn*) and an overly broad statement that 2 factor authentication solves all authentication issues in a cloud environment. Yes, they would say that being as they sell 2FA solutions but it's blatantly not true!

Overall - good event, will definitely try to attend next year's. The attendees were left with the feeling that cloud computing is here, is real and is delivering benefits to the early adopters.