Global Quality Journal

Cloud SLA vs Enterprise Data Centers

Good point about faults of cloud SLAs vs. lost paradise of enterprise data centers. Talking about comparing apples to no oranges.

CIO.com:

Cloud SLA: Another Point of View
By Bernard Golden

You've probably seen a hundred—or even a thousand—articles criticizing cloud computing Service Level Agreements (SLAs). A common example in those articles is the putatively low Amazon Web Services SLA. Typically authors of these kind of articles go on to cite recent outages by cloud providers, implying (or stating directly) that cloud computing falls woefully short of the true SLA requirements of enterprises, often described as "five nines," i.e., 99.999% availability.
Left unsaid in these articles is the assumption that enterprise data centers operate at far higher availability rates than cloud providers. Frankly, I'm unconvinced of this. It seems that nearly every time I contact a large company's support, the very nice call center representative apologizes for a delay caused by "the computer running slow this morning." Plenty of people I interact with fume because their email is down, etc. So the comparison slighting cloud providers versus internal data centers may be inaccurate; however, it may be that the accuracy is in fact, unprovable, as many enterprises do not actually measure real-world SLA performance. [Read more]

posted by: gqpartner

Microsoft's IE9 To Address Performance Gap

ReadWriteWeb:

JavaScript Performance

Today's presentation of IE9 was refreshing, as Sinofsky noted that IE8's JavaScript performance was clearly slower than that of its competitors. The current build of IE9, however, has already closed this gap significantly and the difference in performance compared to the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox were only minor. As Microsoft notes, given how fast modern JavaScript engines have become over the last year, improvements in the JavaScript engine don't influence real-world performance at this point and other browser sub-systems become the bottlenecks that impede improvements.

            [link]

posted by: gqpartner

Burlington Coat Goes Dark for 36 Hours

Now, this is a great illustration for a previous post. If one thinks in terms of a one day worth of lost revenues, it is not such a big deal. If you think in terms of a lifetime user value, the calculation might be different.

Data Center Knowledge:

November 19th, 2009 : Rich Miller

Not many major retailers would take their online store offline for more than a day to conduct planned maintenance. That’s what Burlington Coat Factory did this week, allowing its main web site to go dark for nearly 36 hours as the company performed a major software and hardware refresh, which included an upgrade to an Oracle app server, according to Storefront Backtalk (link via The Server Room) . [Read the rest]

posted by: gqpartner

User's Lifetime Value and Risk of Loosing It

Now, quality prospective is obvious. How much one should invest in keeping this user vs. loosing him? After all no amount of marketing charm would be able to compensate for bad or unsafe user experience. Of course when a site looses one user due to bad quality of user experience the site looses significantly more that this particular user's lifetime value. Picture this -- Sue the User is unhappy with the company XYZ. She is lost for the company. She also might share with experience with 500 of her Facebook friends.

Call it a network multiplier.

Value to the company = Lifetime User Value * User's Network Multiplier

The resulting number could be positive or, unfortunately, negative.

Seth Godin's Blog via OStatic blog:

Embracing lifetime value

If you walk into a company-owned cell phone store to sign up for a contract, what are you worth?

Given the huge gross margins at AT&T and Verizon and the standard two-year contract, I think it's easy to figure on more than $2000 in lifetime value.

If you ran a business where a customer represented an additional $2,000 in profit, how would you staff? How long would you make someone wait? If staff costs $25 an hour, how long would that extra person take to pay off?

Few businesses understand (really understand) just how much a customer is worth. Add to this the additional profit you get from a delighted customer spreading the word--it can easily double or triple the lifetime value. [Read the rest]

posted by: Greg Margolin

Cenzic Reports on Web Application Security Trends : Q1-Q2 2009

The Cenzic Blog via Random Spaf Items:

Read the latest Web application security trends from January – June 2009

Want to read about the latest trends and stats in the Web application security world?  Then look no further – we’ve just issued our latest report for the first half of 2009.

You can read all the gooey details in the report, but here are some key findings worth highlighting:  

• Sun Java, PHP, and Apache continue to be among the Top 10 vendors having the most severe vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009
• 78% of the total reported vulnerabilities affected Web technologies, such as Web servers, applications, Web browsers.  Plugins and ActiveX, which is a significant increase from earlier in the year.
• Of the browser vulnerabilities, the biggest surprise was Firefox that had 44% more vulnerabilities than the other browsers.  Another surprise was Safari – as it usually contains few vulnerabilities, but came in at 35%; significantly higher than Internet Explorer (15%). [Read the rest]

posted by: gqpartner

How Does Page Load Performance Affect Consumer Behavior ?

As expected, it does affect it a lot. comScore measures it and reports findings.

comScore voices:

....Web users’ patience for page loading has clearly diminished over time and those who do not receive immediate satisfaction are likely to shift to a site that can provide it. The ability to monitor page load data will allow us to perform a variety of new analyses that can yield actionable insights for our clients. For example, we are able to review how page load times relate to important factors such as repeat visitation to a site, search usage, and even E-commerce conversion metrics.

In support of a presentation we recently delivered at Akamai’s 2009 Global Customer Conference, we chose to analyze how page load times affected consumer activity at four domestic airline sites in the U.S. We compared two airline sites that were using a page load optimization solution (in this case, Akamai Dynamic Site Acceleration) to two sites that were not. The chart below illustrates the relative load times of pages at the particular airline sites for both visits resulting in a ticket purchase and those not resulting in a purchase:

We can see from the results that page load times were substantially shorter at the two airline sites which used the Akamai accelerator -- whether or not a purchase occurred. We also found that users of the page load optimization solution had a 40% shorter web page load time when a purchase was involved compared to the sites that did not use a solution. In the case of Airline #2, the page load time with a purchase was actually faster than the page load time without one, which is particularly impressive given that more processing needs to occur in order to confirm a customer’s order.[Read more]

posted by: gqpartner

Cost-Performance, Application Consolidation, and SaaS

This seems to be a very good exercise that IT teams and business owners need to do on a regular basis.

SearchCIO.com:

...One exercise that can help stakeholders assess an application's business value is a cost-and-performance diagram. The diagram lets you analyze the cost of the underlying modules or functions of an application against the performance of the group using that function or application. At an insurance company, for example, an application can be broken down into policies, claims, inspections and so on.

Participants then highlight the performance of the functions in red (as in a red flag), yellow and green to show users within a given group the costs of maintaining that application function. ...[Read the rest]

posted by: gqpartner

Cloud computing inevitable? Maybe

NETWORKWORLD:

Cloud computing debate centers on pros/cons of computing's latest trend for higher-ed, others

By John Fontana , Network World , 11/05/2009

DENVER -- Is cloud computing inevitable? Maybe, but IT still has a lot of questions to ask before floating away on its promises, according to Melissa Woo, director of cyberinfrastructure and network and operations services at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Michael Dieckmann, CIO at the University of West Florida, thinks otherwise and the two spent Wednesday at the annual Educause conference debating the hype vs. the hope around commercial cloud computing that promises to cut IT costs and provide efficiencies.

Woo's contention isn't so much that the cloud won't emerge as an option, but that IT still has a lot of questions to ask before floating away on its promises.

"Why is the conversation always when, why are we not asking why," she said to a packed Educause session that with a raising of hands showed the audience of higher-ed IT pros are on the fence over cloud computing. "Gartner has cloud computing at the peak of inflated expectations on its hype cycle," she said. Woo noted recent reports of outages by large providers should grab attention. This week, cloud provider Rackspace reported its third outage since June. Last month, Microsoft reported it lost the data stored by users of T-Mobile's Sidekick service before eventually recovering most of the data. And Google, which provides e-mail services for students, faculty and staff on Dieckmann's campus, has had numerous outages that have frustrated users so much that Google developed a Google Apps Status Dashboard and pumps updates to users via RSS.  [Read more]

posted by: gqpartner

Deflationary Forces: Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Open Source

CNet, The Open Road:

Cloud to suck money out of market, report says

by Matt Asay

A recent survey suggests that CIOs are loosening the purse strings on IT spending. IT vendors may want to hold off their celebrations, though, because much of the spending appears to be headed for deflationary forces like cloud computing, virtualization, and their kissing cousin, open source.

An economic rebound never looked so dire.

That's unless you're an IT buyer, of course, suggests a new report from Goldman Sachs. In this week's report, titled "A Paradigm Shift for IT: The Cloud," Goldman Sachs said it expects that pent-up IT dollars will flow in the short term to building out next-generation data centers (e.g., cloud computing). But in the long term, less money is expected to find its way into fewer wallets:

After the initial build-out, Cloud Computing could drive some headwinds for the IT industry, as a result of two factors. First, we see virtualization as a deflationary technology. Second, we see IT spending consolidating in the hands of fewer buyers--the Cloud providers, hosting vendors, and large enterprises. These factors will likely dampen IT spending growth due to greater utilization and buyer pricing power.

Even short-term build-outs may prove disappointing, however, as Goldman Sachs expects large enterprises to grow existing virtualization and automation technology adoption in the rollout of private clouds, shifting slowly to an embrace of public clouds over time. The chart below gives some idea as to when cloud computing will hit its stride:

Who wins in this scenario? [Read more]

posted by: gqpartner

Death of a Botnet

Emphasis on numbers by GQJ.

The Register via Random Spaf Items:

Security firm chokes sprawling spam botnet

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco 

Posted in Security, 10th November 2009 06:02 GMT

A botnet that was once responsible for an estimated third of the world's spam has been knocked out of commission thanks to researchers from security firm FireEye.

After carefully analyzing the machinations of the massive botnet, alternately known as Mega-D and Ozdok, the FireEye employees last week launched a coordinated blitz on dozens of its command and control channels. The channels were used to send new spamming instructions to the legions of zombie machines that make up the network.

Almost immediately, the spam stopped, according to M86 Security blog. Last year, the email security firm estimated the botnet was the leading source of spam until some of its servers were disabled. [Read more]

posted by: gqpartner