Nexus Technologies – IT Company providing Virtualisation Solutions, IT managed Services and IT Consultancy

Bill Gates is not walking through that door, folks. It’s Ray Ozzie’s show now. And Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s Chief Software Architect is tying the company’s future to the cloud computing platform Azure — an amorphous product that clients can’t see or touch.Risky? It would be hard to argue that anything is truly risky for Microsoft right now, considering its overwhelming operating system market share and billions of dollars in the bank. But pressure seems to be mounting in Redmond, Wash., especially now that Microsoft’s legendary founder has retired.

Windows 7 has launched to mostly positive reviews and strong sales, but users are still getting over some disappointing releases in recent years. While Windows Vista and Office 2007 sold well and helped drive Microsoft’s remarkable financial performance that year, both products were met with heavy criticism and mounting frustration from users.

In addition, Microsoft’s recent history has been marked by the creation of several products that were late to attack growing markets (think Internet Explorer, Xbox, Zune and Bing), but most of these were in popular, consumer-focused areas. And some efforts, like Microsoft’s Digital Home initiative have fallen woefully short. Meanwhile, developers, integrators and solution providers have been left wondering when Microsoft would take a break from chasing consumer trends and truly make a splash in business IT. Microsoft needs a hit, preferably an original rather than a sequel to its core Windows and Office products.

That wait appears to be over with the arrival of Windows Azure Platform. But the question is, what exactly is Microsoft selling? At the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles this week, Ozzie described Azure as an operating environment “designed to manage extremely large pools of computational resources.” The simple explanation is that Microsoft wants customers to run their Windows-based applications over the Internet using Microsoft’s data centers, with Azure being the system that organizes resources and handles spikes in demand. For example, SQL Azure provides database services through the platform that customers can purchase almost on demand.

The key will be making sure customers and channel partners use the Azure platform to develop those applications. For that, Microsoft has been touting Visual Studio 2010, which will be a crucial part of the Azure development platform. In a way, Azure is a descendent of Microsoft’s .Net strategy. The idea is to keep customers and partners tied to the Windows environment while allowing the software to work over the Web. And in the case of Azure, the plan is to offer customers a pay-as-you-go service instead of packaging the applications and selling the licenses.

With Ozzie’s help, Microsoft has a strong edge in the cloud computing market. Amazon.com was a pioneer in the space, but it’s still seen as an online retailer rather than a computing services company. Salesforce.com is another pioneer, but it’s considerably smaller and less well-known than the technology giants jumping into cloud computing. Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, are currently engaged in a battle for networking dominance, and IBM (NYSE:IBM) has lagged behind with its cloud strategy. That leaves Google as the biggest likely threat for Microsoft.

But with its entrenched software business and intriguing, almost relentless promotion of Azure, Microsoft looks to take the lead. The software giant has already unleashed Exchange Server 2010 for Web-based e-mail, and the forthcoming Office 2010 released with come with Web-based applications to better compete withGoogle (NSDQ: GOOG) Apps.

And while Google has gained traction with its cloud computing offerings (it recently scored a big win with the Los Angeles city government’s move to Gmail), Microsoft can position itself as a better, more experienced player in the space with rich solutions instead of cheap, bare-bones Web applications. For example, Microsoft unveiled a new Azure service this week codenamed “Dallas,” which is designed to give users the power to discover, purchase and manage data on the Azure platform and through Azure-based applications. Essentially, Dallas provides data search as a service, which sounds like something that Google would have come up with.

But Dallas is Microsoft’s innovation, and it’s offerings like this that have catapulted the software giant to the front line of cloud computing. With Gartner predicting the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market to grow nearly 18 percent this year, cloud computing isn’t going away any time soon ” despite its nebulous nature. Azure, which is currently in a free preview mode and set for full release early next year, may or may not become Microsoft’s next great product and earn a spot on the company’s Mount Rushmore. But at the very least, Microsoft and Ozzie will be able to say they were on top of cloud early, rather than late, with a clear strategy and an attractive proposition.

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Cloud computing is one of the IT-game changers of our time but security and compliance concerns are holding cloud computing (Infrastructure as a Service) adoption to less than 1% of participants in Nemertes’ benchmark research.

At the heart of cloud computing is virtualization, which abstracts data, applications and operating systems from underlying hardware and in the process marginalizes security practices dependent on physical devices, a hard perimeter, and static boundaries and locations. Virtualization injects movement and dynamism into the IT Infrastructure and introduces a new layer of software and an ecosystem of related management applications that needs its own protection. These are all things that don’t exist in the non-virtualized infrastructure. Since over 90% of organizations are already deploying virtualization, much of our discussion will focus on virtualization security (VirtSec).

Beyond virtualization, cloud computing adds an additional layer of abstraction, raising additional security-related issues, including: Compliance, defense in depth, data location, privacy, shared tenancy, data leakage, data retention, e-Discovery, standards and performance. Addressing these issues requires more than simply slapping on some VirtSec. We must fundamentally rethink data security, depending on whether we’re protecting internal, external or hybrid cloud environments. Many of the underlying security controls are the same: Encryption, strong (multi-factor) authentication, access controls, audit logs, intrusion detection, anti-malware, anti-virus, etc. What’s different is the context, the way we apply these controls and new controls that are only possible in a virtualized infrastructure with virtualized security. The bottom line is we’ve got a lot to talk about.

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I was not happy to see the headline “Unisys official says cloud computing can save money by eliminating U.S. jobs [1]” on a story by InfoWorld’s Paul Krill last night. I was even less happy by what the story quoted Unisys exec Richard Marcello as saying: “We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization.”

Perhaps I’ve been in this business too long and, thus, a bit skeptical about these types of claims, but that’s not the core issue here. What is the issue is the fact that Marcello is linking cloud computing to “eliminating U.S. jobs,” which is something that won’t play well outside the boardroom. The last thing any emerging technology needs is that kind of PR — especially considering it’s largely incorrect.

[ Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in the InfoWorld editors' 21-page Cloud Computing Deep Dive PDF special report [2], featuring an exclusive excerpt from David Linthicum’s new book on cloud architecture [3]. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing Report newsletter [4]. ]

Over the years we’ve all heard claims of “job-eliminating technology.” For instance, the ability to reuse object-oriented programming and eliminate developers, right? Did not happen. Or component-based programming making the same claim — oops, wrong again. How about distributed objects, SOA, and now cloud computing? See a pattern here?

The fact is that the movement to cloud computing is really just a platform change, and while there should be fewer datacenters and software stacks in a few years, the notion that cloud computing will “eliminate a whole bunch of U.S.-based jobs” is not correct, generally speaking. In the short term, there will be a huge need for cloud computing experts, developers, and architects to assist companies and government agencies in moving to cloud computing. Cloud computing providers will need people to define, develop, and maintain their services. Moreover, those now maintaining datacenters will find new roles in managing cloud computing resources.

The message here is that the cloud computing industry needs to think a bit about what it’s saying in the promotion of cloud computing. Some of the “cloud computing experts” are sending wrong and inaccurate messages. In other words, they’re not helping.

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