I have had an interest in DRM for some time.  At the turn of the new millennium, I was involved in co-founding a music distribution company and implementing DRM for our online content, downloadable through our website.  At the time, the only practical (e.g. cheap & relatively easy) solution was from Microsoft.  This required retaining a rights management server permanently connected to the Internet to periodically renew or reject licence requests on played content, which could be licensed based on a permanent or time/subscription basis.

I’ve personally held off using online digital downloads and still buy physical CDs as I didn’t like the way in which the DRM licences are managed.  Today, the owner of an iTunes licence can’t pass on their content to another user as technically music is not owned but simply on a long term “lease”.  The recent Bruce Willis hoax story on iTunes licensing raised this issue into the public view last year.

What’s needed is a more flexible licensing solution, that reflects the way physical media and assets can be transferred between consumers.  We can’t rely on Apple or any other DRM issuing organisation to be in business in 10, 20 or 30 years time, however content will still be valid and have value and ownership rights.  This means decoupling the licensing process from the licensor, so even if content has been acquired from (for example) Apple, the company doesn’t have to be involved in transfer of those rights.

Even if Apple and others implement new technology for DRM, they are not content owners but merely the sales channel and so ultimately the publishing industries should have been working to fix this problem and implement a solution.  Previous history shows us that the record industry are slow to understand the implications and adopt new technology.  By embracing a fairer and simpler DRM management process, then perhaps they could have stemmed the flow of piracy we’ve seen over recent years.

Of course there is one other way of looking at the whole media consumption marketplace.  Rather than purchase content, many people now choose to consume through subscription models like Spotify.  It may well be that the idea of “owning” music or films will become an outdated concept altogether.

Where IT has delivered internally for many years, there will be a culture built up around the traditional skills of server, database, networking and storage.  The development guys will be in there somewhere, as will operations and Service Desk functions, but for many, these disciplines still work fairly autonomously and many hardware purchases will be project driven.  Acquiring technology via separate (unrelated) projects might sort the initial funding out, making justification easier, but ultimately it results in a legacy of hardware that sometime in the future needs to be replaced, without a budget relating to the original application.  In an ideal world, the original owners would refresh their application, but that rarely happens, as application refresh cycles don’t match those for hardware refresh and replacing infrastructure is “the IT department’s job”.

Cloud is seen as the great opportunity to fix this structural flaw, however leaping straight for Public Cloud can bring a world of pain in connecting existing applications and most importantly in understanding the security and reliability/resiliency implications of moving data out of the corporate data centre.

In this ZDNet article, referencing work by Jason Bloomberg, the case is made for public over private clouds.  In fact, I believe this approach is incorrect.  Many organisations can benefit from a move to Private Cloud first, before moving outside the data centre to the Public model.  Why is this?

• Private cloud allows development of a service-based delivery model for infrastructure, moving away from the project-based legacy.
• Private cloud allows services to be developed without a maniacal focus on security, as security was already in place for customer-fronting applications and the infrastructure isn’t multi-tenant.
• Private cloud allows development and use of new technologies, a necessary experimentation phase.
• Private cloud retains data ownership, allowing issues on data privacy, data location, security and backup to be examined and mitigated over time.

There’s an evolution phase that says organisations should focus on moving their IT delivery model to a service-based architecture.  Once that is in place, the step to Public Cloud becomes much easier as it’s not a complete re-invention of the way IT operates.  Public and Private Cloud will exist together for many organisations.  Only a few will be brave (or capable) of moving to a fully public model.  We should embrace the hybrid model now, because it’s what our future holds.

Copyright © Langton Blue Ltd.  This article was first published on www.langtonblue.com.

I believe that IT wastes a huge opportunity to move forward with shared knowledge.  Instead, we see new technologies coming through that are usually adopted by the most recent graduates and entrants into the IT world.  Look around you and you can see it’s true.  IBM have major issues with the support of the mainframe platform as many mainframe systems programmers and others with skill on that technology are at the stage of retirement.  Working on the mainframe isn’t seen as “cool”, but rather, everyone wants to create their own new startup writing consumer apps.

This may seem like a gross generalisation, but when we look at things in more detail, we can see that many technologies are simply re-inventions of things that have gone before.  Virtualisation is a great example.  It was first developed by IBM in 1973 and called VM (Virtual Machine).  That technology was used throughout the 1980′s and 1990′s to virtualise mainframe environments.  Many of the features it supported have only just been made available in the VMware and Hyper-V environments of today.

Another good example is databases.  There have been many database formats over the years, including some data stores used on the mainframe such as VSAM.  We continue to see new and exciting databases being developed.  Our knowledge of how to manage, store and retain structured data today can still learn from the experiences of years ago.

The opportunity here is to use the collective knowledge of those who used the older platforms, worked with scarce and expensive resources and knew therefore how to use them most effectively and in many cases with better service management than we see today.

Compare this to other professions like medicine.  The consultant sits at the top of the tree and typically has all the acquired knowledge and experience.  He or she trains and guides new medical students, assisting on more unusual or rare cases and acting as a mentor too.  He or she also provides a final ratification of the junior doctor’s diagnosis in many cases.  This is a model we could learn a lot from in the IT industry.

Of course, the medical consultant can’t rest on his laurels and acquired knowledge of a career in medicine.  There are continual new developments in technique, understanding of disease and so of treatments and even some of the softer part of the profession when dealing with patients.  Consultants in both IT and medicine have to continue their professional development throughout their career.

So, old IT hands should spend some time investing in keeping their skills current; those new to the profession should spend some time with their older peers and absorb and use their experience.  With more of this, IT would be even greater an industry than it is today.

The attached diagram (I’ll hold short of calling it an infographic) explains how the Enterprise has evolved over the last 30 years. In the days of the mainframe, everything was centralised. IT users were within the business, using technology to move the business forward. Those users would be small in number, as computing was expensive and not everyone could have it.  The user base would be local or perhaps in branch offices, connected by point-to-point leased lines.  Although the technology was expensive, it was predictable, as was the access profile of the user.

Move on to the late 1990s, and the mainframe starts to become legacy and retained only for niche requirements.  Unix/Linux and Windows has seen significant adoption due to lower costs of acquisition and management and of course because the business could deploy those servers outside of IT’s control and without the need for a datacentre, although it did eventually migrate the new platforms into the IT function.  The user profile changed somewhat, with users having VPN access (typically using business hardware) and the start of customer-facing IT through the web.  At this stage, it’s very much still Web 1.0, with static content and some e-commerce.   Remember we’re talking Enterprise here; Web 2.0 as a term was coined in 1999 and existed for many other organisations, but initially not necessarily the Enterprise.

Moving forward to today and we’ve seen another evolution.  The latest business-led technology changes are Cloud and BYOD.  Both have followed exactly the same process as Windows & Unix adoption, with the business leading the way and central IT following.  Now there’s even more complication.  Both customers and internal users want access via their own devices.  The datacentre is exposed like never before, completely changing the risk profile.  IT services can be delivered on or off-premises through the use of IaaS, PaaS or SaaS providers and we’re putting more of our trust in the network guys (lord help us).

So is the Enterprise ready?

Cloud is well on the way through Gartner’s Hype Cycle.  However there are still many things Enterprise IT has to reconcile before Cloud is widely adopted.  The enclosed data centre allowed IT to understand and manage risk because everything was under their control.  As technology moves outside that protective sphere there’s a natural tendency to be nervous of the consequences.  The risk profile changes – for example the serious consideration that has to be given to networking, firewall configuration, encryption and data protection means there is a shift in the areas that are key to delivering cloud services.  It’s not a case that those areas weren’t important before, but they are simply more important now.

Then there’s cost; the whole financial model of Cloud brings a different paradigm to how technology is acquired and billed for.  Many organisations have no idea how what their own internal IT costs.  Even if they do understand it at the empirical level, many won’t be able to translate this into a monthly or per transaction figure.  This makes understanding the cost/benefit of cloud a challenge, one that’s perhaps easier to avoid than tackle head-on.

Is Cloud Ready For The Enterprise?

Cloud offerings are pretty well evolved, however there are some subtle differences in approach in and out of the cloud.  Enterprise design was always focused on expensive, highly reliable hardware running single applications.  Clustering was used for availability (as was remote replication) but the underlying premise of design is that the hardware is reliable enough not to have to build redundancy into the application.  Time is spent architecting the best, most resilient infrastructure (the available) money will buy.  Cloud is different; it is usually implemented on lower cost commodity hardware, purely to make the economics work.  Think of storage; many organisations deploy expensive enterprise arrays from the three-letter vendors.  This wouldn’t be cost effective in cloud deployments.

So, to quote a cliche, there has to be “design for failure” built into the applications for cloud design, but essentially, cloud is ready and willing to accept Enterprise applications.  IT continues to evolve into ever more exciting and challenging ways.

The attached graph is also available as  PDFLB_Cloud_Enterprise Evolution.