City Services Delivered Over Mobile Cloud Infrastructure

Busan Metropolitan City launched a center to host a variety of services for its citizens. Operating like an app store for developers, the Busan Mobile Application Development Center (BMAC), marks the first phase of their deployment of Smart+Connected Community (S+CC) services -- in collaboration with Cisco and a local service provider, Korea Telecom (KT).

The plan is part of the Busan Green u-City (ubiquitous city) blueprint, which is in line with the national agenda to support environmentally sustainable economic growth in the country.

Busan, a bustling city of approximately 3.6 million residents, is located on the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula. The second-largest city in South Korea, Busan occupies about 300 square miles (766 square kilometers), 8 percent of the entire Korean peninsula. Busan also has the country's largest container-handling port (fifth largest in the world) -- thanks to its accessibility from the Pacific Ocean, deep harbor and gentle tides.

Cisco Korea and Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) contributed to this blueprint, which includes the rollout of S+CC services such as urban mobility, distance learning, energy management, and safety and security by 2014.

The aim is to transform the way of life for Busan citizens, improve city management, and generate new economic growth in a sustainable environment.

"Busan is an advanced city and among the first to adopt the u-City concept in Korea. Because of its ICT infrastructure, Busan has decided to move faster toward becoming a green u-City. We are pleased to be able to collaborate with Cisco due to its rich experience in a variety of smart city projects," said Hur Nam Sik, mayor of Busan.

Cisco Smart+Connected Communities in Action

BMAC is phase 1 of Busan's Green u-City blueprint. The center will be based on a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) approach, in collaboration with KT and Cisco, for application developers to test and host city services.

Phase 2 will see the rollout of software-as-a-service (SaaS) managed cloud services, delivered by KT and powered by Cisco, such as billing automation, content management and document management by 2012.

Phase 3, planned for 2014, will see these services widely available to all citizens.

BMAC is built on a platform powered by the Cisco Unified Computing System, the Cisco 4500 backbone and SAN switches.

Busan expects the BMAC to act as a catalyst for app developers to make use of public data provided by Busan Metropolitan Government, which will allow them to develop innovative applications that will appeal to the general public and help improve the quality of life.

By providing a shared services development platform and creating an ecosystem for software developers, Busan expects to see new job opportunities in knowledge industries. Busan also plans to have these developers lead phase 2 of its blueprint, the delivery of S+CC cloud services.

Public and Private Clouds for the Enterprise

Telecommunication service providers will likely consume their own cloud services. After all, every organization can gain something from the proven benefits of infrastructure and application out-tasking. However, their primary role will be to implement and deliver the services that their end-customers will seek from public, virtual private, and hybrid clouds.

Service providers have the opportunity to extend their current offerings, which may already include hosting, communications, media, and software application services. Moreover, cloud offerings enable service providers to extend their reach beyond their traditional areas of operation.

That said, service providers must be prepared to address customer concerns ranging from policy compliance, to end-to-end security, to quality of service management, and to technical customization. They must be able to deliver a flexible range of functionality, service levels, and payment models.

Enterprise Cloud Use-Case Scenario

• Many enterprise-focused service providers (SPs) have an opportunity to create higher-value, differentiated service offerings. They have unique capabilities they can leverage, including customer relationships, physical assets, and extensive operations experience.
• At the same time, over-the-top services (such as Skype VoIP) threaten traditional SP revenue streams (e.g., wireline and mobile voice services). So, SPs have an incentive to evolve their value-add capabilities.

Role for Cloud Technologies

• Cloud is unlocking huge growth potential through new service offerings (e.g., infrastructure as a service, collaboration as a service).
• SPs offering cloud services have several avenues of differentiation in terms of deployment models (e.g., public cloud, virtual private cloud, hybrid cloud) and service types (e.g., infrastructure, collaboration).
• A cloud-ready architecture can also reduce an SP’s overall cost of delivery through more efficient and sustainable infrastructure platforms.

Application Considerations

• As table-stakes, SPs offering cloud services must ensure security and isolation of customer data in a multi-tenant environment. They must also offer a comprehensive suite of basic services (e.g., voice, collaboration).
• Initial customer acquisition will be driven by distinctive solutions with differentiated services and end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs).
• Over the long term, SPs must be able to deliver cost-effective services with viable margins.

While large enterprises also see tangible benefits in using public clouds, we expect private and hybrid cloud models to be very common. Large enterprises may use public clouds for burst or peak capacity and for select services that are difficult to scale themselves.

However, these organizations often require a higher degree of control over their data, applications, and systems than current public clouds allow. At scale, a private cloud offers the efficiency and agility of a public cloud -- without the loss of control.

Still, the IT services that a pure private cloud can offer are often limited to what internal IT can develop or deploy. This is where managed cloud service providers can add value.

Managed Services Gaining Global Momentum

Savvy business leaders are increasingly turning to managed services to enable them to focus more attention on their core competencies, according to the latest market study by Pyramid Research. Managed services free up valuable IT and networking resources, decrease staffing needs and enable investment in activities that differentiate companies from their competition.

That said, the primary adoption driver is the current state of the global economy. As business leaders everywhere face increased financial pressure, they’re looking to managed services to offload their capital expense burden and improve operational efficiencies.

Analysts typically define managed network services as the management and monitoring of telecom infrastructure or applications by a third party -- either with equipment at the customer’s premise or hosted in a managed services provider (MSP) data center.

Responding to the Growing Global Demand
MSPs have responded to the increasing demand for new managed cloud services with a dramatic increase in investment to grow their managed services portfolios to include different types of out-tasked IT services for their customers. They are creating additional services that can be layered on top of the basic transport network offerings.

To learn more about the current market potential, Pyramid Research conducted an independent survey of more than 200 IT professionals from around the world to determine the types of managed services they’re using.

Primary conclusions from the market study include:

• Executives polled were willing to spend a large portion of their IT budgets -- between 10% and 20% -- on network-centric managed services, as the providers continue to prove the value and reliability of their offerings.
• The majority of enterprises -- almost 60% -- already use a managed service and have been doing so for between one and four years.
• Europe still has had the highest adoption of managed services -- driven in large part by the challenges of managing and maintaining business across multiple borders. However, the economic recession drove more North American companies to adopt managed services -- to lower costs and improve employee productivity.
• Additionally, emerging markets, such as those in Africa and Latin America, are preparing for managed services -- especially as broadband network access becomes more established.
• Multinational corporations and large enterprises have the most uptake in network-centric managed services, with SMEs now also looking for proven solutions that lower their costs.
• IT managers are applying a significant portion of their budget to managed services. Almost 25% of enterprises spend between $10,000 and $50,000 annually. Additionally, 26% of enterprises allocate between 10% and 20% of their IT budgets for managed services.
• The types of managed services that MSPs are providing are growing at a phenomenal rate. They manage everything from unified communications (UC) applications, to network security, to network connectivity and telepresence video collaboration services.
• Service trends over the next 18-24 months include managed machine-to-machine (M2M) services, such as automotive telematics, smart utility metering, fleet management, mobile health, point-of-sale transactions, mobile computing, wireless alarms, remote monitoring and wireless local loop (WLL).
• Growth is expected to continue throughout the U.S. and Europe -- especially in Eastern European countries, over the next 18 months. Latin America and Asia will provide continued expansion of these managed services.

Managed Cloud Services for the Public Sector

Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all proposition – clearly, the right approach depends on your organization’s needs and priorities. Different service and deployment models can be adopted to match the requirements of different types of workloads from across the whole organization.

To illustrate some of these solution trade-offs, we’ll profile public-sector organization needs, and their related information technology and communications service requirements.

Government entities will use a variety of Cloud configurations. Those of sufficient scale will likely adopt similar Cloud models to those of large enterprises. Organizations with common needs and interests may join together to build and share community clouds.

Some government services may be provided through the public clouds of managed service providers. A major issue for public-sector organizations will be balancing concerns and regulations regarding privacy and security with aspirations for transparency and sharing information.

Community Cloud Use-Case Scenario

• Governments are challenged to provide seamless, open, and transparent access to services and information while protecting security interests.
• End-users (e.g., constituents, journalists, government analysts, law enforcement, military, intelligence analysts) need secure access to information from various media, formats, and geographies.
• Traditionally, public sector organizations have taken a silo approach to data management (e.g., mapping specific information to specific communities of users). While the siloed approach offers some security benefits, it limits true collaboration potential.

Role for Cloud Technologies

• Community clouds offer a consolidated approach to shared resources, allowing data and applications to be stored collectively.
• Different end-users are able to work securely and collaboratively using these common datasets, thereby increasing transparency, cooperation, and efficiency.

Application Considerations

• Security and compliance policies must still be defined and managed (particularly for sensitive data sets).

We anticipate that there will be growing demand for collaboration solutions to support secure and rich collaboration experiences within and across government agencies -- and with external organizations.

While government organizations may also see tangible benefits in using public clouds, we expect private and hybrid cloud models to be popular. Hybrid clouds will come in many flavors, including the virtual private cloud model in which an organization has access to dedicated resources in a public cloud. An increasing percentage of total IT spend will move to managed hybrid clouds as the technology and applications mature.

Government organizations should invest the time to determine where Cloud applications are most appropriate, based on workload-specific requirements around cost, risk, and performance.

Managed Cloud Services for Enterprise Collaboration

Managed cloud services can accelerate your business by allowing you to transform ideas into marketable products and services with greater speed. Cloud can provide nearly limitless scalability, enabling your business to grow without time and resource intensive IT build-outs.

Cloud can transform the economics of your IT -- from capital-intensive, to pay-as-you-go. Service level agreements guarantee the capabilities you need, when you need them. Costs are tiered and metered to accurately reflect your requirements and usage.

All applications, including legacy, run more efficiently and sustainably with greater utilization of the underlying infrastructure.

Cloud can make new business models possible and unlock revenue potential. Companies can enter new markets, respond more quickly to changing customer needs, collaborate more effectively to drive innovation and business value.

Collaboration Use-Case Scenario

• Global organizations face real collaboration challenges. Employee expertise is distributed across headquarters and regional and branch locations around the world. Technology and travel limit responsiveness to customer needs. Cultural differences hamper internal teamwork and organizational agility.
• Enterprise-wide collaboration is particularly difficult to improve due to the communications silos created by existing infrastructure and disparate technology environments.
• Rich collaboration enables organizations to extend services reach and improve relationships with customers. Poor collaboration can result in customer dissatisfaction and competitive exposure.

Role for Cloud Technologies

• Cloud network-based collaboration strategies enable employees at all levels of the organization to connect and collaborate.
• Collaboration services built in the Cloud can also integrate with and enhance business processes and applications.

Application Considerations

• Proper collaboration architecture design relies on a thorough understanding of technology, people, and processes. The architecture must also be able to integrate with the desired business applications and processes.
• High-quality collaboration experiences require end-to-end solutions.

However, Cloud is neither an instantaneous nor simple transformation, but can be adopted in a controlled and pragmatic way. Cloud involves new technologies, new service and deployment models, and new IT skills sets and processes. Migration of legacy applications to Cloud can be a real challenge. That said, legacy platforms can co-exist with Cloud deployments and be migrated only as appropriate.

Moreover, Cloud does not always offer the best business solution. Some Cloud solutions limit the ability to customize functionality or cannot guarantee quality of service. Some workloads may have stringent compliance or technical requirements that demand other approaches.

Organizations will need to determine where Cloud applications are most appropriate, based on workload-specific requirements around cost, risk, and performance.

Global Alliance Paves Way for Enterprise Cloud Services

Orange Business Services together with Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a business alliance, called Flexible 4 Business -- to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises. This business alliance will help customers easily transition to cloud computing and gain the infrastructure flexibility, cost reduction and business performance optimization cloud computing enables.

Orange Business Services will be the service provider for the business alliance and will deliver the four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions based on the industry-leading technologies from the four partners.

Through Orange Business Services cloud portfolio supported by the Flexible 4 Business alliance, enterprises can realize the benefits of having IT as a service without the concern of building their own cloud computing infrastructure. Through a single service provider, customers will be able to accelerate the deployment of highly secure cloud services across their enterprise while reducing management complexity.

Orange Business Services is certified at the highest level by Cisco, EMC, and VMware to bring the network, server, storage, virtualization and management expertise necessary to integrate the entire cloud solution on a global basis. As the service provider in all Flexible 4 Business engagements, Orange Business Services will commit to tiered end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs).

"Orange Business Services has a long heritage in providing managed datacenter services and hosting and has combined this with its networking and security expertise to provide a growing suite of cloud computing services," said Peter Hall, principal analyst at Ovum.

"The Flexible 4 Business alliance brings together leading players in cloud computing so enterprises can have the confidence that solutions, including private cloud, are delivered and managed on a global scale to the highest standards."

Managed Cloud Services offered by Flexible 4 Business:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS):
Private cloud: Customized solutions based on Vblock Infrastructure Packages that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware, together with a comprehensive service catalogue (computing, storage, operating systems, middleware) based on platforms hosted in Orange datacenters, sub-parties datacenters or in customers datacenters. The related services are managed by Orange Business Services on an "as-a-service" mode enabling the expected flexibility in a highly secured environment. Back-up services: Highly secure hosted and managed back-up solution delivered as-a-service: evolving and charged according to real usage, enabling customers to benefit from an effective solution that grows with their requirement and does not require initial investments.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):
Security services: Enable the ability to offer anti-virus and URL filtering solutions as-a-service. These SaaS solutions enable all users to benefit from immediate protection even when out of the office, and for customers to roll out precise security policies within seconds. Unified communications services: Comprehensive unified communications solution hosted and managed from Orange Business Services datacenters to reduce costs. Services are available from all types of terminals. Administrators can allocate services as required and therefore adapt usage and costs to the precise needs of the company.

"Cloud computing has truly come of age with Flexible 4 Business," said Vivek Badrinath, chief executive officer, Orange Business Services. "Today's business alliance will make cloud computing a reachable reality for global enterprises, providing for our customers' security requirements and mitigating the complexity of technical migration. Orange Business Services has built its reputation catering to the global business needs of multinationals. With industry's top cloud players we will ease the migration for our enterprise customers."

Managed Security Services Gaining Adoption

Enterprise leaders say that it's becoming difficult to find the highly qualified IT and network security talent they need that's affordable, and so they look to service providers for a solution. According to the latest market study by Forrester Research, demand has been growing.

That said, Forrester believes that using a managed security services provider (MSSP) is more than just a lower-cost alternative to doing the same work in-house. MSSPs are not just managing devices, they also provide insightful analysis that can help with business decisions.

CIOs and other business technology leaders used to resist out-tasking their IT and network security requirements. The talent scarcity issue has helped to change that mindset.

Now, one in four out-task their email filtering, and another 12 percent are very interested in doing so in the next 12 months. Another 13 percent already out-task their vulnerability management and an additional 19 percent say they are very interested in doing so within the next 12 months.

CIOs Budgeting for Managed Security
Although security-related spending didn't grow during most of 2009, Forrester estimates that the managed services market actually grew by approximately 8 percent.

Managed security services (MSS) has evolved considerably. Service offerings exist in various forms -- from pure system management to more sophisticated log analysis using a number of delivery mechanisms, from software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud services to on-premises device monitoring and management.

According to Forrester's assessment, while many MSSPs have started to respond to the human resource challenge by offering consulting services, not all providers are equally capable. However, CIOs should expect more MSSPs to further invest in qualified professional services capabilities to provide appropriate integration and consulting guidance.

Managing Security within the Cloud
Forrester said they've received inquiries about providers offering cloud services -- such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and clean-pipe services. Broadband network service providers that own the access circuit have an inherent advantage, because they typically detect and prevent potential attacks sooner than others.

Again, lower cost was the primary driver for moving to a managed services provider, but now cost only ranks fourth in decision criteria. Today there are a number of other incentives to use MSSP services. They include improving the quality of protection; gaining 24x7 support; getting better skill sets and competencies; a reduction is the cost of protection; and decreasing complexity.

Internal security managers are now expected to provide value-added services in support of business objectives -- such as enhancing privacy, achieving compliance, and protecting intellectual property. Therefore, they are demanding additional services from MSSPs, which in return are responding by broadening their traditional service portfolio.

In summary, Forrester offers a key procurement recommendation. They suggest selecting a provider that excels in the specific area you're looking to out-task. They believe that it's extremely important to assess organization culture. It's considered the most important factor that determines whether a relationship is going to succeed. So, start the process by talking to some of the provider's customer references.