10 top tests of 2013

Network World tested hundreds of products in 2013, but here are our top 10 tests of the year. In order to make the list, the product review had to be a comparative test of multiple products in a single category and it had to break new ground or deliver fresh insight into an important product area.

Here’s the list:

1. WAN OPTIMIZATION – JOEL SNYDER
We invited every major network optimization vendor, and ended up with seven contenders: Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix, Exinda, Ipanema, Riverbed and Silver Peak.

Our Clear Choice Test winner is Riverbed, which excels at the core WAN optimization functions of compression and de-duplication. If you’re looking for innovation, you’ll be as impressed, as we were, with Ipanema Technologies ip|engines and Exinda Networks x800-series.

For great performance, we were again impressed with Silver Peak. And if you’re running all Cisco at the network edge, Cisco’s WAAS is a no-brainer with big benefits at moderate cost.
wan optimization

2. MOBILE DEVICE MANAGEMENT – DAVID STROM
We looked at six products: AirWatch, Apperian EASE, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10 (BES10), Divide, Fixmo, and Good Technology's Good for Enterprise. Each has a somewhat different perspective and different strengths in terms of what it can control best.

AirWatch had the widest phone/tablet/desktop support. But it also requires a collection of different downloaded apps that could be confusing to use. If you’re going the secure container route, Fixmo is a strong contender.

BlackBerry should be on your short list if your primary goal is protecting your messaging infrastructure. Good Technology is a mature product that features solid email security, fast device enrollment, extensive security policies and wide device support.

Divide had the most appealing management console and overall simplest setup routine. It features the best overall approach to MDM and is the easiest to operate, but has the most limited device OS version support. Apperian does a great job with setting up a protected app portal, but falls down on some basic MDM issues.

3. MIDRANGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS – BARRY NANCE
If your network has between 1,000 and 10,000 devices and computers, you have a midsized network. Your servers, connections and other resources suffer the same problems as larger networks, but your budget for keeping the network healthy is less than what large enterprises enjoy.

We tested six products that provide a management suite for mid-range networks: Paessler PRTG v12.4, Heroix Longitude v8.1, HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC) Standard and Enterprise v5.2, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold (WUG) v16, SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) v10.4 and Server & Application Monitor (SAM) v5.2 and Argent Software Advanced Technology (AT) v3.1, including Argent Commander 2.0 and Argent Reports 2.0.
Argent Advanced Technology earns itself the Network World Clear Choice award, edging Heroix Longitude, which came in second. Advanced Technology gave us sophisticated thresholds, a responsive user interface, accurate device discovery, time-saving root cause analysis, helpful corrective actions and meaningful reports.

4. HOSTED VDI – TOM HENDERSON
We compared hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) products from Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware and came to many conclusions, but the most important one is this: Setting up hosted desktop sessions in a BYOD world is a complex undertaking.

Our Clear Choice Test winner is Citrix's VDI-in-a-Box for its ease of integration, flexibility of both hosted operating systems and variety of clients, and its end-user experience.

VMware's Horizon View 5.2 is also very capable and can scale dramatically, but it’s more limited in both hosts (Windows) and clients served. Windows 2012 Server is good, yet requires a buy-in to Microsoft's Windows System Center Configuration Manager, and has less client flexibility.

5. PERSONAL CLOUDS – WAYNE RASH
cloud computing

A personal cloud service lets you share photos, music and documents among all your devices easily and quickly.The good news is that these cloud services are normally free for a limited amount of data. Most vendors also offer premium or enterprise versions, which allow you to store more data and to share data, which is useful in a workgroup scenario, for example.

We looked at nine personal cloud services: Apple’s iCloud, Bitcasa, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, MediaFire, SpiderOak and Ubuntu One. While iCloud, SkyDrive and Google Drive are optimized for their respective platforms, all of the cloud services work across multiple operating systems and different browser types.

There was no single cloud service that we considered a winner. All worked as advertised, all had their strengths, as well as peculiarities or annoyances.

6. LINUX-BASED SERVER OPERATING SYSTEMS – SUSAN PERSCHKE
The five products we tested -- SUSE Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 2, Mandriva Business Server 1.0, ClearOS 6 Professional, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS -- are all enterprise server versions offering commercial support options, either at the OS level or in the form of commercial management tools and support plans.

Our Clear Choice Test winner is Ubuntu, which delivered intuitive, uncluttered management tools, excellent hypervisor support, and transparency (commercial and open source versions are one and the same).

The remaining four contenders fell into two categories with Red Hat and SUSE representing enterprise-level offerings and Mandriva and ClearOS geared more towards small and midsize businesses. In the SMB segment ClearOS edged out Mandriva.

7. TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION – DAVID STROM
Relying on a simple user ID and password combination is fraught with peril. One alternative is to use one of the single sign-on solutions we reviewed last year, but there are less expensive options that could also be easier to install.

That’s where two-factor authentication services come into play. Years ago, vendors came out with hardware-based two-factor authentication: combining a password with a token that generates a one-time code. But toting around tokens means that they can get taken, and in a large enterprise, hard tokens are a pain to manage, provision and track.

Enter the soft token, which could mean using a smartphone app, SMS text message, or telephony to provide the extra authentication step. We reviewed eight services that support up to five kinds of soft tokens: Celestix's HOTPin, Microsoft's PhoneFactor, RSA's Authentication Manager, SafeNet Authentication Service, SecureAuth's IdP, Symantec Validation and ID Protection Service (VIP), TextPower's TextKey, and Vasco's Identikey Authentication Server.

8. ULTRABOOKS – WAYNE RASH
We tested eight ultrabooks, all with touchscreens and all running Windows 8 Professional. They are: the astonishingly thin Acer Aspire S7 and Asus Zenbook UX31A, the flip-screen Dell XPS 12, HP’s Envy 400t-12, Lenovo’s business oriented ThinkPad Carbon X1 and the flexible Yoga 13, the Samsung ATIV Tab 7 that transforms into a tablet, and the Sony Vaio T-15.

Our favorite, because it was the easiest to type on and the easiest to use overall was the Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1. This ultrabook has three ways to control the pointer, had the best keyboard by far, yet it was still thin and light.

If you need your ultrabook to convert to a tablet, then you might like the Samsung ATIV Tab 7, or the Yoga or Dell, which fold or flip to become tablets. Acer and Asus win points for being sexy, thin and stylish, so if you want to impress in the conference room, these might be for you.

9. SOFTWARE-BASED NAS – ERIC GEIER
Earlier this year we tested Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. Now we're reviewing software-based NAS that you can load onto your own equipment — whether it's a PC, server, virtual machine, or in the cloud. We looked at FreeNAS, Openfiler, Open-E DSS, NexentaStor, and SoftNAS. All offer some sort of free solution or service, with some being fully open sourced.

Going with a software solution enables you to select and customize the hardware it runs on to best fit your particular application and environment. For a small and simple network you could load the software on a spare consumer-level PC, or for bigger networks purchase a server or run on a virtual machine.

On the other hand, going with an appliance may be better if you aren't comfortable selecting the hardware, installing the software, and then maintaining both. Appliances are generally more plug-and-play, whereas with software solutions you have to spend some time building your own appliance.

10. OPEN SOURCE MANAGEMENT TOOLS – SUSAN PERSCHKE
We reviewed four popular open source products - Nagios Core 3.5, NetXMS 1.2.7, OpenNMS 1.10.9 and Zenoss Core 4.2. All four products are mature, have extensive monitoring capabilities similar to their enterprise-grade counterparts, and are currently updated with good community support.

Zenoss is our top pick due primarily to its intuitive and professional-grade admin interface. Also we were able to configure our environment and run reports easily, and when help was needed, we found the user guide to be an excellent resource, a rare find in the open source world.

Nagios is a good choice if a smaller footprint is desired and the infrastructure is limited in number of devices. Although NetXMS has a somewhat cluttered user interface, it boasts a rich toolset that provides a lot of granularity for infrastructure management and gets a plus for attention to mobile. OpenNMS is another powerful net management tool capable of running on most platforms and with the ability to manage a lot of data.

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Google relaxes access controls to Apps docs

Google relaxes access controls to Apps docs
People without a Google Account will be able to view documents stored in the Apps suite

Adding convenience possibly at the expense of security, Google will now let people without a Google Account view documents stored in its Apps cloud suite.

The move is meant to simplify how Apps customers share files with outsiders.

Until now, Apps customers could only grant document access to users with a Google Account. People who didn't have an account or who weren't logged in to their account couldn't get into the documents even when invited to do so via an emailed link from an Apps user.

That will no longer be the case, Google said on Monday.

The change applies to Word processing files created with Docs, presentations created with Slides and charts created with Drawings, which are all Google cloud productivity apps that are included in Apps, the company's workplace collaboration and communication suite.

"As a result of this change, files shared outside your domain to an email address not linked to an existing Google Account can be viewed without having to sign in or create a new Google Account," reads the Google blog post.

These recipients will only be able to view the file. They won't be able to edit or add comments to it, actions that still require the recipient to be logged into a Google Account.

Google warns that "because no sign in is required, anyone may view the file with this sharing link." In other words, the file could end up being viewed by unintended users who somehow get their hands on the link. This possibility is erased if the recipient creates a Google Account, at which point the link becomes unusable for others.

The company started to roll out the feature on Monday to Apps customers that are on the "rapid release" track, which delivers new and changed functions to administrators and end users as soon as they go live. The feature will later reach Apps customers on the "scheduled release" track, which delivers updates once a week and makes them available to administrators first.

Apps administrators will be able to disable this feature for their users on their domain control console.

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2013: Year of the hybrid cloud

2013: Year of the hybrid cloud
Hybrid clouds, cloud brokers, big data and software-defined networking (SDN) predicted to be the major trends in cloud computing in 2013.

The time for dabbling in cloud computing is over, say industry analysts. 2013 is the year that companies need to implement a hybrid cloud strategy that puts select workloads in the public cloud and keeps others in-house.

"Next year has to be the year that enterprises get serious about having real cloud operations as part and parcel of their IT operations," says John Treadway, vice president at Cloud Technology Partners, a consultancy.

10 cloud predictions for 2013

Careers in the cloud

Treadway says that in the last year, he and his colleagues have worked with many large enterprise clients who have implemented half-baked, haphazard cloud infrastructure schemes - most of them private and developed in-house.

They have some virtualization, explained Treadway. And they may even have some automation. "But when you peel back the onion you can't find the type of cloud infrastructure where you can request a resource and have it provisioned automatically on the fly. There is still a lot of human labor involved in those processes," Treadway says.

He expects most of these in-house private clouds to be abandoned in favor of more strategic hybrid mixes of public cloud services and more commercially packaged private clouds services like those based on OpenStack standard or VMware's vCloud.
Prediction 1: Hybrid clouds will take off

"I'm convinced 2013 is going to be the year of the hybrid cloud infrastructure," says Tracy Corbo, principal research analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.

"Cloud infrastructure outages happen. That's a fact that is not going to change. So it only makes sense for an enterprise to take a look at the workloads they can put in the public cloud where there lies the bigger risk of outage and data loss and those that should be placed on a more controlled private cloud," Corbo says.

Meeting the challenges of hybrid cloud computing infrastructures

That hybrid infrastructure as a service (IaaS) split is likely to be divided between the systems of engagement (customer service systems, for example) and the systems of record (like back-end financials), explains Chandar Pattabhiram, former marketing executive at Cast Iron, a cloud integration company purchased by IBM, and currently vice president of marketing at Badgeville, a company specializing in gamifying cloud applications.

Hybrid cloud deployment is not a new concept. Research published by Gartner shows that the hype surrounding hybrid cloud reached its peak last summer. According to Gartner's research scheme, early adopters take on a technology at the peak of the hype cycle, then there's a period of disillusionment when stories of early adoption failures come out. That's followed by a slow adoption phase, when vendors begin delivering on second- and third-generation services. Finally, there's the phase where adoption becomes mainstream.

Amazon is still the uncontested leader in the public IaaS cloud space, with expectations that it will continue to pull down more than $2 billion annually in that market. But vendors with long and strong ties to the enterprise are all rolling out public offerings alongside their private cloud services.

For example, HP jumped into the public cloud market last summer when it rolled out its OpenStack-based HP Cloud Services. According to Dan Baigent, senior director of business development for HP Cloud Services, there is certainly a "pent-up" need for public IaaS. "We expect to see the most interesting growth patterns in that space," he says, arguing that HP's long-standing relationship with enterprise customers will help it make inroads there. It's difficult for enterprises to support multiple clouds from different vendors, Baigent says, and getting both parts of the hybrid cloud from the same provider can simplify that prospect.

Treadway argues that many public cloud vendors will go under. "It's very hard to play in the Amazon game. The margins are small and if you don't offer a differentiating value, you are very likely going to fail," Treadway says.

Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner, agrees that 2013 will see some corrections to the public cloud market, pointing to Web hosting vendor GoDaddy quietly closing the doors on its public cloud operation in October as a prime example. "These closures certainly don't give any kind of signal that cloud computing is a failure. They simply demonstrate that it doesn't make sense for every vendor to compete in that market," she says.
Prediction 2: Hybrid-cloud management becomes key

If hybrid clouds are the deployment of choice, EMA's Corbo says the IT industry has to make significant inroads on how to manage that type of environment in terms of resource provisioning, scalability and performance.

"It's unfortunate that the IT industry seems to build infrastructure, and managing it is always an afterthought," Corbo says.

IDC issued a report in August that said the worldwide cloud systems management software market grew dramatically, totaling an estimated $754 million in 2011, an increase of 84.4% over 2010. The top two vendors, CA Technologies and VMware, benefited from market demand for a range of capabilities beyond self-service provisioning.

These include automated infrastructure orchestration and virtualization management used to enable dynamic infrastructure resource pooling and sharing across multiple workloads and user groups, and the ability to track cloud resource consumption to support life-cycle management, capacity planning and chargeback.

IDC listed the other top players in that market - determined by revenue - as HP, IBM and BMC. That said, more than 63% of the revenue these companies raked in came from sales to companies managing private clouds only.

IDC expects most successful cloud systems management software vendors will offer customers a wide range of capabilities beyond self-service portals and automation and will be architected to support heterogeneous hypervisor and hardware platforms, as well as a range of hybrid cloud scenarios.

RightScale, a company that bucks Corbo's assertion that management is an afterthought, has offered a service since 2006 that integrates with multiple clouds and allows users to view federated cloud deployments from a single dashboard. The company boasts of a 4.7 million customer base supporting a variety of public and private cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine, Datapipe, HP, Logicworks, SoftLayer and Tata. On the private cloud side, RightScale can be used to manage workloads on the OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus platforms, all of which are open source.

Other startups that have jumped into this space include Cohuman, Okta, Scalr, Tier 3.

Brian Donaghy, CEO of Appcore, a cloud services company in Des Moines, Iowa, that offers a portfolio of private, public and hybrid services, says that developing the skills to manage a multi-cloud environment will make IT professionals a hot commodity in the next year as well.
Prediction 3: Cloud brokerages and integration hubs will explode

Early adopters of the cloud tended to take on the technology when they were building singularly focused greenfield applications. "So the issues associated with integrating either legacy systems or other cloud-based application was not so urgent," says Martin Capurro, a product manager at Savvis Direct, a public cloud service offered by national telco CenturyLink. "They are now."

IDC predicts that by 2015, nearly $1 of every $6 spent on packaged software, and $1 of every $5 spent on applications, will be consumed via the software as a service (SaaS) model. As enterprises buy more and more of their applications as SaaS, issues of integrating the applications themselves, developing security and auditing processes across them, and figuring out how to create B2B links with partners using the same applications will all need to be addressed.

Cloud service brokerage (CSB) schemes set up by cloud providers themselves seek to address the first problem while systems integration services and integration hubs seek to address the latter two.

10 SaaS delivery companies to watch

"CSB" was the phrase for cloud arbitrage that Gartner coined in 2009. More recently, NIST has defined this category of service providers as "an entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers."

Practically speaking, CSBs are the middlemen that aggregate SaaS applications in the cloud and supply a portal by which its customers can buy, access and somewhat control the use of multiple multi-tenant cloud applications within their own companies. The broker negotiates a good price that is passed onto the customer, provides a single point for end users to sign onto these applications and presents the IT department with one monthly bill.

According to Treadway, integration hubs - defined as single integration points between multiple cloud applications - are much needed today, but are more difficult to pull off than CSBs. That's because many custom-built cloud applications are not built using standard APIs, which means that linking them to any other application requires a spaghetti network of connections that is nearly impossible to maintain, he says. The problem is further exacerbated by the proliferation of devices most cloud applications are now required to support.

Almost every major player in the IT space that bases a big chunk of its business on integration has a play in this market, as well. Startups include Cordys and Informatica.

"The advice I give clients is to make sure they have a comprehensive integration strategy developed upfront, and only build or buy applications that have standard APIs and were built within a service-oriented architecture," Treadway says.

Prediction 4: Big data analytic tools will get better

Big data -- the voluminous amount of unstructured or semi-structured data a company creates for which it is cost prohibitive to load into a relational database for analysis -- just gets bigger and bigger in the cloud and businesses are realizing they can't afford to ignore that fact.

Using very geeky predictive modeling and data mining principles, big data analytics tools let users digest volumes of transactional data and other streams like those collected from Web server logs, social media reports and mobile-phone call records that have not previously been tapped by business intelligence tools.

Cloud Illustration: Stephen Sauer

"What they want is actionable analytic big data tools that give them the right information to make business decisions in real time," Treadway says. But innovation in this space, he says, is random at best.

According to CB Insights, a consultancy that tracks venture capital activities, analytics companies have taken the majority of $1.1 billion in big data venture capital funding deals on record since the second quarter of 2011. These analytics companies include those offering real-time data, such as Metamarkets, and others offering analytics solutions, such as Datameer.

But established companies are also investing in this area. Take HP's acquisitions of both Vertica (a data analytics firm bought in February 2011 for an undisclosed amount) and Autonomy (a U.K.-based information management software firm bought in August 2011 for $10.3 billion). Prior to HP's spree, IBM and EMC had already bought big data analytics databases, scooping up Netezza and Greenplum, respectively.

"It's invaluable to our customers to be able to have the ability to put a wrapper of knowledge around the hordes of data coming into a company through its cloud deployments," HP's Baigent says.
Prediction 5: "SDN" will become just "networking"

The idea of software-defined networking rocked the networking world in 2012.

Inside the SDN scheme, the control plane gets decoupled from the data plane in network switches and routers. The control plane runs as software on servers and the data plane is implemented in commodity network equipment.

In July, cloud server software giant VMware plunked down $1.05 billion in cash and another $210 million in assumed unvested equity for Nicira, an SDN startup that had lured high-profile talent away from both Juniper and Cisco.

Cisco's initial reaction to the prospect of SDN was called Cisco Open Network Environment (Cisco ONE), which is a architectural scheme designed to enable Cisco networks to be flexible and customizable to meet the needs of newer networking and IT trends such as cloud, mobility, social networking and video. And then Cisco made some announcements with the OpenStack community in support of its open source SDN projects, and in November, the company agreed to pay $1.2 billion in cash to acquire Meraki, a San Francisco-based provider of networking systems that can be managed from the cloud.

"All of these moves just point to the eventual realization that software-defined networking is just going to collapse back into a new definition of networking that is going to evolve in 2013," says Terremark CTO John Considine.
Prediction 6: Gamification will drive sales and customer service.

Gartner predicts that by 2014, 70% of all Fortune 2000 companies will have at least one cloud-based application that employs game theory to influence employee or customer behavior. According to Badgeville's Pattabhiram, many of them already do, and next year will simply be the year that people sit up and take notice of how effective those applications are in driving business opportunity.

Gamification is the concept of applying the psychology of game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun, engaging and addicting. The psychological carrots include the need for public recognition and the thrill of competition. The applications in the business world include boosting sales, encouraging collaboration and information sharing among employees and partners, and increasing customer service satisfaction.

There are more than 50 gamification products, platforms and services available on the market including Badgeville, BunchBall, Crowd Factory, Gamify.it, Hoopla, Kudos, Objective Logistics and Rypple (a Salesforce.com company) to name only a very few.

Pattabhiram contends that the potential benefits of gamification to the enterprise, should it be implemented next year, are behavior management, rewarding participation, controlled social mechanics and behavior analytics.
Prediction 7: Hybrid security options will bloom

IDC security analyst Phil Hochmuth has no doubt that there will be security breaches in the cloud next year, whether we get wind of them or not, mainly because of the fact that using hard-to-control mobile devices is the dominant means by which employees are accessing the cloud.

"That is one of the biggest reasons we are seeing most vendors take on a hybrid delivery model for their security products," Hochmuth says. Under this scheme, security vendors are offering - and enterprises are deploying - the traditional appliance-based security products for on-premise access and then enlisting a SaaS product - most of the time from the same vendor to help facilitate unified security management policies -- to shore up secure access from mobile clients. IDC predicts that over the next three years, hybrid deployments will comprise 60% of all deployments, a market the firm says will balloon to $3.3 billion by 2016.
Prediction 8: Data sovereignty issues will multiply

Controversy about the jurisdiction and legality of data stored in the cloud and outside of a customer's home country will erupt as cloud adoption grows in 2013, says Jim Reavis, executive director of the Cloud Security Alliance.

But don't expect government policy changes to help mitigate the problem, Reavis says. Greater customer awareness of data residency options, such as format-preserving encryption, will help mitigate these concerns and technological innovation will have a greater impact on solving this global policy question than government action.

Prediction 9: IaaS-based services will expand

EMA's Corbo predicts there will be an increase in services delivered as part of standard IaaS offerings.

"You will see IT folks thinking hard and long about what other infrastructure services can be off-loaded into the cloud," Corbo says. Specifically, she expects to see growth in the areas of WAN optimization (a service is already offered by a startup called Aryaka and mainstays such as Cisco and Akamai have made some movement in this direction) and load balancing as a service in the cloud (Amazon and Rackspace both offer these services).

"It's not a question of being able to do this stuff in-house. It's a matter of figuring out if it's cheaper and more efficient to do it in the cloud," Corbo says.
Prediction 10: Prepare for more outages and shakeouts

Corbo and Gartner's Leong were in sync on their prediction that if customers are asking the public cloud infrastructures to take on more and more responsibilities, then they should be prepared to accept more downtime as well.

Outages are bigger risk than breaches

"Outages will happen as a matter of course," Leong says. "It can't really be helped when you take into consideration all of the permutations of all the services riding on these infrastructures. There is no way every contingency can be tested for."

CSA's Reavis warns that customers should be prepared for other kinds of failures in the cloud in 2013 as well: business failures.

Since we are in a natural part of the entrepreneurial business cycle for cloud, we can expect to see several cloud startups get acquired, change their business focus or go out of business entirely, Reavis says.

"These shakeouts will have differing consequences impacting the availability of customer data and information systems. Customers need to make sure they are mitigating these risks through a combination of building redundancy in cloud security architectures and performing due diligence in cloud business relationships," he says.

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