When we built our Trusted Canadian Cloud ™ last year, it reflected our unique requirements of security, reliability, affordability and ease of use.  We built it on VMware’s virtualization platform because of VMware’s excellent reputation in the enterprise space and the cloud operation, integration and management tools that they offered.

We are very pleased to partner with RackForce because they share our thinking and have built and operate a platform very similar to the one that we built.  It is reliable, flexible, affordable and most of all, 100% Canadian.

As is common with a start-up, many of our prospective customers openly questioned our ability to deliver cloud services over the long term.  That is a valid question, and we were able to address that for many of our customers, but not for all.

Our partnership with RackForce now closes that issue completely.

Canadian Cloud Computing will continue to provide innovative cloud architecture and migration solutions, and RackForce will provide the underlying cloud infrastructure.  Our customers can rely on RackForce’s financial stability and operating excellence to keep their applications and data safe and accessible.  To be frank, they also have access to financial and computing resources that we, as a start-up, would be challenged to provide.

Cloud computing has rapidly evolved into a scale-driven business that demands access to more financial resources and technical expertise than we could provide.  Our partnership with RackForce will allow us to deliver the cloud services that our customers demand on a reliable and scalable platform.

Together, we are a great team that can design and deliver the cloud solutions that you need.

Wally.

Wally Kowal is Founder and President of Canadian Cloud Computing Inc.

The reasons for my protest are quite simple:

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That is what the Internet might look like if SOPA and PIPA are passed. Michael Geist has a great review of the impact of these bills on Canada at http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6244/125/.

I have chosen to stand up for my right, and the rights of our users, to provide services on the Internet without being subject to the risk of unreasonable actions of foreign governments.

Wally.

Wally Kowal is the president and founder of Canadian Cloud Computing Inc.

Among the many services the Hub offers start-ups is a range of office space options from a single desk to a large private space for up to 15 employees.  As your needs change so can your office configuration.

We used to have a private office here at The Hub, but we found that we had built a virtual team and no longer needed it.  Appropriately for a cloud computing company, we shared files over the cloud and communicated via phone, Skype and email.  Our office desks were mostly vacant, and we were taking up valuable space that could be used by other start-ups.

So off we went to the Sandbox, where I have already met our new neighbours (that’s Canadian for “neighbors”). There is a Rube Goldberg-like stretching machine in the corner: it’s a collection of bent pipes that looks like the world’s largest goalie mask, but the instructions posted on it show how you can stretch every part of your body.  Since I am developing the hunched shoulders of many who spend too much time at a keyboard, I hope to put it to good use.

Our address and phone number remain the same, except we are now suite 100.

Our offer still stands: If you would like a tour of the Communitech Hub just give me a call. It is one of the best places to be if you are a start-up.

Wally.

Wally Kowal is the founder and president of Canadian Cloud Computing Inc.

We made this difficult decision for the simple reason that we were unable to fund the company.

We faced several challenges:

1. Canadian angels are conservative, and for a variety of reasons we could not find one willing to fund us. US angels are uncomfortable investing in Canada and the latest economic troubles caused many to withdraw until the economy settles down.
2. Canadian banks and finance companies have cut back their lending activities and raised requirements to the point where it is difficult for a start-up to arrange debt financing.
3. Canadian businesses are more conservative than elsewhere in the world and the Canadian public cloud computing market is about two years behind the US.

We were actually selling well. As with any platform-based service provider, we needed a strategic investor to cover our early operating losses. Our business plan has a very attractive cash-flow-positive schedule.

That funding had proven tough to find.

We have benefited from the incredible teams at Communitech, the Accelerator Centre and The Hub. They opened many doors for us and mentored us as we built our company.  Their support, and the support of the other start-ups around us, helped us get more done faster than we ever thought possible.

We accomplished a lot in our first year; building our cloud platform, arranging for the licensing and deployment of all the necessary software, launching commercial service and finally growing our customer base. We have an excellent team who put their hearts into the company.

However, without a clear view to sufficient funding to keep the company operating we were not prepared to aggressively load customers. We simply could not ask our customers to commit to us if we could not commit to them.

We are still bullish on cloud computing in Canada but it seems the public cloud computing market here will take at least another year to emerge.

Many prospective customers were more interested in deploying private clouds with a later growth to a hybrid solution, so that is the market that we will pursue. We have an excellent team with extensive technical, operational and business knowledge in cloud computing.

We are still going to offer the great architecture and deployment professional services that we did before, but instead of our own platform we will partner with other leading Canadian cloud platform providers to deliver a comprehensive cloud solution.

In start-up speak this is called a pivot.  Our advisers tell us not to look at it as a failure, but as a learning experience. Personally, I hate “learning experiences“.

Whatever you call it, we intend to get through it and be successful at our new plan.

Hopefully you will join us for the voyage.

Wally.

Wally Kowal is the president and founder of Canadian Cloud Computing Inc.

The news and blogosphere are full of stories about the continually advancing threats to your privacy.  Lawmakers, government regulators and the courts are trying to keep up with the proliferation of services and new technologies. Consumers, end-users and corporate IT departments are similarly challenged in balancing the benefits and costs of new technologies and services.

There are two main threats to your on-line privacy, whether it be confidential personal information or confidential corporate information:

1. Confidential data being stolen when it is stored on-line, and
2. You giving away your confidential data.

While everyone is worried about hackers stealing their confidential information, what really surprises me is how few people are aware of how often they simply give it away.

Hacking is a big issue and will be a topic for a future post.

This post is about people and companies willingly giving away their data, including confidential personal data, in return for free or subsidized services.

Here is an excerpt from the Terms of Service of a major cloud computing company that apply whenever you click on “I Accept” or you use their services:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give <-> a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

You agree that this license includes a right for <->to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom <-> has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

Here is an excerpt from Canadian Cloud Computing’s Terms of Service:

The Customer Data belongs to Customer, and Canadian Cloud makes no claim to any right of ownership in it.

Canadian Cloud will keep the Customer Data confidential in accordance with Section <-> of this Agreement.

Canadian Cloud will use the Customer Data strictly as necessary to carry out its obligations under this Agreement, and for no other purpose.

Which one do you think respects your confidential information?

Wally.

Wally Kowal is the president and founder of Canadian Cloud Computing

There are 20,000 attendees this year, with over 100 different sessions covering all things VMware.  It is an astounding organizational effort, and VMware and its co-sponsors should be congratulated on putting on such a great event.

But the reason we’re here is learn, so the days are busy with one session after another.

VMware has put a lot of effort into building their partner ecosystem, to the point where over 1/3 of the attendees this year are partners.  While most of these are systems integrators and re-sellers, a fair number of them are service provider partners.

There are 10 US-based VMware-based cloud service providers exhibiting at the show, and many more attending the general sessions. At one session, I learned that New Zeland, with a population of 4.5 million, has over 20 IaaS service providers.

I was embarrassed to admit that despite a population of 34 million, you can count the number of Canadia IaaS cloud service providers on one hand.

VMware sponsored an after-hours party for Canadians, and several hundred people showed up.  But most of these were end-users who use VMware to virtualize and manage their own internal IT infrastructure. Very few have what you can call an “private cloud”.

I keep wondering why Canadians are so reluctant when it comes to cloud computing.  We have seen first hand that cloud is a tough sell in many Canadian companies, but there is a growing number of companies looking to the cloud for business opportunities and operational efficiency.

When I worked in the early days of wireless, Canadians were considered years ahead of the US in both the business of wireless and in the adoption of cell phones.  We were often invited to talk at US mobile industry events to tell they what their future looked like.

Cloud computing seems to be the opposite.  We sit north of the board and gaze longingly at the diversity, growth and robustness of the US cloud business.

At Canadian Cloud Computing we’re not standing still waiting.  We constantly learning and evolving our cloud, and we’ll be ready once Canadian companies start to see the benefits of cloud computing.

Wally.

Wally Kowal is the president and founder of Canadian Cloud Computing

This despite the fact that I was personally impacted by the outage. I was traveling on a family vacation and The Hyatt would not accept any of my credit cards on check-in.  I figured either their credit card system was down or the entire country of Canada and all our banks went bankrupt when I wasn’t looking.  It turns out that somewhere in their credit card clearing process, someone, somewhere, used Amazon and that link was down.  Interestingly, the hotel’s WiFi service was also down.

Last week Amazon had two more outages; one at their Virginia data center and one at their Irish data center.  Both were crazy coincidences that had knowledgeable technical types shaking their heads at the vicissitudes of life.

Once again, I resisted the urge to score points at a competitor’s misfortune.

After all, you never want to taunt the the evil god of IT operations.  That can come back to bite you when you least expect it

In all three cases major customer-facing web services went down, affecting millions of users.  The sheer scale of Amazon’s platform virtually guarantees that any outage will have a huge affect on Internet users. NetFlix, Reddit and Foursquare all went down, along with innumerable smaller services.

It was with a similar sense of helplessness that I completely understood Amazon’s position when I got the dreaded call – both our primary and backup firewalls are down and the Trusted Canadian Cloud was off the air.  Gone. Nada. Zip. Zero.

Out team was all over it.  We were on the phone with the manufacturer’s Premium Support team. We were logged on to the console. We were standing in front of the offending equipment cycling the power.  We were looking for ways around, under or through the problem.

We eventually got the problem fixed, made sure all our customers were up, and then started the post mortem. The root cause analysis suggested that the problem never should never have happened the way it did. Comforting to hear but it still happened!

A few days later another customer called and reported some problems.  We got them working but were unable to determine the root cause. The next day we found a yellow light on the console of our primary storage array.

I may not be a techno-geek, but even I know that a red light is very bad and a yellow light is almost as bad. Somewhere, something is not right.

The team scrambled to find out what was happening.  Once we figured that out we moved the affected customers to another storage array to fix the offending hardware. Crisis averted with limited customer impact.

I completely forgot that bad news comes in threes.

Late Saturday afternoon came another crisis, one for which we had no easy solution: the Primus network was down and we were off the air again.  This one was completely out of our hands so all we could do was sit back and watch.

Primus eventually fixed their problem and we were back on the air shortly after.

This was a very humbling time for all of us.  We learned a lot about our platform, our processes, and ourselves.

We’ve already implemented some new monitoring and processes that will hopefully lead to faster problem detection, quicker reaction and proactive customer communication.  We’re also looking into moving forward some platform enhancements that will make us more stable and reliable.

And we learned our lesson about reliability: no matter how hard you try, stuff happens and you have to deal with it!

The best part, in fact the only positive part, was the reaction of one of our customers when I recounted this story.  He smiled and said “That’s great. At least I didn’t have to deal with those problems: that was your team’s job.”

I guess it all depends on your perspective.

Wally.

Wally Kowal in the president and founder of Canadian Cloud Computing

One of the most cherished start-up concepts is “the pivot”. A smart and flexible entrepreneur knows when it is time to change things up and send the company or product in a new direction. Sometimes it’s a matter or letting go a bad idea that just isn’t working. Sometimes it’s finding a better idea and going with that one. It’s a tough call to make.

A successful entrepreneur should create a team environment that fosters open communication and welcomes innovation and ideas. Do that right and the ideas will flow. The problem is that not all ideas are good ones: sometimes they are based on flawed or incomplete knowledge. Keeping the ideas flowing while batting down the bad ideas is difficult task that can take years to master.

Many salespeople take to heart the mantra “the customer is always right”. Because they are outward-focused and meeting a lot of prospects (or at least they should be!), salespeople also come back with lots of ideas.

In an evolving early-stage market like cloud computing, though, the customer often is not right.

One of cloud computing’s challenges, and its opportunities, is the lack of clarity around it. Ask four people what the cloud is and you’re likely to get five different answers.

I always use the example of four blind people describing an elephant by touching the part of the elephant in front of them. Is it a rope-like thing that swishes, or a thick tree trunk, or a hairy wall, or a flexible hose that curls and waves around? The answer is yes to all; it just depends on where you’re standing.

As we reach out to small and medium sized organizations across Canada, the U.S., and indeed the world, we get asked for a lot of different cloud services. To the question “Do you do …?”, the knee-jerk reaction is always “Yes!”

A small company cannot afford to turn away business. But neither can it afford be all things to all people. “We specialize in everything” is not only illogical, it is also a recipe for disaster.

So sometimes we just have to say “No”. Or perhaps the better answer is “not right now”.

We also ask “What?” and “Why?”, because sometimes when enough customers ask for a service, maybe you should offer that service.

Building a cloud platform and selling a cloud computing service is a never-ending learning process, and in that process you also sometimes say “Yes!”

Wally.
Wally Kowal is founder and president of Canadian Cloud Computing

You’ve got to be kidding!

I know that good news doesn’t sell newspapers, and that very few journalists understand the intricacies of technology, but this is way out of control.

The authors state, usually with breathless excitement, that companies that move to the cloud will suffer the same fate as Sony.  They suggest that cloud computing is not secure, and that its scale will guarantee that hackers will attack the cloud first.

Sony got hacked because their systems were insecure.  They stored their customers’ data, including my own, by the way, in clear text on Internet-connected servers that were not updated.  That’s like leaving your front door open (not just unlocked) while you go away on a month-long vacation and then acting surprised when someone runs off with all your valuables.

“The cloud” is not insecure.  “Insecure systems” are insecure.  Whether that system is on the cloud or not is irrelevant.

Companies decide how secure their IT infrastructures are, not service providers.  I admit that a poorly-run service provider can compromise even a secure application, but isn’t it the customer who decides which service provider to use?  Shouldn’t that include a review of the service provider’s security?

At Canadian Cloud Computing we go to a lot of effort to secure our cloud.  If you are going to call your platform “The Trusted Canadian Cloud”, then you better make sure it can be trusted.

That’s why we use name brand firewall hardware.

That’s why we use WatSec to continuously poke holes at us to confirm that we haven’t overlooked any configuration issues.

That’s why we chose to locate our platform in a Class A data centre and not in our office’s back room.

That’s why we don’t charge an arm and a leg for basic security like VPN access.

If one of our customers wants to deploy an insecure application, then that’s their decision.  They’re just going to have to do it over our objections.

And that’s why not all clouds are insecure: some cloud providers care enough about our customers to insist that security is a core feature, not an optional feature.

If only the media understood that.

Wally.

Wally Kowal is founder and president of Canadian Cloud Computing

The best part of Canada 3.0 is the wide range of people that you get to meet.  The show attracts students, artists, media, entrepreneurs, government policy-makers, academics and even investors. There was an incredible number of video cameras there, both filming the event and showing off digital video applications.

Our booth was located right at the main entrance so we had lots of traffic.  Several people called us up after the show to say that they dropped by to say hello but were unable to get into our booth.  We highlighted our new logo and corporate identity, along with our cloud management platform.  We certainly have made a great deal of progress since our launch as a small start-up at Canada 3.0 2010 exactly one year ago.  A great deal of that was because of the hard work by the Canadian Cloud team.  That’s me, Phil, and Walter in the booth.  Brian and Stuart were there as well.

We also met several attendees and exhibitors who wanted to talk about partnering.  We were particularly pleased to meet John Tkaczewski from FileCatalyst, who provided the application that we are using to distribute the Canada 3.0 Road to Banff videos.  There are lots of companies out there with great applications that only need a home.  Our Trusted Canadian Cloud is a great platform on which to build and deploy your SaaS application.

We made the finals in the Road to Banff VC pitch-off competition but alas, did not win the grand prize of a trip to the Banff Venture Forum in September. Congratulations to Swiftmint, CleverU and Viafora for their wins and to all the other participants who made it such a great competition.  Thanks also go out to the many judges who listened to the fifty pitches and provided excellent feedback.

The only down side of such a busy show is that I didn’t get a chance to see many of the panel discussions.  I was really pleased to hear that “cloud” was thrown around a lot, along with “privacy” and “security”, because those are the foundations of our Trusted Canadian Cloud.

Congratulations to the organizers and volunteers who made Canada 3.0 2011 such a great success.

Wally.

Wally Kowal is founder and president of Canadian Cloud Computing