Yes, I have been neglectful in keeping this blog updated. It's not for any lack of potential content, it's just the usual blogger excuse of busy, busy, busy.
EMC's recent announcement of the new RSA Cloud Trust Authority, though, is potentially impactful enough to SPs that it's worthy of making some time.
For some, I think it's going to be a big deal.
The Basics
It's pretty much an article of faith here at EMC that -- over time -- more and more IT services will be delivered by specialzed IT service providers, and less and less will be delivered in the traditional way by enterprise IT organizations.
But if that's the big rosy picture of the future, the battles are currently being fought out in the trenches. Enterprise IT organizations are notoriously reluctant to hand over important workloads to service providers.
Not surprisingly, it's not really about the facts. Generally speaking, SP specialists can do a better job than more enterprise IT groups: faster, better, cheaper, more responsive, etc. It's not hard to make those cases.
No, it's turning out to really be about "trust = visibility + control".
If I, the enterprise IT buyer, can have independent visibility and control into your SP environment, it'll be easier for me to trust you, the service provider.
The News
In case you missed it, as part of the recent RSA Conference, EMC (through RSA) announced their intention to offer "trust services" to enterprise IT buyers as they consider external SP IT services.
Ideall, you'd go read a recent post I did on it, but if you're busy, here it is in a nutshell: RSA will offer a growing suite of paid-for services, purchased by enterprise IT, than gives them visibility and control into the SP environment.
The SP Angle
Just about every SP I talk to that's trying to address enterprise IT requirements says the same thing: overcoming the "trust barrier" is currently one of the major obstacles that's holding the market back.
The current de-facto approach is to invest considerable time and effort during the sales cycle in establishing a basis for trust, usually through forming personal relationships.
That's an expensive proposition for any SP business model. If you think about it, it's also very expensive for the enterprise IT teams, who frequently want to use multiple SPs.
Quite frankly, I think this state of affairs is holding the market back. And, if you think about, no amount of personal relationship forming will address the concerns of truly important (hence valuable) workloads -- strong IT governance processes will see to that.
A Familiar Model
It doesn't take more than a few minutes of consideration that non-cloud trust authorities are already a fact of life. Here in Massachussets, when you buy a house, you use a specialized lawyer that gives you specific advice and offers certain protections. You use a certified home inspector that you pay for with your own money.
Financial departments use exernal auditors. Banks issue letters of credit between parties that don't know each other. The need for an independent third party who will -- for a fee -- provide specific trust mechanisms (mostly around visibility and control) are everywhere.
Keep in mind, though, this is very different than insurance against bad things potentially happening. That's a very different business altogether, and not being directly addressed by this sort of service.
Although, you'll have to admit, anyone considering writing a policy in this area will certainly be interested in this sort of trust authority service :)
The Expectation
We've convinced ourselves that there's an existing and fast-growing market for these "trust services". Before long, we won't be only one offering these sorts of services.
We also think that service providers who can use these services to overcome the "trust barrier" will enjoy very specific and substantial competitive advantages: lower cost of sales, lower costs of service delivery, strong differentiation vs. SPs that don't support at least one trust authority service, a lower risk profile as part of their business model, and so on.
The more I think about it from an SP perspective, the more I really like the idea.
The Reality
The first set of envisioned trust services are important, but necessarily somewhat limited. And there's going to be some initial up-front work to partner with SPs who want to support the service. Like with any new thing, it's going to be a bit bumpy to get things going by the middle of this year.
And, of course, there's going to be a lot of "splaining" to do with enterprise IT customers who haven't seen anything like this before: I expect all sorts of important hard-nosed questions around exactly what the services do, and what they don't do.
Although you can do some pre-selling ahead of actual service availability, that process really doesn't get into full swing until the service is stood up, a few SPs support it, and there's something to go touch.
Since it's very likely that RSA won't be the only vendor going after this opportunity, it's fair to expect others to jump in feet-first with a lot of noise and subsequent confusion. That's inevitable, but has the unfortunate side effect of partially delaying widepsread adoption while paying customers try to sort out the landscape.
Confused customers don't buy stuff, they wait.
That Being Said
All in all, I think this is a pretty important announcement as far as such tnings go. The more I talk with enterprise IT groups and SPs who want their business, the more it makes plain and obvious sense.
Already, we've had more than a few queries from SPs who want to know more. I don't think it'll be too long before we have our first early adopters out in the market.
So, I'd be interested in your opinion -- do you think that independent "trust services" will make a key difference for IT service providers?
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