Category Archives: Cloud computing

Cloud computing, Featured, hybrid cloud, IaaS, IT Management, Journey to the Cloud, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

A Guide to Successful Cloud Adoption

Last week, I met with a number of our top clients near the GreenPages HQ in Portsmouth, NH at our annual Summit event to talk about successful adoption of cloud technologies. In this post, I’ll give a summary of my cloud adoption advice, and cover some of the feedback that I heard from customers during my discussions. Here we go…

The Market for IT Services

I see compute infrastructure looking more and more like a commodity, and that there is intense competition in the market for IT services, particularly Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

  1. “Every day, Amazon installs as much computing capacity in AWS as it used to run all of Amazon in 2002, when it was a $3.9 billion company.” – CIO Journal, May 2013
  2. “[Amazon] has dropped the price of renting dedicated virtual server instances on its EC2 compute cloud by up to 80 percent […]  from $10 to $2 per hour…” – ZDNet,  July 2013
  3. “…Amazon cut charges for some of its services Friday, the 25th reduction since its launch in 2006.” – CRN, February 2013

I think that the first data point here is absolutely stunning, even considering that it covers a time span of 11 years. Of course, a simple Google search will return a number of other similar quotes. How can Amazon and others continue to drop their prices for IaaS, while improving quality at the same time? From a market behavior point of view, I think that the answer is clear – Amazon Web Services and others specialize in providing IaaS. That’s all they do. That’s their core business. Like any other for-profit business, IaaS providers prefer to make investments in projects that will improve their bottom line. And, like any other for-profit business, those investments enable companies like AWS to effectively compete with other providers (like Verizon/Terremark, for example) in the market.

Register for our upcoming webinar on 8/22 to learn how to deal with the challenges of securely managing corporate data across a broad array of computing platforms. 

With network and other technologies as they are, businesses now have a choice of where to host infrastructure that supports their applications. In other words, the captive corporate IT department may be the preferred provider of infrastructure (for now), but they are now effectively competing with outside IaaS providers. Why, then, would the business not choose the lowest cost provider? Well, the answer to that question is quite the debate in cloud computing (we’ll put that aside for now). Suffice to say that we think that internal corporate IT departments are now competing with outside providers to provide IaaS and other services to the business and that this will become more apparent as technology advances (e.g., as workloads become more portable, network speeds increase, storage becomes increasingly less costly, etc.).

Now here’s the punch line and the basis for our guidance on cloud computing; how should internal corporate IT position itself to stay competitive? At our annual Summit event last week, I discussed the progression of the corporate IT department from a provider of technology to a provider of services (see my whitepaper on cloud management for detail). The common thread is that corporate IT evolves by becoming closer and closer to the requirements of the business – and may even be able to anticipate requirements of the business or suggest emerging technology to benefit the business. To take advantage of cloud computing, one thing corporate IT can do is source commodity services to outside providers where it makes sense. Fundamentally, this has been commonplace in other industries for some time – manufacturing being one example. OEM automotive manufacturers like GM and Ford do not produce the windshields and brake calipers that are necessary for a complete automobile – it just isn’t worth it for GM or Ford to produce those things. They source windshields, brake calipers, and other components from companies who specialize. GM, Ford, and others are then left with more resources to invest in designing, assembling and marketing a product that appeals to end users like you and I.

So, it comes down to this: how do internal corporate IT departments make intelligent sourcing decisions? We suggest that the answer is in thinking about packaging and delivering IT services to the business.

GreenPages Assessment and Design Method

So, how does GreenPages recommend that customers take advantage of cloud computing? Even if you are not considering external cloud at this time, I think it makes sense to prepare your shop for it. Eventually, cloud may make sense for your shop even if, at this time, there is no fit for it. The guidance here is to take a methodical look at how your department is staffed and operated. ITIL v2 and v3 provide a good guide here of what should be examined:

  • Configuration Management
  • Financial Management
  • Incident and Problem Management
  • Change Management
  • Service Level and Availability, and Service Catalog Management
  • Lifecycle Management
  • Capacity Management
  • Business Level Management

 

Assigning a score to each of these areas in terms of repeatability, documentation, measurement, and continuous improvement will paint the picture of how well your department can make informed sourcing decisions. Conducting an assessment and making some housekeeping improvements where needed will serve two purposes:

  1. Plans for remediation could form one cornerstone of your cloud strategy
  2. Doing things according to good practice will add discipline to your IT department – which is valuable regardless of your position on cloud computing at this time

When and if cloud computing services look like a good option for your company, your department will be able to make an informed decision on which services to use at which times. And, if you’re building an internal private cloud, the processes listed above will form the cornerstone of the way you will operate as a service provider.

Case Study: Service Catalog and Private Cloud

Implementing a Service Catalog, corporate IT departments can take a solid first step to becoming a service provider and staying close to the requirements of the business. This year at VMworld in San Francisco, I’ll be leading a session to present a case study of a recent client that did exactly this with our help. If you’re going to be out at VMworld, swing by and listen in to my session!

 

 

Free webinar on 8/22: Horizon Suite – How to Securely Enable BYOD with VMware’s Next Gen EUC Platform.

With a growing number of consumer devices proliferating the workplace, lines of business turning to cloud-based services, and people demanding more mobility in order to be productive, IT administrators are faced with a new generation of challenges for securely managing corporate data across a broad array of computing platforms. 

 

Cloud computing, Collaboration, Featured, IT Management, Unified Communications

Cloud Corner Series – Unified Communications in the New IT Paradigm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHp6Q5RMMR8

 

In this segment of Cloud Corner, former CEO of Qoncert, and new GreenPages-LogicsOne employee, Lou Rossi answers questions around how unified communications fits into the new IT paradigm moving forward.

We’ll be hosting a free webinar on 8/22: How to Securely Enable BYOD with VMware’s Next Gen EUC Platform. Register Now!

Cloud computing, Gigaom, Revenue

Predict Cloud Revenue With This One Simple Trick

We’ve all seen the ads touting “one simple/crazy trick” to lower your insurance (or weight, or electric bill, or whatever). Now GigaOm has it’s own variant for cloud vendors to predict annual revenue:

Just take your July revenue and multiply it by 12.  Or if you want to get even trickier, take your daily revenue on July 15 and multiply it by 365.

They’re both embarrassingly simple, but surprisingly accurate. For a subscription business with a consistent trajectory, it’ll get you extremely close to the ultimate answer – usually within a couple percentage points.

There is more to it of course.

Cloud computing, Guest Post, hybrid cloud

Seeking Better IT Mileage? Take a Hybrid Out for a Spin

Guest Post by Adam Weissmuller, Director of Cloud Solutions at Internap

As IT pros aim to make the most efficient use of their budgets, there is a rapidly increasing range of infrastructure options at their disposal. Gartner’s prediction that public cloud spending in North America will increase from $2 billion in 2011 to $14 billion in 2016, and 451 Research’s expectation that colocation demand will outpace supply in most of the top 10 North American markets through 2014 are just two examples of the growing need for all types of outsourced IT infrastructure.

While public cloud services in particular have exploded in popularity, especially for organizations without the resources to operate their own data centers, a “one size fits all” myth has also emerged, suggesting that this is the most efficient and cost-effective option for all scenarios.

In reality, the public cloud may be the sexy new sports car – coveted for its horsepower and handling – but sometimes a hybrid model can be the more sensible approach, burning less gas and still getting you where you need to go.  It all depends on what kind of trip you’re taking. Or, put in data center terminology, the most effective approach depends on the type of application or workload and is often a combination of infrastructure services – ranging from public, private and “bare metal” cloud to colocation and managed hosting, as well as in-house IT resources.

The myth of cloud fuel economy
Looking deeper into the myth of “cloud costs,” as part of a recent “Data Center Services Landscape” report, Internap recently surveyed 100 IT decision makers to gain a cross-sectional view into their existing current and future use of IT infrastructure. Almost 65 percent of respondents said they are considering public cloud services, and 41 percent reported they are doing so in order to reduce costs.

But when you compare the “all-in” costs of operating thousands of servers over several years in a well-run corporate data center or colocating in a multi-tenant data center against the cost of attaining that same capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis via public cloud, the cloud service will lose out nearly every time.

The fact that colocation can be more cost-efficient than cloud often comes as a surprise to organizations and is something of a dirty little secret within the IaaS industry. But for predictable workloads and core infrastructure that is “always on,” the public cloud is a more expensive option because the customer ultimately pays a premium for pay-as-you-go pricing and scalable capacity that they don’t need – similar to driving a gas-guzzling truck even when there’s nothing you need to tow.

Balancing the racecar handling of cloud with the safety of a family hybrid
This is not to suggest that cloud is without its benefits. Public cloud makes a lot of sense for unpredictable workloads. Enterprises can leverage it to expand capacity on-demand without incurring capital expenditures on new servers. Workloads with variable demand and significant traffic peaks and valleys, such as holiday shopping spikes for online retailers or a software publisher rolling out a new product, are generally well-suited for public clouds because the customer doesn’t pay for compute capacity that they don’t need or use on a consistent basis.

One of the biggest benefits of cloud services is agility. This is where the cloud truly shines, providing accessibility and immediacy to the end-user.  However, the need for a hybrid approach also arises here, when agility comes at the expense of security and control. For example, the agility vs. control challenge is often played out in some version of the following use case:  A CIO becomes upset when she finds out that employees within most of the company’s business units are leveraging public cloud services – without her knowledge. This is especially unsettling, given that she has just spent millions of dollars building two new corporate data centers that were only half full. Something has gone wrong here, and it’s related to agility.

A major contributing factor to the surprise popularity of public cloud services is the perceived lack of agility of internal IT organizations. For example, it’s not uncommon for it to take IT executives quite some time to turn up new servers in corporate data centers. And this isn’t necessarily the fault of IT since there are a number of factors that can, and often do, present roadblocks, such as the need to seek budgetary approval, place orders, get various sign-offs, install the servers, and finally release the infrastructure to the appropriate business units – a process that can easily take several months. As a result, employees and business units often begin to side-step IT altogether and go straight to public cloud providers, corporate credit card in hand, in an effort to quickly address IT issues. The emergence of popular cloud-based applications made this scenario a common occurrence, and it illustrates perfectly how the promise of agility can end up pulling the business units toward the public cloud – at the risk of corporate security.

The CIO is then left scrambling to regain control, with users having bypassed many important processes that the enterprise spent years implementing. Unlike internal data centers or colocation environments, with a public cloud, enterprises have little to no insight into the servers, switches, and storage environment.

So while agility is clearly a big win for the cloud, security and control issues can complicate matters. Again, a hybrid, workload-centric approach can make sense. Use the cloud for workloads that aren’t high security, and consider the economics of the workload in the decision, too. Some hybrid cloud solutions even allow enterprises to reap the agility benefits of the cloud in their own data center – essentially an on-premise private cloud.

As businesses continue to evolve, it will be critical to go beyond the industry’s cloud hype and instead build flexible, centrally-managed architectures that take a workload-centric approach and apply the best infrastructure environment to the job at hand. Enterprises will find such a hybrid solution is usually of greater value than the sum of its individual parts.

Carpooling with “cloudy colo”
One area that has historically been left out of the hybridization picture is colocation. While organizations can already access hybridized public and private and even “bare metal” cloud services today, colocation has always existed in a siloed environment, without the same levels of visibility, automation and integration with other infrastructure that are often found in cloud and hosting services.

But these characteristics are likely to impact the way colocation services are managed and delivered in the future. Internap’s survey found strong interest in “cloudy colo” – colocation with cloud-like monitoring and management capabilities that provides remote visibility into the colocation environment and seamless hybridization with cloud and other infrastructure, such as dedicated and managed hosting.

Specifically, a majority of respondents (57 percent) cited interest in hybrid IT environments; and, combined with 72 percent of respondents expressing interest in hybridizing their colocation environment with other IT infrastructure services via an online portal, the results show strong emerging interest in data center environments that can support hybrid use cases as well as unified monitoring and management via a “single pane of glass.”

Driving toward a flexible future
A truly hybrid architecture – one that incorporates a full range of infrastructure types, from public and private cloud to dedicated and managed hosting, and even colocation – will provide organizations with valuable, holistic insight and streamlined monitoring and management of all of their resources within the data center, as well as consolidated billing.

For example, through a single dashboard, organizations could perform tasks, such as: remotely manage bandwidth, inventory, and power utilization for their colocation environment; rapidly move a maturing application from dedicated hosting to colocation; turn cloud services up and down as needed or move a cloud-based workload to custom hosting. Think of it as your hybrid’s in-car navigation system with touchscreen controls for everything from radio to air conditioning to your rear view camera.

The growing awareness of the potential benefits of hybridizing IT infrastructure services reflects the onset of a shift in how cloud, hosting and even colocation will be delivered in the future. The cloud model, with its self-service features, is one of the key drivers for this change, spurring interest among organizations in maximizing visibility and efficiency of their entire data center infrastructure ecosystem.

AdamWeissmuller

Adam Weissmuller is the Director of Cloud Solutions at Internap, where he led the recent launch of the Internap cloud solution suite. A 10-year veteran of the hosting industry, he recently presented on “Overcoming Latency: The Achilles Heel of Cloud Computing” at Cloud Expo West.

Cloud computing, Deutsche Börse, Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange AG, Storage

Deutsche Börse Launching Cloud Capacity Trading Exchange

Deutsche Börse says it will launch a trading venue for outsourced cloud storage and cloud computing capacity in the beginning of 2014. Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange AG is a new joint venture formed together with Berlin-based Zimory GmbH to create the first “neutral, secure and transparent trading venue” for cloud computing resources.

The primary users for the new trading venue will be companies, public sector agencies and also organisations such as research institutes that need additional storage and computing resources, or have excess capacity that they want to offer on the market.

“With its great expertise in operating markets, Deutsche Börse is making it possible for the first time to standardise and trade fully electronically IT capacity in the same way as securities, energy and commodities,” said Michael Osterloh, Member of the Board of Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange.

cloud brokerage, Cloud computing, cloud governance, Data center, Featured, IT Management, Journey to the Cloud

What’s Missing from Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Brokerage and Governance

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

Recently GreenPages and our partner Gravitant hosted a webinar on Cloud Service Broker technology. Senior Analyst Dave Bartoletti gave a preface to the webinar with Forrester’s view on cloud computing and emerging technology. In this post we’ll give some perspective on highlights from the webinar. In case you missed it, you can also watch a replay of the webinar here: http://bit.ly/12yKJrI

Ben Tao, Director of Marketing for Gravitant, kicks off the discussion by describing the traditional data center sourcing model. Two key points here:

  1. Sourcing decisions, largely based on hardware selection, are separated by years
  2. In a cloud world, sourcing decisions can be separated by months or even weeks

 

The end result is that cloud computing can drive the benefit of a multi-sourcing model for IT, where sourcing decisions are made in close proximity to the use of services. This has the potential of enabling organizations to adjust their sourcing decisions more often to best suit the needs of their applications.

Next, Dave Bartoletti describes the state of cloud computing and the requirements for hybrid cloud management. The core of Dave’s message is that the use of cloud computing is on the rise, and that cloud is being leveraged for more and more complex applications – including those with sensitive data.

Dave’s presentation is based on the statement, “what IT must do to deliver on the hybrid cloud promise…”

Some key points here:

  • Cloud is about IT services first, infrastructure second
  • You won’t own the infrastructure, but you’ll own the service definitions; take control of your own service catalog
  • The cloud broker is at the center of the SaaS provider, cloud VAR, and cloud integrator
  • Cloud brokers can accelerate the cloud application lifecycle

 

Dave does an excellent job of explaining the things that IT must do in order to deliver on the hybrid cloud promise. Often, conversations on cloud computing are purely about technology, but I think there’s much more at stake. For example, Dave’s first two points above really resonate with me. You can also read “cloud computing” as ITIL-style sourcing. Cloud computing puts service management back in focus. “Cloud is about IT services first, infrastructure second,” and “You won’t own the infrastructure […]” also suggests that cloud computing may influence a shift in the makeup of corporate IT departments – fewer   core technologists and more “T-shaped” individuals. So called T-shaped individuals have knowledge and experience with a broad set of technologies (the top of the “T”), but have depth in one or more areas like programming, Linux, or storage area networking. My prediction is that there will still be a need for core technologists; but that some of them may move into roles to do things like define customer-facing IT services. For this reason, our CMaaS product also includes optional services to deal with this type of workforce transformation. This is an example of a non-technical item that must be made when considering cloud computing. Do you agree? Do you have other non-technical considerations for cloud computing?

Chris Ward, CTO of LogicsOne, then dives in to the functionality of the Cloud Management as a Service, or CMaaS offering. The GreenPages CMaaS product implements some key features that can be used to help customers advance to the lofty points that Dave suggests in his presentation. CMaaS includes a cloud brokerage component and a multi-cloud monitoring and management component. Chris details some main features from the brokerage tool, which are designed to address the key points that Dave brought up:

  • Collaborative Design
  • Customizable Service Catalog
  • Consistent Access for Monitoring and Management
  • Consolidated Billing Amongst Providers
  • Reporting and Decision Support

Chris then gives an example from the State of Texas and the benefits that they realized from using cloud through a broker. Essentially, with the growing popularity of e-voting and the use of the internet as an information resource on candidates and issues, the state knew the demand for IT resources would skyrocket on election day. Instead of throwing away money to buy extra infrastructure to satisfy a temporary surge in demand, Texas utilized cloud brokerage to seamlessly provision IT resources in real time from multiple public cloud sources to meet the variability in demand.

All in all, the 60-minute webinar is time well spent and gives clients some guidance to think about cloud computing in the context of a service broker.

To view this webinar in it’s entirety click here or download this free whitepaper to learn more about hybrid cloud management

 

Cloud computing, Featured, RIM, Virtualization

How RIM Can Improve Efficiency and Add Value To Your IT Ops

This is a guest post from Chris Joseph, VP, Product Management & Marketing, NetEnrich

 

Cloud, virtualization and hybrid IT technologies are being used in small and large IT enterprises everywhere to both modernize, and achieve business goals and objectives. As such, a top concern for today’s IT leaders is whether the investments being made in these technologies are delivering on the promise of IT modernization. Another concern is finding ways to free up IT funds currently spent on routine maintenance of IT infrastructure, so that they can invest in these new and strategic IT modernization projects.

Don’t Waste Time, Money and Talent on Blinking Lights

Everyone knows that IT organizations simply can’t afford to have a team of people dedicated to watching for blinking lights and waiting for something to fix.  It’s a waste of talent and will quickly burn through even the most generous of IT budgets. Yet, according to a Gartner study, 80% of an enterprise IT budget is generally spent on routine IT, while only 20% is spent on new and strategic projects.

If this scenario sounds familiar, then you may want to consider taking a long and hard look at third-party Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) services for your IT infrastructure management. In fact, RIM services have been shown to reduce spending on routine IT operations by 30-40%, but how is this possible?

(1)     First of all, RIM services rationalize, consolidate and integrate the tools that are used to power the functionality of the monitoring and management of IT infrastructure within an enterprise.  According to Enterprise Management Associates, a leading IT and data management research and consulting firm, a typical enterprise has nearly 11 such tools running in its environment, and these typically include IT Operations Management (ITOM) tools and IT Service Management (ITSM) tools. As any IT professional can attest to, while there is significant overlap, some of these tools tend to be deficient in their capabilities, and they can be a significant source of noise and distraction, especially when it comes to false alerts and tickets. Yet, through RIM, IT organizations can eliminate many of these tools and consolidate their IT operations into a single pane of glass view, which can result in significant cost savings.

(2)     Secondly, by leveraging RIM, IT teams can be restructured and organized into shared services delivery groups, which can result in better utilization of skilled resources, while supporting the transformation of IT into a new model that acts as a service provider to business units.  Combine these elements of RIM with remote service delivery, and not only will you improve economies of scale and scope, but you will also promote cost savings.

(3)     Thirdly, RIM services consistently look to automation, analytics, and best practices to promote cost savings in the enterprise. Manual processes and runbooks are not only costly, but also time consuming and error prone. Yet, to automate processes effectively, IT organizations must rely on methodologies, scripts, and tools. This is where RIM comes into play. In fact, within any enterprise, 60-80% of manual processes and runbooks can easily be automated with RIM.

Download this free whitepaper to learn how to avoid focusing on ”keeping the lights on” to allow your team to focus on strategic initiatives

Beyond Cost Savings and Greater Efficiency: Building a Case for RIM

In addition to reducing routine spending and improving the efficiency of your IT operations, there are several other benefits to leveraging third-party RIM services:

  • 24×7 IT operations support.  Third-party RIM services often provide 24×7 IT ops support.  IT organizations benefit from around the clock monitoring and management of their IT infrastructures without additional headcount, or straining internal resources, which saves operating costs.
  • Be the first to know. 24×7 IT operations support means that you are always the first to know when customer-facing IT systems such as the company’s website, online shopping portal, mobile apps and cloud-based solutions go down. And, the issue is resolved in many cases by RIM services teams before the end-user has time to notice.
  • Skills and expertise. Third-party RIM services can provide your IT organization with certified engineers in various IT infrastructure domains. These engineers are responsible for monitoring, alerting, triaging, ticketing, incident management, and the escalation of critical outages or errors to you and your IT staff, if they cannot be immediately resolved. In addition, they may also be available on an on-demand basis if you are looking for skills and expertise in a specific domain.

The bottom line: by leveraging RIM services, IT organizations like yours can not only enhance their service capabilities and bolster service levels, but they can also can say goodbye to the fire drills and late night calls that plague your IT staff.  Proactive management of your IT infrastructure through RIM ensures that it is always running at peak performance.

To hear more from Chris, visit the NetEnrich blog

To learn more about how GreenPages can help you monitor and manage your IT Operations fill out this form

Cloud computing, cloud management, Featured, hybrid cloud

Part 2: Want to Go Cloud? What’s the Use Case?

By Lawrence Kohan, Senior Consultant, LogicsOne

 

Recap:

In Part 1 of this blog post, I started by reiterating the importance of having a strategy for leveraging the Cloud before attempting to migrate services to it in order to achieve the best results.  Using an example use case, I showed the basic pros and cons of considering moving a company’s e-mail services to the Cloud.  Then, delving further into the additional factors to consider, based on the size and breadth of the company, I showed that in that particular scenario, that an e-mail migration to the Cloud would provide more benefit to small businesses and startups instead of medium to large enterprises; wherein such a migration may actually be more detrimental than helpful.

Use the Cloud to level the playing field!

Historically, a small business is typically at a disadvantage to their larger counterparts, as they generally have less capital to work with.  However, the Cloud Era may prove to be the great equalizer.  The nimbleness and portability of a small business may prove to be quite an advantage when it comes to reducing operating costs to give the small business a competitive edge.  A small business with a small systems footprint may be able to consider strategies for moving most—if not all—of their systems to the Cloud.  A successful migration would greatly reduce company overhead, administrative burden, and increased office space and real estate by repurposing decommissioned server rooms.  Thus, a small business is able to leverage the Cloud in a way to gain a competitive advantage in a way that is (most likely) not an option for a medium or large enterprise.

So, what is a good Cloud use case for a medium to large business?

The Cloud can’t be all things to all people.  However, the Cloud can be many things to many people.  While the enterprise may not have the same options as the small business, they still have many options available to them to reduce their costs or expand their resources to accommodate their needs in a cost-effective way.

Enterprise Use Case 1: Using IaaS for public website hosting

A good low-risk Cloud option that an enterprise can readily consider: moving non-critical, non-confidential informational data to the Cloud.  A good candidate for initial Cloud migration would be a corporate website with marketing materials or information about product or service offerings.  It is important that a company’s website containing product photos, advertising information, hours of operation and location and contact information is available 24/7 for customer and potential customer access.  In this case, the enterprise can leverage a Cloud Service Provider’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in order to host their website.  For a monthly service fee, the Cloud Service Provider will host the enterprise’s website on redundant, highly available infrastructure and proactively monitor the site to ensure maximum uptime.  (The enterprise should consider the Cloud Service Provider’s SLA when determining their uptime needs).

By this strategy, the enterprise is able to ensure maximum uptime for it important revenue-generating web materials, while offloading the costs associated with hosting and maintenance of the website.  At the same time, the data being presented online is not confidential in nature, so there is little risk in having it hosted externally.  This is an ideal use case of a Public Cloud.

In addition to the above, a Hybrid Cloud approach can also be adopted: the public-facing website could conduct e-commerce transactions by redirecting purchase requests to privately hosted e-commerce applications and customer databases that are secure and PCI compliant.  Thus, we have an effective, hybrid use of Cloud resources to leverage high availability, while still keeping confidential customer and credit card data secure and internally hosted. We’ll actually be hosting a webinar tomorrow with guest speakers from Forrester Research and Gravitant that will talk about hybrid cloud management. If you’re interested in learning more about how to properly manage your IT environment, I’d highly recommend sitting in.

Enterprise Use Case 2: Using Cloud Bursting to accommodate increased resource demands as needed

Another good Public Cloud use case: let’s say a company, operating at maximum capacity, has periodic or seasonal needs to accommodate spikes in workload.  This could either be increased demands on applications and infrastructure, or needing extra staff to perform basic clerical or administrative functions on a limited basis.  It would be a substantial investment to procure additional office space and computer hardware for limited use—not to mention the additional expenses of maintaining the hardware and office space.  In such a case, an enterprise using a Cloud Service Provider’s IaaS would be able to rapidly provision virtual servers and desktops that can be accessed via space-saving thinclients, or even remotely.  Once the project is completed, those virtual machines can be deleted.  Upon future need, new virtual machines could easily be provisioned in the same way.  And most importantly, the company only pays for what it needs, when it needs it.  This is another great way for an enterprise to leverage the Cloud’s elasticity to accommodate its dynamic needs!

Enterprise Use Case 3: Fenced testing environments for application development

Application teams often need to simulate production conditions for testing, while not effecting actual production.  When dealing with traditional hardware infrastructure, setting up a dedicated development infrastructure could be an expensive and time consuming proposition.  In addition, the Apps team may require many identical setups for multiple teams’ testing, or to simulate many scenarios using the same parameters such as IP and MAC addresses.  With traditional hardware setups, this is an extremely difficult task to achieve in a productive, isolated manner.  However, with Cloud services, such as VMware’s vCloud Suite, isolated fenced applications can be provisioned and mass-produced quickly for an Apps team’s use without affecting production, and then can be rapidly decommissioned as well.  In this particular example use case of the vCloud Suite, VMware’s Chargeback Manager can also be used to get a handle on the costs associated with development environment setup, which can then provide showback and chargeback reports to a department, organization, or other business entity.  This is yet another good example of an efficient and cost-effective use of the Cloud to solve a complex business need.

 

Consider your strategy first!  Then, use the Cloud to your advantage!

So, as we have seen, the Cloud offers various time-saving, flexible, efficient solutions, that can accommodate businesses of any size or nature.  However, the successful transition to the Cloud depends—more than anything else—on the initial planning and strategy that goes into its adoption.

Of course, there are many other options and variables to consider in a Cloud adoption strategy, such as choice of providers, consulting services, etc.  However, before even looking into the various Cloud vendors and options, start out by asking the important internal questions, first:

  • What are our business goals?
  • What are our intended use case(s) for the Cloud?
  • What are we looking to achieve from its use?
  • What is the problem that we are trying to solve?  (And is the Cloud the right choice for that particular problem?)
  • What type of Cloud service would address our need? (Public, Private, Hybrid?)
  • What is our timetable for transition to the Cloud?
  • What is our plan?  Is it feasible?
  • What is our contingency plan?  (How do we backup and/or back-out?)

When a company has solid answers for question such as the above, they are ready to begin their own journey to the cloud.

 

Last chance to register for tomorrow’s webinar on leveraging cloud brokerage. Speakers from GreenPages, Forrester Research, and Gravitant.

cloud brokerage, Cloud computing, cloud governance, Featured, IT Management, JIT, Journey to the Cloud

Is There Such a Thing as Just-In-Time IT?

By Praveen Asthana, Chief Marketing Officer, Gravitant

 

The concept of “Just-in-Time” was pioneered in the manufacturing supply chain as a critical way to reduce costs by minimizing inventory.   Implementing a just-in-time system that can handle unexpected demand is not a trivial undertaking.  It requires the confluence of a number of disciplines such as analytics, statistics, sourcing, procurement, production management, brokerage and economics.

An interesting new idea is to take this concept pioneered in manufacturing and apply it to Information Technology resources.  Doing this can provide an effective way to meet dynamically changing needs while minimizing the inventory of unused IT resources across a set of cloud services platform and providers.

Case Study:  Election Day 2012.

With the growing popularity of e-voting and use of the Internet as an information resource on candidates and issues, the Secretary of State’s office for one of the most populous U.S. states knew that demand for IT resources would go up significantly on election day.  But they didn’t know exactly how much, and they didn’t want to buy extra infrastructure for a temporary surge in demand.  Even if they could come up with a good guess for the demand, deploying the right amount of resources in a timely manner would be challenging.  Given the time it normally took (months) to deploy and provision new servers, the Secretary of State’s office knew they couldn’t use traditional means to procure compute and storage capacity to meet this demand.

As it turned out, demand went up over 1000% to over five million hits on the state voting web site by noon on Election Day.

Praveen

Fortunately the state had deployed a novel capability based on a cloud brokerage and management platform to seamlessly provision IT resources in real time from multiple public cloud sources to meet the variability in demand.  As a result, this demand was fully met without needing to do complicated planning or buy unneeded infrastructure. I’ll actually be speaking on a webinar with Chris Ward, CTO at GreenPages-LogicsOne and Dave Bartoletti, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research on June 12th to talk about leveraging cloud brokerage and the impact it can have on managing your IT environment.

Minutes, not months—that’s what enterprise users want when it comes to having I.T. resources available to meet changing business needs or develop new applications.

However users find this to be an extraordinary challenge—most IT departments today struggle with rigid processes, a round-robin of tasks and approvals across multiple silos and departments, and manual provisioning steps.  All this adds significant time to the deployment of I.T. resources resulting in users waiting for months before the resources they need become available.

How do users respond to such delays?  By going around their IT departments and directly accessing cloud services.  Often termed ‘rogue IT’ or ‘shadow IT,’ such out of process actions expose the company to financial risk, security risks, and operational risk.

The Solution: Just-in-time IT with Real-Time Governance

Just-in-time IT is not merely about using private or public cloud services.   It is about engineering the end-to-end IT supply chain so it can be agile and respond immediately to dynamic business needs.  To achieve this in practice, you need:

  1. Effective assessment and strategy
  2. Self-service catalog of available IT resources
  3. Collaborative solution design
  4. Rapid approval work flow
  5. Sourcing platform that allows you to select the right supply chain partners for your business need or workload profile.
  6. Single button provisioning of resources
  7. Transparency across the IT supply chain
  8. Sophisticated supply-demand analytics
  9. Elastic source for resources
  10. Governance—dynamic control of resources based on goal based optimization of budget, resource usage and SLAs.

 

The first critical aspect of real time supply chain is identifying, sourcing and procurement of best fit cloud platforms and providers (internal or external) to meet your unique business needs.

The second critical aspect of ensuring just-in-time IT is effective is real-time governance, for this is the mechanism by which you truly manage the elasticity of cloud resources and ensure that IT resource inventory is minimized.   This also has the additional benefit of eliminating shadow or rogue I.T.

As I mentioned above, if you’re interested in learning more on this topic I would highly recommend registering for the upcoming webinar “What’s Missing In Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage” being held on June 12th. This should be a great session and there will be time for Q & A at the end.

About the Author:

Praveen Asthana is Chief Marketing Officer of Gravitant (www.gravitant.com), a cloud services brokerage and management company.  Prior to joining Gravitant, Praveen was Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Dell’s $13B Enterprise Solutions Division.

Cloud computing, Featured, Journey to the Cloud, Virtualization

Want to Go Cloud? What’s the Use Case?

By Lawrence Kohan, Senior Consultant, LogicsOne

This is the first of a two-part blog series intended to provide practical, real world examples of when it makes sense to use the cloud and when it does not.

We’re well into an exciting new era in the technology world.  The buzz-words are flying around at light speeds, and talk of “Cloud” and “software-defined-everything” is all the rage.

Advances in virtualization, which allows software processes to be decoupled from underlying hardware is giving way to amazing possibilities for moving around workloads as needed, either between racks in a datacenter, or even between datacenters!  In addition, the concept of “Cloud” is very exciting in the possibilities is offers business to leverage these advances by being able to move workloads offsite for greater availability, redundancy, disaster recovery.

Indeed, the promise of the Cloud as a whole is to provide IT as a service.  It’s a way of offering companies resources on a metered usage basis, so that they can consume as needed, grow or reduce their resources as needed, and only pay on a per use basis for what they consume, as needed.  The hope is to free up a business and their IT staff from worrying about the mundane, daily details and repetitive administrative tasks and burdens of keeping the business functioning and allows them to be more strategic with their time and efforts.  In the Cloud Era, servers and desktops can be provisioned, configured, and deployed in minutes instead of weeks!  The time saved allows the business to focus on all other areas of the business to make it more profitable, such as their marketing and advertising strategies, application/website development, and the betterment of their product and services.

Cloudy Conditions Ahead

All of this sounds like a wonderful dream.  However, before jumping in, it is important to understand what the business goals are.  What is it you intend to get out of the Cloud?  How do you intend to leverage it to your best advantage?  These questions and answers must come first before any decision is made regarding software vendors or Cloud service providers to be used.  The promise of the Cloud is tremendous gains in efficiency, but only when it is adopted and utilized correctly.

 

Register for our upcoming free webinar on June 12th on what’s missing in hybrid cloud management today. Speakers include Chris Ward from GreenPages, Praveen Asthana from Gravitant, and David Bartoletti, a top analyst from Forrester Research.

 

To Host or Not to Host?

For starters, let’s look at a simple use case: Whether or not to host a company’s e-mail in the Cloud.

Pros:

  • Hosting email will be billed on a per-usage basis, either by number of user mailboxes, number of emails sent/received, or storage used.
  • Day-to-day administration, availability, fault tolerance, backups are all handled by the service provider.  Little administration is needed aside from creating user accounts and mailboxes.
  • Offsite-hosted email still has the same look-and-feel as on-premise email, and can be accessed remotely, in the same ways, from anywhere.  Most users don’t even know the difference!

Cons:

  • Company is subject to outages and downtime windows of the service provider.  (In such a case, as long as it is not an unplanned outage or disaster, steps should be taken to ensure continued e-mail delivery, but systems may be unavailable for periods of time, usually on weekends or overnight)
  • Initial migration and large data transfers can be an administrative burden.

There are factors that can either be positives or negatives depending on the business size and need.  For example, a small startup company with only several people needs to be extremely budget conscious.  In their case, it would certainly make more sense financially to outsource their e-mail for a monthly fee instead of looking to install and maintain their own internal email servers, which after hardware and software costs and licensing would cost 5 figures, not to mention needed at least one dedicated person to maintain it.  This is certainly not a cost-effective option for a small, young company trying to get off the ground.

 

Download this free whitepaper to learn more about how organizations can revolutionize the way it manages hybrid cloud environments.

 

At the same time, a very large enterprise with thousands of mailboxes may find the process of migration to be an expensive, time consuming administrative burden.  While offsite email would offer good availability and safeguards against system failure, perhaps even above and beyond what the enterprise currently utilizes, it is also a substantial risk; if the Cloud Provider has an outage that could affect the enterprise’s email access.  The same risk would apply to a small business as well; however, the smaller and more localized the business, the more likely they are to adapt to an e-mail outage and resume intra-office communications via secondary means—a contingency plan that is more difficult to act upon for a larger global enterprise.  And, yes, the enterprise that hosts e-mail internally has the same risk of an outage, however that enterprise can respond to an internal e-mail outage immediately and be able to ascertain how long the outage will be, instead of being at the mercy of the Cloud Provider’s timetable and troubleshooting efforts.

Therefore, in our sample “hosted e-mail” use case, it would make more sense for a smaller business to consider the option of moving e-mail services to the Cloud, and may not provide much value, if any, for the enterprise.

In the second part of this two-part blog series, I will cover when is a good time to utilize cloud for medium to large businesses. In the meantime, would love to hear your thoughts!

Webinar June 12th 11am-12pm EST “What’s Missing in Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage” Speakers from Forrester, GreenPages, and Gravitant. Register here!