Category Archives: cloud management

as-a-service, Cloud computing, cloud management, Companies, hybrid cloud, multicloud, Network, Platform as a service, Software as a service, Verizon

Verizon Business brings multi-cloud management solution to network-as-a-service offering

Verizon Business today announced Network as a Service (NaaS) Cloud Management, a new service that allows businesses to control application components and network architecture across multiple cloud environments – public, private and hybrid – all on one unified online portal. The new solution is designed to work with Verizon Business’ NaaS offering and vastly simplify multi-cloud… Read more »

The post Verizon Business brings multi-cloud management solution to network-as-a-service offering appeared first on Cloud Computing News.

cloud management, Featured, IT Management, Shadow IT

Guest Post: How to Regain Control Over the “Shadow IT” in Your Environment

Do you need to regain control of shadow IT in your environment? The use of cloud services is growing, and according to a recent Cisco/Intel Study, “The Impact of Cloud on IT Consumption Models,” the cloud occupies 23% of IT spend with respondents estimating that number will grow to 27% by 2016. Recent analyst reports also suggest that of the total cloud spend, Software-as-a-Service (Saas) alone could capture greater than half within the next few years.

shadow ITThese numbers are not surprising, considering growing demand from workers for the latest and greatest technologies and applications, that will enable them to do their jobs with greater ease, efficiency and flexibility than is possible using traditional computing tools and applications. Yet, as anyone working in IT can attest to, not everyone goes through the proper channels when it comes to procuring cloud services. This trend, often referred to as “shadow IT” is creating problems for IT organizations of all sizes as it makes it difficult to gain visibility into their entire infrastructure operations.

 

The fact is, the most tech-savvy employees figured out years ago how to get their hands on the applications they want and need – without IT’s blessing. With quick and easy access to public clouds, analytics, development, and collaboration tools via the Internet, it’s no wonder workers are purchasing and provisioning virtual machines (VMs) on public clouds, downloading apps, or even building their own apps using cloud-based tools, and deploying them on the cloud, with a simple click of a button.

As a result, many IT organizations are still in the dark about how many cloud apps they have running on their system. And, according NetSkope’s 2014 Cloud Report those numbers are on the rise with the average number of cloud apps per enterprise going from 397 in January 2014 to a whopping 579 in October 2014.

 

If You’ve Lost Control, You Are Not Alone

The effects of shadow IT are well-documented in the enterprise with recent research reports and industry surveys estimating that IT has effectively lost control of between 35% and 50% of the enterprise IT spend, with marketing, sales, accounting, HR and other departments regularly purchasing cloud services directly from cloud services providers – and completely bypassing the IT department during the purchasing process.

Yet, when major outages happen, or when these systems go down or troubleshooting is required, you know as an IT professional that your department will be called on to respond and mitigate for any system failures.

So what’s the fix? The first step is to find a way to regain control, not just over the spending, but how clouds and applications are provisioned and managed. This way, lines of accountability are made very clear.

One of the ways to do this is through by automating IT operations via a centralized dashboard. By having a single pane of glass view into your organizations entire IT operations, your team will be aware of where cloud VMs are being spun up, where applications are being used, who is using them, how much is being used, and how they are performing. This, in turn, will put IT back in the drivers seat and help eliminate the threat that your users’ “shadow IT” purchases are having on the business.

 

To learn more about how GreenPages can help you with automating your IT operations, watch this short video on our Cloud Management as a Service Infrastructure Operations offering

 

By Chris Joseph, VP, Product Management & Marketing, NetEnrich, Inc.

Cloud computing, cloud management, CMaaS, Featured

Modernizing IT by Killing the Transactional Treadmill

By Geoff Smith, Senior Manager, Managed Services, GreenPages-LogicsOne

Many IT departments today are unable to get off the transactional treadmill. You may have some serious talent in your IT department, but valuable, strategic IT assets are becoming bogged down with tactical actions. When this happens, IT cannot fulfill its true purpose: applying technology to enable business success. As an IT decision maker, you need to be providing IT with an effective, efficient, and modern way of addressing every day responsibilities so that internal focus can shift back to supporting crucial business objectives. I consistently see this issue when I’m out in the field speaking with customers. For this reason, I’m hosting a webinar on May 8th to go over some strategies your IT department can implement.

In this webinar you will learn ways to modernize IT operations and combine advanced management tools, mature operating procedures, and a skilled workforce to:

  • Build an Enterprise Command Center to effectively address and monitor the health and status of critical infrastructure systems
  • Leverage run books and Standard Operating Procedures to complete required actions and create consistency in approach
  • Establish a transparent co-sourced operational structure that promotes a culture of collaboration and joint responsibility for success
  • Create visibility and analytics that maximize availability and functionality of technology investments

If you’re interested in learning more, register here & bring your questions May 8th at 11 am EST.

 

 

Cloud computing, cloud management, Featured, hybrid cloud, IT Management, Journey to the Cloud, Saas

Cloud Spending Will Increase 1 Billion% by 2014

By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

It seems like every week a new study comes out analyzing cloud computing growth. Whether it’s that Public Cloud Services Spending will reach $47.4B in 2013, Global SaaS spending projected to grow from $13.5B in 2011 to $32.8B in 2016, the public cloud services market is forecast to grow 18.5 percent in 2013, or cloud spending at Dunder Mifflin will increase 200% by 2020, the indication is that cloud adoption and spending are on the rise. But how is that relevant to you?

Does it matter to the everyday CIO that cloud spending at midsized companies west of the Mississippi is going to increase by 15% over the next 3 years? The relevant question isn’t how much will cloud adoption and spending increase, but why will it do so? It’s the “why” that matters to the business. If you understand the why, it becomes easier to put context around the statistics coming out of these studies. It comes down to a shift in the industry – a shift in the economics of how a modern day business operates. This shift revolves around the way IT services are being delivered.

To figure out where the industry is going, and why spending and adoption are increasing, you need to look at where the industry has come from. The shift from on-premise IT to public cloud began with SaaS based technologies. Companies like Salesforce.com realized that organizations were wasting a lot of time and money buying and deploying hardware for their CRM solutions. Why not use the internet to be able to allow organizations to pay a subscription fee instead of owning their entire infrastructure? This, however, was not true cloud computing. Next came IaaS with Amazon’s EC3 initiative. Essentially, Amazon realized it had excess compute capacity and decided to rent it out to people who needed the extra space. IaaS put an enormous amount of pressure on corporate IT because App Dev. teams no longer had to wait weeks or months to test and deploy environments. Instead, they could start up right away and become much more efficient. Finally, PaaS came about with initiatives such as Microsoft Azure.

{Free ebook: The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department}

The old IT paradigm, or a private cloud environment, consists of organizations buying hardware and software and keeping it in their datacenter behind their own firewalls. While a private cloud environment doesn’t need to be fully virtualized, it does need to be automated and very few organizations are actually operating in a true private cloud environment. Ideally, a true private cloud environment is supposed to let internal IT compete with public cloud providers by providing a similar amount of speed and agility that a public cloud allows. While the industry is starting to shift towards public cloud, the private cloud is not going away. Public cloud will not be the only way to operate IT, or even the majority of the way, for a long time. This brings us to the hybrid cloud computing model; the direct result of this shift. Hybrid cloud is the combination of private and public cloud architectures. It’s about the ability to be able to seamlessly transition workloads between private and public, or, in other words, moving on-premise workloads to rented platforms where you don’t own anything in order to leverage services.

So why are companies shifting towards a hybrid cloud model? It all comes down to velocity, agility, efficiency, and elasticity. IT delivery methodology is no longer a technology discussion, but, rather, it’s become a business discussion. CIOs and CFOs are starting to scratch their heads wondering why so much money is being put towards purchasing hardware and software when all they are reading about is cloud this and cloud that.

{Free Whitepaper: Revolutionizing the Way Organizations Manage Hybrid Cloud Environments}

The spending and adoption rates of cloud computing are increasing because the shift in the industry is no longer just talk – it’s real and it’s here now. The bottom line? We’re past hypothetical discussions. There is a major shift in the industry that business decision makers need to be taking seriously. If you’re not modernizing your IT operations by moving towards a hybrid cloud model, you’re going to be missing out on the agility and cost savings that can give your organization a substantial competitive advantage.  This is why cloud adoption and spending are on the rise. This is why you’re seeing a new study every month on the topic.

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 computing, cloud management

Complicating Cloud- Yes You Can, But No You Shouldn’t

By Ben Sawyer, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

As a software engineer it is very easy to, well, over-engineer something.  But, just because you *can* do something doesn’t mean you *should* do something.  For example, I can get a tattoo but I shouldn’t.  That being said, I did get a tattoo a while back so don’t judge me.  Okay, back to the point.  In these days, where for almost any project it’s hard to control scope, it’s very easy for an engineer to go above and beyond what is required because often times they will build something because they think it’s cool.  These ideas are often not vetted with the internal team or, even more tragically, the client.  And, while the idea may actually be great, the engineer has unknowingly increased the duration of the project significantly because, now, not only will time be used to implement some feature but more time is needed to test how that feature may affect the many other “known” features of a product or service.

There is no better example of simplicity than Apple.  Steve Jobs was fanatical about keeping its products as simple as possible.  If you think about it, the more features and moving parts a product has can very easily lead to more confusion.  There is a lot of up front work (a lot) that needs to be considered about how a user *should* (there’s that word again) use a product…in other words how to control their experience.  My 3-year old son was able to navigate his way around my iPhone in a matter of days so that speaks volumes to its usability.  My mom still calls me once a week with an iPhone question and that speaks to her age.

For anyone who builds a product or delivers a service, it is crucial to not only consider how someone should consume their product but also how they shouldn’t.  In other words, don’t let them shoot themselves in the foot (sorry Plaxico Burress).  In terms of configuring or customizing a piece of software, many have options that are grouped under a “Basic” or “Advanced” group.  The goal is to protect the users from themselves because if my mom ends up in the “Advanced” settings, I will most likely get a phone call in a matter of minutes (unless she’s managed to disable her phone).

So what does usability have to do with the cloud?  Lots.  As companies expand their datacenters, move some resources to the public cloud, and in general add more moving parts, it’s crucial to make sure all those products work together nicely and, if possible, are able to be managed as easily and in as few “places” as possible.  Think of the famous new buzzword, Single Pane of Glass.  That very phrase implies that there is a bunch of stuff going on under the covers which therefore necessitates having an easy place to control, monitor, and use all the moving parts.  Regardless of what products companies use, they need to make certain that it’s not just the guts and plumbing of the product that’s important, it’s how you may manage them. Simplicity is even more important as people move to the public cloud where in many cases a user has little control over the UI (user interface) which must be used to manage those resources.  That’s why it’s key to find a tool which can not only integrate with a company’s existing private infrastructure but also any one of the many public service providers out there.  Any large service provider will provide a public API (a way for your code to call their code) so that you can manipulate the underlying resources without having to use their front-end application.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a product out there that allowed people to monitor & manage their entire infrastructure from a single place?  Well, it just so happens there is…GreenPages’ Cloud Management as a Service solution, a.k.a., CMaaS.  This product takes all the hard work from thousands of hours of development & presents the abundance of information in a very easy to use interface.  But don’t be fooled by its simplicity; Steve Ballmer said the iPhone would never take off.  Appreciate the amount of work that went into understanding how someone would use it in addition to how someone could use it.  Bottom line…don’t be a Steve Ballmer.

 

To learn more about Cloud Management as a Service and the importance of hybrid cloud management in today’s IT landscape, download this free whitepaper. To contact us for more information on GreenPages CMaaS offering, click here!

Cloud computing, cloud management, Featured, hybrid cloud, Rogue IT

Cloud Corner Video- Keys to Hybrid Cloud Management

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIEGDZ30H2Q

 

GreenPages CEO Ron Dupler and LogicsOne Executive Vice President and Managing Director Kevin Hall sit down to talk about the current state of the cloud market, challenges IT decision makers are facing today in regards to hybrid cloud environments, as well as a revolutionary new Cloud Management as a Service Offering.

If you’re looking for more information on hybrid cloud management, download this free whitepaper.

 

Or, if you would like someone to contact you about GreenPages Cloud Management as a Service offering, fill out this form.

Cloud computing, cloud management

Breaking Down the Management Barriers to Adopting Hybrid Cloud Technologies

By Geoff Smith, Sr. Solutions Architect

It is inarguable that change is sweeping the IT industry.  Over the last five years a number of new technologies that provide huge technological advantages (and create management headaches) have been developed.  We have attempted to leverage these advances to the benefit of our organizations, while at the same time struggling with how to incorporate them into our established IT management methodologies.  Do we need to throw out our mature management protocols in order to partake in the advantages provided by these new technologies, or can we modify our core management approaches and leverage similar advances in management methodologies to provide a more extensible platform that enables adoption of advanced computing architectures?

Cloud computing is one such advance.  One barrier to adopting cloud as a part of an IT strategy is how we will manage the resources it provides us.  Technically, cloud services are beyond our direct control because we do not “own” the underlying infrastructure and have limited say in how those services are designed and deployed.  But are they beyond our ability to evaluate and influence?

There are the obvious challenges in enabling these technologies within our organizations.  Cloud services are provided by and managed by those whom we consume them from, not within our four-walled datacenter.  Users utilizing cloud services may do so outside of IT control.  And, what happens when data and service consumption crosses that void beyond our current management capabilities?

{Download this free whitepaper to learn more about GreenPages Cloud Management as a Service offering; a revolutionary way organizations can manage hybrid cloud environments}

In order to manage effectively in this brave new world of enablement, we must start to transition our methodologies and change our long-standing assumptions of what is critical.  We still have to manage and maintain our own datacenters as they exist today.  However, our concept of a datacenter has to change.  For one thing, datacenters are not really “centers” anymore. Once you leverage externally consumed resources as part of your overall architecture, you step outside of the physical and virtual platforms that exist within your own facilities.  A datacenter is now “a flexible, secure and measurable compute utility comprised of delivery mechanisms, consumption points, and all connectivity in between.”

And so, we need to change how we manage our IT services.  We need to expand our scope and visibility to include both the cloud services that are part of our delivery and connectivity mechanisms, and the end points used to consume our data and services.  This leads to a fundamental shift in daily operations and management.  Going forward, we need to be able to measure our service effectiveness end to end, even if in between they travel through systems not our own.

So the root question is, how do we accomplish this?  There are four distinct areas of change that we need to consider:

  • Tools – the toolsets we utilize to perform our management processes need to both understand these new technologies, and expand our end-to-end visibility and evaluation capabilities
  • Techniques – we need to modify the way we perform our daily IT functions and apply our organizational policies in order to consider the new computing platforms we will be consuming.  Our ability to validate, influence and directly control IT consumption will vary, however our underlying responsibilities to deliver effective and efficient services to our organizations should not
  • Talent – we are faced with adopting not only new technologies, but also new sets of responsibilities within our IT support organizations.  The entire lifecycle of IT is moving under the responsibility of the support organization.  We can develop the appropriate internal talent or we can extend our teams with external support organizations, but in either case the talent needed will expand in proportion to the capabilities of the platforms we are enabling
  • Transparency – the success of enabling new technologies will be gauged on how well those technologies meet business needs.  Through comprehensive analysis, reporting and auditing, IT will be able to demonstrate the value of both the technology decisions and the management structures

First and foremost, we must modify our concepts of what is critical to monitor and manage.  We need to be able to move our viewpoints from individual silos of technology to a higher level of awareness.  No longer can we isolate what is happening at the network layer from what is transpiring within our storage facilities.  The scope of what we are responsible for is expanding, and the key metrics are changing.  No longer is availability the key success factor.  Usability is how our teams will be judged.

In the past, a successful IT team may have strived for five 9s of availability.  In this new paradigm, availability is now a foundational expectation.  The ability of our delivered services to be used in a manner that enables the business to meet its objectives will become the new measuring stick.  Business units will define what the acceptable usability metrics are, basing them on how they leverage these services to complete their tasks.  IT will in fact be driven to meet these service level agreements.

Secondly, we have to enable our support teams to work effectively with these new technologies.  This is a multifaceted issue, consisting of providing the right tools, processes and talent.   Tools will need to expand our ability to view, interface and influence systems and services beyond our traditional reach.  Where possible, the tools should provide an essential level of management across all platforms regardless of where those services are delivered from (internal, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS).  Likewise, our processes for responding to, managing, and remediating events will need to change.  Tighter enforcement of service level commitments and the ability to validate them will be key.  Our staff will need to be authorized to take appropriate actions to resolve issues directly, limiting escalations and handoffs.  And we will need to provide the talent (internally or via partners) necessary to deliver on the entire IT lifecycle, including provisioning, de-provisioning and procurement.

Last, IT will be required to prove the effectiveness not only of their support teams, but also of the selection of cloud-based service providers.  Because we consume external services does not release us from the requirements of service delivery to our organizations.  Our focus will need to shift toward demonstrating that service usability requirements have been met.  This will require transparency between our internally delivered systems and our externally consumed services.

This is a transition, not a light-switch event.  And as such, our approach to management change must mirror that pace.  Our priorities and focus will need to shift in concert with our shift from delivered services toward consumed services.

Would you like to learn more about our Cloud Management as a Service offering? Fill out this form and we will get in touch with you shortly!

Cloud computing, cloud management, Featured

Getting Out of the IT Business

Randy Weis, Director of Solutions Architecture

Strange title for a blog from an IT solutions architect? Not really.

Some of our clients—a lumber mill, a consulting firm, a hospital—are starting to ask us how to get out of “doing IT.” What do these organizations all have in common? They all have a history of challenges in effective technology implementations and application projects leading to the CIO/CTO/CFO asking, “Why are we in the IT business? What can we do to offload the work, eliminate the capital expenses, keep operating expenses down, and focus our IT efforts on making our business more responsive to shifting demands and reaching more customers with a higher satisfaction rate?”

True stories.

If you are in the business of reselling compute, network, or storage gear, this might not be the kind of question you want to hear.

If you are in the business of consulting on technology solutions to meet business requirements, this is exactly the kind of question you should be preparing to answer. If you don’t start working on those answers, your business will suffer for it.

Technology has evolved to the point where the failed marketing terms of grid or utility computing are starting to come back to life—and we are not talking about zombie technology. Cloud computing used to be about as real as grid or utility computing, but “cloud” is no longer just a marketing term. We now have new, proven, and emerging technologies that actually can support a utility model for information technology. Corporate IT executives now are starting to accept that the new cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service is reliable (recent AWS outages not withstanding) predictable, and useful to a corporate strategy. Corporate applications still need to be evaluated for requirements that restrict deployment and implementation strategies–latency, performance, concerns over satisfying legal/privacy/regulatory issues, and so on. However, the need to have elastic, scalable, on-demand IT services that are accessible anywhere is starting to force even the most conservative executives to look at the cloud for offloading non-mission critical workloads and associated costs (staff, equipment, licensing, training and so on). Mission critical applications can still benefit from cloud technology, perhaps only as internal or private cloud, but the same factors still apply—reduce time to deploy or provision, automate workflow, scale up or down as dictated by business cycles, and push provisioning back out into the business (while holding those same units accountable for the resources they “deploy”).

Infrastructure as a service is really just the latest iteration of self-service IT. Software as a service has been with us for some time now, and in some cases is the default mode—CRM is the best example (e.g. Salesforce). Web-based businesses have been virtualizing workloads and automating deployment of capacity for some time now as well. Development and testing have also been the “low hanging fruit” of both virtualization and cloud computing. However, when the technology of virtualization reached a certain critical mass, primarily driven by VMware and Microsoft (at least at the datacenter level), then everyone started taking a second look at this new type of managed hosting. Make no mistake—IaaS is managed hosting, but New and Improved. Anyone who had to deal with provisioning and deployment at AT&T or other large colocation data centers (and no offense meant) knew that there was no “self-service” involved at all. Deployments were major projects with timelines that rivaled the internal glacial pace of most IT projects—a pace that led to the historic frustration levels that drove business units to run around their own IT and start buying IT services with a credit card at Amazon and Rack Space.

If you or your executives are starting to ask yourselves if you can get out of the day-to-day business of running an internal datacenter, you are in good company. Virtualization of compute, network and storage has led to ever-greater efficiency, helping you get more out of every dollar spent on hardware and staff. But it has also led to ever-greater complexity and a need to retrain your internal staff more frequently. Information Technology services are essential to a successful business, but they can no longer just be a cost center. They need to be a profit center; a cost of doing business for sure, but also a way to drive revenues and shorten time-to-market.

Where do you go for answers? What service providers have a good track record for uptime, customer satisfaction, support excellence and innovation? What technologies will help you integrate your internal IT with your “external” IT? Where can you turn to for management and monitoring tools? What managed services can help you with gaining visibility into all parts of your IT infrastructure, that can deal with a hybrid and distributed datacenter model, that can address everything from firewalls to backups? Who can you ask?

There is an emerging cadre of thought leaders and technologists that have been preparing for this day, laying the foundation, developing the expertise, building partner relationships with service providers and watching to see who is successful and growing…and who is not. GreenPages is in the very front line of this new cadre. We have been out in front with virtualization of servers. We have been out in front with storage and networking support for virtual datacenters. We have been out in front with private cloud implementations. We are absolutely out in front of everyone in developing Cloud Management As A Service.

We have been waiting for you. Welcome. Now let’s get to work.For more information on our Cloud Management as a Service Offering click here