Category Archives: hybrid cloud

cloud brokerage, Cloud computing, Featured, hybrid cloud, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Shadow IT

Managing Resources in the Cloud: How to Control Shadow IT & Enable Business Agility

 

In this video, GreenPages CTO Chris Ward discusses the importance of gaining visibility into Shadow IT and how IT Departments need to offer the same agility to its users that public cloud offerings like Amazon can provide.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AELrS51sYFY

 

 

If you would like to hear more from Chris, download his on-demand webinar, “What’s Missing in Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage”

You can also download this ebook to learn more about the evolution of the corporate IT department & changes you need to make to avoid being left behind.

 

 

 

Cloud computing, Featured, hybrid cloud, Public Cloud, Shadow IT

Have You Met My Friend, Cloud Sprawl?

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

 

With the acceptance of cloud computing gaining steam, more specific issues related to adoption are emerging. Beyond the big-show topics of self-service, security, and automation, cloud sprawl is one of the specific problems that organizations face when implementing cloud computing. In this post, I’ll take a deep dive into this topic, what it means, how it’s caused, and some options for dealing with it now and in the future.

Cloud Sprawl and VM Sprawl

First, what is cloud sprawl? Simply put, cloud sprawl is the proliferation of IT resources – that provide little or no value – in the cloud. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll consider cloud to be IaaS, and the resources to be individual server VMs. VM sprawl is a similar concept that happens when a virtual environment goes unchecked. In that case, it was common for an administrator, or someone with access to vCenter, to spin up a VM for testing, perform some test or development activity, and then forget about it. The VM stayed running, consuming resources, until someone or something identified it, determined that it was no longer being used, and shut it down. It was a good thing that most midsize organizations limited vCenter or console access to perhaps 10 individuals.  So, we solved VM sprawl by limiting access to vCenter, and by maybe installing some tools to identify little-used VMs.

So, what are the top causes of cloud sprawl? In IT operations terms, we have the following:

  • Self-service is a central advantage of cloud computing, and essentially cloud means opening up a request system to many users
  • Traditional IT service management (a.k.a. ITIL) is somewhat limited in dealing with cloud, specifically configuration management and change management processes
  • There remains limited visibility into the costs of IT resources, though cloud improves this since resource consumption ends up as a dollar amount on a bill…somewhere

How is Cloud Sprawl Different?

One of the main ideas behind cloud computing – and a differentiator between plain old virtualization and centralization – is the notion of self-service. In the language of VMware, self-service IaaS might be interpreted as handing out vCenter admin access to everyone in the company. Well, in a sense, cloud computing is kind of like that – anyone who wants to provision IaaS can go out to AWS and do just that. What’s more? They can request all sorts of things, aside from individual VMs. Entire platform stacks can be provisioned with a few clicks of the mouse. In short, users can provision a lot more resources, spend a lot more money, and cause a lot of problems in the cloud.

We have seen one of our clients estimate their cloud usage at a certain amount, only to discover that actual usage was over 10 times their original estimate!

In addition, cloud sprawl can go in different directions than plain old VM sprawl. Since there are different cloud providers out there, the proliferation of processes and automation becomes something to watch out for. A process to deal with your internal private cloud may need to be tweaked to deal with AWS. And it may need to be tweaked again to deal with another cloud provider. In the end, you may end up with a different process to deal with each provider (including your own datacenter). That means more processes to audit and bring under compliance. The same goes for tools – tools that were good for your internal private cloud may be completely worthless for AWS. I’ve already seen some of my clients filling their toolboxes with point solutions that are specific to one cloud provider. So, bottom line is that cloud sprawl has the potential to drag on resources in the following ways:

  1. Orphaned VMs – a lot like traditional VM sprawl, resulting in increased spend that is completely avoidable
  2. Proliferation of processes – increased overhead for IT operations to stay compliant with various regulations
  3. Proliferation of tools – financial and maintenance overhead for IT operations

 

Download John’s ebook “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department” to learn more

 

How Can You Deal with Cloud Sprawl?

One way to deal with cloud sprawl is to apply the same treatment that worked for VM sprawl: limit access to the console, and install some tools to identify little-used VMs. At GreenPages, we don’t think that’s a very realistic option in this day and age. So, we’ve conceptualized two new approaches:

  1. Adopt request management and funnel all IaaS requests through a central portalThis means using the accepted request-approve-fulfill paradigm that is a familiar concept from IT service management.
  2. Sync and discoverGive users the freedom to obtain resources from the supplier of their choosing, whenever and wherever they want. IT operations then discovers what has been done, and runs their usual governance processes (e.g., chargeback, showback) on the transactions.

Both options have been built in to our Cloud Management and a Service (CMaaS) platform. I see the options less as an “either/or” decision, and more of a progression of maturity within an organization. Begin with Option 2 – Sync and Discover, and move toward Option 1 – Request Management.

As I’ve written before, and I’ll highlight here again, IT service management practices become even more important in cloud. Defining services, using proper configuration management, change management, and financial management is crucial to operating cloud computing in a modern IT environment. The important thing to do now is to automate configuration and change management to prevent impeding the speed and agility that comes with cloud computing. Just how do you automate configuration and change management? I’ll explore that in an upcoming post.

See both options in action in our upcoming webinar on cloud brokerage and governance. Our CTO Chris Ward will cover:

  • Govern cloud without locking it down: see how AWS transactions can be automatically discovered by IT operations
  • Influence user behavior: see how showback reports can influence user behavior and conserve resources, regardless of cloud provider
  • Gain visibility into costs: see how IaaS costs can be estimated before provisioning an entire bill of materials

 

Register for our upcoming webinar being held on May 22nd @ 11:00 am EST. “The Rise of Unauthorized AWS Use. How to Address Risks Created by Shadow IT.

 

 

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, Featured, hybrid cloud, IT Management, IT operations, Journey to the Cloud

The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

 

Corporate IT departments have progressed from keepers of technology to providers of complex solutions that businesses truly rely on. Even a business with an especially strong core competency simply cannot compete without information systems to provide key pieces of technology such as communication and collaboration systems (e.g., email). Many corporate IT departments have become adept providers of technology solutions. We, at GreenPages, think that corporate IT departments should be recognized as providers of services. Also, we think that emerging technology and management techniques are creating an especially competitive market of IT service providers. Professional business managers will no doubt recognize that their internal IT department is perhaps another competitor in this market for IT services. Could the business choose to source their systems to a provider of services other than internal corporate IT?

IT departments large and small already have services deployed to the cloud. We think that organizations should prepare to deploy services to the cloud provider that meets their requirements most efficiently, and eventually, move services between providers to continually optimize the environment. As we’ll show, one of the first steps to enabling this Cloud Management is to use a tool that can manage resources in different environments as if they are running on the same platform. Corporate IT departments can prepare for cloud computing without taking the risk of moving infrastructure or changing any applications.

In this piece, I will describe the market for IT service providers, the progression of corporate IT departments from technology providers to brokers of IT services, and how organizations can take advantage of behavior emerging in the market for IT services. This is not a cookbook of how to build a private cloud for your company—this instead offers a perspective on how tools and management techniques, namely Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS), can be adopted to take advantage of cloud computing, whatever it turns out to become. In the following pages, we’ll answer these questions:

  1. Why choose a single cloud provider? Why not position your IT department to take advantage of any of them?
  2. Why not manage your internal IT department as if it is already a cloud environment?
  3. Can your corporate IT department compete with a firm whose core competency is providing infrastructure?
  4. When should your company seriously evaluate an application for deployment to an external cloud service provider? Which applications are suitable to deploy to the cloud?

 

To finish reading, download John’s free ebook

 

 

 

 

 

 

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, 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, 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.

hybrid cloud, IBM, M&A Activity, Private Cloud, SmartCloud, SoftLayer

IBM Acquiring SoftLayer for Private Cloud Infrastructure

IBM is acquiring SoftLayer, a privately held cloud infrastructure provider. IBM hopes SoftLayer will enable IBM to  marry the security, privacy and reliability of private clouds with the economy and speed of a public cloud, with Fortune 500 companies the target market.

IBM says the majority of the Fortune 500 have concerns about how cloud will work with the IT investments they have already made, and many have been waiting for a cloud that is better than “good enough.”   As a result, although cloud is growing quickly, it’s still only a small part of the total IT spend.  There’s a lot of opportunity for IBM to capitalize on.

SoftLayer has a breakthrough capability that provides an easy “on ramp” especially for the Fortune 500 to adopt cloud. And for the SoftLayer born-on-the-cloud customers, IBM opens a new market into the enterprise.   Specifically, SoftLayer allows cloud services to be created very quickly on dedicated servers — rather than a virtual ones, which is the norm in the public cloud.

By building out a cloud on a dedicated server , a client no longer has to worry about sharing computing resources with other companies — thereby improving privacy, security and overall computing performance.  By using dedicated servers, software that was built for on-premise use can be more easily ported to the cloud.  It doesn’t have to go though as much heavy configuration as it does with a virtual server, which it was not developed to work with.

This capability will be added to IBM’s SmartCloud portfolio. IBM SmartCloud offers 100 cloud-based solutions for line-of-business execs including Watson Engagement Advisor; hybrid solutions such as IBM PureSystems, mission-critical cloud services for SAP on our SmartCloud Enterprise+ and the best private cloud solutions in the market.

Headquartered in Dallas, SoftLayer serves 21,000 customers with a global cloud infrastructure platform spanning 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe. SoftLayer excels at running cloud-centric, performance-intensive applications in mobile, social, gaming and analytics.

IBM is also announcing today the formation of a new Cloud Services division that combines SoftLayer with IBM SmartCloud into a global platform, reporting to SVP Erich Clementi, IBM Global Technology Services.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close later in 2013 following standard regulatory review.

Guest Post, hybrid cloud, Information technology management, VCloud, VMware

The Rise in Popularity of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Guest Post by Paul Vian of  Internap

Organizations are increasingly choosing to outsource business-critical applications and content to third-party providers. But, with it comes a long list of questions in order to determine the right mix of IT infrastructure services to meet specific scalability, control, performance and cost requirements. Although a shared public cloud can offer the convenience of easily scaling infrastructure up and down on-demand, many organizations are still hesitant due to concerns around privacy and security within a shared tenancy arrangement. Another complication is that the virtualization layer typically takes around 10 per cent of the resources. Accordingly, dedicated, physical infrastructure is often ideal just for performance purposes.

Which cloud environments are businesses considering?

If a business has a fluctuating workload that has ever-changing demands and requires more resources in the short term, a cloud environment is often still the preferred choice, but this does tend to become more expensive for applications that are always on, such as databases or other highly resource-intensive applications. The reality is that organizations often require something in between, which is driving demand for flexible, hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions that can easily adapt and scale to meet a wide range of use cases and application needs.

What are the benefits of a hybrid cloud infrastructure?

Taking a tailored approach can enable businesses to scale their infrastructures ‘on demand’. It is also now possible for companies utilising physical servers to gain the flexibility and benefits they have been enjoying within a highly virtualized cloud environment in recent years. We are in an age where physical servers can be instantly spun up or down as global demand dictates, so there is no reason why organizations can’t gain the convenience and agility of the cloud with the reliability and performance of physical servers.

How can companies achieve a hybrid cloud infrastructure tailored to their specific needs?

Ideally, companies should look to work with a third-party provider that can provide access to a broader mix of services to meet these emerging demands around scalability in particular. Through working with a provider that takes a consultative sales approach, businesses can benefit from a tailored service that allows them to seamlessly mix, provision and manage both their virtual cloud and physical IT infrastructure – whether this is legacy hardware or back-up equipment. With this approach, businesses can not only meet their diverse application requirements, but also easily address changing global business needs.
We are now seeing things coming full circle; from physical networks, through to virtualization and the cloud, to today’s move towards a hybrid approach. This is in response to the ever-growing sophistication of automation and self-service capabilities, and is the way forward for any forward-thinking organization with a complex list of requirements.

Paul_Side

Paul Vian is Internap’s director of business development for Europe, Middle East, and Africa