Tag Archives: cloud

Cloud computing, Featured, RIM, Virtualization

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

June 21, 2013 Journey to the Cloud

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?

June 11, 2013 Journey to the Cloud

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?

June 7, 2013 Journey to the Cloud

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.

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:

Effective assessment and strategy
Self-service catalog of available IT resources
Collaborative solution design
Rapid approval work flow
Sourcing platform that allows you to select the right supply chain partners for your business need or workload profile.
Single button provisioning of resources
Transparency across the IT supply chain
Sophisticated supply-demand analytics
Elastic source for resources
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.

Adobe, Cloud computing, Miscellaneous IT, software

Adobe’s Out of Box Thinking and Into the Cloud

May 21, 2013 Rob OShaughnessy

By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Software Licensing Specialist

I attended Adobe’s MAX conference in rainy, LA, California last week and I felt bad, as a local, that a lot of travelers had to witness our once a quarter rainfall, however with all the forest fires ranging around SoCal it was an unexpected relief. Adobe put some fires out on their own by providing some great insight as to what they are doing to the software community.

It was the first time that partners and Adobe sales team members were invited to this mostly technical event. The room was divided between the cool hipster “Creatives” and the button-up suit with no tie looking sales people. It was a 7^th grade dance before the first slow song was played, but we were all there for the same purpose; to find out what’s going on with Creative Cloud.

So let’s backup if you haven’t heard of Creative Cloud. Several months ago Adobe began offering a subscription-based licensing model for their creative products. The Creative Cloud is essentially everything that’s included in the Creative Suite Master Collection. It’s a subscription-based licensing model which gives you all the Adobe creative products for a monthly fee. Like Creative Suite, it’s also an on-premise product so ultimately the big difference between the two boils down to how you want to purchase it – to subscribe to it or own it.

The biggest announcement at MAX was that moving forward Adobe will no longer provide future releases of Creative Suite or other CS products. Like Rocky, Creative Suite has ended at version 6, so moving forward if you wanted to obtain the latest and greatest technology and features you will need to move to the Creative Cloud. Also if you like box product, Adobe will no longer be offering shrink-wrap as well. Customer will now need to purchase a volume license or jump into the Cloud.

In my opinion this is a good thing, because as a Creative it’s important to be up to date with all the latest enhancements that Adobe provides as it will allow access to all the cutting edge technology instantly as it comes out, instead of waiting every 18 months for Adobe to compile a list of enhancements and release an upgrade. Plus the promo price till August 31st ($39.99 per month) is less than what I spend at the local pub, err I mean coffee shop.

If you’re interested in Creative Cloud and want to learn more about subscribing new users and co-terming future users, please fill out this form.

Disaster Recovery, Featured, Flash, High Availability, SSD, Storage, Storage and Information Management

Catching up with Chuck Hollis: A Storage Discussion

April 25, 2013 Journey to the Cloud

Things are moving fast in the IT world. Recently, we caught up with Chuck Hollis (EMC’s Global Marketing CTO and popular industry blogger) to discuss a variety of topics including datacenter federation, Solid State Drives, and misperceptions surrounding cloud storage.

JTC: Let’s start off with Datacenter federation…what is coming down the road for running active/active datacenters with both HA and DR?

Chuck: I suppose the first thing that’s worth pointing out is that we’re starting to see using multiple data centers as an opportunity, as opposed to some sort of problem to overcome. Five years ago, it seems that everyone wanted to collapse into one or two data centers. Now, it’s pretty clear that the pendulum is starting to move in the other direction – using a number of smaller locations that are geographically dispersed.

The motivations are pretty clear as well: separation gives you additional protection, for certain applications users get better experiences when they’re close to their data, and so on. And, of course, there are so many options these days for hosting, managed private cloud services and the like. No need to own all your data centers anymore!

As a result, we want to think of our “pool of resources” as not just the stuff sitting in a single data center, but the stuff in all of our locations. We want to load balance, we want to failover, we want to recover from a disaster and so on – and not require separate technology stacks.

We’re now at a point where the technologies are coming together nicely to do just that. In the EMC world, that would be products like VPLEX and RecoverPoint, tightly integrated with VMware from an operations perspective. I’m impressed that we have a non-trivial number of customers that are routinely doing live migrations at metro distances using VPLEX or testing their failover capabilities (not-disruptively and at a distance) using RecoverPoint.

The costs are coming down, the simplicity and integration is moving up – meaning that these environments are far easier to justify, deploy and manage than just a few years ago. Before long, I think we’ll see active-active data centers as sort of an expected norm vs. an exception.

JTC: How is SSD being leveraged in total data solutions now, with the rollout of the various ExtremeIO products?

Chuck: Well, I think most people realize we’re in the midst of a rather substantial storage technology shift. Flash (in all its forms) is now preferred for performance, disks for capacity.

The first wave of flash adoption was combining flash and disk inside the array (using intelligent software), usually dubbed a “hybrid array”. These have proven to be very, very popular: with the right software, a little bit of flash in your array can result in an eye-popping performance boost and be far more cost effective than trying to use only physical disks to do so. In the EMC portfolio, this would be FAST on either a VNX or VMAX. The approach has proven so popular that most modern storage arrays have at least some sort of ability to mix flash and disk.

The second wave is upon us now: putting flash cards directly into the server to deliver even more cost-effective performance. With this approach, storage is accessed at bus speed, not network speed – so once again you get an incredible boost in performance, even as compared to the hybrid arrays. Keep in mind, though: today this server-based flash storage is primarily used as a cache, and not as persistent and resilient storage – there’s still a need for external arrays in most situations. In the EMC portfolio, that would be the XtremSF hardware and XxtremSW software – again, very popular with the performance-focused crowd.

The third wave will get underway later this year: all-flash array designs that leave behind the need to support spinning disks. Without dragging you through the details, if you design an array to support flash and only flash, you can do some pretty impactful things in terms of performance, functionality, cost-effectiveness and the like. I think the most exciting example right now is the XtremIO array which we’ve started to deliver to customers. Performance-wise, it spans the gap between hybrid arrays and server flash, delivering predictable performance largely regardless of how you’re accessing the data. You can turn on all the bells and whistles (snaps, etc.) and run them at full-bore. And data deduplication is assumed to be on all the time, making the economics a lot more approachable.

The good news: it’s pretty clear that the industry is moving to flash. The challenging part? Working with customers hand-in-hand to figure out how to get there in a logical and justifiable fashion. And that’s where I think strong partners like GreenPages can really help.

JTC: How do those new products tie into FAST on the array side, with software on the hosts, SSD cards for the servers and SSD arrays?

Chuck: Well, at one level, it’s important that the arrays know about the server-side flash, and vice-versa.

Let’s start with something simple like management: you want to get a single picture of how everything is connected – something we’ve put in our management products like Unisphere. Going farther, the server flash should know when to write persistent data to the array and not keep it locally – that’s what XtremSW does among other things. The array, in turn, shouldn’t be trying to cache data that’s already being cached by the server-side flash – that would be wasteful.

Another way of looking at it is that the new “storage stack” extends beyond the array, across the network and into the server itself. The software algorithms have to know this. The configuration and management tools have to know this. As a result, the storage team and the server team have to work together in new ways. Again, working with a partner that understands these issues is very, very helpful.

JTC: What’ the biggest misperception about cloud storage right now?

Chuck: Anytime you use the word “cloud,” you’re opening yourself up for all sorts of misconceptions, and cloud storage is no exception. The only reasonable way to talk about the subject is by looking at different use cases vs. attempting to establish what I believe is a non-existent category.

Here’s an example: we’ve got many customers who’ve decided to use an external service for longer-term data archiving: you know, the stuff you can’t throw away, but nobody is expected to use. They get this data out of their environment by handing it off to a service provider, and then take the bill and pass it on directly to the users who are demanding the service. From my perspective, that’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Can you call that “cloud storage”? Perhaps.

Or, more recently, let’s take Syncplicity, EMC’s product for enterprise sync-and-share. There are two options for where the user data sits: either an external cloud storage service, or an internal one based on Atmos or Isilon. Both are very specific examples of “cloud storage,” but the decision as to whether you do it internally or externally is driven by security policy, costs and a bunch of other factors.

Other examples include global enterprises that need to move content around the globe, or perhaps someone who wants to stash a safety copy of their backups at a remote location. Are these “cloud storage?”

So, to answer your question more directly, I think the biggest misconception is that – without talking about very specific use cases – we sort of devolve into a hand-waving and philosophy exercise. Is cloud a technology and operational model, or is it simply a convenient consumption model?

The technologies and operational models are identical for everyone, whether you do it yourself or purchase it as a service from an external provider.

JTC: Talk about Big Data and how EMC solutions are addressing that market (Isilon, GreenPlum, what else?).

Chuck: If you thought that “cloud” caused misperceptions, it’s even worse for “big data.” I try to break it down into the macro and the micro.

At the macro level, information is becoming the new wealth. Instead of it being just an adjunct to the business process, it *is* the business process. The more information that can be harnessed, the better your process can be. That leads us to a discussion around big data analytics, which is shaping up to be the “killer app” for the next decade. Business people are starting to realize that building better predictive models can fundamentally change how they do business, and now the race is on. Talk to anyone in healthcare, financial services, retail, etc. – the IT investment pattern has clearly started to shift as a result.

From an IT perspective, the existing challenges can get much, much more challenging. Any big data app is the new 800 pound gorilla, and you’re going to have a zoo-full of them. It’s not unusual to see a 10x or 100x spike in the demand for storage resources when this happens. All of the sudden, you start looking for new scale-out storage technologies (like Isilon, for example) and better ways to manage things. Whatever you were doing for the last few years won’t work at all going forward.

There’s a new software stack in play: think Hadoop, HDFS, a slew of analytical tools, collaborative environments – and an entirely new class of production-grade predictive analytics applications that get created. That’s why EMC and VMware formed Pivotal from existing assets like Greenplum, GemFire et. al. – there was nothing in the market that addressed this new need, and did it in a cloud-agnostic manner.

Finally, we have to keep in mind that the business wants “big answers”, and not “big data.” There’s a serious organizational journey involved in building these environments, extracting new insights, and operationalizing the results. Most customers need outside help to get there faster, and we see our partner community starting to respond in kind.

If you’d like a historical perspective, think back to where the internet was in 1995. It was new, it was exotic, and we all wondered how things would change as a result. It’s now 2013, and we’re looking at big data as a potentially more impactful example. We all can see the amazing power; how do we put it to work in our respective organizations?

Exciting time indeed ….

Chuck is the Global Marketing CTO at EMC. You can read more from Chuck on his blog and follow him on Twitter at @chuckhollis.

Cloud computing, cloud management

Breaking Down the Management Barriers to Adopting Hybrid Cloud Technologies

March 19, 2013 Geoff Smith

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

Guest Post: Why Midmarket Business Needs Cloud Services in 2013

February 22, 2013 Journey to the Cloud

Guest Post: Grant Davis

This is a guest post and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of GreenPages Technology Solutions.

The global market is becoming more and more competitive by the second, thus requiring businesses to operate very efficiently with regards to organizational structure. Businesses, specifically midmarket size, are faced with tall tasks in 2013. With a growing enterprise, information increases as the operations do. A growing company requires higher level data management, and this leads to more intricate demands when it comes to IT organization and communication.

If a midmarket is firing on all cylinders, acquiring new clients and consumers by the day, there is only so much that an unorganized or incapable operations model can withstand. The IT department can only cope with so many networks and so much data. A commonality among growing business in America throughout modern society is the implementation of cloud services. Cloud offers a way to outsource data and network management with the ability to focus resources and time on more intricate and fundamental aspects of the business.

Below I list the main ways that midmarket businesses can benefit from the utilization of cloud services in 2013, and the critical reasons for the argument.

1. Cost.

Cloud services can be financially viable in the right situation. Using an outsourced data storage center can decrease the cost of real estate, software and employee payroll. For one, a midmarket that works with a cloud vendor does not have to physically house as much data. This is substantial benefit, mainly because of the physical space but also the operational costs of a larger company with high energy consumption.

Secondly, a cloud provider would be responsible for software agreements and also network operations. This is a huge burden off of a midmarket, as serious growth tends to take focus away from standard processing issues. This responsibility being shifted to the cloud provider alleviates cost in the sense that a business can reduce or relocate IT staff for better efficiency. It can also benefit an enterprise to not have to worry about multiple SLAs with various software providers. It can save money to have the agreement consolidated and maintained by the cloud vendor.

Why this is crucial: Midmarket business can only reach maximum efficiency if all of the parts are in place. Part of this is allocating resources in a way that gets the most out of each aspect of the company. If a Data Modeler or System Admin can be utilized more effectively in this crucial phase of business development, maybe it’s better to outsource their daily role to a cloud vendor. It’s possible that their creativity and focus needs to be distributed in another area of the business different than process management. Innovation is key right now, and this is part of the process.

2. Flexibility.

Cloud services may be a good idea for IT decision makers within a midmarket because employees are able to be more flexible. For instance, a cloud vendor allows for immediate access to business information from various portals, including mobile devices. In 2013 a typical cloud vendor seamlessly supplies business leadership and operations teams with the ability to access information from all angles of daily routines. This is a huge benefit in modern society where nearly everything is immediate and in constant real-time.

Also, because midmarket business is often trying to compete and outreach in a competitive market, traveling off location will be much less detrimental to work efficiency. If the company CIO is going to a tradeshow in Phoenix, they should still be able to access any processes being maintained by the cloud vendor.

Why this is crucial: Midmarket business in 2013 requires collaboration to be successful. With information being stored in a cloud storage center, information can be accessed from diverse locations. This increases both internal and external business collaboration. Modern society is far too demanding to have anything that is inefficient, and flexibility is directly related to efficiency when it comes to a growing business and data management.

3. Scalability.

IT is the backbone of most business operations. Modern information is too complex to handle manually, and we rely on computers and networks to transport and maintain data. An additional advantage of a midmarket acquiring cloud services is that the business can upscale or downscale IT services based on specific need. For instance, if the midmarket has stagnant growth over the holiday season, they can scale back their service agreement with the vendor to save money during that time. Similarly, if business continues to grow, the cloud service can easily expand and accommodate the new volume of data management that it performs for the business. This is not as viable with internal data management, as new software and hardware will need to be purchased with each major alteration in IT requirements. This can lead to wasted money and lost resources.

Why this is crucial: Business in general is too unpredictable in the current economy to assume anything, even when it comes to IT requirements. Cloud vendors allow for leeway with regards to data storage and this is important when a midmarket is concerned because often times these businesses don’t have the margin of error to make up for any inefficiency. They need the exact amount of storage they need, when they need it.

Conclusions

Midmarket business is important to the United States economy and affects the lives of many people. Usually these operations are on the cusp of doing something significant, and proper organization within IT can help allocate resources in the right areas for maximum production and business model maintenance. It’s time for IT and business leadership to make note of this and move to action in early 2013.

Grant Davis is a Data Modeler by day and a writer by night. His passion for computers started when he discovered instant messaging in junior high school. When Grant isn’t trying to climb through the computer screen he writes for BMC, a leading mainframe management provider.

Are you a midmarket organization looking to bring your IT environment to the next level? Click to learn more about how GreenPages can help!

The cloud news categorized.