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There is good news: it’s time to filter out the hype and confusion. While still evolving, cloud
computing is here to stay. Organisations need to be ready.
But for most organisations, cloud computing is relatively amorphous. For practical
consideration, cloud needs to be addressed in the context of immediate issues and future
opportunities for enterprise IT.
One key challenge for IT executives is developing an enterprise-wide strategy for cloud
computing that’s proactive and drives the business. Creating and communicating this plan
requires IT leadership, knowledge, and guidance around cloud initiatives.
This paper reviews these challenges and benefits in five main sections:
With true demand forecasting and planning capabilities, you can evolve from a just-in-case
scenario to a just-enough provisioning system for real-time infrastructure allocation.
Cost transparency allows you to develop meaningful business-based metrics to make
smarter, informed decisions for all aspects of your infrastructure—from facilities to staff. In
addition, cost transparency provides the information to enable you to evaluate your capital
versus operational costs and margins, and report on them.
Finally, the automation aspect of an internal cloud provides a key building block for shifting
from an up-front capital to a modular, pay-as-you-go operations model.
Wherever you are in the planning phase, 2010 will be a major year for cloud computing.
Gartner estimates the current market in 2009 for cloud services to be nearly $50 billion, and
predicts this will grow to $150 billion in 2013.1 This represents an entire spectrum of cloud
computing providers and ecosystem solutions.
IT leaders can begin assessing and evaluating cloud computing trends by understanding:
• Potential benefits and applicability to the organisation
• Delivery models to compare provider offerings
• Deployment models in support of your organisation’s public and private clouds
1Source: Gartner Group. Forecast: Sizing the Cloud; Understanding the Opportunities in Cloud
Services. 18 March, 2009. Pg 1.
Infrastructure as a Service
Examples include many public cloud services such as Amazon EC2 and various service
providers (Rackspace, Savvis, Go Daddy, for example) shifting from pure-play co-location
and hosting to “virtual dedicated” and to shared, multi-tenant cloud services.
About 42-percent of IT executives surveyed by GlassHouse consider Infrastructure as a
Service as the cornerstone of their cloud computing strategy.
Platform as a Service
Major platform vendors (VMware, Microsoft, Google Apps, Force.com) are now calling their
products cloud platforms (or Platform as a Service). Any cloud-enabled application
development platform—often built on Web Services—can be thought of as PaaS. This is an
amorphous category with many variations among vendor solutions.
Software as a Service
Salesforce.com’s success has popularised SaaS (or Software as a Service) as an alterative to
dedicated large chunks of IT infrastructure to customer applications. SaaS can be thought of
as an application or service delivered directly as a service over the network, usually the
internet or intranet.
Deployment models
Deployment models are used to describe privacy (public and private), location, and
ownership (internal, external, and hybrid).
While internal clouds are typically managed by IT, some innovative service providers such
as Surgient are beginning to offer on-premise, managed private clouds.
External Clouds
An external cloud is deployed and managed on remote IT infrastructure, either directly by IT
or a 3rd-party vendor. External clouds come in various forms. Large, shared, multi-tenant
clouds such as Amazon and Google provide one example of a public external cloud. In this
case, the service provider provides all resources—hardware, software, and in some cases
management automation—remotely. For companies with minimal regulation, compliance,
and security requirements, this type of external cloud offers no-to-low up-front costs, true
pay-as-you-go usage models, and fluid scalability of resources.
Some service providers (RackSpace and Savvis, for example) offer virtual dedicated,
remotely hosted private clouds, where all computing hardware can be assigned to an
individual customer—but is charged for on a monthly or per-use basis. For customers with
higher security, performance, or scalability requirements, this may be an option.
Cost Transparency
Cost transparency provides the foundation for tracking costs and showing business value.
To assess the capital and operational savings, companies need to gain visibility into their
current cost structure—to ultimately compare against any new service offering, in-house or
externally procured. Cost transparency provides the basis for developing granular metrics
around cost of capital, cost of operations, and profit margin.
These costs include but may not be limited to:
• Hardware Infrastructure: networks, servers, storage, and components
• Software Infrastructure: software and application licenses, tools, and utilities, etc
• Operations Infrastructure: staff and team required to develop, test, deploy, operate,
and support services
• Facilities Infrastructure: floor space, power and cooling, etc.
Companies may not need to immediately start charging directly for services, but IT can
provide significant cost transparency—and hence chargeback—back to management and the
user community. The costs should be associated with defined services and service levels so
that clients and customers understand what they are getting and where the costs come from.
As your organisation matures, companies can refine and adapt services to internal clients.
The reality is, IT may not have the time, resources, or knowledge to assess, build, and
deploy internal cloud strategies and services—much less analyse, plan, and integrate new
services with current IT infrastructure functions. GlassHouse provides a Cloud Impact
Analysis, described later in the paper, which provides this framework tailored to your
business.
GlassHouse provides:
• An objective vendor-independent approach to helping your IT organisation define
and execute the best cloud strategy for your environment, leveraging multi-vendor
solutions already deployed on-premise
• Proven methodologies and expertise in cost analysis, monitoring, and metering to
provide visibility and control for global IT enterprises
• IT transformation services to drive high-performance and agility through cloud
computing—reducing costs, improving efficiency, and managing service levels
effectively.
“In the long run, an IT
organisation will have to Application and Data Portability
function as a service A central tenant of the external and hybrid deployment models is application portability.
provider. This is normally Files (usually virtual machines, databases, or user data files) must be replicated in bulk, or
a major shift in IT partially, as changes are made in one location. This poses challenges for proprietary external
governance, changing a clouds (and virtualisation formats) such as Amazon and Google. Once an application is in a
significant number of
proprietary format, contains large amounts of data and is located in a remote data centre, it
policies, processes, and
will not easily be replicated across a WAN without significant cost.
technologies within the
organisation.”
This will require you to assess both storage replication and new file transfer (import/export)
--Rob Zylowski, Services
technologies to replace or compliment FTP and HTTP, as well as ways to leverage industry-
Director, GlassHouse standard virtualisation software to maximise data portability.
Business unit customers with high security and compliance requirements may require
dedicating virtual private clouds. These are islands of hardware, networks, and software
instances dedicated to a business unit and locked in a physical jail or cage. Legal
departments, financial services companies, health care organisations and other highly
confidential information may require these higher levels of security.
Automation
Many service providers (from carriers to ISPs to external cloud providers) supporting large
numbers of users, are likely to have rich automation processes in place. These processes are
typically designed for automated provisioning, management, reporting, operations support,
billing, and charge back. If your organisation is not already employing automation, you
should consider applying some of the techniques and methodologies of the service
providers to your IT operations.
Strategic Services
GlassHouse provides a Cloud Impact Analysis service to determine the strategy, business
requirements, and compelling rationale for moving forward with an internal or external
cloud (private or public). GlassHouse works closely with customers to build a business case
and cost analysis based on ROI modeling for potential cloud solutions. GlassHouse also
recommends solutions and provides a prioritised action plan for moving forward.
For customers requiring modernisation and automation, GlassHouse offers a Service Provider
Model Modernisation service. This is a transformational service that creates the foundation to
operate infrastructure through standardised levels of service and cost. It includes the tools
and processes necessary to automate and operate as a service provider. The package can be
tailored to specific needs, exploring the potential for Cloud services (private or public) for an
entire infrastructure area or discrete services within a larger portfolio. This model lays the
foundation for demand-planning and forecasting processes and cost transparency.
Conclusion
While there has been much hype around cloud computing, it is critical for executive staff of
competitive enterprises to understand and begin planning for internal cloud services.
IT executives must own and drive enterprise-wide cloud computing strategies. The
cornerstone of an enterprise cloud computing strategy is based on obtaining accurate
information and guidance, especially for internal cloud readiness.
For enterprise IT to fully realise the efficiency and promise of cloud computing, IT must
demonstrate cost transparency to drive a service-oriented strategy, evaluate prospective
external vendors, and deliver end-customer-consumable cloud services.
About GlassHouse