Driven by headlines proclaiming lower costs, improved employee efficiency, and increased speed to market, cloud computing has attracted the attention of the vast majority of organisations. In fact, widespread vendor hype has led to a lot of organisations jumping on the cloud bandwagon without a clear strategy.
Although the top-line benefits are clear, many businesses are less sure of how to best implement and manage cloud services. In fact, a recent Vanson Bourne survey showed that 71% of organisations remain worried about the potential management complexity cloud services will bring.
Any organisation considering cloud is offered a myriad of options – do they want private, public or a mix of both (hybrid), where some resources are managed in-house, and others provided externally? Each option has pros and cons, so the new challenge is to decide which model will meet the organisation’s specific needs and how they can most easily move into the cloud with little or no disruption to service.
Seeing through the hype
The best way to avoid service disruptions while reaping the benefits of cloud is to take a strategic approach. Cloud isn’t just another technology; in fact, it is not a technology at all. It represents an opportunity to fundamentally change the way organisations manage and deliver IT.
In essence, the benefits of cloud revolve around a more flexible IT landscape. By undertaking an audit, organisations can understand how ready they are for a more flexible and agile model of delivering IT services.
For large enterprises, the audit will be pivotal in strategy development. Their IT environments differ widely in terms of maturity. Some may be managing infrastructure components such as servers, storage and networks in silos; others may have moved to managing IT as business services. There will also be major differences in terms of how manual or automated IT management is within these organisations.
It is not just the structure and management of IT that will need to be analysed, it is also the make up of, and interdependencies between, different services that will need to be audited.
For example, if you consider a CRM application, an organisation would need to understand whether it is tied to particular hardware, whether it is fed by one or multiple databases or whether it integrates with other line of business applications. In addition, the business requirements of IT need to be considered. What are the priorities? Is it more flexible working practices, quicker deployment of new applications or a reduction in capital expenditure?
By analysing all these factors, organisations can understand cloud computing in the context of their own situation and decide on how cloud computing should be deployed. In doing this, they’ll need to build the business case and compare the current cost of running workloads with the cost of running them through the various cloud models. This will be tricky, as typically IT is accounted for as a list of items with an associated cost. For example, the cost per server, per application license or member of staff.
To make an accurate comparison with a cloud service you’ll need to look at the current cost of running that service in-house. Assessing costs based on service rather than individual item will be key in understanding the business case for and against cloud.
Ultimately, cloud computing will drive IT transformation, and therefore no organisation should rush cloud adoption without putting in place stepping stones to ensure that the process is well thought-out and, ultimately, successful.
Choosing the right cloud model
Once you have completed an audit or assessment of where you are today, you will be in a much stronger position to understand how cloud computing can help your organisation going forward. It is at this point that you will need to understand the various cloud options available and what each can offer your organisation.
- With on-premise private cloud, you have your own data centre, which then provides on-demand services to the business that can be metered and charged back. Typically, it is highly automated with elements of self service. For organisations that are highly regulated this option has the benefit of keeping all data in-house. However, building and running your own data centre is expensive and often requires numerous IT resources to manage and maintain it.
- In a hosted private cloud, organisations will have a private cloud provided as a service. This is effectively an evolution from a traditional managed service model that organisations have been using for many years, the difference being that it should deliver the benefits of cloud: pay as you go, flexibility to scale up and down, automated provisioning, flexible financing and SLAs.
- Public cloud is the most accessible, scalable and flexible form of cloud, but it is also seen as the least secure and reliable. It is also the most likely cloud model to experience performance issues in that you are sharing your IT infrastructure with other organisations. However, it provides the benefit of low-cost on-demand computing, as public cloud services do not have upfront capital or setup costs, and can provide instant solutions to business needs.
Understanding what each cloud model offers and therefore which is right for your organisation is vital. In truth, it is rare that one model suits an organisation entirely and therefore a mixture of approaches should be used.
The balancing act
Acknowledging this need for a flexible cloud model, organisations have found that a mix of the three options – on-premise private, hosted private and public – is emerging as the best option for them. A hybrid cloud model means that businesses will have a mix of infrastructure, platforms and applications in both private and public cloud environments.
This enables them to take advantage of vanilla public cloud services where security and reliability are not paramount, while keeping more critical data and applications in the private cloud, be that an on-premise or hosted private cloud.
Ultimately, decisions about which type of cloud to use for each IT service will depend on several factors including cost, security and control. For example, a retailer may decide to put its customer-facing website in the public cloud to take advantage of the elasticity this model offers, while keeping the associated shopping cart application that contains customer details in a private cloud.
If organisations take a best practice approach and carry out an audit they will be able to develop a strategy that matches the right cloud model to different parts of the infrastructure, platform and application estate. To do this they will also need to address the challenge of visibility.
Many organisations do not have a good enough view of their IT environment to allow them to transform it into a hybrid cloud-based model. Many are still using IT monitoring or performance tools that give them a snap-shot of their infrastructure but do not let them drill down deeper to see exactly how each application works, how one application is linked to another and, ultimately, what will happen if one is moved into a public cloud and one kept in an on-premise private cloud.
Indeed, the Vanson Bourne research shows that businesses are concerned about this issue, with 68% acknowledging that there are major risks in migrating to the cloud because of the complex nature of their in-house IT, with applications all being interlinked. This type of visibility and insight will be key in determining what your blended, hybrid cloud environment should look like.
What else you need to consider
Of course, once the ‘which type of cloud?’ question is answered, another question arises – ‘how do I manage my cloud applications?’
This once again hinges on how well you know your IT infrastructure. If you have done a thorough audit of your IT while deciding on your cloud model, you will in a great position to determine your management strategy and processes moving forward. Your processes will need to be supported by tools that automate many of the manual tasks performed in data centres today. You will also need to ensure that you have the ability to monitor across your hybrid cloud environment.
In addition to ensuring that you have the right monitoring in place to manage cloud, another vital component is communication with your various external providers. This starts when deciding Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Before signing a contract, you should very carefully consider each part of the SLA on the table.
For example, if your private hosted cloud provider experiences downtime and your organisation is consequently unable to access any applications stored with them, how will you be compensated? In short, you need to ensure that external providers put in place solid SLAs that they are accountable for if they are not met.
Many organisations worry about how they will manage an IT environment in which they are reliant on so many outside influences. That is understandable. The modern IT infrastructure looks completely different to what we were seeing even five years ago. In a hybrid model you are still likely to have multiple providers, whom will be reliant on each other as well as your in-house team to deliver the IT services your business requires. Although SLAs will be an important component of the mix, they are not a silver bullet solution.
In fact, managing multiple service providers with differing SLAs is a complex task in itself. With this in mind you will either need to invest in management resources in-house or look to one of your service providers to deliver a service wrapper, which means you ultimately have one throat to choke.
With the right insight, strategy and management approach, organisations will be able to utilise the cloud delivery model to transform their IT services. Undertaking the assessments and developing the strategy might seem like a task that you do not have the time for, but without it you will struggle to realise the many benefits.
In addition, if you pick the right partner or the right individuals within your team, much of the high-level scoping work can be completed in a few days. One thing to be aware of is that should you decide to get a third party to undertake this work for you it will be key to ensure they do not have a bias towards one model of the cloud.
Furthermore, it is also important to remember that the audits and strategy will undoubtedly save you time in the future by ensuring that you do not make knee-jerk reactions that might result in downtime. Most importantly, you’ll have a strategic, business-driven, step-by-step approach to cloud computing that will enable more effective delivery of IT services.
