By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks,” says Gartner.
Of long, organizations have been stockpiling technology, with the infrastructure revealing problems of under-utilization and existence of too many silos. Information multiplying every single day is making things increasingly challenging for the enterprises to manage them. IDC says that during the coming ten years, data stored in various storage systems will increase by 44 times, with the current rate of data growth. But it won’t be possible for enterprises to increase their IT budgets and scale up their IT infrastructure in tandem with the information explosion that’s happening.
Another point is the time to market, which has become significant for businesses and they are looking at ways and means to minimize it. For eg , if an enterprise wants to set up a collaboration service internally or develop social networking capability, they would plan about the hardware, software, service requirements, etc which might take a long time to market. But now with the available cloud services, the same roll out is possible within much shorter time.
In such instances, cloud computing is increasingly being looked at by the enterprises as a great alternative as it lets them scale up or down, save organizations money, decrease the time to market and shift their capex to opex.
Who’s moving to Public Cloud?
Currently the trend is that larger enterprises are exploring Public Clouds for support applications such as Dealer Management Systems, Document Management Systems, mailing, CRM and Learning Solutions, etc while critical applications for which data has to reside within a firewall due to regulatory requirements or have to be available physically from the audit point of view are being reserved on the private cloud. Most enterprises want to move to the cloud for the great cost advantage that it offers, but there are hardly few of them who actually move to the cloud for the big security concerns that they perceive in that.
| “We believe that enterprises will leverage and adopt the private cloud model faster than other models, because as a hybrid model of a public and an internal cloud, a private cloud model will utilize resources from both the internal and external pools.” - Manoj Chugh
President, EMC India & SAARC. |
SMBs where cash and people resource are scarce, a public cloud’s flexibility, reliability and scalability with no capital expenses, no upfront commitment, low unit costs and pay-as-you-go model, is highly compelling . Also the application development world is increasingly undergoing a significant change through adoption of Platform as a Service as it is resulting in faster roll-out of applications at lower costs. Public clouds are being used by companies delivering products and services over the Web, with no captured set of users using a single network and software developers with dynamic resource requirements. Another aspect is the presence of a large mobile workforce in organizations that need access to applications on-the-go. Depending upon the criticality of the applications; organizations are hosting these applications on the public cloud and are making them available to its mobile workforce via the Web.
Who’s moving to a Private Cloud?
A private cloud can be set up either internally or by partnering vis-a-vis with an external cloud service offerings vendor to identify which model is suitable. The trend is that the larger enterprises having a substantial “On-Premise” IT with many legacy applications and systems are looking to optimize their IT through Private Clouds. Private Clouds are hosted inside enterprise firewalls and have to be controlled by the enterprises themselves. Most enterprises have already started their journey by virtualizing servers and some IT infrastructure. Prospective consumers are being attracted by better automation and self service for users, but these early adopters are facing challenging decisions and integration headaches due to a general lack of standards.
As private cloud technologies get adopted, IT managers will start to grow comfortable with the use of cloud technologies inside their walls. As a result, they will start to look more seriously at the cost/benefit analysis of private versus public clouds. More efforts will be taken to verify the promises of the cloud in terms of cost savings and the ability to deliver functionality quickly. Companies will start to take a more serious look at building hybrid clouds that better integrate existing enterprise applications with cloud-based applications. The proliferation of different services will lead to several models designed to meet the needs of different companies. Most will not prove practical, but a few models will emerge that help balance the needs of security, compliance and cost savings in a practical way.
Trend towards Hybrid Cloud
“The concept of Hybrid Clouds, primarily for infrastructure is yet to gather momentum. Over a period of time, this is set to change where larger enterprises will increasingly focus on Hybrid Clouds in order to leverage the best of both worlds. This will happen once Public Cloud providers begin to follow open standards that will enable seamless integration between Private and Public Clouds. With this the services oriented architecture would become a focus point as the Hybrid environment becomes more and more sophisticated with apps or services from cloud integrating with apps or services running on premise; it would become necessary to have the architecture in the right way so that they support these loosely coupled models. This would make the hybrid environments to run optimally.”
Before you think ‘Cloud’
Amid an ever-increasing bevy of regulations that enterprises need to worry about and a growing number of cloud service providers to choose from, enterprises have a lot of options and a lot of questions to consider concerning cloud computing compliance.
- Evaluate existing IT infrastructure portfolio against organizational requirements today and in the future, map on the service level requirements and then arrive at what kind of future infrastructure is required.
- Evaluate the future IT requirement against budget outlay and cloud vendor services and maturity levels available in the market to determine which IT services need to be move to the cloud and which need to remain physical.
- Finally, identify an end to end vendor solutions provider that brings together different pieces from the larger ecosystem together for simplicity and to avoid vendor lock-in.
Moving to the Public Cloud
It is critical for organizations to fully assess vendors’ security systems, as the most critical element of their businesses—information is in the hands of the service providers. It is also important for them to avoid cloud lock-in. This will help them switch providers. This approach will help them to retain control over the company’s IT processes. Beyond the data center, threats lie in connectivity to the cloud. So, it is important to have an end point security mechanism in place. The need of the hour is a smart choice of next-generation technologies, which are both effective and cost-efficient
and provide a proven way to prevent unauthorized access to critical data and applications.
Questions to ask before you move to the public cloud:
- Does the cloud offer a service level agreement (SLA) for services? If yes, how many 9’s does it have (look for 99.9% to 99.999% uptime guaranteed)?
- Does the Cloud have a public transparency site where the system issues or outages are published for everyone to see?
- Does the Cloud offer compensation commensurate with any potential financial loss if my business suffers due to lack of availability? Will I be compensated automatically or do I need to ask for it?
- Does the Cloud have applications and data stored in several geographically separated data centers? If yes, how many datacenters does the Cloud have? If geographically distributed datacenters are used, what countries are involved?
- Is there a disaster recovery strategy in place? How frequently is it tested?
- How many copies of the data are backed up? How often is backup performed?
- Can I readily export my data in a usable format?
Security questions
- What are the security measures used to authenticate users?
- What level of encryption is offered to protect my data?
- How secure is the Cloud and is it certified with any independent security vendors to vet the overall security of its services?
Moving to a Private Cloud
A private cloud can be set up either internally or by partnering vis-a-vis with an external cloud service offerings vendor to identify which model is suitable. The process begins with consolidation - storage, networks, applications, data centers.
Storage consolidation alone can realize 2:1 savings. The next step is virtualization, then building in security through identity assurance & access control, encryption & key management, compliance & security information management and fraud protection. Adoption of tiered storage, data de-duplication and applying software and process automation for further benefits.
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The content for this article is sourced from PCQuest Visit their website: www.pcquest.com
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