Who needs the cloud?
The five essential characteristics that define the cloud (see prior post Why is "The Cloud" still unclear?) introduce added capabilities for an organization, but they also introduce added cost. The primary cost contributors are the technologies cloud computing uses to automate functions and provide seamless availability of data and applications to end users (this post assumes a virtualization platform is already established). But can the level of automation and seamless availability be justified at the cost of moving to the cloud?The answer is different for every organization, but it boils down to weighing the cost of migrating to and operating in the cloud, against the benefits achieved from the cloud. For many organizations with an established IT environment the technical and financial barriers that lay in the migration path may steer them to a more simplistic solution. This simpler solution consists of a strong IT Service Management (ITSM) structure and a well designed virtualization platform. ITSM is an IT management best practice methodology developed on the ITIL framework. To learn more about ITSM please visit http://www.best-management-practice.com/IT-Service-Management-ITIL/.
To help develop an initial idea of which direction your organization should take, let's dive deeper into the five characteristics that comprise the cloud. Each section below outlines the associated costs, benefits and areas of caution for each cloud characteristic, as well as potential alternatives.
On-Demand Self-Service
The ability for a consumer (end user) to provision computing resources automatically without human intervention, typically done through a web portal.
Primary
Costs
|
Determining
Benefits
|
Areas
of Caution
|
Potential
Alternatives
|
·
Technologies required to provision, deploy and
decommission IT resources through an on-demand self-service portal.
·
Detailed policy and permission development to
profile departments, groups and/or individual employees who can order IT
resources, what types of resources and quantity of resources.
|
· What areas (i.e. departments, business units, etc.) demand
a self-service portal and what is the extent of the demand?
· Will use of a self-service model reduce operational costs,
such as eliminating or repurposing staff?
·
What is
the difference in efficiencies achieved from a
portal versus using ITSM practices with manually
initiated deployment of virtualized resources?
|
· Be thorough in polling employees and understand not just
initial demand but frequency and long term usage.
·
Automated
tools may reduce employee workload freeing up time, but not significant
enough time to recoup the cost of implementing self-service.
|
· Requests can be handled efficiently with an incident
management (ticket request) system and resources manually deployed quickly with
standardized Virtual Machine templates
|
Broad Network Access
The ability for a consumer to access computing resources (often applications or documents) from any device (laptop, tablet, smart phone, etc.) from any location.
Primary
Costs
|
Determining
Benefits
|
Areas
of Caution
|
Potential
Alternatives
|
·
Network infrastructure required to authenticate,
authorize and audit any device on the corporate network.
·
Server/platform and application infrastructure required
to present applications that will run on any device.
·
Detailed policy development to
profile which employees can bring devices and what rules apply to those devices
while used at work.
|
· What are the specific benefits from employees
having access any time from any device?
·
What features of the current devices
are missing that are prohibiting or limiting employees from
doing their job functions?
|
·
If benefits
are classified as productivity gains, make sure to identify the
employee population it applies to and quantify the gains.
·
An
"any device" policy, aka Bring Your Own Device (BYOD),
has more implications than just security concerns.
|
· It may be more cost effective to define a new
corporate standard device(s) versus an "any device" policy.
|
Resource Pooling
The provider’s computing resources (storage, servers, network bandwidth, etc.) are pooled together and dynamically assigned and reassigned to multiple consumers (multi-tenant model) based on demand.
Primary
Costs
|
Determining
Benefits
|
Areas
of Caution
|
Potential
Alternatives
|
·
Technologies required to dynamically assign and
reassign resources based on usage.
·
Technologies required to keep resources securely
isolated and segmented between groups
·
Detailed policy and permission development to
profile departments, groups and/or individual employees to identify types of
resources and minimum/maximum usage.
|
· What is achieved through dynamic resource allocation?
· Does my organization require a multi-tenant model?
|
· For public cloud offering a secure multi-tenant model
should be mandatory.
· For private cloud offering a multi-tenant model may not be
a requirement.
|
· A basic virtualization platform provides the ability
to pool resources and achieve the primary benefits of lower
infrastructure costs and improved IT service levels.
|
Rapid Elasticity
The ability to quickly/rapidly scale up or scale down the pool of computing resources to meet consumer demand.
Primary
Costs
|
Determining
Benefits
|
Areas
of Caution
|
Potential
Alternatives
|
·
Additional infrastructure required to scale to
meet high demand.
|
· What defines "rapid" to your
organization?
· What are the quantifiable outcomes for rapid deployment?
· Does your organization require the flexibility to scale
down?
|
· Make sure rapid is in context of the business (not IT) and
determine the outcomes from the deployment of additional resources.
· Many organizations require the ability to scale up, but only
select organizations need the ability to rapidly scale down.
|
· Can an increase in demand for IT resources be addressed
with a more creative and less costly approach? For example shutting
down non-critical or test servers to allow for additional production servers
during predictable high activity periods.
|
Measured Service
The pooled resources are metered to capture consumer usage, and automatically controlled and optimized based on usage.
Primary
Costs
|
Determining
Benefits
|
Areas
of Caution
|
Potential
Alternatives
|
·
Technologies required to monitor, control and
optimize resources.
·
Detailed policy and permission development to
profile departments, groups and/or individual employees to identify types of
resources and minimum/maximum usage.
|
· What are the benefits of automatically controlling and
optimizing IT computing resources through metering?
|
· Capture several months (preferably a full year) of
resource usage data through manual audits to understand actual usage before
looking to an automated tool.
|
· Measuring service is a good practice, and necessary if
deploying ITSM, but manual metering methods may be all your organization
requires.
|
Conclusion
There is no question cloud computing is the future of IT services, but organizations should take a cautionary approach today. The technical and cost barriers that exist in the migration path to the cloud will be reduced as advancements are made in virtualization and unified/fabric computing, and more application providers adopt a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Cloud computing will eventually reach the point where data center virtualization is today, with a less obstructive and proven migration path.Because many organizations have already made an investment in virtualization and ITSM technologies, achieving similar results of cloud computing maybe closer than they realize. Often it's the process piece of people, process and technology where many IT departments can make the biggest gains towards cloud like capabilities. So take caution the next time a vendor claims they can solve your problems with the cloud, you might be able to solve them with far less investment through simple process development and/or reengineering.
Is your organization currently assessing a move to the cloud? I'd like to hear your story, or any comments on the content of this post.
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