GMO Cloud

The Private Cloud: Mapping IT Resources to Business Needs

Regardless of industry, when transitioning to a cloud model, change is necessary to ensure migration is appropriately meeting business needs.  “Mapping IT resources to business needs” therefore entails identifying requisite staff and technological changes under cloud-migration, with a focus on mission critical business needs.  The whole focus of cloud migration is to solve business problems as opposed to technical problems within an IT infrastructure, using cloud to streamline processes and move business forward. 

Organizational Changes That Help to Meet Business Needs

Ensuring that a new cloud model will meet business needs requires laying the initial groundwork with people instead of technology.  The more time you invest in working with key people within your organization, the more influence you will hold when planning a transition to the cloud.  This will also help reduce the amount of resistance from those who probably know that cloud will help the organization, but nevertheless remain resistant to change.

You must begin by identifying the key players within the organization. Such players include those focused on business tasks, professionals focused on technology and IT initiatives, administrators who are IT- task oriented, and other planning professionals adept at looking at the big picture.  You must then identify roles in each of these categories, and the changes in these roles that can be implemented.  Naturally, some of these categories may require more changes than others.

Scenarios of Role-Based Changes

When cloud-based deployment is focused around business needs, it is important for staff to work closely with management to identify new roles in the key areas mentioned above.  Focus must be placed on quickly delivering services which solve business problems and appropriately serve organizational needs. The following represents a typical scenario for cloud-based deployment, geared toward business solutions rather than solving technology problems:

• Business Focused Management: This category of business-focused management is built upon the players who manage key business areas and understand business needs.  Such players typically work in product management, consistently identifying solutions.  The goal of a cloud model focused on business needs is to rapidly deploy services to keep business moving forward, and business-focused management must be geared toward this.
• Technology Focused Engineers: In a typical organization with legacy IT systems, the responsibilities of engineers converge upon manual tasks associated with these systems.  When deploying a cloud model, the role of the engineer must be aligned with deployment of hardware and software systems in the new environment.  This involves learning new IT methods since most of the knowledge required for manual tasking is no longer required with a cloud model.
• Technology Designers with Business Experience:  These are the technology professionals who act as liaisons between the business-oriented professionals and technology engineers.  Technology designers are architects who can take business needs identified by product managers and customize business services which can be rapidly deployed.  This role requires specific technological expertise combined with a business sense which ensures that deployed services foster usability within the organization.
• Administrators: This is the role which changes the least since it involves maintenance and monitoring of the new environment to ensure operations are running as they should be.  It also includes testing and tweaking to overcome any discrepancies which may occur as the cloud model is integrated into mainstream business activities.

 
Invest more time in working with people on cloud-based organizational change, identifying what works and what needs improvement. Prioritizing the human factor will cause the technology to take shape a lot easier, as many technical problems will automatically be addressed.

 

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About the Guest Author:

Aeyne Schriber has more than two decades of accumulated experience in IT security, computer technology, and internet marketing. She has also been educated in both the technology and administration fields, at public school and college level.  She works worldwide helping companies establish an online presence from small businesses to large enterprises.  Her skills as a published copywriter and marketer also include consulting and training corporate personnel and entrepreneurs. For more information, please visit  www.digitalnewmediamarketing.com

Public Cloud Computing: Cost Reduction or Cost Transfer?

Despite cloud computing being gradually adopted into various enterprises, a number of misconceptions are still causing doubts. Among these can be found the question: is cloud really bringing real cost reduction or simply a cost transfer?

Several cost-cutting corporate decision-makers have reportedly succeeded in using cloud technology to reduce overheads. Can this claim be taken as read?

Firstly, some background.

Depending on the size and nature of operations, companies normally establish in-house IT systems that handle a list of on-going activities including – but not limited to – e-mail, data processing, data storage, communications, e-(electronic) publicity, decision-making methods and IT marketing Applications. All these functions are primarily hosted in-house which, in most cases, costs a lot to implement, maintain and customize if productivity is to be optimized.

A public cloud is one type of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which allows business managers to have their IT managed by external providers. In practice, this can allow companies to reduce expenses for purchasing, implementing and developing software (required at end-user workstations and server-level), servers and their accompanying hardware, firewall infrastructure, media outlet, storage facilities (which include a series of hardware back-ups and related servers for security), facility accommodation, and concurrent personnel expenses (that is, salaries, benefits and consultancy payments). Utilizing a public cloud service should lift the above responsibilities from the shoulders of corporate IT managers, allowing them to focus on their core business.

In principle, cloud computing provides a “buffer experience” for corporate executives. They need neither expend themselves on managing complex in-house IT systems, nor agonize over whether their IT structures are securely hosted in an external and non-intrusive environment with unrestricted access to IT infrastructures. Although this practice seemingly helps business managers save cost on IT applications, some pundits have argued this is not always true, believing instead that hosting a company’s IT systems in a public cloud denotes a “mere cost transfer” from the company to the external cloud-technology providers.

So, what do the stats say?

Typically, a mid-size company is expected to spend between $130,000 and $200,000 a year on its IT set-ups. Here’s an important breakdown of likely yearly capital expenses.

Pre-Cloud Technology Adoption Expenses

Description	Cost ($)
Software & Hardware (purchase, implementation, customization)	50,000
Servers and Server’s maintenance	40,000
Personnel Expenses (salaries etc)	40,000
Total	130,000

Post-Cloud Technology Adoption Expenses

Description	Cost ($)
Software & Hardware (purchase, implementation, customization)	30,000
Servers and Server’s maintenance	None
Personnel Expenses (salaries etc)	None
Public cloud hosting & other services	60,000
Total	90,000

Taking these figures into account, it does appear possible for businesses to save on their IT infrastructure costs through the use of public cloud services. With cloud, they only need pay for resources actually used, rather than purchase additional capacity which is permanently paid for but used only in times of peak access.

Public cloud computing provides an opportunity for an “agile IT” system, which allows businesses to increase or decrease resources (processing power, memory and storage capacity) based on their business requirements. This flexible scalability is not possible in a rigid in-house IT structure.

Above all, optimized use of resources can only be achieved by identifying the particular needs of the organization, during which a public cloud-based structure to reduce waste can be created.

There are several ways on how to configure the public cloud, including: examples of public cloud configurations commonly used by business users.

 

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About the Guest Writer:

Jerry Olasakinju (BTech) is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing seems unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/

 

How Can Colleges and Universities Leverage on the Cloud?

An article in Sys-Con relates that higher education, an industry that is normally a slow adopter of new technology, is openly adopting cloud technology.

A fact stated was that in this industry, most schools and colleges do not realize that they have already been using cloud technology to some extent such as Yahoo! And Gmail.

The article also shared a few areas that cloud can be used to the industry’s advantage:

• Business continuity planning
• Storage of archived data
• Financial aid, enrollment and admissions

Of course there are the usual concerns, primarily security, obviously because confidential and sensitive information of institutions will be moved outside the physical confines of the school to a virtual and easily accessible storage area.

Other concerns include reliability, confidentiality and regulations. The article also suggests to the school administrator to make it a point to know who has access to their information.

How else can the education industry take advantage of cloud technology? Read the full article in Sys-Con and find other reasons why cloud computing will be right for higher education.

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Can Software-Defined Networking Become the New Norm?

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) was yet another buzz-topic during the recent Interop. An article in Light Reading shares an opinion on this technology its reason for existence and where it is perceived to be going in the future.

In a nutshell, SDN is a technology that transforms networking through standardization. The consortium, Open Networking Foundation (ONF), has been initiating efforts into educating the market through the OpenFlow protocol.

The author of the article objectively raised questions on this rising industry:

• Is the value in the industry shifting away from hardware?
• Can the effectiveness of SDN be measured?

Visit Light Reading to read the full article and see a new perspective on networking and how it has come to transform to the development of a unique architecture.

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Cloud Security Needs to be Part of Planning Stage

“Traditionally – and even today – security is an afterthought, bolted on,” according to Becky Swain, co-founder of Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

This was part of the article written by technology and business writer, Susan Kuchinskas entitled, “8 Steps to a Secure Cloud Initiative”. She emphasizes that security needs to be part of the first stages of cloud deployment: Planning. More importantly, she writes about how to design a secure system. Here are the first few steps:

1. Segment data based on sensitivity
2. Decide how much security is to be outsourced
3. Identify a “short list” of cloud vendors for evaluation

Another citation in this article is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab CTO Tomas Sodestrom’s advice, which is to “Focus on real business problems, not IT experiments”.

Visit Esecurityplanet to read the rest of the steps and find out why these steps will help in implementing a secure cloud deployment.

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