GMO Cloud

Automation is the Key to Private Cloud

With the growth of virtualization in individual business, we see as a result the core systems of many enterprises themselves becoming virtualized. Inherently, the consequences of this growth are complexity of those critical application environments. It begins to feel as if the closer a data center reaches towards the goal of the private cloud, the more difficult it becomes to attain that goal of a true cloud VPS server environment. What can be done to reach beyond these hurdles and grow the data center virtual servers to true private cloud adaptation? For in that direction lays the promise of fast efficient service. The key to all of this is automation.

Management of changes and configurations, automated provisioning and asset management are legacy issues that virtual data centers need to approach with creative and original solutions. We have seen how many virtual data centers can become victims of virtual sprawl and stall due to the increased demands of virtualization speed and resources. By automating time consuming and routine tasks, automation can aide businesses to meet the challenges of cloud adaptation while improving operations through efficiency. Both of these will improve the self-confidence of the enterprise’s IT team.

But virtual data centers must transform themselves from centers for managing infrastructure to ones that handle and organize the consumption of services if they are to make the transition to private clouds. If IT teams want to quickly and efficiently respond and fulfill on-demand service requests they must add efficiencies to the scaling of administrative competencies. This can be done through the leveraging of easy-to-use authorization and deployment workflows with policy-driven automation. To ensure regular and dependable delivery of IT services through cloud VPS servers and private clouds, processes must be standardized to business and IT policies.

There are many benefits to a successful private cloud implementation. Organizations will soon discover that they have not only reduced operational costs but at the same time have seen improved quality of service, faster delivery modes and a response to business needs that proves far more agile. A reduction in the number of incidents, errors and outages is another benefit of automating the response to an increased demand that will often result in a cloud model. This reduction of administrative support will bring your admin ratios and costs, one of the highest costs in the data center, to a more manageable level.

The Seven Keys to Automation

When considering a move to automation, it is always better to take it one step at a time. If you can define the places within your organization’s cloud VPS server environment where the clearest overall benefit or most defined fit would be, that is the best place to start. A short list of possible areas to consider would be:

Discovery and Reporting: The most basic need of any virtual data center management system is to be able to see what needs to be managed. This may seem self-evident, but it bears special attention.

Capacity Planning: If you can optimize assets that are being over or under provisioned while staying aware of growth trends, it will allow you to proactively plan infrastructure capacity. This is vital for you to meet any Service Level Agreements (SLAs) you may have.

Self-Service: This is a feature that will allow business teams to request virtual machines (VMs) on-demand, engaging them in the process while at the same time lowering your administrative load. Virtual Machine requests can be tracked by business teams, right up to the provisioning of VMs. It allows stakeholders access to real-time information regarding the virtual infrastructure without a technical management account in or additional administrative team support.

Automated Provisioning and Life-Cycle Management: Virtual Machines, unlike physical machines, have lives that can span anything from a few minutes to decades and have the advantage of mobility. This lifecycle creates the need to manage and control VMs in the environment, get confirmation that only compliant and approved VMs are provisioned, and ensure that they are decommissioned at the conclusion of their lives to release valuable resources for reuse.

Management of Change and Configuration: Growing virtual datacenters introduces a built-in complexity that requires the standardization and maintenance of configurations. In addition, all changes to the environment must be monitored and audited at all times.

Optimizing Resources: Just as a physical data center works to ensure that resources are proficiently used at optimal levels; in a dynamic virtual center this is even more critical.

Policy-based Automation: The development of standard practices, policies and automation are vital to any successful private cloud, regardless of type. This is due to the increased volume of VMs, manual maintenance and environmental support that soon becomes both unreliable and unworkable.

Looking at the Bottom Line

The cost savings from immediate reductions in capital expenditures is what will give management buy-in and momentum for most businesses initial venture into virtualization. However, the financial benefits of virtualization go beyond these cost savings to the true value in the private cloud or cloud VPS servers. This is where long term lower operational expenses can be realized through automation.

The expected return on investment (ROI) from virtualization can be compromised when unexpected downtime together with inefficient hardware utilization and increased staff cost occur when automation is not part of the solution. In some cases it can stall the whole initiative. To realize true long term reduction in operational expenses you must automate the daily tasks associated with virtual systems management.

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Three Tips on Performance when Migrating to the Cloud

If you have a business that is contemplating moving some of your enterprise tasks to the cloud, whether just a portion of daily tasks or a more significant amount relative to your business, there are a number of factors you should consider as you make this decision. This usually starts with which cloud service to use, what type of cloud (public, private or hybrid) you should consider and what the best path is for migration.

There is however one other factor that many IT organizations do not take into consideration, but should, when planning a venture of this magnitude for their business organization. That factor is performance, and because it is often not a part of the overall considerations there are some big performance mistakes being made as these systems begin to migrate to the clouds.

Before you even consider moving your production to the cloud, you should be aware of three common cloud performance mistakes that every IT organization should plan to avoid during planning stages.

Code Porting Errors

For many, the primary error is to assume you can begin porting code without performing platform localization modifications. For example, the assumption that you can take C++ code from on-premise platforms and simply move that code without any problems whatsoever is flawed.

For most of us, it is a given that you would always need to localize and optimize any code before moving it from one platform to another. We tend to forget that when we move code to the cloud, the same rules apply. Even if the cloud model is Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), you still need to consider performance. Your cloud provider may indicate that they provide A-to-A portability, but that portability will not give you A-to-A performance characteristics unless you do your part of the heavy lifting.

Leaving Out I/O Tuning

For many organizations, the error is in not considering I/O tuning when migrating to the cloud. Keep in mind that you will need to optimize I/O subsystems and the best way to do this is by tweaking tunables. Realize that this is separate from elasticity — cloud platforms can always auto provision servers as you saturate the processors. In this instance, we are referring to access to the native I/O system and how to be sure you are accessing in the most efficient way possible.

Network Latency Issues

This is similar to the problems with I/O tuning. Because we cannot control the Internet when it comes to providing us with consistent performance, when looking at the overall performance model for the new cloud environment, latency has to be considered as a separate issue. This can be critical depending on your needs, so be sure to include this in your consideration of whether a move to the cloud makes sense for your operation.

However, it isn’t just latency within the net that has to be considered, you also will need to look at latency issues that can occur when systems communicate within the cloud. This is an issue that can be easily overlooked at the planning stages. Because it is tricky to monitor, issues can crop up at a later stage and cause difficulties since there is typically not access to physical systems. It is not an insurmountable problem however, and if taken up with your provider at the planning stages, they can usually work with you on this.

As you can see, these are all issues that can be avoided if considered during the planning stages of your organization’s system migration to the cloud.

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Report Indicates Primary Cloud Growth Coming from SMB Sector

This past week a report has been released by OnApp, a leading cloud hosting software company, from a June survey that shows 49 percent of global cloud providers expect the growth of cloud services to come primarily from the small business sector over the next twelve months. This finding supports statements made recently by non-profit organization EuroCloud’s Vice-Chairman Phil Wainwright in an interview that claimed small businesses in the U.K. were a driving factor for growth in Europe’s cloud community.

ONApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl was not totally surprised by the findings and said that it showed how adoption is being led by SMBs.

“As more cloud providers enter the market we’re seeing a broader range of industries beginning to take advantage of hosted cloud services,” he said.

When discussing the enterprise sector and its impact on cloud service growth, the survey revealed that 27 percent of those surveyed did expect their primary growth to come from enterprise, leaving only 17 percent of global cloud providers expecting to make the lion’s share of their cloud services growth from consumers.

When taking a closer look at the expectations of the SMB market, the study revealed that 67 percent of those who anticipated growth from the SMB market predicted the majority of that growth to come from web and application developers. Many cited such advantages as the ability to scale IT services on demand, pay as you go service that allows them to only pay for the services they actually use, as well as the lower costs involved with not having to run their own IT department when using cloud services. A factor also mentioned was lower overall cost for just about any SMB looking at moving to cloud services in the next year.

“Based on cloud adoption rates, our survey shows that cloud computing is most accessible to technical users right now,” stated Bredahl. “Adoption is being driven by small and medium sized businesses focused on application and web development. This makes sense, since sandboxed development, web development and testing are very well suited to a cloud environment. It’s easy to control costs during development, and as load increases. You can spin up a virtual machine, even if it’s just for an hour or two, because you only need to pay for the cloud as you use it.”

The survey of 157 cloud providers was commissioned by OnApp and distributed by WebHostingTalk a premier web hosting discussion site, to gain a snapshot of what the hosting industries should be expecting in terms of the challenges it will face and business expectations for provisioning and selling hosted cloud services.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.

Friday Cloud News Roundup

There was a lot going on this week’s news of cloud servers, cloud hosting and the way we do business. Here are a few highlights of what we saw that may impact you and your business in the clouds.

Could 2012 Be the Year of the Cloud?

In a recent global survey of organizations KPMG International found that “C” executives in most of the major corporations have already moved some part of their business to the cloud. The expectation is that this number will grow with even more considering the move in the coming year.

Will a Secure Cloud be Leading to More Government Cloud Use?

James Shaeffer is a leading expert on cloud security and was recently vice-chair for a government committee exploring the expansion of the cloud for US government organizations. His recent testimony of the advisability of increased adaptation of the cloud for government agencies could fuel further expansion as security concerns are addressed and resolved.

Cloud-Based Medical Billing Continues to Expand

As the number of physicians using cloud-based systems for record keeping and billing, the cloud healthcare industry continues to grow at amazing rates. Kareo is a cloud-based medical software company that just announced securing a $10 million equity investment. Is this just the start of a move by healthcare industries to the cloud?

Will OpenStack Foundation Finally Become a Reality?

IT World’s Brian Profitt talks about SpaceRack’s involvement in OpenStack, the open source developers organization and the foundation that needs to be setup to prevent OpenStack from being merely another arm of SpaceRack. Is it finally time for the OpenStack Foundation to be a truly vendor-neutral and open home for the development of open source cloud hosting?

Fighting for Web and Cloud in Washington

There is legislature up for vote in Congress that could mean the end for some web services and curtail the rights of many web and cloud-based businesses. The battle between web service companies and the large entertainment entities that feel threatened by the growing dominance of the cloud is just beginning.

Google and Microsoft Continue to Battle Over Cloud Supremacy

Just like two giant monsters fighting over the fair maiden, the giants of the tech world continue to do battle to see who will win the war over cloud dominance. As apps continue to roll out and prices continue to roll down, where will the rest of the cloud go to find the software to run their cloud-based business? That is what Google and Microsoft want to know.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.

The New Cloud-Based Answering Service

The answering service industry is one that has really benefitted from the evolution of the cloud for business applications. In a virtualized business world, this industry is holding its own and more. What started out as specialized utilization — use of software as a service, managing applications and sharing resources through cloud technologies — is becoming common practice in the answering service industry.

Contact centers have increasingly come to use cloud-based software because it allows them to completely integrate with existing customers and partners while still providing ability to deliver a streamlined and efficient service that is highly personal.

Cloud-based software that is shared between contact centers and client partners enables answering services to relay messages over multiple platforms and keep information updated in real time. Because of the cloud, contact centers are no longer tied to one fixed location such as an office building. It gives them the green advantage of using lower amounts of electricity and emitting smaller amounts of carbon while at the same time making them less vulnerable to natural disasters or technical failures that could bring their services to a standstill just when they are needed most.

With the coming evolution of the 24 hour business day and today’s customer expectation of instant information, call centers that are connected via the cloud world-wide can provide around-the-clock customer service. The idea of anyone calling a service number on a website and getting an answering machine has become almost archaic with the advent of the 24/7 customer service center that is connected via the cloud to time zones anywhere in the world.

This anytime anywhere service model is bound to grow as smartphones, laptops and now iPads and computing tablets have made businesses even more mobile. With this mobility comes a higher number of consumers spending money and time online. According to Forrester Research, tablet users are expected to grow at a rate of 51% from 2010 to 2015. This will be reflected in increased use of customer service for both consumers and businesses, as this mobility brings them into a business cycle that becomes increasingly 24/7.

An example of the latest cloud based tool for this type of customer service center is the cloud-based switch that can setup “universal queuing” to enable a call center to route emails, calls, chats and any other type of customer service contact all in the same way. Primary, secondary and tertiary agent skills can be established that allows all incoming contacts to be identified and segmented to the correct agent, wherever they are located. This system eliminates hard queues and improves services while cutting agent populations by 20% and generating real switch data for workforce management tools. All of this leads to better customer service and lower costs.

Another major evolution currently underway for customer service has been the movement to cloud-based web services such as social media as a customer service tool. With so many of any industry’s clients using social media, it is only logical to include a customer channel that is highly active to provide the best customer service possible. The top five industries that are currently engaged in this practice are Retail, Telco, Travel & Hospitality, Cable and Financial Services according to a leading customer service industry blog.

The movement to the cloud for customer service has only one direction to go – up. With cloud-based service ticket management tools that can create, track, escalate and resolve customer service requests in real time, service requests become more efficient and effective. Cloud-based software encourages cross-sell opportunities, measures employee staff productivity and improves the effectiveness of any customer service department with real time analytical reporting. It is the perfect tool for any customer service business and as the cloud evolves, customer service and how it reaches out to the client to take care of needs before they become problems will continue to evolve along with it.

Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.