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07.3.2012

When it comes to transitioning to a cloud model, regardless of the industry, change is a necessary part of ensuring that the migration process is successful and appropriately meets the needs of every business.  Organizational changes must be identified in terms of both staff and technology in order for cloud migration to successfully solve business problems. This is what is meant by mapping IT resources to business needs when deploying a cloud model.  The whole focus behind cloud migration is to solve business problems as opposed to solving technical problems within an IT infrastructure.  By streamlining business processes through cloud computing deployment you are assisting a business with moving forward.  This means that organization changes must focus around meeting mission critical business needs when planning for cloud migration.

Organizational Changes That Help to Meet Business Needs

To ensure that a new cloud model will meet business needs certain organizational changes must take place to maintain a focal point on solving business problems as opposed to technical problems.  This requires laying the initial groundwork with people instead of technology.  The more time you invest on working with key people within your organization the more weight you will hold when planning a transition to the cloud to help a business move forward.  This will also help to reduce the amount of resistance you will face from those who are reluctant to change despite the fact that they know it will better serve business needs and help the organization to operate more efficiently.

In order to implement business-enabling change you must identify the key players within the organization which include those who are focused on business tasks, professionals who are focused on technology and IT initiatives, administrators who are IT task oriented, and other planning professionals who are adept at looking at the big picture when it comes to organizational change.  Then you must identify roles in each of these categories so changes in the roles can be identified and implemented.  In some of the categories we mentioned the changes needed may be more for some areas than in 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.  This requires maintaining focus on quickly delivering services which solve business problems and appropriately serve the needs of the organization. The following represents a typical scenario for cloud-based deployment which is geared toward business solutions more than it is toward solving technology problems:

• Business Focused Management: The category of business focused management involves the players which manage key areas in the lines of business in order to understand business needs.  These are typically those who work in product management and are the ones who consistently identify solutions.  Since the goal of a cloud model that focuses on business needs is to rapidly deploy services which keep a business moving forward, the role of business-focused management must be geared toward this initiative.
• Technology Focused Engineers: In a typical organization with legacy IT systems the responsibilities of the engineers are focused on manual tasks associated with legacy systems.  When deploying a cloud model the role of the engineer must be changed to align with the deploying 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 which take the business needs which are identified by product managers and customize business services which can be rapidly deployed to keep the organization moving forward.  This role requires specific technological expertise with the business sense that ensures the 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.  It also involves testing and tweaking to overcome any discrepancies which may occur as the cloud model is deployed into mainstream business activities.

So when you invest your time more heavily in working with people in terms of organizational change and identifying what is working and what is in need of improvement, the technology will tend to take shape a lot easier with many technical problems automatically addressed when you make the human factor the priority during the deployment of a cloud model.

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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 marketingas well as technology education and administration field both on the 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

07.2.2012

As the concept of cloud computing is being gradually adopted in various enterprises, there are still a number of misconceptions people associate with public cloud hosting. One of these concerns is: does it bring about true cost reduction or is it a mere cost transfer?

Corporate decision-makers are constantly looking for ways of cutting the costs of running their businesses. And when cloud computing comes along, a few companies have reportedly utilized cloud technology to reduce their overhead cost. But how did they do it?

Depending on the size and the nature of operations, companies normally establish in-house IT systems that handle a list of on-going activities which include but are not limited to e-mail, data processing, data storage, communications, e-publicity (electronic publicity), decision-making method and IT marketing Applications. All these IT systems’ functions are primarily hosted in-house which, in most cases, cost lot to implement, maintain and customize in order to necessitate greater productivity.

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

In principle, cloud computing provides a “buffer experience” for corporate executives in the sense that they do not necessarily need to bother about managing somewhat complex in-house IT systems, and they could enjoy peace of mind knowing fully that their IT structures are hosted securely in an external and non-intrusive environment where they have unrestricted access to their IT infrastructures. Incidentally, this practice helps business managers to save cost on their IT applications. However, some pundits have argued that this is not always true. Some believe 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. Could this observation be true?

Typically, a mid-size company is expected to spend between $130,000 and $200,000 a year on its IT set-ups; look at this important breakdown of its possible yearly capital expenses.

Pre-Cloud Technology Adoption Expenses

Post-Cloud Technology Adoption Expenses

It is possible for businesses to save on their IT infrastructure costs through the use of public cloud services because they only need to pay for the resources they actually use, rather than having to purchase additional capacity in case usage increases owing to business expansion or other factors.

Public cloud computing provides an opportunity for “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.

One thing to note is being able to identify the particular needs of the organization in order to maximize the use of resources. Once needs are identified, then the structure can be created so as to reduce resource wastage.

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

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the Guest Writer:

Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/