October 25th, 2011
Whatever type of business you are, the decision to move a part or all of your business to the cloud is challenging. To complicate matters, there is always the question of which type of cloud you need to use: public, private or hybrid. So how does anyone make this decision? Here are a few things to consider when balancing out the needs of your business while looking at the various pros and cons for each of the three types of cloud hosting solutions.
As of 2012, Gartner is predicting that 30% of all enterprises will have moved at least a part of their business to the cloud. The capability to scale on demand to any capacity and to perform that scalability at will continues to draw more businesses to the benefits of virtual servers in the cloud.
One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is the flexibility to ramp up or down according to the flow of traffic. Disk space can be allocated as the need increases and then released as soon as the demand begins to ebb, with great cost efficiency.
Virtualization gives cloud virtual servers the ability for replication. It also allows them to launch quickly and easily, allowing greater flexibility for IT management. With the growing popularity of viral campaigns, video and social networking, the cloud has become a vital part of any organization. Digital marketing initiatives can create huge divergent swings of traffic. With the cloud, companies have the flexibility during a new marketing campaign when they need more servers, to expand to the capacity it requires until the end of the campaign and then ramp back down.
In a private cloud, the growth of the business is not affected by a need to change platforms or architecture upon expansion. They can add capacity to accommodate the increase of clients effortlessly and automate resources dynamically. In addition, virtual servers can have the physical machine or hardware node segmented into smaller units allowing different functions or even separate systems to be run on the same virtual server.
This streamlining of operations makes virtual servers perfect for businesses that are on the move and growing. It doesn’t matter if you are an SME that is getting geared up for expansion or a large enterprise that needs to outsource IT in-house infrastructure management, or begin a national marketing program. You can simplify operations and reduce costs at the same time.
For some there is always the concern of security risks, but these can be allayed through the use of duplicate servers and firewalls. Your cloud host provider can create layers of redundancy with backup levels and even SAN configured in redundant pairs to reduce the security risks.
There have been countless reports of how the major reason many companies have not yet made the move to the cloud is because of the concern for security. It has probably not helped much that the media continues to report security breaches by high profile brands bringing negative publicity to the cloud community.
Sony is a good example of this negative reporting, as early stories pointed to cloud-based security structures as the cause of leaked data. But there is no specific evidence to suggest that the cloud servers were at the heart of the security problem. And while it is true that there have been other security breaches in various cloud platforms, in the case of Sony and numerous other security breaches, the end result would have been the same if the server had resided in-house.
The main difference between an in-house server and a cloud server is that the cloud server is run across the internet. This does pose some vulnerability, but not one that cannot be guarded against in a similar manner as with an in-house server. Private clouds are the most secure as they can be fully protected and cloud clients can be assured that their data is safe.
Public clouds, because of the nature of multi-tenancy servers, do pose a slightly higher security risk. However, a discussion with your host provider can clarify the security measures taken and which cloud server infrastructure is right for your business. If you are concerned about the jurisdiction of the country where the servers that hold your data reside, talk to your host provider.
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.
October 24th, 2011
A recent study from KPMG shows that the adoption of cloud technology, including use of cloud servers, is changing the way that business is conducted by affecting the basic approach of business concepts.
Not surprisingly, four out of five businesses were shown to have been affected by this new technology by having moved some of their business needs to the cloud. If they had not already moved parts of their business to cloud servers, they were in the planning stages of doing so. One in ten companies interviewed for the report said that they had made the decision to move their core business functions to remote cloud servers.
When discussing what factors were the primary drivers to make these changes, three out of four companies said that the ability to save costs was the most important reason for the move to the cloud. When asked to comment on the significance of the findings, KPMG’s head of technology Tudor Aw said, “What the survey shows is that ‘cloud’ is becoming more of a business and not just a technology conversation.” He went on to point out the economic realities and how they are affecting this change. “In these harsh economic times, cloud computing should be considered by all companies that strive to reduce costs.”
With the growing interest in not only moving daily functions to the cloud but the core business as well, any business that does not make the change to cloud technology may soon find that they are not only losing the competitive edge but are going to find the cloud a necessity for conducting business. There are many examples of how businesses have used the move to the cloud to cut costs, improve their core business and achieve their goals. Here are just a few:
Seattle University – They made the decision to decrease operating costs, prolong the desktop lifecycle and put all of the labs onto one software program. This move would synch the entire lab system by converting twenty campus computer labs and over 1500 desktop computers to virtual desktops linked by a cloud server. The end result was faster response times to students, teachers and faculty. It also was instrumental in helping to meet the universities educational and administrative needs.
Germany – A German service provider uses cloud servers to connect churches and public sector organizations in a multitenant cloud. This enables them to deliver business applications to their end users which can number in the millions. By providing this cloud server to their customers, the service provider can scale the need for resources based on the demands of their client and bring new services to that client base in a timelier manner.
Georgetown University – This Washington D.C. University has a tradition of serving the legal needs of a wide ranging group of students. The recent conversion to a cloud server has made it possible for the law school to extend its classrooms out to remote locations. In addition, it has also created continuity for businesses in the event of a disaster.
Cloud computing has many solutions in many complex ways. Every organization is different and has different challenges and needs that can be met in a variety of ways and with a range of cloud solutions. The goal is to go beyond the complexities, engage with cloud service providers, customers and users to find the cloud server model that suits them best. Every journey must begin with a set of simple decisions, and the journey to the cloud is no different. The cloud is changing the way many businesses work, and with the right planning it is changing them for the better.
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.
October 20th, 2011
One of the industries with the most intensive record control needs is the health industry. Recently the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) made the decision to implement the use of a cloud-based suite of collaboration software to aid in the certification of electronic health record systems.
The non-profit has a public mission of assisting in the adaption of electronic records keeping by the introduction of robust interoperable health information technology. It certifies electronic health record technology and has been an Authorized Testing and Certification Body approved by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services since 2006.
The organization has been using the cloud-based software to facilitate file sharing amongst its own staff as well as with customers and contractors. It has recently moved the entire mission-critical application to a cloud hosting service in order to leverage the cost saving benefits of the cloud, along with the added gains in productivity.
CCHIT has found that by moving to the cloud it has “helped us to collaborate more effectively with our customers and contractors,” says Earl Evans, Technology Engineer at CCHIT. “We are able to seamlessly store, move and share important files internally and with outside parties as needed, while maintaining strong security and good performance. [Having it cloud-hosted] permits us to enjoy those same capabilities, but with significantly decreased cost.”
The scalable collaborative cloud-based solution is a client-server product suite that enables users to collaborate on files from within the applications that they are already using. This feature greatly reduces training costs for the organization and allows end users to realize the benefits of the cloud at a much accelerated rate.
The ability to scale up or down as needed gives an organization such as CCHIT the kind of control it needs to instantly manage costs while still allowing the flexibility to expand upon demand. For an organization like CCHIT it is an exciting move to the cloud.
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.
October 19th, 2011
For most of us, when we think Adobe Software, we think of desktop applications for multimedia and creativity, as opposed to anything that you could run on virtual servers. That is probably because they have been producing these types of applications for over thirty years. But the world of the PC has gradually evolved into a place where desktop software is becoming old fashioned and virtual servers based “Software as a Service” (SaaS) is increasingly becoming the norm. It has often looked as if Adobe was completely unaware of this evolution happening around them. But that seems to have changed. Recently Adobe announced a very different set of tools for the creative community, one that is meant to work in the cloud.
Adobe recently revealed that they have created a set of applications (apps) that show they are ready to begin to change their focus. It will move them towards mobile technology and the ability to work with virtual servers to make those platforms a part of the Adobe world. The new mobile apps are called “Adobe Touch Apps” and were created to work with Android tablets and Apple iPads. They have the look and feel of the current Creative Suite desktop software and will continue to allow users to do full Photoshop image editing just like the desktop version, as well as a bunch a new creative design tasks.
These six apps are created specifically for touch screens and are designed to be intuitive. They will give users the ability to explore ideas and present creative concepts on the go through their iPad or Android tablet. These devices will be connected to cloud-based Adobe applications that will sit on virtual servers. These apps will have the same high professional quality that Adobe is known for and that many creative business people rely on, but with the ability to access them through a touch device while on-the-go. The mobile apps will create instant accessibility to image editing, ideation, sketching, mood boards, website and mobile app prototyping as well as being able to present finished work.
The biggest step for Adobe has to be the creation of a virtual server hub for users to share files, synch the collaborative work they are doing and allow others to view work as it progresses. This hub, which Adobe has named “Creative Cloud”, will take the company that extra step into one of the areas that cloud is best at, collaboration. In many ways, this is a natural step for a company that has always been at the heart of the creative community.
It is no secret that the company sees this move as an important step that will transform the company and bring it into the 21st Century. Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch has even said, “The move to the Creative Cloud is a major component in the transformation of Adobe.”
With this move to bring the desktop software that has been so vital to many creative businesses into the world of virtual servers and cloud technology Adobe brings its unique creative software to the world of the tablet and beyond. It also anticipates the move by many tablets to stylus capabilities and will prove to be a good partner for that development.
One of the hallmarks of Adobe has always been its Flash product, an application that at one time was used anywhere that animation and video was seen on the web. But Flash has recently been under fire as video, gaming and animation developers in both large companies and independent studios explore HTML5 capabilities. HTML5 is an open source standard as opposed to Flash’s proprietary platform, which is another reason for HTML5’s recent popularity amongst developers. At a recent conference Adobe talked of its own work with HTML5 and was noticeably silent about any new Flash developments. This may also be a sign that Adobe is moving more of its gaming based software towards the open source HTML5 and the cloud. It is probably no coincidence that Adobe also announced its recent purchase of Nitobi software, creators of PhoneGap, an open source platform for creating mobile apps based on HTML5.
With the addition of these six apps and the introduction of the Creative Cloud, it looks like Adobe has finally entered the Cloud universe. Adobe’s push toward HTML5 development support merely endorses that change. For many within the creative community this will be welcome news. It is also welcome news to anyone in the cloud community as it simply reinforces that almost any business model can be adapted successfully to the power of virtual servers in the cloud.
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.
October 18th, 2011
Is your company considering moving some or many of their day-to-day operations to cloud servers? These days it is no longer really a question of if you will move at least part of your business enterprise to the cloud, but when. If this is a step you are contemplating soon, you might want to consider a couple of key questions that will help you to decide what elements in your groundwork may prevent your business from utilizing virtual servers or cloud hosting.
Every project has both long term and short term risks for its financial return on investment. Have you looked at both of these to assess how including cloud servers will affect your goals? There are a number of factors to consider when looking at risk probability including utilization, speed, scalability and value. While it is true that these factors can and often will be built into most ROI models, careful consideration should be made to ensure you are aware of how including virtual servers or cloud hosting will affect the headline numbers for investment, revenue, cost and most importantly how long before you see your return.
This is an important question that isn’t always asked at the beginning. The best solution is to start with an executive vision that clearly shows the direction the business transformation will take. Of course, this is easier said than done. It will require top-level support for the changes proposed, a clear roadmap for procurement, cloud services or cloud hosting and applications implementation and most of all the organization of stakeholders. You will need to develop consensus amongst these stakeholders for such elements as storage, computing, network and applications in order to prioritize demands for usage. If you begin by creating a series of pilot introductions you can build confidence amongst the users and create buy-in from your most critical stakeholders.
If you are considering several different cloud solutions as part of a bigger solution, do these various elements integrate and can they work well with the existing system in addition to each other? This can be a critical factor since the inability to integrate an element such as cloud VPS servers into the current system may make the changes impossible to implement. The three key elements to include are taking into account the interface conversion cost, assessing the difficulty level in changing the existing system and considering whether the skills exist within the company to make these changes.
The question of skills is an important risk as you will need to know if the current skill sets include an ability to assemble and customize multiple cloud servers and services from various providers. This will need to be accomplished in a flexible way that is adaptable while able to maintain the same high levels of security, handle backup and all governance issues that may arise. If you do not have this kind of skill in house, the cost of adding it needs to be considered as part of the solution.
Noncompliance can become an issue when considering an outside cloud service provider for cloud hosting or cloud VPS servers. Even the provision of contracts may not be sufficient when it comes to confidentiality and location assurances. In some instances you may even discover that force majeure will stop the supplier from honoring those agreements. A good example of this would be if a legal action resulted in a subpoena of another tenant’s data that is in the same system. This may have an impact on the enterprise’s corporate reputation.
If you were buying a system in-house, you would have benchmarks it needed to meet. The same criteria holds true for anything in the cloud. You can assess the quality of an external system using the same factors you would use for the quality of your own system. In addition, take a close look at the provider’s track record just as you would with any other vendor. The same rules should be applied to security. Ask questions, get answers and adapt your traditional security models to the new cloud computing needs. Be sure that you include end-to-end security as part of the solution. Your own internal policies regarding user provisioning and control over access should be a part of the entire security plan.
As you can see, none of these questions are a large departure from what you would be asking if you were considering a new system in the traditional mode. Deciding to include cloud servers or cloud hosting as part of a larger project simply requires a few more questions that in the long run will give planning stages more information, ultimately ending with a better designed solution.
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.
October 17th, 2011
Anyone paying attention to technology today is familiar with the term “disruptive technology” as coined by Clayton Christensen in his ground-breaking work “Innovator’s Dilemma”. A great example of this particular type of innovation can be seen by simply taking a look at your desktop and the desktop software you use on a weekly basis. When you compare that to the services your company uses from the cloud, you can begin to see how much this has changed in a short amount of time. With the introduction of cloud servers, business could move away from the clumsy and burdensome applications that took up time and money, often more time and money in maintenance then was originally invested in the product. Business has begun the move to the cloud, and this disruptive technology is the new reality being born in every enterprise.
As an alternative to the legacy models, cloud hosting technology is more inexpensive to run. It is easier to implement and often offers a broader application when it comes to enterprise computing. Customers are drawn to the advantages of performance and low expense on products that in the past were often over-serviced as well as over-priced. As with many disruptive technologies, the cloud have begun to solve additional problems as the solutions spread through an organization, often due to the ease of adaption and low price for introduction.
But just as Christensen pointed out, it is the smaller more adept businesses that are the initial ones who embrace the changes a disruptive alteration brings, like cloud hosting and cloud servers. With only a small fraction of the $270 billion spent on enterprise software currently going towards cloud vendors, it is obvious that many don’t feel the need for change or yet see the writing on the wall. Some traditional enterprise leaders can see the need to make the leap, but often don’t have the business models to allow the change. They are like a huge cumbersome ship trying to turn in the wind. Some don’t see the need for change; others just don’t have the support within the organization to make the changes needed to accommodate the new dynamic.
The comfortable positions that these enterprises hold make them unable to initiate the aggressive changes needed to accommodate a new cloud directive. Fear of confused customers, disrupted channels and unfamiliarity leading to problems in product execution hold them at bay. Their predicament is obvious, the solution not quite so.
There are some, however, that see this as an opportunity for change and growth. Mike McCarthy is the VP of Cloud Computing with IBM and he recently spoke at the INTEROP technology conference in India about these very changes. In his keynote talk he spoke of the importance of businesses to reinvent themselves in regards to changes and the cloud, or they would soon find themselves being left behind.
An interesting statistic he gave at the talk was how of the ten top companies listed a decade ago, only two could be found in that list today. The others were left behind when changes to the way business is being done found them caught in their own stagnation. To stay on top you have to constantly reinvent yourself, and that includes your business model. With the coming changes created by cloud servers and cloud hosting, we are not only going to be working faster with fewer expenses attached to that work, but thinking differently. And that means looking at cloud computing not as a technology but as an important concept that will give us a smarter planet.
With an expected 80 percent of the traffic moving to server-to-server by 2014, according to a recent report by Mike Nielsen, Director of Vertical and Solution Marketing for HP Networking, we will see unbelievable growth in new ways. “We anticipate 1,000 percent growth in the next four years in the enterprise network because of video,” says Nielson. “Data center on the cloud, fragmented networks and new services are the new realities of today. And the entire ecosystem has to be prepared with solutions around these.”
However, McCarthy does caution that although he sees cloud computing as an important player in the roles that are affecting the IT landscape, it is not the only solution. IT organizations today face some big problems and part of the solution is to understand where cloud hosting or cloud servers fit as part of the answers.
“The percentage of CIOs who see cloud computing as IT and business model is growing,” says McCarthy. “Cloud helps a business and IT to create and deliver value in fundamentally new ways. Businesses are choosing a variety of cloud models (private, public and hybrid) to meet their unique needs and priorities.”
But he stresses that IT will need to re-invent itself several times over as enterprises look to sustain growth. There are cycles of sprawling IT complicated by incomplete data and an inflexible IT that must change.
But not all innovation needs to be disruptive. When technology reinforces current leaders, it can then be seen as sustaining rather than disruptive. But is that so with the cloud? Are the go-to-market strategies unchanged or the technological advances linear ones? In these instances the current market players can maintain the status quo. But when a totally new technology is brought to market, such as the introduction of the web, new players can move more quickly to capitalize and commercialize the new reality.
A good example is Dell versus The Yellow Pages. The web simply meant that Dell could put its catalog on the web, and it did so quite quickly. The difference between the catalog and a web page was a linear move. With the Yellow Pages, they lost their opportunity when Yelp came along and recognized the power of the community on the web. The web was a disruptive change in this instance. It had the ability to access local information and from it creates a community. This was an element that the Yellow Pages lacked.
We see this once again with the move of many of the core business applications to the web. Almost every aspect of business has changed from sales, marketing and distribution to the actual utility of cloud powered software. End-user adaptation drives sales and marketing, not the top-down mandates of old. Startups can access the same distribution networks (i.e. the Internet) as current market leaders, diminishing their high-value partnerships and vendor relationships. And in the final analysis, the products themselves are defined by their openness, ability to be mobile and their flexibility that makes them perfect tools for collaboration. And so, with this new disruption, startups have the ability to compete successfully with the traditional leaders in their field, changing the rules of the game for many.
Salesforce is a good example of a business that initially competed by slipping in as a “just good enough” competitor that with time and more complex product roadmaps became an indispensible tool for its clients. What began as a small 2% share of the market in 2002 that had analysts dismissing it as an also-ran lacking the functionality side of the equation became a $2 billion enterprise with 100,000 customers by 2011. They were able to serve their customers in more meaningful ways and knew how to capitalize on that fact.
This kind of change is happening across the globe as IT is liberated from solving the day to day functions of putting together servers and plugging cables into boxes. Instead it can move on to help build value of interest on the software and systems of the enterprise. Reaching beyond the necessary but more utilitarian tasks, IT can add value to the core business process of a company.
We see this beginning to happen at companies like Pandora where the integration of applications creates greater value, speed and flexibility for their clients and employees. Dole has seen their IT create systems that allow individuals to work from anywhere drawing critical information through their iPads from any part of the company to any other. And at Proctor and Gamble they have an innovative IT team that works to deliver the cloud to teams and groups in just about any corner of the globe. They work securely and with greater productivity than ever.
Customer experiences are more dynamic, solutions are updated more frequently, projects are completed more quickly, and this all contributes to better business results. The entire system can grow with greater breadth, wider diversity and a farther reach of technology for all. The change is here already, it is up to us to decide if we are part of that change or if we will cling stubbornly to the old truths while the new realities emerge.
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.
October 14th, 2011
Cloud Hosting and the Need for Business Agility
Michael Hugos is a writer and speaker on the changing world of business and technology. In this week’s blog for CIO, he talks about the need for businesses to become more agile as social media and the advances of cloud hosting change many aspects of business.
Survey Shows Support for Government Cloud
A recent survey of California voters revealed that 9 out of 10 supported the idea of the California government using technology including cloud technology such as cloud servers to save the state money. In addition, a second survey by the same company, BlueText, showed that government IT managers who were familiar with cloud servers and other cloud technology were more likely to support it in their agencies.
In a bold move Apple announced they are talking with numerous studios to ink a deal that could allow them to offer major motion pictures through their iTunes service as early as late 2011 or early 2012. This move reflects the recent trend towards entertainment in the cloud as UltraViolet, a multi-studio collaboration to bring movies to mobile devices through a cloud hosting service launches their first offerings: Warner Brothers Horrible Bosses and Green Lantern.
VMWare Refocuses its Offerings on SMBs
A recent realization that over half of the licenses sold were to businesses with less than 1,000 employees has prompted virtualization leader VMware to rethink their focus. The result was a launch of cloud service products and services geared to SMBs. They are now seeing a triple in the number of SMB clients from last year and are planning an upcoming announcement of the expansion of this portfolio of products.
Science and Cloud Servers Break New Ground
With the announcement of DNAnexus and Google’s upcoming co-venture, it is only a matter of time before we see more breakthroughs in science that were only possible with cloud server based collaboration. All of the recent breakthroughs in DNA sequencing were only possible because of the collaborative nature of cloud hosting solutions, and this recent announcement will give the SRA website a greater ability to build stronger ties with its publicly accessible DNA sequence site.
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.
October 13th, 2011
The legal profession is another area that has started to see more movement into Cloud Services. A recent article discussed how the new choice of IT platform for lawyers in Scotland has become the Cloud, with many firms moving IT processing and data to cloud servers. By doing this, they have suddenly made a vast amount of information that the legal professionals need access available to whether in their offices, in the field or at a court case. It has also made it much easier for smaller law firms to expand into new locations.
The first element that most lawyers want to see in the cloud is practice management. This type of software would facilitate an individual lawyer or practice setting up or branching out to new locations quick and easily.
With cloud services’ popular benefit pay-as-you-go cost structure, many lawyers find that moving all of their IT processing and data to the cloud makes a lot of sense. Active case data can be accessed no matter where a lawyer may be at any time. Once a case is closed, the majority of data can be archived. Overhead is reduced and with an ability to share infrastructure many smaller firms find they can afford professional IT structure at a reasonable price.
There was a time when all lawyers worried about the security of the data they had for any case they were working on. This could include physical data as well as information on laptops and USB sticks, as all were vulnerable to theft or damage. With the move to the cloud, all pertinent data can be stored in a safe environment, even in a private cloud if needed, to ensure security for all sources of information. With confidentiality an important part of the business, this increases the ability of any legal professional to serve their clients — knowing that they have a safe and secure place for all confidential data.
Another great advantage for any lawyer when using the Cloud is that they can work from just about anywhere: at home, the office or even while away on vacation. The ability to check in on new information posted, double check sources and know that all of your information is secure can make it easier for most members of the legal profession to stay on top of latest developments and learn new information as it becomes available.
In short, by evolving with the latest in cloud technology, many legal firms are finding that it can help their teams be more efficient, engage more productively and attend to their business in a more competitive manner than ever before. As the cloud continues to evolve, many predict that it will come to be one of the most important tools yet for the modern law firm.
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.
October 12th, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
October 11th, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
« Older Entries Newer Entries »