Maximizing the potential cloud computing benefits in a migration
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.
Almost half of all cloud computing projects are rated as being at least partially unsuccessful by internal or external auditors after launch. In two-thirds of all cases, benefits promised by the cloud migration were deemed real but not realized by the cloud project. To secure your own cloud benefits, establish explicit target benefits and link each target benefit to a specific step in the process, then audit benefit realization status at each project milestone and take prompt steps to record what you’ve promised. There will, however, be hurdles along the way.
Establishing target benefits
The biggest problem with benefit loss is lack of any organized benefit set. You can’t chase benefits you never really had under control, and control starts in the cloud project planning phase. A cloud computing project audit showed that projects that expended less than about 20% of their time in the planning phase were twice as likely to have benefit problems as those that spent 25% to 30% planning. Even though extensive planning and review seems to waste project time and opportunity, it pays off in accurate identification of costs and the creation of sound project controls to monitor critical assumptions…
ScaleXtreme is combining server management with enterprise cloud management in its new Advanced Cloud Management product, which is now in general availability but has been tested over the last few months in Fortune 500 companies. The new product was designed to be fully integrated with ScaleXtreme’s existing server management capabilities, which include server and application monitoring, patch management and job automation. It also includes a new workflow and orchestration system, autoscaling, multi-cloud management capabilities and cloud access control features.
HP came out on top because of its breadth and depth of services for private clouds, while Cisco and Microsoft were also named leaders. Enterprises are expected to significantly ramp up their pursuit of internal private clouds within the next year and HP, Cisco and Microsoft have the strongest product offerings for those deployments, according to a new Wave report by research firm Forrester. According to a Forrester survey of more than 2,300 IT hardware buyers, about 55% of them said they plan to build an internal private cloud within the next 12 months; another 33% have already started.
SAS Visual Analytics on-premise data exploration tools are now available in the cloud with five different versions for public, private, and hybrid clouds SAS has launched a new cloud version of their Visual Analytics data exploration product, allowing anyone in a business to get access to SAS data visualisation on any device, with the ability to analyse over a billion rows of data in seconds.
Cloud broker Cloud Sherpas took a shot at Microsoft (MSFT) recently for its Scroogled marketing campaign that targeted Google (GOOG) by claiming in a blog post that "Microsoft customers are the real victims." Cloud Sherpas Solutions Engineer Derik VanVleet led his company’s attack, writing a blog post around the idea of Microsoft scanning personal files.
This is the third part in a series of articles about creating my own IaaS performance benchmarking project. In the first part, I explained the methodology I’m using to test instance types across major IaaS providers. In the second part, I ran benchmarks across every instance type in every U.S. region run by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the most widely used IaaS provider. In this part, I look specifically at the new C3 family of instances that AWS launched at its re:Invent conference, and update my AWS charts accordingly.