Introducing a Practical View of the Cloud

Cloud computing continues to gain visibility as it is one of the most discussed terms in the IT industry.  However, there are many unanswered questions about the cloud, including what is it, how do I leverage the cloud, where should I place my services and when should I implement.  In addition, security and maturity pose other relevant concerns to this emerging technology.  Some feel that it may take a long time for the industry to adopt public cloud services, so why invest?  We will be exploring answers to these questions in a series of articles over the next few months looking into the emerging technology, and how it is introducing new services and standards.

An example on how to leverage cloud services is with disaster recovery. DR usually involves establishing infrastructure that allows you to recover in cases of a serious disaster or an outage. In order to achieve that goal, the IT teams need to make sure that the DR site is up-to-date and contains enough resources (processing power, memory, storage capacity and more) for a failover. In some cases, cloud computing can ease these requirements as it provides a key role in scalability.  Cloud DR allows organizations to start small and increase resources by demand in a very flexible manner.  The cloud provider should be able to give capacity to grow on demand – this module “pay per use” for on demand scalability can significantly reduce costs.

Organizations should start with assessments that address the top four questions – “what, how, where and when” to move toward cloud services.  The key steps for these assessments are:

• Evaluate what cloud can do for you and how the cloud can meet your needs. For example, good candidates might be disaster recovery or dev/test environments, while servers that contain your intellectual property might not be good candidates.
• Determine the approach (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), or how to leverage cloud services in your IT.  Even if you decide to wait on cloud adoption, make sure you understand how to make your IT cloud ready.
• Make sure the cloud provider meets your requirements, such as service level agreements, costs, regulatory compliance and others requirements you may have.
• Determinate how to move into the cloud, the adoption of the technology might take time and can bring other concerns and IT challenges.

Remember, you will need to develop a strategy which will allow you to purchase those external services and resources.  Those resources will provide you with the needed flexibility and scalability which will meet your cost requirements.  In addition, the cloud will need to meet your IT requirements in a similar manner to today’s traditional IT services.  This series of articles will explore these issues in greater detail by diving into the what, how, where and when of cloud computing.  The practical view of the cloud kicks off with a simple yet complex question – what is cloud computing?