Not all clouds are created equal

Many vendors advocated the merits of a specific cloud deployment model over another, depending on which they offer – be it private, public or hybrid clouds. However, if you’re starting any cloud discussion by asking, “What kind of cloud deployment model should I consider?” you’re asking the wrong question. You’ve put the cart before the horse – or in this case – the cloud before your business. Instead, the first question you should be asking is “How can I transform my business through cloud computing?”

When you begin by focusing on deployment models, you are looking at cloud as though it’s just another IT option, out of many. Cloud computing is bigger than that. It is part of a wider strategic piece that could have wide reaching implications for business and society, creating new possibilities and enabling more efficient, flexible and collaborative computing models.

Before embarking into a Cloud project, CIO’s need to consider the potential business benefits Cloud has to offer. Organizations have to embrace Cloud Computing strategically — what business values can be achieved through innovation, flexibility and speed of deploying IT services with reference to business requirements. Not to mention the potential to reduce operational costs and complexity in supporting the every changing business requirements.

Another point to consider is the existing IT infrastructure and how it will interface with Cloud solutions. It might pose new sets of problems if not properly addressed. It is very evident that a “Cloud” strategy opens up huge opportunities of reinventing the way to do business and at the same time, the way IT will support the new business initiatives triggered by Cloud computing.

How business behaviors have changed due to Cloud

By enabling computing resources and services to be accessed more easily over the internet or intranet in a utility fashion, similar to that of, say, electricity and water, clouds are dynamic and flexible. In terms of performance, availability and scalability, Clouds enabling businesses to quickly adapt to changes in business demands. In the case of public or hybrid clouds, businesses can also transfer costs and risks to third-party service providers – while retaining and increasing the value of their services.

For example, a business using public cloud is able to smooth cash outflows by trans­forming some capital investments into on-going expenses depending on their demand; and its IT department is able to avoid spending time and resources supporting those services internally – and instead, focus on tasks that advance their core business offering.

From a business perspective, cloud enables better sense-and-respond capabilities: for example, an organization can outperform its competition by using the cloud to boost the volume and accuracy of business insight, from both internal processes and external data, to help them re-engineer their business and react to individual situations in new ways.

From an IT perspective, cloud enables IT to keep up with changes in user demands and dynamic business needs – enabling more efficient resource utilization including increased sharing of IT resources through highly virtualized infrastructures, greater ease-of-use through self-service with rapid delivery, more flexible access to servers and services available on the public/Internet cloud, and savings in storage and data, by replacing existing on-premises storage or by providing better storage and content management capabilities.

The characteristics of Cloud computing have and will definitely change the way IT impacts the overall business.

Challenges arising from the Cloud

Cloud computing services are reshaping the way businesses provision their IT. Simple, consumer-style offerings make it easy for end users to self-provision computing capacity – with or without the blessing of their IT departments, especially in areas where gaps exist between their business needs and their IT and financial means.

Certainly by offering flexible access to resources and services, cloud computing opens a new realm of possibility. However, organizations have also learnt that it also presents its own challenges and issues.

The recent outage of a major cloud service, for example, highlighted for many businesses the potential weaknesses of piecemeal, tactical cloud deployments and emphasized the need for a holistic approach to remove risk in cloud implementations.

Some risks organizations potentially face from entering the Cloud include:

• Server failures: which can cut access to, or lead to the loss of critical information such as emails and financial transaction information;
• Cloud vendors shutting down: disrupting important processes dependent on the cloud application e.g. if it were an accounting application, it could disrupting business’ ability to create invoices, manage inventory, receive payables, etc.;
• Slow uptime due to poor cloud hosting: making website access difficult, slowing down business.

As more line-of-business managers are managing their own budgets and exercising autonomy in purchasing computing capabilities at their convenience – encouraged by today’s advancement of public cloud offerings – CIOs and IT Managers are facing the complex task of balancing the mix of on-premise, cloud and other deployment options in the organization.

If multiple groups in an organization were to make independent decisions to deploy cloud services that are disconnected or do not have an end-to-end strategy, the result could lead to – in the best case – a situation where services, workloads and processes cannot easily be integrated, shared and migrated. In the worst case scenario, data or intellectual property could be leaked and the business is compromised. Rather than take on a siloed approach, a holistic strategy would ensure interoperability, resiliency, security and integrity for the protection of a businesses’ data and business.

Thus despite the numerous cost-savings and capability-boosting opportunities cloud presents, without an integrated, holistic cloud strategy, organizations risk losing control over the information they rely on.

Launching into Cloud the right way

To reduce various vulnerabilities, companies need to engage vendors that understand their entire business operations and are able to take an end-to-end approach towards their implementations to ensure security and integration.

While a provider may have redundancy and resources to recover from any failures, it’s not always the case that they are able to provide guarantees to your business. While it’s important to read the fine print in vendor agreements, it’s just as important to have your own backups, and someone with the expertise to deal with such problems if cloud vendors fail to deliver. But creating back-ups and enlisting IT support is resource intensive and costly, which in many ways reduce the initial benefits for adopting cloud.

What’s needed is a holistic approach that simplifies and standardizes the underlying infrastructure by deploying efficient yet flexible IT foundations that can support the development of new services. This has to be supported by the consistent delivery of quality user experiences, and a strong focus on ensuring interoperability, resiliency and security in an integrated fashion.

From a foundational level, IBM is the only vendor which offers cloud designs based on a virtualized environment which extends from bare metal through to the hypervisor, eliminating bypass of security controls and assuring a rock-solid audit trail to confirm conformance. It also provides pre-integrated cloud workload-optimized systems for demanding production workloads, and offers the highest available infrastructure, above industry-average reliability, availability and security for cloud environments that are built on entry level systems to the mainframe.

IBM has proven reference architecture for building and managing cloud solutions, providing an integrated approach that uses the same standards and processes across the entire portfolio of products and services. The company’s expertise and experience in designing, building and implementing cloud solutions — beginning with its own — offers clients the confidence of knowing that they are engaging not just a provider, but a trusted partner in their IT endeavors.

By building on its industry-leading experience and success in implementing cloud solutions, IBM helps organizations make the entry into the cloud with minimal risk, streamlining business processes to make the organization more responsive to change and more oriented to service delivery, and deliver measurable value from cloud computing.