Cloud Hosting

by Rich Bourdeau

Thanks to improved efficiencies and greater business agility, the number of companies looking to deploy private cloud infrastructures has increased dramatically in 2012. CIOs across industries can no longer ignore the compelling business case for cloud computing. In his February 2012 report, Top Five Trends for Private Cloud Computing, Gartner analyst Tom Bittman forecasts: the number of [private cloud] deployments throughout 2012 will be at least 10 times higher [than 2011].

Many companies view private clouds as the next phase in their virtualization efforts with the goal of enabling the consumerization of IT. Compared to virtualization, private clouds are an even larger paradigm shift that requires significant changes in the way many companies deliver IT services. Unless IT teams thoughtfully plan how they are going to address the organizational and cultural challenges, they will likely derail their initial cloud deployments or deliver a solution that cannot be scaled to other groups or businesses within the enterprise.

Provisioning Virtual Infrastructure Still Takes too Long During the last five to ten years, cost savings through server consolidation was the primary motivation driving most companies to virtualize large portions of their IT infrastructures. A secondary benefit was that virtualization also helped reduce IT service delivery from weeks to days. However, with the pace of business accelerating, companies need faster access to compute resources so they can continue to grow their businesses in an increasingly competitive market. The challenge at most companies is that IT consumers still wait days for access to servers, desktops, storage and other compute resources they needed yesterday.

Agility Replaces Cost Savings as Private Cloud Motivation In their non-work, consumer lives, many of the services people use can be acquired online through a self-service portal and delivered immediately. However, in their business lives, these same people have to submit requests and wait days for manual processes to deliver much-needed services. Increasingly, IT consumers are demanding the same levels of service they have in their personal lives. They want self-service access to resources with delivery measured in minutes, not days. In order to achieve this and maximize the benefits from virtualization, businesses need to evolve into IT as a service or private cloud. While virtualization provides the foundation that enables the delivery of private cloud services, private clouds provide the consumer interface that will empower companies to take virtualization to the next level.

Like many other companies, you have probably recognized that for IT to remain relevant, you need to embrace the consumerization of IT and offer on-demand access to private and, yes, even hybrid cloud services. As with any IT project, you probably want to start out small and grow your implementation in both size and complexity over time. Before you begin, you should be aware of the more common mistakes companies make in their initial private cloud deployments and how to overcome these obstacles to ensure that your company achieves the quickest time to cloud value.

Common Pitfalls One of the theories exposed by the so-called experts is that, in order to successfully deploy a private cloud, companies need learn from the public cloud providers and standardize on a few offerings with a single deployment process. The theory is that it will be easier to automate the delivery of these services if you limit the number of permutations. In theory, this sounds great, but in practice this is one of the biggest obstacles that stalls the growth of many private cloud deployments.

For companies to achieve the economies of scale enjoyed by cloud providers, they need to achieve higher utilization by sharing resources and amortizing the cost over multiple business and departments. The problem that many companies encounter is that they start by building their private cloud to meet the specific needs of one group. Like virtualization, which started first in lower-risk IT applications, initial private clouds pilots are frequently deployed in Dev/Test environments. The choice of Dev/Test by itself is not a bad option, but when combined with standardizing the offering and automation process, it typically leads to poor adoption by other groups within the company because the offerings dont meet the unique needs of their business.

Lets take a look at provisioning methodology, which is just one of the many attributes that make up an infrastructure service. The Dev/Test groups primary need is to get access to machines quickly. For them, cloning a machine meets their needs. The production group is more concerned about compliance to software revision levels and patch management; for them, using enterprise software deployment tools from BMC, CA, HP, IBM and others is a critical necessity. The desktop group, on the other hand, is more concerned with creating space-efficient desktops to lower its storage costs. However, if you build a private cloud service where the provisioning methodology only supports machine cloning, then you are likely to achieve poor adoption by the other groups.

The rest is here:
Consumerization of IT Driving Virtualization to the Private Cloud