Keys to a winning cloud solution
Cloud computing is taking up an increasing portion of IT budgets. The early trickle is turning into a rush as more cloud services come onto the market and organisations are lured by the many advantages.
Organisations that sign up to cloud in a piecemeal and unplanned way – without any long-term vision – may find themselves tackling a host of unwanted problems. As organisations rush to reap the benefits of cloud, they must be mindful to avoid over-investing and wasting resources. Private and hybrid cloud assets may be virtual, but they still need to be managed.
Easy access to so much computing power is akin to virtualisation on steroids and can lead to over-provisioning with increased complexity and management demands.
Left unchecked, this lack of insight and planning leaves organisations faced with spiralling costs and an increasing problem of cloud sprawl and supplier sprawl.
Enterprises must realise that cloud is not an all-purpose solution to every IT challenge. Specific needs must be examined to establish if a cloud solution will help or not.
There are three common uses of cloud. Their application should be carefully monitored and measured to ensure full agility is being realised. One of the biggest uses of cloud today is in development and test environments to accelerate the design of new software applications.
When designing a cloud environment, organisations must first decide which services to leverage externally versus building internally. While cloud is a powerful tool, correct decisions are needed on which types to adopt to best achieve the organisation’s IT goals in the most cost-effective and efficient way.
For example, will the enterprise benefit most from infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS), or elements of all three? Systems must be in place to manage vendors from an end-to-end perspective and also internally to measure how well the interaction with cloud is progressing.
For example, public cloud IaaS delivers on-demand servers, networking and storage in minutes, but designing and building the actual services still takes time.
The key is to find and remove any bottlenecks so that all systems are working at the same speed as the cloud services.
It’s important to compare outages and breaks in cloud service level agreements with traditional infrastructure to determine how well it’s enabling business agility.
Any business that depends on services in the cloud should consider pre-buying computing power or, if offered, a premium service that guarantees availability.
Organisations should not be turned off by these potential drawbacks. Take advantage of software and services available to help IT departments adopt and manage cloud computing implementations, both public and private.
To plan and design a cloud strategy and architecture, use software that supports workshops services, cloud roadmap solutions, cloud design solutions and management consulting services.
The competitive advantages of cloud services are considerable for those who are strategic in their approach and diligent in their application.
Dhanawat Suthumpun is managing director of Hewlett-Packard (Thailand).
