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General Information
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January 29, 2010
• Vol.32 Issue 3
Page(s) 43 in print issue
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Why Run Your Business Applications In The Cloud?
Cloud Computing Is A New Tool In The Enterprise IT Arsenal
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| Key Points
• Cloud computing is moving from an over-hyped vision to a mainstream IT service. IT executives must develop strategies and plans to opportunistically exploit the cloud for business advantage.
• Start by gaining familiarity with the various service models (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) and available offerings in each. Assess which internal IT services could benefit, in either reduced cost or increased functionality, by moving to the cloud.
• Prioritize several low-risk, noncritical, and largely commodified services, such as development and test infrastructure, Web applications with highly variable usage, or email/collaboration, for pilot implementations. | | The hype surrounding cloud computing, while often overwrought, could be justified if Goldman Sachs’ report presaging a “techtonic shift” to the cloud is correct—let’s just say the forecast is bright. Yet despite vendor pronouncements and constant media coverage, clouds still aren’t on the radar for many IT organizations.
There are a number of reasons why cloud computing isn’t more commonplace. Many IT executives have been infected by the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) spread by incumbent enterprise software vendors, others are concerned that the cloud represents the latest form of career-ending outsourcing, while some can’t envision IT’s role as anything other than infrastructure operations, not appreciating how cloud services can free IT to tackle more strategic business initiatives. Yet a head-in-the-sand attitude toward the cloud is no longer tenable.
It’s not the hype, but actual business results achieved by early cloud adopters fueling CIO interest, according to James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “Early adopters are finding serious benefits, meaning that cloud computing is real and warrants your scrutiny as a new set of platforms for business applications.”
Although largely in agreement, Peter Coffee, director of platform research at Salesforce (www.salesforce.com), takes issue with the frequent juxtaposition of the terms “cloud” and “early adopter.” “It’s too late to be a leader [with the cloud]; the best you can hope for is to be in the pack . . . wait another year and you’ll be too late.” Coffee describes cloud use in the enterprise as “immediate, urgent, and inevitable.”
Coffee’s sense of urgency notwithstanding, other experts say there’s no rush to move IT applications to the cloud and that 2010 should be used for developing strategy and testing pilot projects.
As they ponder the cloud, IT managers should understand the three layers in the cloud computing stack: packaged applications (aka SaaS [software as a service]), software platforms (aka PaaS [platform as a service]), and hardware infrastructure (aka IaaS [infrastructure as a service]). According to a taxonomy developed by Peter Mell and Tim Grance of the NIST Information Technology Laboratory (www.itl.nist.gov), these services can be deployed in four ways: as so-called private clouds owned or leased by the enterprise, as community clouds shared by several organizations with shared requirements, as public clouds using large-scale infrastructure owned and operated by a large service provider, or as hybrids.
 Consider The Cloud
Clouds offer the ability to do things “better, faster, and cheaper,” according to Ryan Nichols, head of cloudsourcing and cloud strategy for solution provider Appirio (www.appirio.com). He says the direct financial benefits come from leveraging shared infrastructure provisioned as needed, obviating the need for capital investment. Although the cost savings attract people's attention, Nichols believes the first two attributes are more significant drivers for cloud adoption—they increase the speed of service and application implementation, and they result in better overall business solutions. Nichols admits this last claim isn’t intuitive but says it becomes obvious when considering that cloud providers are specialists with expertise in their field, constantly optimizing and improving their services without requiring any action by customers. “You just wake up one morning with new capabilities,” he adds.
Clouds also serve to better align IT budgets with user demands, according to Staten. He notes that many enterprises deploy Web sites without knowing exactly how popular they’ll be and thus can’t accurately plan capacity. Instead of over-buying hardware, Staten says clouds, with their elastic and usage-based subscription models, allow companies to pay only for the resources they actually use—hour by hour in many cases. He adds that elasticity also means that clouds can also be used to provide a safety valve for peaks in demand on internal infrastructure, be it computing, storage, or network resources—so-called cloud bursting.
Prepare To Exploit The Cloud
Fundamentally, Staten says CIOs must ask themselves what they hope to achieve by using the cloud: Is it primarily a cost-control measure? Are they hoping to improve application functionality, enhance the customer experience and loyalty, or move IT away from operating non-core services to those where they can provide competitive business differentiation? As Nichols puts it, “Do you really want to be in the business of running a data center?”
A big challenge for IT executives is understanding what cloud services are available and which best fit their organizations’ needs, says Chris Curran, partner and CTO of Diamond Management and Technology Consultants (www.diamondconsultants.com). After starting with a survey of available services and their capabilities, Curran says IT managers should take stock of their existing applications and infrastructure to assess which would be good candidates for the cloud, narrowing it to a list of three to five top priorities.
He notes these candidates will often be apps requiring imminent and significant new investment in hardware or software. Then it’s time to build a business case for each candidate, which Curran says shouldn’t just focus on the costs, but also examine how using the cloud might create or change business processes, enhance products or services, affect other internal applications and databases, or necessitate staff training. For those that pass muster, Curran says the final step is building a project plan and timeline and doing more exhaustive vendor evaluations.
Staten advises introducing cloud services on low-risk applications such as infrastructure for development, testing, and QA environments or Web applications, information portals, and collaboration tools. Commodity services, such as email, calendaring, and collaboration, where IT provides little added value are particularly opportune candidates for the cloud, according to Staten. Other candidates include areas with spiky swings in usage such as online commerce or other seasonal usage patterns that can exploit the dynamic provisioning nature of clouds.
In contrast, Staten says applications that use and manage sensitive or persistent data are poor places to start. “Avoid enterprise resource planning, back-office transaction systems, and portals that require state retention to function properly.”
Staten says, “Cloud computing should be viewed not as a threat to traditional IT but rather as a new set of tools in your arsenal.” He notes, “Cloud computing is in its early childhood, and CIOs have the luxury of designing a measured approach to discover its benefits and gradually incorporate cloud.” He recommends convening a cloud council to assess the risks, benefits, and best use of cloud services within the organization. “Start asking the question, ‘Why not run X in the cloud?’” 
by Kurt Marko
What About Private Clouds?
So-called private clouds are defined by Peter Mell and Tim Grance of the NIST Information Technology Laboratory (www.itl.nist.gov) as clouds “operated solely for an organization.” These clouds “may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.” Internal private clouds essentially take virtualized infrastructure a step further by adding a service provisioning layer. External private clouds, or what James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research, prefers to call hosted clouds, are, in his words, “a walled garden for an individual customer within a hosting provider.”
Private clouds might seem like low-risk entry points to the world of cloud computing; however, Staten is less enthusiastic because these provide fewer of the public cloud’s benefits. They don’t share infrastructure across many customers and can’t be scaled as quickly or dynamically, yet are saddled with many of the public cloud’s drawbacks such as data migration and integration. According to Staten, “On the surface, neither internal nor hosted clouds inherently make movement between clouds easier, but both rely on server virtualization, which is a core tenet of public clouds. At this base level, anything you can put in a server virtual machine, you could deploy to a public cloud virtual machine. However, differences in virtual machine formats, deployment frameworks, monitoring and management, and sometimes software licensing rights may make such portability impractical.”
Sources: “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing”; Peter Mell, Tim Grance; NIST, Information Technology Laboratory; Version 15; October 7, 2009.
“Q&A: By 2011, CIOs Must Answer The Question, ‘Why Not Run In The Cloud?’”; Forrester Research Report by James Staten, Ted Schadler, John R. Rymer, and Chenxi Wang, Ph.D., with Sharyn Leaver and Allison Herald; August 14, 2009. |
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