At uptime software, we’ve been quite bullish on Cloud’s potential but feel it still has some distance to cover before it lives up to the hype. In fact, I wrote a blog in January looking at a hypothetical company and the costs involved in moving an entire infrastructure into the Cloud (using Amazon EC2). The results were not impressive, Cloud computing was too expensive (in this example) to gain the critical mass it needs to catch on. It’s amazing how much had changed in the ten months since that blog, as we have learned more about how the Cloud can be best utilized. Recently, the media has driven the Cloud excitement and IT managers are now thinking about how the Cloud, in one form or another, can be used in their environments to drive performance and efficiencies.
The real question is this; in what capacity will organizations adopt Cloud over the next few years? With that in mind, we see the coming year as one of exploration and experimentation. The first step is for companies to quantify what Cloud means to their business. Is it as banal as remote storage used for DR purposes, or something as evolved as dynamic compute with secure private/public networking?
Let’s take a look at the “IT Spectrum,” which is loosely aligned with IT maturity and size of organization.
In this diagram, the left represents most small businesses who house their own servers and have a small number of IT staff. As the small business matures, they may evaluate SaaS-type applications (like Salesforce.com) or push some servers out to an MSP. Further maturing, or growing, businesses may have additional servers in remote hosted datacenters, like web servers or remote disaster recovery storage. At the right-most point in the spectrum, businesses/enterprises have opted to completely outsource their IT and minimize the number of IT staff employed by the business.
Understanding the spectrum’s components is important. They represent a “menu” of options that businesses can use to leverage virtualization and cloud technologies to reduce costs (either labor or infrastructure). This “menu” is most likely how IT managers will choose to evaluate the relevance of Cloud to cost savings and enhanced service delivery. For example, with VMware’s new VBlock offering and the ongoing relationship with Terremark, entire stacks of infrastructure can be pushed into off-premises locations and operated in a mission-critical environment. So, whether it’s just dipping a toe into the Cloud waters (like hosting a server in Amazon EC2 or the RackSpace Cloud to deliver a decoupled application) or leveraging the VBlock to move entire mission critical infrastructures, there are many options to consider. Keep in mind that issues such as backup management, lifecycle management, and systems management need to be addressed in all cases.
How is the experimentation starting?
[ more next week in Part 2 ]
