BANGALORE, INDIA: While the notion is true that cloud infrastructures is poised to revolutionize the way we access technology, it is also true that it is a vast area and enterprises often grapple with understanding its full potential. The ever increasing complexity of data centers coupled with the massive growth of data is leading to an increase in resources required to store, process, optimize and serve information back to end users when required. Organizations have rapidly adopted virtualization and are now looking at cloud delivery service models to reduce costs, increase flexibility and improve their time to market.

To keep pace with today’s competitive marketplace, enterprises require greater flexibility and agility than their traditional storage architectures can provide. This, coupled with explosive unstructured content growth, is driving organizations to look toward instant IT delivery models.

On-demand IT Delivery

In the move towards on-demand IT delivery, it hasn’t taken long for customers to recognize the benefits of private, hybrid or public cloud models, the most tangible being significant cost savings. From a capital expenditure perspective, organizations tend to over-purchase to deal with the ebb and flow of storage and resource requirements to support the business. This often leaves them with an abundance of underutilized hardware assets. The ability of cloud infrastructures to grow and contract storage resources, in tune with the business needs, minimizes this upfront capital expense, moving them from fixed costs to variable costs.

If we take a look at the operational costs, hidden costs, the data growth and complexity to manage traditional IT environments has emerged. Customers can reduce much of this operational expenditure by deploying cloud models and leveraging cloud managed services, paying only for what they consume and eliminating the day-to-day management tasks altogether.

While on-demand access to computing resources is what the industry is striving for, it also poses concern and risk for IT organizations. This can be very disruptive to business process and control. If business users begin to outsource to cloud providers in order to get faster support, sensitive information could be put at risk.

To mitigate this risk, IT organizations should be thinking about developing an internal cloud enabled architecture to provide greater business agility, in addition to a process for ad hoc projects that require to be outsourced to a public or hybrid cloud provider. This way they can move into the cloud in a controlled and orderly manner mitigating associated risks.

There are many deployment choices to consider for moving into the cloud.

Private cloud: For simplicity, let’s define a private cloud as cloud enabled infrastructure within the physical walls of a data center. A private cloud can provide many of the benefits of cloud without the security risks associated with public deployments. Because it is accessed over an internal network or intranet, its as secure as the rest of the data. Since one controls it and the environment around it (ie networks, servers, etc), one can achieve enterprise level SLAs. But one do sacrifice some of the operational cost savings such as physical floor space, power, and cooling. Unless one is leveraging a managed service one is also subject to management overhead.

Hybrid cloud: Now lets take a look at the hybrid or trusted cloud, which we will define as infrastructure that resides at a trusted service provider. In this case, access is limited to appropriate resources in ones organization and delivered over a virtual private network or a secure Internet connection. Since the infrastructure is out of the organizations direct control, service levels could be impacted by external factors. Customers also need to think about the physical security of the environment, which is why it is important to understand the service provider’s processes and requirements around physical access.

Public cloud: Lastly, the public cloud can be described similarly to the hybrid, except that there is usually more general access over the Internet providing limited security. Many public cloud offerings are quite inexpensive or sometimes even free and SLAs are generally not guaranteed or measured differently than how an enterprise measures their SLAs. Additionally, value added services and features such as encryption, compression, back-up; tiering and replication are not available from public providers as they are from private or hybrid cloud providers.

What Makes a Cloud?

Regardless of the type of cloud, there are some key features every cloud platform should have. Firstly, it is a secure, direct connection to get data into the cloud, such as a representational state transfer (REST) interface or an on-ramp to connect applications to the cloud without requiring application recoding. REST is an approach for getting information content from a website by reading a designated web page that contains an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file that describes and includes the desired content. There also needs to be multitenancy capabilities to logically segregate the data, so that SLAs can be assigned to specific data types or applications. The cloud should also have namespaces with access rights and security layers to prevent unauthorized access. Depending on the provider, some clouds offer value added features like compression and single instancing to improve cost savings, encryption to provide greater security and billing and chargeback for organizations or service providers that wish to bill each business unit or organization based on consumption.

IT services are generally held to service level standards for availability, reliability and integrity. Augmenting or replacing legacy IT services with cloud services require the same quality guarantees. Although, managed cloud services allow customers to focus less on the storage management it is critical that customers include an expected quality of service in their contracts with cloud providers. Not all cloud providers measure SLAs the same way, so it’s important to ask how they quantify their SLAs.

Given some of the trade-offs between the various cloud deployment models, how does one identify the most appropriate candidates for deployment? One should start by identifying the data in ones environment that generally has lower business value and lower SLA requirements. For example, think of data types like home directory shares, static data or backup content that can be moved from onsite primary to cloud secondary storage.

One can get immediate cost savings by moving this peripheral datadata that doesn’t require active management or constant read/write access to the cloud. It is unnecessary to pay such high administrative and management overhead for this non-business critical data, frees up resources to focus on the core business applications, improving operational efficiency and utilization of ones existing assets. Next, it allows ones organization to gain experience and develop best practices for cloud deployments. Lastly, it allows one to move toward the core, tier-1 applications at ones own pace.

(The author is director, software group and cloud solutions, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data System)