Public Cloud: How to keep this rising star shining

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud computing is continuing to reshape the IT landscape and is now considered a mission-critical engine to boost IT services. The development of cloud-enabling technologies and the cost-efficiencies that they create are leading an ever-increasing number of users to build cloud-based IT services either internally or as a service center that brokers public cloud services.

The Rising Star of IT: Public Cloud

IDC forecasts the spending on public IT cloud services will reach $72.9 billion by 2015, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.6 per cent. Its findings also point out that IT departments will transition to become cloud service brokers, offering “IT as a service centre” to provide unified management for internal and external services.

Obviously, in this dynamic growth market, cloud services providers face a bright future full of new business opportunities.

However, no matter what kind of services these providers offer, it is a simple fact that cloud operations are more data and content intensive than traditional IT environments, which means careful thought must be given to data management. To meet the challenges created by a new era of business and social connectivity, it is essential for cloud services providers to manage process and preserve their constantly-proliferating data and content in a secure and cost-effective way.

The Keys to become a successful cloud services provider (CSP)

The data-driven nature of public cloud services makes data management increasingly important. Despite differences in size and nature, all service providers must address the fundamental and critical elements of how to build and manage a cloud infrastructure that can support reliable and fast services with constant availability. These key elements include:

Elastic Scalability

Organizations and individual users choose public cloud services because they offer remarkable service flexibility in a dynamic, rapid and on-demand fashion. They also eliminate or minimize upfront expenses and move many “fixed costs” to “variable costs.” To maintain this essential service flexibility, CSPs need to build a storage architecture that offers virtualized, elastic scalability to support fluctuating needs, varying system workloads, constant technology updates, and wave after wave of new service deployments.

Security and Availability

The 2011 “Future Proofing the Cloud” Survey showed that most IT practitioners expect numerous major public cloud failures and security breaches by 2013. At the same time, however, respondents strongly agreed that cloud-based services, architected and contractually liable for failover and redundancy, will become key components of many organizations’ business continuity plans.

Despite this optimism, there have already been an increasing number of security breaches in B2C businesses. If CSPs want to emerge victorious in this highly competitive growth market and distinguish themselves from such risky B2C CSPs, they need to run their services on an enterprise-level cloud infrastructure equipped with exceptionally high availability and robust security capabilities.

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Effective Serviceability

By nature, CSPs offering infrastructure or applications as a service need a common virtualized storage platform that unifies management of all data types (structured and unstructured) and heterogeneous environments.

To deal with the complex data management and preservation which this involves, it is crucial that tiered storage, data deduplication and thin provisioning are used in the back-end storage infrastructure to enable greater efficiency, simpler management and higher levels of service availability, thus maximizing the potential for profitability.

Critical Issues

The economic downturn has accelerated the adoption of cloud services because of the cost-cutting that they enable. Besides responding to the growth in demand for cloud computing and virtualization, now is also the time for CSPs to prepare for future opportunities.

Choose a Trusted Cloud Solutions Partner

The majority of CSPs have evolved from other kinds of service providers, such as hosting providers, telecommunication service providers, and systems integrators. Their legacy businesses and systems are often one of their key competencies in offering public cloud services.

To maximize these advantages, however, they need a cloud solutions partner with a trustworthy platform that can harmonize both existing and new cloud systems and applications, and provide unlimited room for them to grow.

Integrate Solutions with Dynamic Scalability

Customers will increasingly look to CSPs to manage all data types and content in a single infrastructure that is reliable, scalable, multitenant and multitiered. These solutions will also require elastic scalability that enables CSPs to rapidly provision or deprovision a service and scale up or scale down an existing service. 

Secure Business with Top-Quality Security Solutions

Seen from another perspective, organizations and individuals selecting a CSP will be carefully evaluating which cloud platform the CSP has deployed. For their peace of mind, these customers will naturally choose a CSP that works with a vendor that is specialized in data storage, security and management.

In essence, infrastructure development and management can never be a one-off project. Vendors should be committed to evolving in pace with the latest cloud technology and working with CSPs to build a forward-thinking blueprint that empowers organizations to grow and thrive.

*IDC Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2011-2015 Forecast.

The author is director of Software Group & Cloud Solutions, Asia Pacific at Hitachi Data Systems.