Straddling the Cloud with in-depth understanding

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud computing offers a host of advantages to business enterprises, a few being - improved agility, reduced capital and operating expenditure and faster time to market. No wonder that a lot of organizations are looking at going the cloud computing way.

Cloud computing is also increasingly being seen by organizations as an integral part of their IT evolution; a crucial step that will equip them with greater agility and responsiveness to business demands along with  a much improved quality of service.

However, before organizations undertake the momentous journey towards cloud computing — whether a private cloud for internal stakeholders or a public cloud for external customers — they may want to take a closer look some of the important aspects of the subject.

There are some common snares that can easily mar the positive impact that an organization may wish to make by adopting cloud computing technologies into its systems. Some of these have been outlined here:

Treating virtualization as an end in itself:

Virtualization is a crucial step in the process of adopting cloud computing technologies. However, many organisations make the mistake of treating virtualization at par with the actual implementation of the cloud semantics. This is a misconception.

Virtualization is an important enabler for cloud computing. It enables hardware sharing and flexible deployment of application.  However, it’s only part of the solution. While it addresses the Infrastructure-as-a-Service requirement, its scope does not cover Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service models.

All virtual machines (VMs) in a given cloud are segregated from each other. For accessing a VM from another VM on the same cloud, authentication-based access is required. This cannot be realized with virtualization alone.

So, while virtualization is vital for cloud, it cannot implement the cloud by itself.

Inadequate focus on standardizing application platforms:

Quite a few organizations stop at the infrastructure layer — in other words, servers and storage. What they may not realize is that their RoI could suffer because of this. There is far greater value in providing a standardized, shared and elastically scalable cloud application platform that would include middleware and database services.  A standardized platform for all applications also reduces complexity, expenditure and stack inconsistency, while improving the overall operational efficiency for existing and new applications. 

Looking beyond datacentre architecture:

For completely leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, organizations need to go beyond just focusing on datacentre architecture.

Enterprises need to rethink how they structure and allocate their IT resources, how they develop new applications to manage business processes, how they enable and facilitate user interaction and how they secure and manage IT resources.

With this macro-view organizations will be well-equipped to straddle the cloud.

Falling short of leveraging enterprise architecture for maximum impact

For making the most of the enterprise architecture, organizations need to use it to create a strong foundation with better agility, lower risks and reduced costs.

In case of cloud computing, IT acts as a business while delivering cloud services to its users. For that, it needs to establish a platform, market it to all stakeholders and also provide a financial model to charge customers for these services.

With a deep understanding into the merits of shared services and cloud computing, organizations can best leverage their enterprise architectures and consequently maximize their business benefits.