Trends in Cloud Computing

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated

trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as

virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops

and notebook systems on corporate networks,” says Gartner.

Of long, organizations have been stockpiling technology, with the

infrastructure revealing problems of under-utilization and existence of too many

silos. Information multiplying every single day is making things increasingly

challenging for the enterprises to manage them. IDC says that during the coming

ten years, data stored in various storage systems will increase by 44 times,

with the current rate of data growth. But it won't be possible for enterprises

to increase their IT budgets and scale up their IT infrastructure in tandem with

the information explosion that's happening.

Another point is the time to market, which has become significant for

businesses and they are looking at ways and means to minimize it. For eg , if an

enterprise wants to set up a collaboration service internally or develop social

networking capability, they would plan about the hardware, software, service

requirements, etc which might take a long time to market. But now with the

available cloud services, the same roll out is possible within much shorter

time.

In such instances, cloud computing is increasingly being looked at by the

enterprises as a great alternative as it lets them scale up or down, save

organizations money, decrease the time to market and shift their capex to opex.

Who's moving to Public Cloud?



Currently the trend is that larger enterprises are exploring Public Clouds

for support applications such as Dealer Management Systems, Document Management

Systems, mailing, CRM and Learning Solutions, etc while critical applications

for which data has to reside within a firewall due to regulatory requirements or

have to be available physically from the audit point of view are being reserved

on the private cloud. Most enterprises want to move to the cloud for the great

cost advantage that it offers, but there are hardly few of them who actually

move to the cloud for the big security concerns that they perceive in that.

SMBs where cash and people resource are scarce, a public cloud's flexibility,

reliability and scalability with no capital expenses, no upfront commitment, low

unit costs and pay-as-you-go model, is highly compelling . Also the application

development world is increasingly undergoing a significant change through

adoption of Platform as a Service as it is resulting in faster roll-out of

applications at lower costs. Public clouds are being used by companies

delivering products and services over the Web, with no captured set of users

using a single network and software developers with dynamic resource

requirements. Another aspect is the presence of a large mobile workforce in

organizations that need access to applications on-the-go. Depending upon the

criticality of the applications; organizations are hosting these applications on

the public cloud and are making them available to its mobile workforce via the

Web.

Who's moving to a Private Cloud?



A private cloud can be set up either internally or by partnering vis-a-vis

with an external cloud service offerings vendor to identify which model is

suitable. The trend is that the larger enterprises having a substantial

“On-Premise” IT with many legacy applications and systems are looking to

optimize their IT through Private Clouds. Private Clouds are hosted inside

enterprise firewalls and have to be controlled by the enterprises themselves.

Most enterprises have already started their journey by virtualizing servers and

some IT infrastructure. Prospective consumers are being attracted by better

automation and self service for users, but these early adopters are facing

challenging decisions and integration headaches due to a general lack of

standards.

As private cloud technologies get adopted, IT managers will start to grow

comfortable with the use of cloud technologies inside their walls. As a result,

they will start to look more seriously at the cost/benefit analysis of private

versus public clouds. More efforts will be taken to verify the promises of the

cloud in terms of cost savings and the ability to deliver functionality quickly.

Companies will start to take a more serious look at building hybrid clouds that

better integrate existing enterprise applications with cloud-based applications.

The proliferation of different services will lead to several models designed to

meet the needs of different companies. Most will not prove practical, but a few

models will emerge that help balance the needs of security, compliance and cost

savings in a practical way.

Trend towards Hybrid Cloud



"The concept of Hybrid Clouds, primarily for infrastructure is yet to gather

momentum. Over a period of time, this is set to change where larger enterprises

will increasingly focus on Hybrid Clouds in order to leverage the best of both

worlds. This will happen once Public Cloud providers begin to follow open

standards that will enable seamless integration between Private and Public

Clouds. With this the services oriented architecture would become a focus point

as the Hybrid environment becomes more and more sophisticated with apps or

services from cloud integrating with apps or services running on premise; it

would become necessary to have the architecture in the right way so that they

support these loosely coupled models. This would make the hybrid environments to

run optimally."

Before you think 'Cloud'



Amid an ever-increasing bevy of regulations that enterprises need to worry

about and a growing number of cloud service providers to choose from,

enterprises have a lot of options and a lot of questions to consider concerning

cloud computing compliance.

• Evaluate existing IT infrastructure portfolio against
  
  organizational requirements today and in the future, map on the service level
  
  requirements and then arrive at what kind of future infrastructure is
  
  required.

• Evaluate the future IT requirement against budget outlay
  
  and cloud vendor services and maturity levels available in the market to
  
  determine which IT services need to be move to the cloud and which need to
  
  remain physical.

• Finally, identify an end to end vendor solutions provider
  
  that brings together different pieces from the larger ecosystem together for
  
  simplicity and to avoid vendor lock-in.

Moving to the Public Cloud



It is critical for organizations to fully assess vendors' security systems,

as the most critical element of their businesses-information is in the hands of

the service providers. It is also important for them to avoid cloud lock-in.

This will help them switch providers. This approach will help them to retain

control over the company's IT processes. Beyond the data center, threats lie in

connectivity to the cloud. So, it is important to have an end point security

mechanism in place. The need of the hour is a smart choice of next-generation

technologies, which are both effective and cost-efficient and provide a proven

way to prevent unauthorized access to critical data and applications.

Questions to ask before you move to the public cloud:

• Does the cloud offer a service level agreement (SLA) for
  
  services? If yes, how many 9's does it have (look for 99.9% to 99.999% uptime
  
  guaranteed)?

• Does the Cloud have a public transparency site where the
  
  system issues or outages are published for everyone to see?

• Does the Cloud offer compensation commensurate with any
  
  potential financial loss if my business suffers due to lack of availability?
  
  Will I be compensated automatically or do I need to ask for it?

• Does the Cloud have applications and data stored in
  
  several geographically separated data centers? If yes, how many datacenters
  
  does the Cloud have? If geographically distributed datacenters are used, what
  
  countries are involved?

• Is there a disaster recovery strategy in place? How
  
  frequently is it tested?

• How many copies of the data are backed up? How often is
  
  backup performed?

• Can I readily export my data in a usable format?

Security questions

• What are the security measures used to authenticate
  
  users?

• What level of encryption is offered to protect my data?

• How secure is the Cloud and is it certified with any
  
  independent security vendors to vet the overall security of its services?

Moving to a Private Cloud



A private cloud can be set up either internally or by partnering vis-a-vis

with an external cloud service offerings vendor to identify which model is

suitable. The process begins with consolidation - storage, networks,

applications, data centers.

Storage consolidation alone can realize 2:1 savings. The

next step is virtualization, then building in security through identity

assurance & access control, encryption & key management, compliance & security

information management and fraud protection. Adoption of tiered storage, data

de-duplication and applying software and process automation for further

benefits.