What to Move to the Cloud?

IT experts, analysts, industry leaders and everyone else talks about Cloud
Computing today. While some peoplebelieve that it is Internet's next evolution,
others say that it's just hype. But what one doesn't argue about is the business
benefit proposition that Cloud Computing offers to an organization. Both IT and
business managers are already inundated with information on the benefits of a
cloud centric infrastructure. The question now that they seek an answer to is
not on whether to move to the cloud or not, but how and what to move to the
cloud. Let's try and address this issue.

Public or Private?

A public cloud will be like services from Amazon, Microsoft, Google or
Salesforce.com that will drive the costs down and relieve you of the management
of resources burden but at cost of losing some control over them. Whereas a
private cloud will be built using an enterprise's own resources in the data
center, will reside within the enterprise firewalls, and you'll have to manage
the whole resources while having full control over them. Making a choice between
these two adoption approaches is a third option of hybrid cloud, which is
leveraging some of the services on both private as well as the public cloud.

Private Cloud: Enterprise's choice

Any large enterprise or organization would have a clear choice of adopting a
private cloud, as they do not want to compromise on the critical security
policies involved with data and information. The main benefit of private cloud
over a public cloud that an enterprise see is that in a private cloud all the
services, data and processes will be managed within the organization without
restrictions of network bandwidth, security and legal requirements that using a
public cloud over public network could involve. Also they have the resources to
have virtual infrastructure to adopt the cloud computing model. While small
organization or SMBs won't be having that kind of virtual infrastructure that
enables remote configuration of a virtual network involving routers, firewalls
etc. Any large organization, say a bank, would not port their business critical
applications like core banking solution onto the public cloud. They want total
control over their business applications and related data, therefore a private
cloud infrastructure suits them well.

But many organizations would have already invested on their own data center
for next 4-8 years. They cannot abandon these investments overnight and move
towards cloud. So what is a viable option for them? Actually, the idea of
adopting a private cloud is to make use of existing virtualized data centers.
Since virtualization is just the base layer for having cloud infrastructure, and
most data centers would already be having servers that support virtualization.
The larger organizations with existing infrastructure can leverage
virtualization of their servers so as to enable them to manage peaks in demand.
By consolidating storage and applications and virtualizing their infrastructure,
organizations are beginning to create their own private cloud services. They are
modifying their physical data centers by changing the way they manage the
services that run out of their data centers. Doing so they are overcoming the
issues of availability, security, and vendor lock-in and are getting benefitted
with easier management of resources.

But the question about what to move to the private cloud remains. IT experts
say that almost everything can be moved to the cloud. But the advisable approach
is to move those applications that are not performance centric to the private
cloud. For instance, storage, archival applications, NAS, etc can be moved.
Hitachi Data Systems is offering cloud service for private File Tiering for
organizations, wherein an organization can have their storage in a private cloud
within their own data center and managed by Hitachi. For instance, if an
organization is having a NAS of 50TB, it is unlikely that more than 80-90% of
that data would be active. So an organization can opt for having a NAS for 10TB
storage and have rest on their private cloud storage, which will be setup and
managed by Hitachi and the organization will be paying them on what they
actually use. Thereby, shifting their capital expenditure on storage devices
towards operational expenses. Similarly, apps or processes like email archiving,
document management systems, data backup can be migrated onto the private cloud
initially. Then as the model stabilizes and the organization has developed or
modified their existing business applications for the cloud computing
infrastructure, it will be in this phase that an organization can move some of
their business critical apps on the cloud computing infrastructure within their
data center. This gives organizations to deliver internal IT services more
effectively and in cost effective manner.

Public Cloud: For everyone?

While the cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft,
Salesforce.com etc. are all in an endeavor to offer a one-stop shop for all the
IT needs for any particular organization by providing those as services on
public cloud model. The cloud service provider takes the care of deploying,
managing and securing the infrastructure, and the organizations can consume them
on demand with a pay for what you use model. Though, the adoption towards Cloud
is increasing, it can be related to the skepticism that people had earlier
towards online payments. During the DotCom days when people were skeptic of
giving their credit card details online, but now they are using online payment
on a daily basis without second thoughts. Exact same ways will happen with
Cloud. As issues with SLAs, data security, etc. get worked out and finalized and
standards are adopted; a Cloud business model will emerge which will be 'pay as
you use' for different customers like enterprise, end-users etc.

Adopting a public cloud makes more sense to smaller organizations or SMBs
that can't invest upfront on hardware or on licensing of business productivity
solutions like ERP or CRMs. Such organizations can opt for cloud services
offerings ranging from business apps to having a server on the cloud. The only
thing that the consumer has to ensure is the bandwidth availability for availing
these services. Whereas, a large organization won't be adopting public cloud
completely, rather they would be adopting a Hybrid cloud approach, wherein the
will host their non-risky data and resources onto the public cloud and have
their business critical apps and data within their private cloud.