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.