TheInfoPro

Written by Sean Hackett, Research Director for Cloud

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

This is the first edition of the bi-weekly Cloud Computing Thursday’s TIP that you are entitled to receive in exchange for participating in TheInfoPro’s Cloud Computing Study. This week we are highlighting the three leading roadblocks/inhibitors to successful cloud projects: change management and learning, complexity, and upfront costs.

Fifty-two percent (52%) of those interviewed said that change and learning represented the largest roadblock or challenge to the implementation of their cloud projects. Teaching people to do things differently is always challenging, but the disruptive nature of cloud computing brings another dimension that makes embracing change even more difficult. Many IT pros feel that cloud computing represents a likely trip to the unemployment line as companies consolidate through virtualization or move projects to a third party. This makes it harder for IT pros to embrace the cloud as a net positive for their organization. In our interviews several respondents stated that their employees were often “reluctant” or that the cloud represented a different “cultural mindset.” In addition, many noted that the cloud represented a new technology and a new model for procuring and managing technology, which often requires employees with a different skill set.

Reduced complexity and lower cost are often cited as benefits of cloud computing; however, respondents to our study highlighted both cost and complexity as leading inhibitors. In fact, 32% percent of respondents cited complexity and 15% cited cost among their top three roadblocks to cloud project success. Our definition of complexity encapsulates many of the technical challenges associated with integration and interoperability, virtualization management, and migration. Our findings also highlight that although a cloud solution is often cheaper in the long term, it’s not free in the short term. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of respondents cited cost reduction as a leading driver of cloud adoption. In the same study, 52% of respondents said cost is a leading roadblock, as many struggle, in an increasingly challenging economic environment, to justify and secure the budget (largely for private cloud) needed for the up-front implementation and ongoing management of a private or public cloud solution.

The struggles associated with cloud projects often map to those found in most traditional projects. Moving to a new system or supporting one is always going to result in a certain amount of disruption. However, structural changes, like in staffing or operating models, will be an increasingly daunting management challenge for many organizations in the long run. With this in mind, the largest service providers and vendors in the world are lining-up with pre-integrated cloud-in-a box solutions and other professional services capabilities needed to make the transition to the cloud as easy as possible. However, let’s not forget that we have been here before. Can anyone spell ERP or transformation?

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Part 3 of 3: What Data Center Leaders Should Do About The Cloud Threat

Part 2 discussed why competition continues to appear for the data center. With this understanding of the prior threats we now approach what to do about this latest challenge.

How does cloud computing compare to these prior threats?

Cloud computing combines the strengths of the other challengers, and loses most of the inhibitors. It has a low cost of entry, simplicity, rapid responsiveness, and can be adopted selectively. At first glance, business executives will see this as a very appealing alternative to data center capital expenditure. It is a challenge that cannot be ignored.

How should the enterprise data center executive respond to the latest challenge? There are three steps you should take:

1. Know your competition
2. Become an IT service broker for your company
3. Develop your strategy for hybrid capability

1. Know your competition:

There is a quick way for a data center executive to truly understand the competition provided by cloud computing. Try it. Create an account with Amazon Web Services (and suitable credit card) to get started. Then try getting a server up and accessible. These are my results:

• 02.01p – Decide to get a server
• 02.02p – Order a server (choose the o/s image type, location and size; create a key pair if this is your first time; create security group for open ports; and launch)
• 02.08p – Connect to server

The responsiveness of the cloud was demonstrable in less than ten minutes. The entry cost for experimenting with infrastructure is negligible. This test was rounded up to an hour of usage and cost $0.03. Now compare this to the service level delivered by your data center. Can you deliver service immediately? Can your business units pay only for what they use? Have you simplified compute infrastructure down to multiple-choice selections?

Yes, this is an unfair comparison. There are many other aspects to compare besides cost and responsiveness including availability, service levels, recoverability, and compliance (feel free to add more in the comments). The servers provided by data centers come customized to company policy with management and protection software pre-installed, not a bare bones image. Yet the comparison is compelling.

Cloud computing sets a new expectation for service from the data center.

Developing an equivalent internal service for your company will take time, but there is an interim step you can take.

2. Become an IT service broker for your company:

Data center executives should step into the cloud and quickly. If not already, your business will soon be using cloud servers and storage. You face a choice. You can be out of that loop, or you can step in as the expert broker in cloud negotiations. Negotiate a deal with Amazon, Rackspace, Verizon, IBM or myriad others that is cheaper than the rack rate your business can find on the internet. Market your alternate service internally … “have the hassle of dealing with Amazon directly or get the same service from me and save x%”

Of course, you need to deliver the same service level.

• Work with finance to offer this service as pay as you go.
• Make it a self service on demand offering – if it takes three weeks to get approval from you before your customers see the server, then the discount you add will not help.

You need to plan for how you can bring these services back into the data center later on. Your customers may realize the grass is not always greener on the other side.

Stepping in as a broker allows you to offer the service quickly, monitor the computing that is going on, and add value by identifying savings. It gives the data center the ability to compete immediately, and creates a window to create the plan to deliver such services internally.

3. Develop your strategy for hybrid capability:

Designs for internal cloud computing should be architected with eventual hybrid capabilities in mind. A simple internal cloud computing ability suffices to respond to the competitive challenge. But why stop there? Extending the goal to developing hybrid ability will allow the data center to offer a previously unavailable service, and strengthen the architecture.

Extending internal data center capacity is an expensive and time-consuming task that can obstruct a successful business initiative. The new business process captures customers’ attention and gains popularity causing performance to suffer under the load. Support falters while the data center procures and implements the needed capacity into the data center and the magic business moment is lost. Hybrid computing is an aspect of virtualization that promises to give us significant value. Sometimes called cloud bursting, it is the ability to add external computing capacity onto our existing internal ability transparently when needed.

Of course, this is more complex than it sounds. Which is why the hybrid approach acts as a good design test. The external and internal environments must be copacetic for this to work. Actually configuring this to work is a complex topic too deep for this blog. Nevertheless, this ability should be a basis for any internal cloud strategy.

The hybrid market is still unsettled having no standards and no clear market leaders. Thus the hybrid design will be limited. Even if you will never use external compute for security, compliance or other reasons, designing for it is a great criterion for ensuring you are exploiting the agility of the cloud. If you can go to an external cloud seamlessly, then it will be easy to elastically scale within your data center to cope with growth and equipment refreshes.

Will this response mean no future challenges to the data center?

No. As for the other challenges, cloud computing will mature and have to meet greater business expectations for availability, robustness, etc. Agility will eventually suffer as it mires in a complexity of options and choices. Hardware will become a constraining factor as we virtualize and consolidate open systems (cloud computing on an enterprise stack is a return to the mainframe model in many ways).

As enterprise data centers address each threat, we raise the level of service, find new efficiencies and add value to our relationship with the business units. Each threat is really a challenge that makes us stronger. Addressing cloud computing will take several years. We can already look forward to the next challenge!

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Part 2 of 3: Competition Exists When There Is a Better Choice

Part 1 revealed that over decades, the data center faced several competitive threats that shared certain traits. In order to understand what is happening today with cloud computing, we need to first ask a question.
…

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There has recently been a lot of hype about ARM and it presenting a challenge to Intel. While this may be true in the mobile arena, it is a bit of a stretch when talking about enterprise servers.  So, when the ARM-based server maker Calxeda made that claim (see Look Out! Your Data Center Is About to Change), I had to go back and look at our data and see if that were true.

It turns out that in 239 extensive interviews of enterprise server professionals, not once did ARM come up in conversation.  In fact, while ARM architecture may be very good at power savings, these IT pros overwhelmingly think processors are most differentiated by performance and then cost.

While Intel will face many challenges in the years to come, its position in the server market isn’t being threatened yet.

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By: Matt Sarrel
29 December 2009 | CIO Update | Original Article

Virtualization is a pretty hot topic in enterprise IT these days. It’s safe to say that everyone has some sort of …

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