Cloud computing strategy: external cloud and internal cloud

If you believe in the descriptions of some vendors, cloud computing is as simple as opening a service remotely. But at a recent Gartner Catalyst conference in Santiago, some corporate IT managers say the maturity of cloud computing will take 3-5 years, as it involves many issues such as management, infrastructure, and new service delivery models.

Steve Paynter, senior technology architect at Kindred Healthcare Inc. (Kentucky Louisville), once believed that his company's computing resource sharing model was equivalent to an internal cloud, but based on the business side's view, This internal cloud is not complete without a service provider portal for employees. Paynter says the new portal will take some time to develop. The Gartner proposal is that it leaders must leave their own time to build a service delivery portal because it is a new service consumption model for employees and IT departments.

Based on Gartner's survey of 17 private cloud practices, this new portal is a necessary component of an internal cloud strategy. In addition to the results mentioned by Gartner analyst Chirs Wolf at the meeting, here are some of the things the private cloud pioneers are working on:

Virtualized infrastructure and corresponding management modules

IT Services Directory

Authentication and access Control

The managers of these enterprises also point out some of the functions that the internal cloud should have, albeit with a long distance from the real implementation:

It deduction

Lifecycle Management

Configuration and change Management

C Performance Management

Evaluate the viability of a private cloud

Wolf believes the above can be used to test whether the company is ready for a private cloud: "Many customers say, ' No, we don't need to make real-time billing, which is too expensive for the private cloud, and it's actually necessary for the public cloud." ’。 ”

What about capacity, lifecycle, configuration, change, and performance management? Many of the 17 companies are revamping existing technologies. While the need for these management functions is not the most urgent, Wolf thinks that some of them are necessary: "For example, capacity management must be solid, for example, I've heard of customers shutting down virtual machines when they are doing capacity management." Therefore, there is a need to devote resources to doing this work effectively. ”

Finally, Wolf recommends a step-by-step approach to building an internal cloud using a small project, and he made three recommendations:

Centralize control of process and change management from separate business units to it side

Focus on automation (as this is a service supply requirement)

Increased investment in service delivery and cloud provider management software

The cloud computing strategy at Warner Bros. Entertainment (CALIFORNIA-BASED, Calif.) spans its various branches, including Turner, HBO, Warner Bros., and Time Inc. Angelo Salerno, the company's corporate architecture and engineering vice president, said an important task of implementing the strategy was to coordinate the relationship between centralized it and control.

Warner is deploying enterprise-class IT systems across four organizations, including centralized e-mail systems and Microsoft SharePoint collaboration software. Salerno says cloud computing is only part of the strategy: "Our cloud computing strategy is walking on both legs." We've worked with Microsoft to implement some PAAs capabilities, and we want to work with our subsidiaries to evaluate cloud service providers. ”

On the private cloud side, Time Warner's approach is to hire a CIO, the chief of each subsidiary, whose main goal is to build a time-sharing share of resources. "Mainly coordinates the distribution of data centers around the world (currently, Warner Bros.." There are three data centers, Truner has four data centers, and HBO has two data centers) to achieve resource sharing among the various subsidiaries, thereby breaking down the barriers in the data centers. "Cloud computing paints a promising future in integrating multiple data centers to provide dynamic shared resources," says Salerno. ”

Management of service self-supply

Tomasz Kozlowski is the Enterprise information Services architect of Allergan Inc., a special drug manufacturer in California, and the best way to do this is to use as many SaaS services as possible. When the company began deploying its cloud computing strategy, it found that 15% of its applications were outsourced to SaaS service providers (IT departments knew nothing about it), so migrating to cloud computing was inevitable.

For Allergan, the most important part of cloud computing strategy is not the service catalog or capacity management, but the development of a complete company-level assessment process for new applications and service needs of users. The assessment of cloud service providers includes a questionnaire covering such areas as contract management, architecture, vendor evaluation, and risk assessment. For vendor evaluation, Kozlowski mentioned in Gartner conference that cloud providers must fill out a detailed form, including protection of personal information.

Allergan this mechanism for user applications and service requests is relatively simple, with about 20 problems, using Excel tables. The main purpose of these issues is to assess the impact on the business, identify potential risks and rewards, and whether such applications or services should be outsourced to cloud service providers.

Allergan is a transition from a relatively standardised application, such as travel and cost-related systems. and regulatory-related applications face greater risk. "So before applying to a SaaS provider, you should think about the risk of being associated with an application." Kozlowski said. Allergan most of the current outsourcing applications are business-side, but development and manufacturing-related applications are gradually moving to SaaS providers. "These teams are relatively conservative. "Kozlowski said.

So Kozlowski have any regrets? If you can start again, Kozlowski will reduce the number of cloud service providers, because managing more than 40 SaaS vendors is a challenge (of the company's 600 applications, 140 to 150 are already provided by SaaS vendors )。

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