Enterprise Private cloud and its implementation steps

What is a private cloud

According to Gartner, companies are investing more in private cloud services over the next few years than public cloud services, but in the end, most will be transitioning from private cloud to public cloud.

At the same time, the analysis agency said many companies will experience a private cloud in the future, a mixture of public and non-cloud systems, and the process may last for years. This development route means that in the next few years, the primary responsibility of the enterprise IT department will be to find the most appropriate IT services for the enterprise.

However, aside from the forecasts, there is no scenario of large-scale adoption of private clouds by companies. "The concept of a private cloud is ideal for today's businesses and for some time to come," explains Joe Tobolski, senior cloud manager at Accenture. There are two reasons for this, one is the powerful propaganda effect, the other is the real business reasons and architectural challenges involved. ”

Workload present wave Storm Valley cyclical business sector most interested in private cloud

There is also a special case, because the current economic situation is still not ideal, many enterprises have delayed most of the necessary internal applications and architecture updates.

However, some enterprises have configured a series of virtual servers, indicating that they will implement private cloud technology. Tobolski said: "99.99% of the enterprise's internal data centers are still in the traditional mode of operation, not to mention the private cloud, they do not even have the minimum automation capabilities." ”

Workload present wave Storm Valley the corporate sector is most interested in private clouds, such as retailing, distribution, and some global manufacturers and the public sector.

1. What is a private cloud?

To explain what a private cloud is, we can first understand what is not a private cloud. That is, the existing virtualization technology and automation technology in the IT industry are not what we call cloud technology. As Derek Kay, Deloitte's cloud services manager, points out, while the real private cloud architecture does exist, it is more of a large automated server cluster that is under the banner of a private cloud.

Derek Kay said: "Automation is only half a foot into the cloud of the door." Cloud computing is a comprehensive transformation project if you just look at it as a common IT project, you can only get a bit of the benefits of cloud computing, and if you can focus more on it and want to make some broader changes, it will take a little more cost to get a more rewarding return. ”

So one definition of a private cloud is that it is a series of IT services delivered to customers through browsers, using Internet protocols and technologies. The underlying platform is shared and has unlimited scalability, and users can get more or less computing resources according to their own needs. Finally, the cost is based on the consumption and use of computing resources, and some providers also provide a refund mechanism.

Reed Specialist Recruitment The business as a model for successful use of private clouds. The company uses EMC's VMware to centralize, standardize, and virtualize the background architecture, and rewrite most of the program code so that programs can be accessed through the browser.

Reed has 3,500 employees worldwide, 3300 of whom are based in the UK, who have been trained in ITIL to learn IT service management, introduced more stringent change management procedures, and introduced a refund mechanism when paying fees.

But in addition to changing the internal technology as the main way to provide applications to customers, Reed has adopted Citrix thin client software for security and other considerations. About 2% of the company's customers need special applications, such as financial software or CAD/CAM software with a huge resource requirement, and they use the virtualization desktop in Citrix's xendesktop to do the work.

Sean Whetstone, head of IT services at Reed Company, explained why, saying: "If we can transfer all applications through encrypted SSL VPN lines, we don't need to use Citrix anymore." Citrix has a significant role in security and load balancing, and it also helps with development tools. So we don't always follow Gartner's definition of a private cloud. ”

Perhaps it was not at first thought that the private cloud architecture must not be built within the enterprise. According to the latest industry research, public cloud providers can also provide a private cloud service platform, at which point the vendor's hardware architecture is used only for the enterprise and will not be shared with third-party companies as in traditional multi-tenant mode. This means that private resources are assigned to the customer and the sensitive information of the enterprise is protected.

Enterprises that adopt this model typically need to perform computational-intensive tasks such as large-scale data modeling or settlement. Such models are appropriate for pharmaceutical companies, investment banks and government and military departments.

Migrating to a private cloud the first thing to do is to analyze many of the enterprise's applications

Some enterprises also take this architecture as a service (IaaS) of the private cloud route, to complete the enterprise of some non-critical projects, such as application development and testing. But whether they end up running the program in a private cloud environment, and once the work is done, the enterprise will take that data back from the cloud.

2. Steps to implement a private cloud

The first step in migrating to a private cloud is to analyze an enterprise's existing applications. Many companies have a situation where more than half of the applications may not be used by one person, but businesses are afraid to shut them down easily.

Deloitte's Kay says: "Migrating to a private cloud is like moving a house, you have the opportunity to clean up obsolete things, and if you want the business to be more efficient, then hold this moment." The point is that you only have to pay for the services you use, and you can only use the services you've paid for, so the cost becomes clear. ”

Once you have identified which programs and services are needed and which can be discarded, you can begin to rationalize the system. If the enterprise's servers have not been virtualized before, then the enterprise can effectively reduce the number of servers needed.

This transformation process is a good beginning for the enterprise to realize the private cloud goal, it can help the enterprise to fully improve the utilization rate of system resources and improve the efficiency of operation.

On the other hand, those useful programs can be used better in a private cloud environment, and some can even serve the public cloud.

The next step is to standardize the hardware and software stacks. If you just want to build a type of architecture, it's not necessary to do so, but doing so does limit the scope of the selection when you build the schema, and all the special cases outside of the standardization scope need to be adjusted to apply to the architecture.

The purpose of this standardization effort is to make the entire architecture more performance and cost-effective, from a productivity and management perspective. But doing so requires more formal IT management to maintain this standardization while avoiding schema problems because of the inclusion of non-standard content.

After completing these tasks, the next step is to implement automation engineering, which ensures that all processes are under strict policy control.

It is important to migrate to a more service-oriented architecture using tools such as ITIL, which involves understanding the user's consumption and service economy, with the ultimate goal of introducing a rebate mechanism.

The process described above, probably going through years time from the beginning to the end, Kay says that most companies are actually completing or partially completing virtualization, and some companies are even starting to standardize on hardware and software, but the automation is not mature enough.

In fact, the most advanced part should be the migration process and the business change element. "Migrating to a private cloud is inherently a more economical process than a technological process," Kay warns. "The most important question is: ' Is it less expensive for companies to use services? ' If not, the enterprise does not implement a private cloud. ”

3. Refund Challenge

One of the hardest parts of migrating to a private cloud is the right to price. Most companies now use it as an input rather than a profit center, which means that enterprise users are not accustomed to linking the demand for IT service consumption to the corresponding service level agreement (SLA). Nor do they know what it resource consumption or how to consume IT resources, and the potential costs of consuming IT resources.

Therefore, in order for enterprises to understand the cost of doing so, the introduction of the term refund, even if it is only a theoretical cost of an IT consumption, for the smooth implementation of private cloud projects is also critical.

From an IT perspective, this process actually gives a cost framework for IT service provisioning, determines the costs involved in consumption and predefined SLAs, and introduces a paid-for-use model. At this point, standardization is once again a key issue, and standardization is used to financially determine the cost of each decision.

Reed Specialist Recruitment is at the forefront of the private cloud, using a refund mechanism based on 12 standardized user policies.

"The bills that cloud vendors are opening are not complicated but important, because companies don't want it to burn money like a bottomless pit," Whetstone explains. In the same way, we want each customer to be able to pay for the service resources they use, so we have 12 different billing options based on the user. ”

To determine these costs, you first need to determine the cost of the architecture within the five-year cycle, as well as the financial and operational costs of operating it, including employee payroll, maintenance costs, and logistical costs.

"The bulk of the cost is the central architecture that all users use, but you can split it and try to spread the fixed cost to some applications, which can help you build a set of data for annual evaluation," Whetstone said. You just need to check the form every year to see which costs have gone up and what has gone down, and then consider whether to change the cost model. ”

But to achieve the Deloitte Kay's "less cost less" model, the next step is to introduce measuring tools, but such tools are still in an immature state, or are evolving.

Kay also warned: "Companies must consider their own refund base, because other companies ' refund strategies are not necessarily suitable for their own businesses." Therefore, if your business is based on transactions, you may pay more attention to the number of users and system upgrades, but if your business is based on information, it may be more reasonable to judge the service delivery by examining the click-through rate of the database information. However, many companies are mixed, so consider it should be more comprehensive. ”

However, when migrating to private cloud services provided by Third-party agencies, it is important to understand the difference between it attrition, usage, and costs and costs.

Lisa Hammond, chairman of Centrix Consulting, explained: "If companies are not aware of their IT losses and usage before the transition, how do you know if the cost of using a private cloud is increasing or decreasing?" in three-fourths of cases, companies actually spend more money. ”

One reason for this is that, for example, each user pays a service fee of £ 250 a month using the private cloud services provided by the vendor, but at the same time the enterprise is running its own IT systems and architectures, and the enterprise also pays for its own internal architecture.

Lisa Hammond said: "From a service economy perspective, the provider needs to know exactly how much they are spending on these services, so that they can talk to the business and tell them how much it costs each month." ”

4. Organizational and governance challenges

Another challenge encountered in migrating to private cloud is that business units are not accustomed to sharing system architecture resources with other colleagues. This thinking means having more communication with them, understanding the benefits of cooperation, and not needing them to use their own dedicated resources in the future.

But for the enterprise IT department itself, migrating to shared or similar patterns of sharing also poses a problem of managing resources. This change, in turn, means that it functionality may need to be improved or rationalized, and that employees will no longer meet specific business units but manage public services.

Reed Specialist Recruitment, for example, retrain their IT technicians and assign them to different day-to-day teams, such as storage, virtualization, and Citrix teams. "They have to be aware of each stage of the business process and work in a virtualized team," Whetstone explains. ”

But technicians also need to develop skills in some areas, such as business or vendor management techniques, to negotiate external private cloud management issues with vendors or to pay rebate patterns, such as whether public cloud resources can be incorporated into private clouds when business requirements are too great.

Another consideration is to ensure that existing business processes meet future requirements, or that these businesses hinder the application of new services.

Further, if you choose to use the services of a third party private cloud provider, it is necessary to review and extend the scope of the enterprise's own risk framework to ensure that the risk framework includes both internal and external architectures, such as ensuring that the enterprise internal data center and Vendor data center are not in the same geographic location.

This work also involves adding audit rights to the contract and ensuring that the security agreement is based on an enterprise security policy. To respond to potential rapid changes, it is also necessary to ensure that the risk assessment framework can be upgraded every six months, rather than every 18 months normally considered.

5. Data Locked Challenge

One key issue that needs to be faced when considering the services provided by external third party private cloud vendors is data locking. Although many cloud service providers currently provide data migration and conversion tools to help customers migrate programs and data to the vendor's server environment, not all vendor migration tools are developed on an open standard.

Centrix Consulting's Hammond explains: "Companies must be very careful not to choose a path of return at the outset." Some migration tools are good, but some can cause enterprise data and programs to be locked. Enterprises must avoid the choice of such a service provider. ”

Developing new applications in a private cloud environment also encounters a locked problem. "Companies must be able to extract the developed programs from the vendor's application development tools and frameworks, rather than relying on the developer's service framework," Hammond said. Otherwise, the newly developed program becomes a program that binds to the vendor's framework. ”

To avoid this, the enterprise's CIO or Enterprise architecture team must make strategic decisions about which application development tools to use, and the framework. You also need to define data standards and appropriate data management methods to ensure that future migrations to different cloud environments do not present problems. These are to be implemented in terms of the contract as well as in concrete implementation, rather than verbal commitment.

Although the cloud environment migration needs to consider many questions, but if chooses the correct way, regardless of future chooses what cloud technology, will make the enterprise future development road to become more flat and broad.

Finally, the CTO of Gemini Outsourcing Department Karl Deacon that: "Some of the elements of IT services, such as data workflow and business logic, because of its differences, will remain within the enterprise." But most conventional services will migrate to the cloud as the enterprise pursues low-cost, efficient, and highly flexible mode of operation. ”