Five skills to transform enterprise informatization into cloud computing

The advent of cloud computing has shown a new direction for many companies to transform, following five introductory tips from cloud computing experts and early adopters.

1. Understanding Cloud Computing

NATO Alliance transition Command (ACT) technical and Human factors department head Johan Goossens that before the transition to cloud computing, companies should be trained in the principles and definitions of cloud computing, and the company has communicated with the manufacturers, and in the summer of 2010 began the gathering training.

2. Clear your own application

Pedro Villalba, CTO of the New York health insurer EmblemHealth, said that before turning to cloud computing, the first thing to be sure is whether the company understands its application. After understanding the company should first distinguish which applications can enhance the business, and then find out which applications require an independent environment. In the process, they found that some applications must be completely redesigned for design reasons if they want to be used in a cloud strategy. After the EmblemHealth company has finished classifying applications, it is clear what applications can be used in virtual environments.

3. Summarize typical business cases

"Cloud computing has no magic, it's not a panacea, they're just running technology that has some advantage," says Mark White, chief technology officer at Deloitte Consulting. As with any other technology, especially when you are testing, we recommend that the CIO take a business instance as the first experience of cloud computing. He points out that the advantage of doing this is that the public cloud provides the enterprise with the initial experience of migrating workloads cloud, as if on tiptoe across the river.

In the process of practice, the enterprise needs to consider the factors of cost, investment return expectation, difficulty level, service level agreement (SLA), expected performance and service characteristics. In addition, consider how these can be evaluated afterwards. David Linthicum, CTO of the Blue Mountain Lab at cloud computing consultancy, agreed. "Most of our customers have technical prototypes and we recommend them to do so," he said. ”

"If someone came up to me and said," We want to address our storage needs through infrastructure, the service (IaaS). "I'll say to him," That's fine, but first let's get a sense of what the IaaS is, and then we'll look at the business case. "This is the best way to understand the performance of cloud computing and how they work in your environment," Linthicum stressed. You might be able to spend thousands of of dollars and some energy trying. If you choose the right solution, you will save millions of of dollars. ”

4. Approval of reasonable expectations

If you're going to build a private cloud, you want this private cloud to be as simple as Amazon's Elastic Cloud (EC2). James Staten, vice president and chief analyst at Forrester Research, said: "Go ahead and get your users a self-service license so they can deploy apps in 15 minutes." But set a reasonable expectation when doing these things. ”

For example, the IT department should make a clear 4 warning to application developers that some workloads will be limited to running on private clouds; the SLA for cloud computing is similar to what users get from Amazon, rather than enterprise data centers; they have to set deadlines for workloads; Running a workload on a private cloud requires paying the IT department a fee.

"After these are clear, many companies may understand that once your request is approved, you can deploy the application in 15 minutes," he said. "But it's not the case for IT staff, because it's wishful thinking." These approvals may come from the enterprise's architect, application development manager, or other person. ”

Staten also warns that if your private cloud looks or feels very much like Amazon EC2, then most developers will turn to this. "This will hinder the expansion of virtual machines if you don't have a reasonable fee model," he said. For example, this is like giving them a free EC2. In this case, they have no reason to leave. This way you will only add virtual machines, not less. ”

5. Choose a shortcut to Private cloud deployment

Staten advises companies to try to buy integrated packaged cloud services (Cloud-in-a-box). "Given the urgency and priority of the current cloud computing, it would be wise to do so," he said. He explained that the integrated package cloud services fall into two categories. One is the software Cloud integration package, which then provides specific hardware and infrastructure. According to the scale of cloud computing, the cost of this approach is between 10,000 ~5 million dollars. "We recommend that the IT department deploy as little cloud as possible at the start, so that it is easy to explore and accumulate experience," Staten said. "Another integrated package cloud service is the physical encapsulation of the entire cloud, which costs about 150,000 dollars." In this way, Staten says, companies can meet the needs of most developers for cloud computing.