The cloud is the extension of the data center

A year after the deployment of local asset management applications in Oregon State Multenomer County, the resignation of two it employees who are dedicated to managing the application has left other employees powerless to maintain the professional server environment. To ensure continued support for this mission-critical tool, Multenomer County has no choice but to cloud migration.

"All of our IT projects are tracked through Planview," said Staci Cenis, Multenomer County and Portland IT project manager. We use Planview to develop planning and time limits, and monitoring of planned and unplanned maintenance will let us know when employees will be able to take part in other projects. ”

Cenis explained that initially Multenomer County had two planview full-time administrators, but the two full-time administrators resigned around March 2009. "Their resignation has put us in a passive position," she said. None of the other employees were trained on the Planview instance configuration or how to update the form inside the tool. ”

Although Cenis never considered cloud services before the problem occurred, Cenis agreed to abandon local software and choose Planview Software as a service (SaaS) solution after assessing costs. Cenis says training for IT staff engaged in server storage, backup management, recovery and upgrade is the primary cost of local software.

Currently, by handing over infrastructure and application management to the cloud, IT departments can handle most of the configuration, test, and disaster recovery issues. Cenis said: "I really want to choose from the beginning of the cloud, because they can be to a large extent for us to ease the burden, especially in software upgrades." ”

Each upgrade is the responsibility of the application provider rather than her team. She estimates that every upgrade saves a lot of time for her resource pool. "In the past, it took weeks to troubleshoot, and now it's a consumed to solve," he said. "At the same time, users can access the latest version within a months of a new version of the software."

Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and renowned analyst at Gartner, a marketing research firm, said the example of Multenomer County's choice of cloud computing had become one of the five frequently cited examples.

Gartner divides them into the following categories:

· Replace。 Like Multenomer County, abandon the infrastructure and choose SaaS;

· Re-hosted. The IT department still manages the software, but the software is hosted on the external infrastructure, such as public or private cloud servers such as Amazon, HP or Rackspace;

· Refactoring. Make some simple adjustment to the application to use the platform as the service;

· Modify。 The code or data framework must be modified for PAAs;

· Reconstruction。 The developer or IT department abandons the application code and starts using the PAAs again.

Manes said: "In order to transplant applications to the cloud, there are not many companies that choose to rebuild or make major changes." Companies often choose to replace, re-trust, or refactor. ”

In general, the Enterprise sees the cloud as a solution to the problem of overloading and lack of space in the data center. "If you are facing the creation of a new data center, it can save a lot of money by moving some non-critical applications to the cloud, compared to a new data center that needs billions of of dollars," Manes said. ”

Problems

Ever since the first time that cloud computing began to look chaotic many years ago, Manes has found that many companies have begun to eat their own fruit. "Many corporate leaders are keen to migrate to cloud computing so that it does not have a reasonable redundancy, or a system that guarantees the proper implementation of the agreement," she said. "Such negligence makes them technically and financially vulnerable to disruptions and other problems."

Companies that migrate applications and data to the public cloud in the early days may not be working out how to use traditional methods such as load balancing to deal with outages. "Even if an outage is concentrated in one part of a country, it can cause a ripple effect," she said. If the accident lasts longer than a day, it will have serious consequences for the company. ”

But Dave Woods, senior program manager at SNL Financial, who specializes in business intelligence services, disagrees. SNL Financial's business is primarily for their clients to collect and analyze data through public channels from around the world. Although there is a large internal data center, the company's existing workflow management applications have encountered constraints.

"Our data centers are crammed with in-house and customer-facing applications and databases," Woods said. This results in a company not being able to conduct a comprehensive analysis to find out whether the limitations are due to insufficient server space, insufficient cooling, or other problems. However, it has become very obvious that the capacity is running out, and cloud software is becoming more attractive. ”

Although he had considered rebuilding applications and increasing the number of data centers, he dismissed the idea of cost, time, and code stability. "Legacy applications are not designed and flexible enough to meet our need to upgrade our processes," Woods said. "In other words, his goal is not just to re-trust applications, but to make some significant improvements to the workflow process."

To achieve this goal, SNL Financial deployed the Appian Company's cloud-based business process management system. Although the annual license cost is comparable to the cost of the local software used by the company, the company saves 70000 of dollars in hardware costs, and the hardware needs to be upgraded once the application is upgraded.

As Woods believes cloud services support extensibility and different geographic locations, SNL Financial extends its work flow in Asia to more than 500 banks. "These platforms seem to us to be critical to the task, they are not marginal products," Woods explains. They affect our core business engine, allowing us to fulfill our commitments to our customers. ”

Woods refers to the process of collecting, auditing, and evaluating data and news for specific industries--in other words, the information that SNL sells to customers.

This is not to say that there are no obstacles in the process of cloud migration. Woods said that while it was involved in the early stages of the decision, his process improvement team was not implemented to ensure that IT departments were fully informed. "We find that no matter how well we think we communicate with the IT department and the Internet, it's not important to think about it," he said. ”

(Responsible editor: Schpeppen)