cloud computing strategy
Envisioning a World without Enterprise Data Centers
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BuzzBy Ellen Rubin
In discussions with our customers, we’ve seen an interesting trend emerge in recent months. A surprising number of customers are telling us that their goal is to never build another data center again, or even to do away with their data centers completely. They see the cloud as central to this goal. We’re seeing this trend from customers of many different sizes, from mid-size to large and very large companies. This new mindset seems to reflect a major shift in direction as enterprises rethink their IT strategies.
One interesting aspect of this trend is that customers are taking the lead in recognizing the possibilities of the cloud. As their confidence grows, they’re taking another look at their current infrastructure and adopting a new mindset around what enterprise computing should look like. While the traditional brick and mortar data center has been a staple of enterprise IT for decades, nobody really wants to have an expensive data center, and enterprises realize that now they’re in a position to do something about it. They want to get off the “data center treadmill” because they know where it leads: to ever-increasing operating costs, ever-larger capital investments, more and more manpower, and a huge distraction from their main mission. With the emergence of the cloud as a viable alternative, enterprises are taking a close look at the way they’ve been doing things and incorporating cloud into their overall infrastructure plans.
We’re actually seeing two flavors of this trend. Some companies in the mid-tier space are now trying to determine if they can get down to a very small data center footprint or none at all. They’ve already consolidated as much as they can, perhaps from several data centers down to one. They’ve virtualized much of their environment and squeezed as much efficiency as possible out of it, and now they’ve turned to the cloud to offload the next level of application infrastructure. As they shift operations to the cloud, they’ve decided to stop building out their data centers or taking more space at their colos. The argument (at least in the mid-tier space) is: “Data center management is not our core business, so why are we investing so much time, effort, and expense in it, instead of leveraging resources that are managed by the experts?”
We’re also engaged with much larger F1000 companies with more extensive operations. They may have had dozens of data centers at one point, and have been trying to scale down to less than ten. They’ve aggressively consolidated and virtualized, but know they’re not likely to be able to live without a data center in the foreseeable future since their operations are just too vast and fast-growing (especially when they engage in M&A activity). These companies also have “big iron” in their data centers (like mainframes, dedicated cluster hardware, and high performance SANs) that can’t be directly moved or hosted in the clouds. In addition, some critical data and computing will have to remain under tight control for compliance and business reasons. Thus there are factors at play that will slow down their ability to close their data centers — but they aspire to, and this long-term vision is starting to inform their strategic planning. The way they think about where to run their applications is changing, and they’re just as eager as mid-sized companies to get off the capital expenditure treadmill.
What will this new world look like? Enterprise computing is already in the midst of dramatic change, where the old brick and mortar data center is being replaced by pools of virtual resources that can be located anywhere as long as they perform and behave in the way that meets business requirements. Physical control of resources is being replaced by virtual control, by an administrator managing the virtual data centers across multiple clouds from their desktop or laptop.
How will it come about? Much of the cloud discussion over the past year has been dominated by hybrid clouds, where workloads can be allocated across internal and external resources. Using this approach, enterprises can take advantage of resources on demand for scaling and peak workloads rather than over-provisioning the internal environment. They can also use clouds in multiple regions so that processing and data can be placed near consumers, eliminating the latency of a distant internal server. And they can offload back-office, non-mission-critical apps from their internal environments given that many of these could really be run anywhere. Enterprises will use this hybrid model to make the transition to the virtual data center, choosing which workloads have to run on their internal infrastructure and which can run externally. Over time, the internal environment will shrink as companies run more and more workloads in the cloud.
The possibilities start to get very interesting. Rather than the current approach to cloud computing, where enterprises try to graft cloud capabilities on top of a legacy infrastructure, the cloud becomes a virtual private data center. A control point is still needed to manage those pools of resources across the different cloud environments, but this could be something extremely lightweight and portable such as an administrator’s laptop.
This is the next, upcoming chapter in the hybrid story — and once again, CloudSwitch is playing a leading role. As innovators in the hybrid space, we make it easy to provision, migrate, scale, and manage workloads in public clouds, while providing the security, control, and adherence to standards that an enterprise depends on. Using our technology, enterprises can orchestrate workloads across the cloud landscape (internal and external), as they start to phase out their current environments and get off the “data center treadmill.”
What IT Managers Should Learn from Public Clouds
By Ellen Rubin
Corporate computing is going through a fundamental shift — moving to a world that’s largely cloud-based, self-service, and highly virtual with shared resources. Rather than go through their IT departments like they have for decades, users will simply specify how many cloud servers they need and for how long, and provision their own resources with a few mouse clicks. I recently read an interesting post by Rodrigo Flores, observing that the growing acceptance of public clouds is also changing the role of corporate IT departments, and they’ll have to either adapt or die. I’d like to make a few suggestions about how they can adapt.
First of all, they need to face reality. IT is driven by the need for agility, elasticity and cost-efficiency, and that can be provided most effectively in the public cloud. A year or two ago, most pundits were saying that large-scale adoption was inevitable — now the transition is well underway. Individual users and departments are already making inroads into the cloud to take advantage of agility not available internally. In many cases they’re not waiting for permission or help from corporate IT— they’re moving ahead on their own.
The growing emergence of public clouds creates an alternative to the traditional data center, while lowering the costs of infrastructure services. As cloud computing takes hold, the impact can prove unsettling for corporate IT departments that find themselves increasingly evaluated against the fast service and flexibility provided by public clouds. How will corporate IT departments fit in? How can they maintain their relevance when users can simply go to the cloud and get the servers they need immediately, often with better service than is available internally?
Rather than viewing public clouds as a competitive threat, corporate IT should embrace cloud computing and recognize their new role — serving as a trusted broker for the resources that users need, whether in a public cloud or internally depending on where the application belongs. Corporate IT becomes a much more agile organization, leveraging public clouds and internal clouds within an integrated framework, and IT professionals providing the front-facing infrastructure and support services that make it work.
But corporate IT still has much to learn about how to design and support this new environment, with virtualization being only the first step. To gain this expertise, they need to look to the public cloud — Amazon, Terremark, Savvis, Rackspace, Microsoft, etc. The infrastructure and processes that cloud providers have created at tremendous effort and cost can provide a guide for how corporate IT departments are going to operate in the very near future. It’s an idea that hasn’t yet received much attention from industry observers, but we’ve been hearing it a lot lately from our customers, particularly those thinking strategically about the cloud.
Thus, corporate IT has another incentive (in case they needed one) to take the lead in moving their companies to public clouds. As they plan their own agile environments for internal users, public clouds are where they’ll learn the best practices needed to make it work:
- Building the self-service portal: Corporate IT will need to make self-service for computing resources as simple and robust as it is in the public clouds.
- Managing a multi-tenant environment: Cloud providers deliver rapid provisioning at low cost by supporting large numbers of users on a shared infrastructure. Corporate IT will need to replicate this environment, while providing mechanisms that allow applications to be moved out to a public cloud or back again.
- Scaling efficiently: Cloud providers use several different scaling techniques and policies to keep up with growing demands, and corporate IT can learn a great deal from them about how to make trade-offs and automate wherever possible.
To sum up, corporate IT should look to public clouds as their most valuable resource — often far more agile, elastic, and cost-effective than internal resources. They’re where many enterprise applications (perhaps the majority) will soon run. In addition to their inherent advantages, public clouds also have much to teach. The lessons will come in handy as IT departments discover their new strategic role as champions of a more agile corporate computing environment. CloudSwitch technology makes that new world much easier to build and manage, so corporate IT can drive innovation without losing the security and control they need.
