corporate it
F500 Corporate IT, Cloud Innovators?
Digg
Reddit
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
BuzzBy Ellen Rubin
The way you know you’re in the midst of a technology shift and market disruption is when organizations don’t behave the way you expect them to based on past track records. Cloud computing has been filled with surprises and unexpected behavior from the get-go. First, Amazon, a retailer, turns out to be a technology powerhouse in disguise and changes the rules of IT infrastructure. Then, “real” technology leaders like IBM, Dell, EMC, HP and others make lots of announcements about cloud but essentially do little and re-brand existing offerings as “cloud-enabled.” Next, Verizon, the phone company, buys Terremark in a bid to become a global cloud leader. And of course, there’s always the fact that the federal government has embraced cloud widely and is spending large amounts of money to build private clouds and leverage public ones.
So, in a world that sometimes seems upside-down, how surprising is it really that the F500, and in particular, the corporate IT groups within these huge organizations, have often turned out to be the early adopters and drivers of cloud in all flavors – private, public and hybrid? When we started CloudSwitch, our hypothesis (based on all sorts of track records and past behaviors) was that within the enterprise market, mid-tier companies (defined loosely as several hundred million to a few billion dollars in revenues) would try cloud first. This was because we were betting that these organizations had enough pain from internal data center management (cost, over-provisioning, not their core business, lack of responsiveness to business users, etc.) that cloud computing’s benefits would overcome their initial concerns. And in fact, this is true of many mid-tier enterprises, who have indeed taken the leap into cloud over the past couple of years, along with the developer and start-up communities.
But the companies who seem to be driving enterprise adoption of cloud and defining many of the requirements for vendors in our experience are at the multi-billion-dollar revenue mark, and often within the F500. Our initial hypothesis here was that these companies would be too large and resistant to change to be early adopters, unlike the smaller, more nimble mid-tier players. But it turns out that these companies have such enormous capital expenditures in data centers and infrastructure investments that they’re determined to adopt cloud to move them to a lower cost curve (“get off the data center treadmill”) and help them break through the internal limitations on self-service provisioning and scaling that have frustrated their business users for years.
Even more unexpectedly, many of the people who are leading the way within these companies are managers and architects within the corporate IT group. It’s interesting to note that in previous technology shifts – SaaS and virtualization come to mind – the revolution was staged from within business units or at the developer level, and corporate IT came on board once these technologies were de facto standards. It’s possible that with these experiences in mind, corporate IT (and the CIO in particular) has decided to take the lead this time around, and not wait to find out what’s been going on without enterprise security, control or standards.
Last year, corporate IT was struggling to absorb the avalanche of information about cloud and to separate the hype from meaningful architectures and use cases. With some encouragement from the large technology vendors, corporate IT shops retreated into private clouds as the safe way to go. This year, with hybrid clouds all the rage, it feels like enterprises and IT managers are coming into their own. They’ve been speaking with more confidence based on their pilots and initial deployments, and have come to see cloud as something that can be shaped and driven by real enterprise requirements – not just a new set of processes/resources that need to be run as a separate and un-integrated silo.
In this hybrid model, F500 enterprises are working with vendor partners to build private clouds, and identify application categories that can run completely in public clouds, and those that need to span internal and external environments. They’re asking for management, orchestration and federation technologies that let them be vendor-agnostic and “position independent” (so apps can run in a given environment at a particular point in time, regardless of underlying infrastructures). This process is clearly a multi-year learning experience with the usual fits-and-starts as companies bump into the inevitable limitations of new technology and meet resistance from internal stakeholders. But the trend is clear. And although relatively few of these large enterprises are willing to go on record yet with their case studies, we can see first-hand the in-roads cloud is making among some of the largest pharmas, banks and manufacturing companies in the world, and it’s exciting to be part of the paradigm shift.
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.
