Working the cloud

Many IT organisations are moving to cloud computing in order to achieve extreme agility in responding to the demands of the business and drive down service delivery costs. While the transition to cloud may seem straightforward, the cloud is an entirely new model for service delivery. If the cloud does not provide the expected levels of service, the company will lose money through customer dissatisfaction and lost business. By following best practices as your organisation migrates to the cloud, IT can mitigate or eliminate these risks.

Moving to cloud computing demands a focus on reliability, levels of security and regulatory compliance as your organisation begins to use cloud computing. If you are consuming public cloud services, your cloud service provider should be flexible, allowing you to easily change the amount and types of services you consume while operating the services they are hosting as if they were your own.
To make a successful move to the cloud and achieve the return on investment that you expect, IT must undergo four major changes described here.

Infrastructure transformation
Perhaps the most significant transformation you face in adoption involves IT infrastructure. Traditional architectures are fragmented, with application stacks and data segregated into hardware silos. Cloud architecture is unified and fluid. In the cloud, application stacks and data share hardware. They move freely throughout the cloud to deliver services when and where they are needed.
So how do you transition from a fixed to a fluid environment? With an incremental approach, you can implement cloud computing while avoiding disruption and minimising risk. Because not all services are appropriate cloud candidates, you can expect to manage both traditional and cloud environments for the foreseeable future.

Many IT organisations are pursuing cloud computing by augmenting internal (private) cloud services with offerings from public cloud providers. This approach also presents service management implications. Operations need to manage public cloud services as robustly as private cloud services to achieve the performance, security, and compliance the business requires. Consequently, it’s important to choose a public cloud provider that can extend service management capabilities to your organisation.

As with the rest of IT, you can’t just wind up a cloud and set it going; it needs a certain amount of work to get the most value out of your cloud. There are actually two levels of maintenance involved: maintaining the infrastructure platform and maintaining the user-facing parts of the cloud, mainly the service catalogue. The offered services need to be kept up to date and aligned with users’ expectations and needs, even as those change over time.
Maintaining the in-house part of the cloud’s infrastructure is not much different from maintaining any large data centre. The difference is that there are a large number of servers that are pretty much identical at the level that the cloud admins need to worry about. This means that the maintenance is a perfect candidate for very extensive automation, with only occasional manual work being required.
Keeping the service catalogue up to date can often require a new role to mediate between the users and IT. Given the pace of change, it is very important to choose a technology that will make this process easy and painless, and not one that requires a lot of manual work to create new catalogue entries and update existing ones.

Process and organisational transformation
Over the years, many IT organisations have developed and honed best-practice processes across IT disciplines, such as those based on the IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®). Incident and problem management, change and configuration management, access control, and compliance are just a few examples. These best practices have delivered huge gains to IT organisations by providing them with greater agility, cost effectiveness, and risk avoidance.

You don’t have to scrap these processes and start all over to accommodate cloud computing. In fact, the automation inherent to the cloud makes it much more cost effective to follow ITIL processes in order to achieve desired service levels.

Whilst scalability is one of the main reasons that people move to cloud infrastructure. The caveat is that the applications need to be able to take advantage of this capability. An extra server doesn’t help your overloaded cluster until it’s actually added to the cluster, so you need a cloud platform that is capable of delivering a full application stack and adapting it on the fly.

Keep in mind that you may need to modify your processes so that they are more attuned to the cloud environment. Since the cloud is the same as IT, just harder, better, faster, stronger, it will also need to be managed much the same as the rest of IT. The same processes, audit trails, and approvals still apply, even if the resources concerned live in the cloud. The integration has to be completely automatic, however; manual processes simply cannot keep up with the speed of cloud, and will either cause huge bottlenecks or, more probably, be bypassed as quickly as possible.

Many IT organisations are benefiting from technology breakthroughs that simplify the management of processes in the cloud. Advancements in configuration management, for example, support the fast-moving cloud environment in which large numbers of resources are automatically and rapidly provisioned, deployed, and retired. Sophisticated change management capabilities maintain strong control and tracking of changes without impeding the rapid change that must occur in the cloud.

New automation orchestration solutions accommodate the greater complexity and dynamic nature of the cloud environment. Robust integration across service management solutions is helping to ensure that provisioning occurs with appropriate monitoring and tracking to maintain service quality and compliance.

Service transformation
ITIL best practices are focused on helping IT organisations manage their applications and infrastructure in a service-oriented way. Cloud computing can support that approach by empowering IT users to request services without assistance, which has the dual benefit of increasing agility and reducing service delivery costs.

For self-service to work it must present resources in terms that users understand as business people tend not to care about the IT infrastructure components required to deliver the services they need. For example, they aren’t interested in how many CPUs and how much memory is required to host an online shopping cart application. Instead, business users would be better served with a “Supports 1000 concurrent users” tier and a “Supports 5000 concurrent users” tier, enabling them to make the choice based on anticipated customer volumes.

To meet this requirement, organisations need to present a set of standard offerings in business terms. Not only does standardisation make it easier for users to request services, it also simplifies management and helps further drive down IT costs.

Cultural transformation
Cloud computing promises to improve cost transparency, and failure to have a comprehensive service catalogue can significantly increase the cost of cloud computing. With a comprehensive service catalogue, IT can publish the cost of a service so that business users can accurately budget their IT needs up front. Cloud computing supports granular usage metering, enabling IT to construct a credible, transparent pricing model with which to charge the business for resources used. This model could include everything from physical resource utilisation and software costs to augmentations for service level outages or peak/non-peak usage patterns.
Cloud computing is transforming every aspect of IT: the infrastructure, processes, services orientation, organisational structure, and corporate culture where a move to cloud computing will demand greater efficiencies borne of a tighter integration of the service delivery value chain. With the incredible transformation IT organisations must undergo, it will always be an ongoing process. Most organisations will transition to the cloud without throwing away all that they’ve built in their traditional environment. And most importantly, IT’s objectives remain the same: agility, cost effectiveness, and risk management.