The
discussion today is about the challenges that businesses are facing in the wake
of a wave filled with new technologies such as BYOD, virtualized desktop
infrastructures, content-anywhere-anytime, higher requirements for mobility and
flexibility. All of these are generally
included under discussions related to Cloud or Cloud Provisioning. The question that most companies face is “How
do I use Cloud as a Business Enabler?”
Traditionally
IT has been a (mostly) bottomless pit of expenditure for desktops, servers,
switches, security etc. Ask most CFOs and they all cringe at the thought of
spending money on IT. Some companies
have adopted financial models whereby IT has turned itself into a profit
centre, billing back to business units and therefor cementing the value of
their existence within a company. This, however, does not work well in all
situations. Hence the reason why many companies (should we say CEOs and CFOs?)
are skeptical when confronted with a new investment in something as fluffy as a
“Cloud”.
The
reality of the matter is that the world is changing (does it ever stop
changing?). We are now, for the first
time, dealing with a new generation of school-leavers that have never known the
world without the Internet. They are the
most blogged about, webbed about, video’ed, skype’ed, sms’ed, facebook’ed and
youtube’ed generation of all time. The
way they socially interact is significantly different to any and all
generations ever before. Ever seen a group of teenagers sitting around a table
sending sms’s to one another?
Whereas
a few years ago it was unheard of to have “Chat clients” within a corporate
environment, it has now largely been adopted as a business tool. How many of us use Skype as a business tool
these days? The Net Generation expects that these tools will be
available in everyday companies. It’s HOW THEY INTERACT SOCIALLY. Being super-connected anywhere on any device
has now become the de facto expected
standard.
People
generally expect to have the ability to use their mobile devices and tablet PCs,
whether it’s Apple, Android or any other, within the workplace. Challenges that IT departments face is that
their 30-year-old-standard-answer-to-anything
i.e. “NO” does not hold any water. It
was recently reported in research done in the US that close to 65% of users that
were told that they are not allowed to connect their personal device to company
networks, do that in any case! So don’t
be surprised if your valuable company data suddenly finds its way into DropBox,
Google or iCloud. Neither should you be surprised if your company email is
forwarded to an unknown Gmail or Hotmail account, thus making it possible for
users having access to it on their mobile devices. Surprised? Yes it does happen. I have not had a discussion where at least
one person has not admitted in doing so.
IT
departments have an increasingly difficult beast to tame. BYOD (Bring Your Own
Device) policies have not become a “yes/no/maybe” decision, but rather a “How
the hell do we deal with it?” Clever
companies look at this and say “How can we make this work for us?”
“Where
is the Cloud?” someone asks. “Its all around us” someone responds.
Cloud
is whatever and however we make it to be.
There are a multitude of different options available, all strongly
aligned to virtualization and the provisioning of services, infrastructure,
software, desktops, applications and support no matter where you are or which
platform or operating system you might be using.
Public
Cloud offerings do provide an easy and cost-effective way for companies to
quickly and efficiently gain access to cloud infrastructure. But… would you trust your valuable company
assets in the grimy hands of the public domain?
What
we have seen is that many companies are moving towards a Hybrid solution.
Meaning that they invest in, and develop their own virtualized environment behind
a firewall (Private Cloud) and then have an element of such connected to a
Public Cloud entity. This could typically be done through a SP
partnership.
A
hybrid cloud is a cloud-computing environment in which an organization provides
and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. For
example, an organization might use a public cloud service, such as Amazon
Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for archived data but continue to maintain
in-house storage for operational customer data. Ideally, the hybrid approach
allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness
that a public cloud-computing environment offers without exposing
mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities.
This type of hybrid cloud is also referred to as hybrid IT.
OK,
so you have a “cloud”… now what?
The
ability to provide applications, infrastructure, desktop and services on demand
anywhere, anytime on any device is the ultimate in flexibility and high
availability. Literally you can have
“anything or everything - as a service”, also known as XaaS.
These
are the things dreams are made of…
The most common examples of XaaS are Software
as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) and Platform as a
Service (PaaS). The combined use of these three is sometimes referred to as the
SPI model (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS). Other examples of XaaS include storage as a
service (SaaS), communications as a service (CaaS), network as a service (NaaS)
and monitoring as a service (MaaS).
Today we are living in a world, which is more
global than ever before. Companies create virtual project teams, which are largely
geographically dispersed, who use collaboration tools to bring their efforts
together. No longer do we need to be in
the same room, the same office, or even the same continent as our co-workers. The ability to collaborate seamlessly across
multiple applications by sharing information, presentations, video and voice,
have become the key driver behind making the world a smaller place.
And while the giant corporates of the world
try to figure out how it all works and how it all fits together, we are
creating new generations, which are even more connected than ever before. Our younger generations are the largest
consumers of cloud applications. Whether it is for email, video or any of the
multitudes of collaboration applications they have to their disposal, they
already have it all figured out…
Oh
and PS… Cloud is not new either. Back in the 1950s many academic institutions
started to link their mainframe systems together, allowing multiple users to
share both the physical access to the computers as well as CPU resources, thus
having a much higher return on investment.
Until
next time, we’ll see you in The Cloud!
