Cloud Computing: Time to Rethink IT Service Delivery and Bring the Clouds Down to Earth

By Kia Behnia
published: Tuesday, September 15 2009

Many IT organizations are reexamining how they deliver services to the business. IT service delivery today is often analogous to using a private jet fleet. Service is frequently delivered through an IT infrastructure consisting of one-off configurations, with many assets dedicated and underutilized. Deploying new applications takes time and often requires buying new assets. Although the approach delivers the highest level of service for every requirement, costs are high and unpredictable, and agility is limited.

IT service delivery tomorrow will be analogous to using a commercial airline. Standard classes of services can be defined and advertised along with specific service levels and prices. Pricing will be demand-based. Users will simply select the services they need from a service catalog, much like travelers select flights, service classes, and seats from an airline schedule. New IT services will be added easily, and in many cases may be created by combining already existent services.

Cloud computing, enabled by advances such as virtualization, automation, and self-service portals with an integrated service catalog, brings this new dynamic, service-oriented delivery approach down to earth. But with all the noise in the market about cloud computing, how do you know where to begin? By understanding the underlying service-related delivery requirements that are needed, you can successfully take full advantage of cloud computing technology for your enterprise so that you can improve service delivery to the business. Here are questions to address to help you get the process started:

• How do I determine and implement the right cloud computing strategy for my organization?
• What services should I offer via the cloud to my customers?
• Which services should I source externally versus build internally?
• How are my service levels being managed?
• How do I protect my investment now and in the future?
• How can I manage the cloud environment?

Your Cloud or Mine

With cloud computing, dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users don't need to have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them. On the IT side, cloud computing can increase the speed of IT responsiveness to business needs, while reducing the cost and use of the infrastructure, platforms, and applications.

The technological power of cloud computing has been around for awhile, evolving from the maturing of several different IT capabilities over the past few years. These include the "greening" of the data center, hosted computing environments, unified blade server, storage and network technology, and virtualized data centers.

There are three main types of cloud computing environments: public, private, and hybrid. Public clouds are attractive to organizations that don't want to own or maintain their own infrastructure or applications. You're essentially renting a virtual machine by the hour, eliminating capital expenses within the IT organization.

If you have applications or data that are confidential or very proprietary, you may not want to risk putting that information in the public cloud until you are comfortable that it is safe. A public cloud may not be able to meet the stringent regulatory compliance requirements, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or Payment Card Industry (PCI) for your organization, and its public nature could lead to governance issues. But with the right solutions in place focusing on integrated IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) processes such as configuration management, you could track and audit which services are hosted in the cloud and automate governance of these workloads.

Some enterprises are building their own internal private cloud in order to improve IT responsiveness to business needs and drive down costs. Private clouds are also appealing to the enterprise or company looking for a very elastic, dynamic computing or storage capacity. With a private cloud, a business service that needs additional compute or storage resources can dynamically provision for it. The benefit of a private cloud is that it enables an organization to manage the infrastructure and have more control. Doing so can put the burden of creating a secure, scalable, compliant cloud on the shoulders of IT organizations. Any gains associated with better utilization and lower capital expenditures could be wiped out or significantly reduced by the increase in administrative costs and other operating expenditures. However, by using comprehensive "cloud" service management solutions, many organizations are able to address these challenges.

Other enterprises may choose to implement a hybrid cloud, an environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers. The hybrid cloud offers the cost-saving benefits of public cloud services with some of the control and compliance required for private clouds. For instance, the enterprise may have a private cloud, as well as a relationship with a cloud resource provider that offers additional storage or infrastructure computing power. When peak demand is increasing, the IT organization may not own the physical infrastructure to allocate for this demand, but may instead leverage a relationship with this resource provider to pay for the needed resources for a given period of time.