Why cloud?

I have helped large organizations relocate enterprise applications to the cloud, helped small companies make cloud vendor selections and have been CTO of an IaaS cloud.   I also have experience running large IT organizations and have provided consultation to companies on many aspects of their internal processes and technology.   I have been asked many times "why cloud?"   While the question has been asked many times and there are many biased answers, my view through the fog provides me some specific answers.

While the answer will be different for every organization, but the parameters fall into a combination of five areas:

• ROI - some organizations can show an ROI for moving infrastructure and applications to the cloud.   Typically, the cost savings come from reductions in employee costs (harder to justify since the downturn in the economy in 2009 when many companies cut IT resources and possibly reduced service levels).   There are some potential savings from CapEx avoidance on refreshes, potential cost reductions from colo-sites.   I have built a fairly elaborate model that always needs tweaking based on a specific business situation.
• Agility - I believe this is the real the driver behind the long term growth of cloud.   More today than ever before, businesses are required to respond rapidly to competitive changes and business opportunities.   The legacy model of IT that is slowed by CapEx anchors of previous purchases and the availability of IT resources within the organization reduces agility.   Cloud is the newest method of outsourcing IT with portentially a new benefit of varying cost and changing vendors more easily.   There are immediate agility benefits from a move to cloud.   The ensuring that business remain agile with a transition to cloud requires planning and management.
• Improved Service Levels - Cloud vendors will live or die based on their service levels.   Even AWS will need to have improved availability and MTTR going forward.   The ability of an internal IT organization to justify the cost of improved service levels has always been limited because it is managed as a cost center.   Regardless of the size of an organization, I find that there are never enough IT resources.   IT as a The shift to cloud will deliver the SLAs that are desired at an economy of scale that most businesses cannot afford.  Improved service levels will also come from cloud vendors having more resources, more specialized resources.
• Improved Data Security - Yes, I said better data security in the cloud than in the enterprise.   As a CTO of an IaaS cloud, I knew that we had to be better than the internal IT organization at protecting data.   I also know, having been inside many businesses, they they actually struggle to achieve the data security that they demand of cloud vendors.   Transition to cloud is good for all in this area as well.
• Improved BCP/DR - Many organizations are required to have business continuity plans, disaster recovery plans and an ability to execute on them.   Even some privately help companies that do not have compliance requirements driving them in this direction have decided that it is smart to have this insurance policy to ensure survivability.   Virtualization and cloud make BCP and DR much easier and provide many more options for controlling the cost of a BCP/DR program.

Planning for Cloud Implementation

We have done a good amount of consulting on moving to public cloud (especially for companies that are not happy about the cost of their existing managed hosting vender).   On the initial discussion, one of the first questions is “what do I need to think about and how do I choose a cloud vendor?”

Moving to a public IaaS cloud vendor and to a lesser extent, a SaaS vendor is a typical data center move or implementation with a few twists and the usual issues that are easily forgotten.   While it is amazing simple and fast to build a new environment in the cloud, caring for it will take some planning, and may require changes to existing technology and processes.   While it may not be as formalized, even small organizations need to think through the issues.   Here is a checklist of items to think about:

Resiliency and Availability

Adding another node to your infrastructure network requires that you think through network configuration and redundancy, as well as server resiliency for servers that are in the new cloud environment.

Data considerations

Do you have constraints because of compliance, performance or support that affects where your data needs to be located.   A compliance requirement may force you to keep data in an internal data center and use it from the cloud.   A performance requirement may suggest a hybrid cloud with database servers in the cloud managed environment and web and application servers in the self-service environment.   Your database vendor or your performance requirements may not support a virtualized database server.

Compliance and Security

Does your IT implementation require that you have an intrusion detection or intrusion prevention system?   Is there a requirement that your infrastructure be located in a SAS-70 certified environment?   Are there requirements in your security policy that require multi-factor authentication?   Will you need to extend your vulnerability and penetration testing activities for the new site?

Identity management

How will enforce the user authentication and control policies for the new environment, e.g., when an employee or consultant leaves the organization?   Will you need to create a new AD domain and build a trust?  

Managing capacity

Monitoring performance and availability

Change, Configuration and Release Management

Will you need to add roles or workflow changes to the change management process?   What changes to you need to make to ensure that your configuration management database is current as you add and remove CIs from the new cloud environment?  Will you need to modify your release management process to push changes to the cloud?

IT service management

If there is a bump in the night, do you need to modify your incident management process to deal with workflow or contacts associated with the new environment?   Are there new services that you need to add to your service catalog to support users of the new environment?

Licensing

Will you need to extend software licensing to cover the new environment from with your vendors or will you acquire licenses through the cloud vendor or SaaS provider?

Testing

If you are moving applications or portions of applications to the new cloud environment, how will you approach functional and performance testing?

Disaster recovery

Will you build a DR site for the cloud implementation?   How will you approach data synchronization?   How does this affect your change, configuration and release management processes?