CLOUD COMPUTING: HOW IT CAN FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ORGANIZATIONS

Cloud computing probably isn’t a reality at your company yet, but that could change fast.

 

According to a recent InformationWeek survey, almost half of companies (46%) say they’ll use or are likely to use a cloud CPU, storage, or other infrastructure services, given the economy. A year ago, less than a third (31%) had that view. For software as a service, 56% say they will use it or are likely to.

With Amazon’s EC2, Google’s AppEngine, and now Microsoft’s Azure, cloud computing is looking more like a real architecture that your data center has a good chance of being connected to in the near future.

For companies to realize the advantages they want from the cloud, the IT organization will need to evolve, requiring different management approaches and different IT skills from what has grown up in the traditional data center.

The IT organization may need to examine strategy questions like:

• Which workloads should be exported to the cloud?
• Which set of standards will be followed for cloud computing?
• How to define and police service-level agreements?

Your staff will need to develop new skills--for example, it may be more difficult to get to the root of performance problems. Early adopters are finding that other data center skills and roles work better in a slightly modified form.

There will be a need for increased collaboration and interdependence across disciplines and skills may need to be applied at different times. For example, when constructing a virtual machine for use in the cloud, it may be critical for a system administrator, network manager, and information security officer to collaborate up front on the design of specific VM types. In the past these skills have been applied at different times in the provisioning of a server, with the security officer often coming in at the end to inspect work and impose overlooked security measures. As virtual machines get cloned by the dozen, there is no chance for errors of any kind to be caught just before deployment. These three crucial disciplines will need to work together in a new interdependent way.

Planning for the Unexpected
With Michael Jackson’s unexpected death on June 25, Sony Music Entertainment found its micheljackson.com site overwhelmed with people who wanted to buy his music, obtain information and post comments in memory of the star. The site could process transactions and comments from 200 shoppers at a time, but the site had over a million people trying to access it in a 24 hour period. Sony Music realized it couldn't solve its problem conventionally with more hardware, since it could never predict which of its artists would be hit with a traffic surge.

Sony Music’s senior systems engineer Greg Taylor used the cloud to build surplus capacity for Michel Jackson and other leading musicians’ stores. Taylor rearchitected the stores so traffic can be split into two streams: one for people trying to buy, and another for those just seeking information. The transactions remain on the core site hosted by dedicated Sony servers. During a traffic surge, visitors seeking album or background information can be shunted off to a matching, read-only site powered by servers in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Many companies share those servers, keeping costs low and there is always surplus capacity to handle individual store spikes of up to 3.5 to 5 million visitors per day.

“It changes the way you look at IT,” Taylor says of the cloud option. Taylor sees that it is no longer a question of having direct control, all the time, over resources. Rather it is a question of what needs to be under his immediate power in the data center versus what is suitable to be moved off to the “elastic” public cloud, where at a moment’s notice he can tap additional servers.

In the future, businesses may adopt a similar solution whereby transactions and customer data remain in-house, but read-only content that poses no security threat to customer privacy or data center security can be shipped off to the cloud. If spikes in the on-premise data center can be shipped off to the cloud, the enterprise could make do with a smaller data center requiring less capital expense.

For IT leaders, it will raise new questions about what core competencies must stay in the data center and what should go to the cloud.

Companies are already using software as a service for apps such as HR and employee benefits. Two common early uses of Amazon’s EC2 are software testing and quality assurance, where an app is tested in a cloud in a duplicate of the data center’s production environment. It is expected more testing and software development will occur in the cloud, as cloud computing becomes more common.

Microsoft has picked up on the potential that developers can create Web apps using a cloud development platform and skip the usual painful transition from developer source code to code that is ready for the deployment environment. Its TeamSystem Server in Azure hopes to capitalize on this opportunity and Microsoft has even reached out to PHP and Eclipse users to encourage their use of Azure development services.

Many companies wish to take advantage of the cloud, yet find their customer data must meet an array of national and state privacy regulations. While there are some de facto cloud security standards—SAS 70 data center audits, for example—currently, there are no data handling standards for the CEO, CFO and CIO to rely on, so sensitive data must remain on premises or be released only to partners known to be operating trusted systems.

Blurring of Boundaries
Another organizational roadblock could be the division within IT between data center operations and development staffs. Typically in operations, a systems administrator gets to know an application and its server well, while a programmer learns network protocols, API, and coding languages well. In cloud operations, the system administrator’s role changes: the admin has to trust someone else to do the conventional role of directly managing the server. And in order to access the server, the admin needs to understand more programming skills, like SOAP or REST Web services protocols and how to deal with virtual machines in a distributed environment, which may also require an understanding of PHP, Python, or one of the other scripting languages.

Business-unit users and IT teams may need to change policies, in terms of IT approvals, project management, portfolio managements, and IT budgets to accommodate the speed of cloud computing. With virtualization, a new server can quickly be spun up in minutes rather than the six week endeavor for traditional server capacity increases. Approval processes must match the new speed or businesses can miss out on the added value of cloud computing.

The evolution of cloud computing frequently builds on development and deployment techniques already familiar to IT organizations, and often it removes some of the old obstacles to scaling out to large numbers of users. And cloud computing also has its own complexities to master, which will require fine-tuning the typical IT organizational structure and its policies.

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