How to Get on Top of Your Cloud Strategy
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This presentation, from a recent webinar, explores the keys to transitioning from a multi-cloud environment to a true hybrid cloud strategy designed for optimal performance and business results.
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How to Get on Top of Your Cloud Strategy
- 1. #CloudStrategy HOW TO GET ON TOP OF YOUR CLOUD STRATEGY
- 2. John Keller Director Product Management Data Center/Cloud Comcast Business Jon Feld Chief Content Officer OnCore Media Eric Hanselman Chief Analyst 451 Research Panelists Moderator HOW TO GET ON TOP OF YOUR CLOUD STRATEGY
- 3. AGENDA • Multi-Cloud vs. Hybrid Perspective • Hybrid Cloud Benefits • Migration Considerations • Mitigating Risk • Future-Proofing and Continuity Planning
- 4. MULTI-CLOUD vs. HYBRID CLOUD: A BASELINE It’s about integration, control and manage Bringing user applications together Optimizing provisioning
- 5. IT’S A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD WITH HYBRID ON THE HORIZON Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise Cloud Computing: Workloads and Key Projects 2016 How organizations will use on and off premise cloud environments over the next two years… Single cloud not multiple clouds Multiple cloud environments with little to no interoperability Multiple cloud environments to migrate workloads or data between cloud environments Multiple cloud environments where delivery of business function across different cloud environments is seamless 32% 22% 15% 32%
- 6. ++ 61% 42% 40% 63% 45% 32% 74% 50% 33% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% On Premises Private Cloud with a Hosted Private Cloud Hosted Private Cloud with a Public Cloud Organizations configuring the following clouds for interopera 2014 Multi-Users 2015 Multi-Hybrid Users 2016 Multi-Hybrid U Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise Cloud Computing: Workloads and Key Projects 2016 On Premises Private Cloud with a Public Cloud IT’S A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD WITH HYBRID ON THE HORIZON
- 7. 13.8% 5.5% 7.8% 13.8% 7.4% 51.6% Cloud Non-Cloud 22.5% 11.7% 11.1% 14.2% 7.0% 33.5% The shift of workloads to cloud environments over the next two years is dramatic, from 41% overall today to 60% expected in two years Off-premises workloads also shift from 35% today to 52% in two years Cloud providers will account for 76% of all Cloud workloads, up from 66% today TWO YEAR TRENDING IS DRAMATIC Software-as-a-service (SaaS) rastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)/Public Cloud Hosted Public Cloud On-premises Private Cloud Off-premises Non-Cloud On-premises Non-Cloud Base=Cloud Adopters Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Computing, Q1 2016 2016 2018
- 8. HYBRID CLOUD BENEFITS A “fit for use” environment Deployment where it is neede Control over data distributi
- 9. MATCHING PLATFORMS TO WORKLOAD Intelligently match workloads to most suitable execution environment User Workloads Partner Systems Optimize user connections Push workloads close to partner systems/platforms
- 10. KEYS TO MOVING TO THE HYBRID CLOUD Interconnectio n is the bedrock Take “cloud bursting” and oversubscription into account Build the architecture in steps What type of cloud do you want?
- 11. TESTING YOUR ARCHITECTURE, ASSUMPTIONS Implement in stages, use control data to test Test both applications and user connections All testing should be user led
- 12. HOUSING APPLICATIONS What you control vs. what you don’t Choose your priority Centralized vs. user proximity
- 13. MITIGATING RISK DURING THE SHIFT Manage a slow transition with small, select user Create an upfront architecture geared to a gradu Build redundant paths to the cloud
- 14. FUTURE-PROOFING CONSIDERATIONS Build dependency into your architecture Understand what you’re committing to upfront Don’t limit your options
- 15. CREATING AN EFFECTIVE CONTINUITY PLAN Redundancy is key to withstanding a true disaster Do the financial math to determine those apps that matter most Learn to manage “useful abstractions”
- 16. LET’S BRING YOU INTO THE CONVERSATION Jon Feld Chief Content Officer OnCore Media Eric Hanselman Chief Analyst 451 Research John Keller Director Product Management Data Center/Cloud Comcast Business Today’s presentation is being recorded and will be provided to you within 2-3 business days.
- 17. UPCOMING WEBINARS Lessons in Advancing Predictive Analytics in Healthcare June 20th http://www.himsslearn.org/lessons-learned-advancing- predictive-analytics-healthcare?source=Sponsor3 Beyond the Legacy Bank June 21st https://vts.inxpo.com/Launch/QReg.htm?ShowKey=40 665&AffiliateData=cboutreach
- 18. LEARN MORE Thank You for Joining Us! Learn how Comcast Business can help you build the right foundation for digital transformation. Business.Comcast.com/digitaltransformation Or call us: 855-273-3654
Editor's Notes
- Jon: Quick pause (2 seconds) Welcome to today’s broadcast of How to Get on Top of you’re your Cloud Strategy. My name is Jon Feld and I’m your moderator today. CUE NEXT SLIDE
- JON: Our panelists today are: Eric Hanselman, Eric Hanselman is the Chief Analyst at 451 Research. having direct experience in the areas of networks, virtualization, security and semiconductors. John Keller, Director Product Management Data Center/Cloud Connectivity for Comcast Business, is responsible for solutions and services focused on enabling customers to leverage multi-tenant data centers and cloud providers through private, direct connections. WELCOME FROM JOHN KELLER ON BEHALF OF COMCAST BUSINESS ending with pass off to Jon Feld “Jon, over to you” (or something similar). JON FELD cue next slide at pass off.
- Eric Hanselman: Well, it’s really a matter of integration, control, and management. It’s a matter of the extent to which the clouds are integrated with either on premise or other cloud management environments. John Keller: The multi-cloud environment is simply the presence of more than one cloud. Now, they can be completely discreet uses of cloud that have nothing to do with each other. Whereas, a hybrid cloud environment, typically the workload, will be working on multiple clouds or data will be being transferred between clouds or in some way the application, the end user application--and I use that term very loosely because we think of an application as something on our phone--but an application could be a very complex inventorying system that has the gathering of information on web servers sitting in a cloud, and the data repository, the database, could be in a completely different cloud or even on an on-premise or call location facility. So, hybrid really is the interaction of multiple clouds versus just simply, I’ve got a cloud that does my storage, I’ve got a cloud that does my accounting, and I got a cloud that does something else. It might be very separate clouds, but the end user typically wouldn’t know that. They just simply would be accessing whatever the application environment promotes, end user perspective would be. And the fact is, you might have fields in a form that are populated from information in one cloud, and fields in that same form that are populated from a completely different cloud or from a different part of your company, and the end user would not really know. Also, from a provisioning standpoint when a business is saying, I need to use cloud, we’re looking more and more at what I’ll call, cloud brokerage services, that you sort of say, I want a provision and new instance of my inventory system, and the brokerage service knows that that means I’ve got to provision five web servers, one database server and two application servers, and they get provisioned in different places, but me, as the guy who is requesting it, doesn’t care, shouldn’t care, doesn’t know. It just gets set up that way, and all that the pointers between those different clouds, get set up for me as well, as setting it up from the scratch. So, hopefully that elaborates enough.
- Eric Hanselman: Sometimes through planning, but more often by happenstance, most enterprises have multiple cloud relationships. Part of this can be driven by SaaS use, but there are a growing set of connections driven by sales and marketing integration. Links with Salesforce can be obvious, but connections to services like Marketo and Eloqua may happen behind the scenes. That can leave key elements of application and web performance at the mercy of best effort connections. One of the challenges with multiple cloud environments, is the variation in operational models, cost profiles, and service levels. Just sorting out how to optimize billing can be a serious challenge.
- Eric Hanselman: Many organizations refer to having multiple clouds as being hybrid, but that loses the importance that true hybrid can offer. Getting to a point where management of multiple cloud environments is integrated can create large operation savings and improve performance and reliability.
- John Keller: Lower cost and pay as you go is a cloud of things, so hybrid clouds, multi-clouds, single clouds, they all benefit from those same benefits. The hybrid versus other types of cloud, the benefit is really being able to have, what I call “fit for use.” In other words, I need small web servers. I need one big large database server, back to my analogy beforehand, one cloud system or one cloud service may be better at serving part of that than another cloud, so having that environment be integrated and each piece is designed to do exactly what it needs to do. I think of it a bit as in car manufacturing going down the line. You got a person or a station that bolts on the window properly, and another station that bolts on the tires properly, it’s still bolting something on, but very different machinery that does it. And so, that’s the same for a cloud environment or a hybrid cloud environment where you have one station that’s really good at web serving, and one station that’s really good at database serving. Plus, you now can deploy your web and frontend closer to your end users, and your database closer to your IT shop. You don’t have to have everything in the same place, and you can control where pieces of that are. Eric Hanselman: It’s about the ability to be more selective about how you handle the distribution of data and how you scale application capacity. The distribution of data piece is one that oftentimes has some regulatory components. So, if you happen to be in a regulated industry that’s a key aspect of which data do you need to move where in the application architecture to both serve your customers well, but also manage the regulatory and compliance issues.
- Eric Hanselman: Being able to have a truly hybrid environment means that you can intelligently select where you place workloads to be able to match the workload to the execution environment that’s best suitable for it. Different characteristics may mean greater capabilities for delivery for certain users, like mobile users who are better connected to mobile environments. Some of that winds up being also what the ecosystem is to the cloud environment. If you’re, for example, you’re using a CRM system or you have to have a marketing partner, you may want to push workloads to cloud environments that are topologically close to where those partners are. So that’s a fundamental piece of application performance management. So there’s also an aspect of both customization and control.
- Eric Hanselman: Interconnection is really the bedrock. The primary issue that we work with our clients around is the quality of interconnection. You have to make sure that you put the infrastructure pieces in place to support that move to hybrid. Now at the same time, you also have to make sure that your orchestration and management capabilities can integrate with the cloud that you want to project to. Upfront planning is really key, and one of the challenges that people talk about is “cloud bursting.” And the caution that I offer around the cloud bursting idea is that oftentimes it leaves the impression that you don’t have to do a lot of upfront preparation to manage that, but in fact, that proper planning is really critical for real operation. John Keller: The move to any cloud needs to account for connectivity, and size of your pipes, so that you’re going to be providing the performance that the end user, whether that’s what a customer or an employee are expecting. And certainly, over subscription is an important aspect of cloud in general because you can build and provision as needed, so the over subscription is more of a pay as you grow, and build as you grow as well, so you only instantiate what you need today, and if you’re growing you can add more, but you’re actually not over subscribing, you’re just adding more on the fly as you go ahead. In the traditional IT sense, you would always sort of build in steps. You’d build a certain amount of IT infrastructure for the anticipated workload that I have today, and then in a year from now, I’m going to add more, and add another step, that would be traditional. But in cloud, instead of building that step, I’ll just provision what I need on day one, and throughout the year I can add more over time and not have to worry about adding it at the beginning of the year, and maybe not using it until June of that same year, and not having to worry about the next step in a year from now, but rather just continuing on that growth curve, if you will. Let’s also talk about private and public because a hybrid cloud can be not only two public clouds, it could be a hosted private cloud and a public cloud or it could be a private cloud on premises, and a public cloud or it could be even multiple private clouds, so it can be all different things. So, you need to be thinking about what type of cloud environment you believe will work for you. Will a public cloud environment work for you, i.e., it provides enough security, and you like the flexibility versus the control that you might have in a private cloud environment? Private clouds tend to be the first step for corporations who are a little bit leery of giving up full control, and giving up knowledge of where their workloads reside, so I’m worried that publicly identifiable information is being kept within country. Well, I can control that in a number of different ways, including, I’ll create a private cloud, and then keep that in my own four walls. In the public cloud, you can move the web front ends, wherever the heck you like. It doesn’t matter if they’re in Seattle today or overseas tomorrow, maybe I need it to be overseas because I’m a global company, and need to have that, you know, provisioned in that area as well.
- John Keller: In essence, you test by implementing in stages. This is a little bit out of my expertise, but from my previous life in provisioning software, basically, you would stand up one server, and then you’d have a controlled testbed whether that might be data that you load up that’s not real data but control data, whether that’s test users who are going to run the environment, but you don’t provision the entire environment. You’re going to just provision one instance or a couple of instances to see how that goes, and you’re going to measure things like performance. Is it performing the way you expect it? Are you getting the response times? Is the communication working as you expected? Is it even being provisioned the way you expect it, because provisioning is the first thing that happens is, somebody goes into some interface, whether it’s a very manual interface where you’re doing it all by hand or whether it’s a completely automated multi-cloud brokerage interface that will provision all the different pieces at the same time. You’re going to want to make sure that it’s actually communicating with each other correctly, i.e., input data in the web front end and it ends up in the database from the backend and it doesn’t get lost along the way. Then I can start setting up performance testing where I’m actually setting up automated test beds that will just hammer at the system and ensure that that is working is correctly. Of course, when you’re looking at communication, that happens before even setting up the cloud and you’re testing, you know, you’re doing as simple as 10 data reach from one end of the pipe to the other end of the pipe, and is that happening the way expected in the time that I expected the turnaround to happen. Eric Hanselman: One of the most important parts is understanding as you’re building out, what is really a fundamental extension of your infrastructure that you have capabilities in place. Test both how the application operates and how the connection with users is going to be viewed, and really what that overall comprehensive assessment of what that user experience is going to look like, and that’s a matter of understanding that you really have both your paths to data, well qualified. You need to do some level of monitoring and management of whatever those interconnection paths are, and then most importantly, make sure that you’re simulating that environment and testing it up front with similar workloads. And that’s a matter of making sure that you’ve got the appropriate pieces in place to do that real simulation. Do that testing, and do that upfront load generation to make sure that you’re really actively testing the application in the same way the users are actually going to experience it. And it’s all led by the user experience.
- John Keller: In some respects, that depends a lot on the application, and on the application environment. There are applications that are today, software is a service anyway, and if you’re using them, they’re housed wherever that vendor has decided to house them, and you have no control over that whatsoever. If you are in control developing your own applications, you may choose to make decisions again based on security primarily or secondarily on control. More security…so the fallacy is that public clouds are not secure, and I say it’s a fallacy because in fact most cloud providers today are held to a very high standard of security of protecting your data, of access rights, etc., and so, they can deliver a very high level of security. However, we humans believe that if it’s in my own basement, it’s more secure then if I trust Amazon or Microsoft to house my applications and my data. That’s really not the case today, and in fact, you’re more likely to be hacked in your own basement than you are going to be hacked in the cloud. So, applications ultimately need to take that into account. Then finally, it’s where are my users. Get those applications as close as possible to my users. So I may be looking at, again, hybrid environment, where I’m taking more control of where my apps are housed or my web frontend is housed, so that the users experience least amount of time to access those applications, as opposed to necessarily keeping it central where my administrators would prefer to have that application or that data.
- Eric Hanselman: You need to manage what is a slow transition in terms of how you actually step into that environment, and you do that by managing transitions with small and select user communities. One of the challenges is you have to have in place, as part of this transition, an environment that has enough sophistication to be able to manage where your users are directed and how they actually get to that environment. So, typically you don’t want to do the midnight knife-edge cutover. That’s just fraught with all sorts of risks. It’s a far better thing to be able to begin to migrate early-stage users and to be able to monitor and manage the overall performance of those small transitions first. Now, it takes some work up front to be able to manage that, but it’s important to make that transition as gradual a one as possible, and to make sure that the way you’re architecting that move supports a gradual transition and what is that longer term environment. You need to make sure that you can roll back to your existing environment to be able to get users back into a well-known, understood, and stable environment in case things aren’t going well. You need to plan for failure. Overall, you’re not trying to swallow the elephant whole; you want to do this in a very stepped fashion. John Keller: Coming from a Comcast perspective, you need to make sure you’ve got redundant paths to the cloud. That’s something that people sort of think, oh, I’m putting stuff in the cloud, I can always get to the cloud. Well, you want to make sure that you’ve architected for that, so redundant paths right down to the last mile or last half mile. And I say that explicitly because often times you’ll get two paths going to the cloud, but they’ll run over the same physical infrastructure because two different telecodes actually use the same physical wire to get to your building. So, look at alternatives to that, down to your last mile from that perspective. Architect the application to be redundant. In other words, that it isn’t reliant on a central core piece of application or data that could be compromised and therefore, take your whole environment down. Design for high availability or disaster recovery. Designing for disaster recovery also means you have to design with…you have to consider your time to fail and your time to recover, if you will. So, how long is it going to take if something happens for you to fail over to another environment, and you need to test that. That is probably more important even than testing your changes to the cloud because, I mean, at the end of the day, you’re going to be doing that as you’re developing anyway, but people tend to forget that if I’m worrying about downtime, if I’m worrying about some kind of disaster, whether man-made or natural, that I actually need to test all of those processes. How do my users get to the cloud if the primary path is down? If the cloud goes down itself, what am I going to do? The Amazon outage just a couple of months ago, which was attributed to human error on the part of Amazon, was a prime example of, you know, a lot of companies had all their eggs in that one region that was affected by the Amazon outage. So, you may want to be designing your application to be sitting in multiple regions and exchanging the data between those regions, so that when one region is not accessible the other region is accessible. So, designing redundancies at all steps of that environment is the only way you can truly mitigate risk, and even then, your meantime to recover may mean hours sometimes, just sailing over from one system to another can take time. And then group sailing back, recovering back into a known good state can take you even more time. So those things are the kinds of things that you should consider regardless of whether it’s a hybrid cloud or any kind of cloud or in fact, if you’re not even going to the cloud and you’re just doing it in your own data center.
- Eric Hanselman: It’s important to understand the extent that you build in dependency to different types of infrastructure. There’s a natural element of optimizing what you’re deploying to meet what the available capabilities are of the platform that you’re using. But you also want to keep that in mind so that you don’t build dependencies that wind up anchoring you to one particular environment or one particular aspect of the way in which your application’s architected. For any transition, you’re going to make commitments to the decision that you make, but it’s important to understand though how you get into a particular commitment. The kind of decision points you’re making around it, and that you go into that with an expectation of how you’ll move beyond it in the future. Nobody can make a perfect plan for the future but you want to make sure that you don’t limit too many of your options. It gets back to that upfront work of really taking a hard look at how you’ve architected what you’re actually building and how you expect to move forward.
- John Keller: It’s back to mitigating risk in some ways. First of all, redundancy is presented in paths. Redundant architecture of your application environment. Is it designed to withstand a true disaster or business, you know, an event that would compromise your business continuity. And you also need to do the financial math before you even do any of that, and that is, so which applications are important, and how do I, you know, I’ll protect the important ones. If I’m going to lose a dollar every week, I’m not going to worry about it. If I’m going to lose a dollar every second, then I better make sure that nothing is going to take my system out for more than 60 seconds, you know I’m making it up, but you know, and it’s really application design before cloud design. Once you’ve designed your application, cloud and hybrid cloud are eminently well situated or well suited to providing the best possible platform for a business continuity plan because you do not need to design that part or it’s already designed with that in mind. It can be accessed from anywhere at any time in most cases. It can allow you to move data or copy data from one place to another. So in essence, the foundation’s there by simply going to the cloud and now you need to build your application to understand that it’s in a cloud, and it’s redundant, and it can fail over at any time or need to fail over at any time from one location to another. Eric Hanselman: Well, it’s all of the same pieces that we should have been doing in our environments in an on-cloud world. The difficulty is that for many organizations, some of the things that they were relying on for physical proximity, moving to the cloud are now abstracted out at a distance, and can be more difficult to manage, if you haven’t already gotten to those environments. That said, a move to cloud opens the door to a whole set of very useful abstractions and the way in which you can manage what that transition looks like, but it’s important to understand both what your data sources look like. What your paths to data are going to be and what their capacity is to recover in the event of a failure. You want to make sure that you don’t strand particular data sources in locations in which it’s is either impractical from a performance perspective or from an expense perspective to be able to get all that data moved and back. The biggest challenge in cloud transitions is data movement. Moving applications is straightforward, but it’s maintaining both a robust backup of that data, and a plan to ensure that you can get it to whatever platform you need in the event of a failure. The larger challenge really, in many cases, is simply in just moving volumes of data. If your back end really winds up being large enough that it’s going to take a considerable amount of time to transfer, if you don’t have significant interconnect capacity between where you need to go between that can mean that those transfer times can be the biggest amount of what that time to restoration is from a business continuity perspective, that can be a significant issue.
- End of Q&A Thank you to Eric and John JON: Cue Next Slide
- JON: Mention both upcoming webinars and CUE NEXT SLIDE
- Jon closes with a thank you to all attendees for their time, watch your email for more webinars on Digital Transformation and the CTA on the closing slide.