2. 2
Fulfilling the promise of the cloud
For IT decision makers, the cloud has become alluring with its
enticements of flexibility, agile development, rapid innovation, and
reductions in capital costs and infrastructure complexity. But much
like the aromas drifting from a restaurant kitchen, the promise
goes unfulfilled until the dish is plated and the waiter delivers it to
the dining room. It’s the service that satisfies. Consequently, as you
consider a cloud computing model for your organization, take heed
of how cloud-based services will be delivered and consumed to
match the business goals of the enterprise. That means developing
an IT strategy that can meet the appetites for a broad range of
workloads, characterized by varied expectations for security,
availability, performance, and compliance standards.
The emergence of the cloud compels IT to become a service
broker for the enterprise. It’s an evolving role that requires you to
determine if you should build IT services or purchase them from a
third party, then subsequently manage the services with an insight
into their unique requirements. It also requires a firm understanding
of SLAs and security standards for each area of the business.
This is a task that’s best achieved by striking a balance among IT
domains, spanning traditional internal IT, private, and public cloud
environments. Such a balance makes it possible to deliver the
right services—represented by the right applications—in the right
environment, at the right cost, and at the right time.
But how do you achieve the right IT balance for delivering
cloud services?
Serving a balanced IT diet
Under the traditional IT model, you were responsible for
provisioning and managing internal IT assets to meet specific project
needs. And with the application delivery process safely behind an
enterprise firewall, you could maintain full control and visibility to
service standards such as performance, availability, and security.
But with the rising expectations for quickly delivering high-quality
applications within increasingly tighter budgets, you should be
embracing alternatives to the traditional IT model. Cloud computing
provides you with the potential to offer new levels of flexibility,
scalability, and cost efficiency. But conversion to the cloud also calls
for a shift in perspective.
It’s no longer possible to be just a builder and manager of
technology; it’s your role to be a broker of IT services across the
enterprise. Consequently, you need to design an IT environment
that offers the flexibility, efficiency, and security to meet these
expectations and aligns services with business needs. The emerging
best practice calls for an optimal mix of traditional IT with private
cloud and public cloud sources—a hybrid delivery model—that
offers a reliable, secure, and compliant end-to-end experience.
Get started: HP Converged Cloud Workshop
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technologies including HP CloudSystem. Other
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Talk to your HP representative to sign up for an
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For more information, visithp.com/services/
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3. 3
Essential attributes of cloud services
The transition to a cloud-based services model is an incremental
journey that starts with the goal of establishing an optimal service
mix. With that goal in place, the next step is to acquire a lay of the
land—identifying the scope of services and applications demanded
across the enterprise while understanding the requirements for
each service:
• Flexibility and speed: Understand how often a particular service
needs to be initiated or changed. Frequent change is a clear
trigger that a cloud model is likely to be a good fit. Additionally it’s
important to know how quickly the service will be expected by the
user, how long it will be needed, when it will be stopped, or how
much demand will fluctuate.
• Compliance: Establish usage policies to ensure that services
comply with business requirements, and implement a mechanism
to audit these policies and prompt remediation should the services
fall out of compliance. Compliance requirements don’t preclude
cloud. In fact, private cloud models can even simplify compliance
by automatically tracking changes.
• Security: Protect against external threats and safeguard mission-
critical data and intellectual property. Again, tight security
requirements don’t preclude cloud, but deeper due diligence is a
must.
• Availability: Understand the uptime expectations. While for some
services, cloud can provide disaster recovery capabilities that are
more cost effective than in traditional IT environments, it may not
suit the most demanding applications.
• Cost: Evaluate the total cost of managing and maintaining an
application. It may be beneficial to change the emphasis of
your IT budget away from asset ownership and maintenance to
operational expenses. Leveraging traditional and cloud resources
can reduce IT investments and complexity and shift workloads
during periods of peak capacity.
• Performance: Success is measured by the end-user experience.
Ensure that your application response times can adhere to
SLAs, and prepare to monitor performance to meet ongoing
requirements.
• Customization: Assess how important it is that a service be
tailored specifically to the requirements of your business. The less
customization needed, the more suitable the cloud becomes.
Core, context, and the cloud
As you consider a cloud model, the overarching challenge for the
IT leader is to determine which applications can be delivered from
public cloud sources and which should be managed internally in
private clouds, and which should stay in traditional IT environments.
One effective approach is to distinguish between applications that
are “core” to the business and those that are “context.”
In his book Dealing with Darwin, economist Geoffrey Moore defines
these concepts. A business activity is “core,” Moore says, if it
represents an investment that sets the business apart from its
competitors. By contrast, the business activity is “context” if it can
be categorized as a support function. Moore uses Tiger Woods to
further elaborate on this distinction. For Woods, golf is clearly his
core business. His product endorsements, while highly lucrative,
are only possible because of his success as a golfer and therefore
represent the context.
Applying this method, you can identify the less-sensitive context
applications in your portfolio, where factors such as customization
and availability may not be such a high priority. Context applications
are typically support services, such as human resources or
CRM. Core applications are those that are mission critical to the
enterprise and represent a competitive advantage. These can
include applications that constitute proprietary data and intellectual
property—necessitating greater security and availability.
Once you’ve drawn the demarcation between context and core in
your portfolio, you’re in a position to determine the ideal sourcing
strategy. Context applications are more easily entrusted to a public
cloud environment, or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Core
applications are better suited to a private cloud—the deployment of
infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—or in a traditional IT environment.
