Whitepaper about Cloud Infrastructure, how to start off successfully and when and how to use IaaS for your migration to the cloud. Contact us if you are interested to know more: +31 20 737 05 37.

1. Every cloud concept can be
developed within four weeks
CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE:
START SMALL, THINK BIG
whitepaper

2. The Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS)
market is young
and dynamic.
Services are
developing rapidly
and standards have not been defined yet. Due to the lack
of standards a vendor lock-in is a realistic, but undesirable
scenario.This might be an argument to wait until the market
has been more crystallized. By waiting, organizations leave
opportunities unused to accelerate and make their IT services
more flexible.Therefore, it is not unusual for IT departments
to be seen as rigid and inflexible by their internal customers.
“Because we use IaaS for our OTAP processes we
can deliver new software every week instead of
once every six weeks.” - Head of Infrastructure,
Financial Organization
Organizations that develop their own software often
deal with rigidness and lack of flexibility caused by their
infrastructure. As a result of methods like agile and scrum,
software can be developed a lot faster than it can be
delivered. Delivery has suddenly become the bottleneck.
The solution to this problem is a software-defined
infrastructure combined with a methodology of continuous
delivery. In time you can convert your own datacenter to a
software-defined datacenter (a private cloud), but it might
take a few years to do so, while IaaS-providers offer such
a ready-to-use infrastructure as we speak. Why not take
advantage of this and gain experience right now?
Business case for IaaS
A business case for IaaS is easily made.This is not because
the public cloud is by definition much cheaper, it depends
mainly on the character of the workload: continuous or in
peaks. In case of fluctuating workloads the financial business
case for the public cloud is best to demonstrate.
Not only the character of the workload but also the
complexity of the pricing model is important.To make a
proper cost estimate, expertise of existing infrastructure
is necessary as well as knowledge of the range of cloud
options.
The business case is built on the degree of cost reduction
and/or shortening the time-to-market for new software.The
latter is by convenience of a software-defined datacenter
that makes DevOps possible: technological and process
If the effectivity of your
cloud concept can not
be proven within four
weeks, it will not succeed
within four months or four
years.Therefore, always
start off with a Proof of
Concept when considering
a migration to IaaS
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
0
50
100
150
200
0
25
50
75
100
31
35
39 43
46
16
20
24
28
33
6
9
13
18
24
Billions of dollars
% of ECC price in
2012
Cloud System Infrastructure
Services (IaaS)
Cloud Application Services
(SaaS)
Cloud Business Process
Services (BPaaS)
IAAS CAGR = 41,4%
Source: Gartner, February 2013
Public Cloud Services Market Segment, 2012 - 2016

3. integration of development and operations.
One of the core principles of DevOps is continuous delivery:
small updates of software, multiple times a day. Since the
updates are small, the impact of a mistake is limited and
the risks in software delivery can be minimized. Moreover,
all developers work in a uniform environment, which results
in higher predictability. In short, IaaS results in an increased
number of releases, while at the same time minimizing
risks. Which software development team does not have that
on their wish list?
“Before we introduced IaaS for development,
testing and acceptance environments we released
new functionalities a couple of times a year.This
led to peak periods for our helpdesk, because
we received numerous questions from clients
who, for example, were unable to find their
‘standard button’, because it was moved. After the
introduction of continuous delivery changes do
not have such a big impact anymore, leading to
less and better diffused questions for our helpdesk
Customer satisfaction has increased and our
internal processes are more efficient.”
Operation Manager Front Office System, Service
Company
Another business driver is the unlimited scalability of IaaS
services. Which is useful when you do not know in advance
how much your application is used.This can be the case
when, for example, short term marketing campaigns are
directed to a large public.
“In our industry many websites and applications
perish in their own success. Due to a large
concourse in the peak period websites crash on
the most important moments. We did not want to
take that risk any longer during the publication
of our annual reports. With the cloud solution our
website had ten times more visitors in one day and
the platform did not even budge. Moreover, since it
was a short time operation, the pay-per-use model
of IaaS made this a very cheap solution for us.”
Corporate Online Manager, Multinational
Not everything is suitable for IaaS
Not every application is suitable to host in a cloud
environment. Applications that are developed to scale
vertically (increase capacity of the server) do not function
within the current public IaaS environments, where the
scalability is organized horizontally (by adding servers).
Unfortunately most of the critical business applications,
such as ERP, CRM and BI, are not yet scalable horizontally.
Organizations with a lot of critical business applications
and dedicated high-end servers are therefore hesitant to
migrate from their datacenter to a cloud platform. Although
understandable, doing nothing is leading to an organization
that does not serve their business department to the
optimum.
“Nowadays when our marketing department
thinks of a campaign–for example temporarily
providing a barbeque when buying new garden

4. furniture because a weatherman forecasts
barbeque weather for next week–we can adjust
the capacity of our online shop within one day.
We became a lot more flexible. IT is no longer
our hindrance, but it has become a driver for our
business growth.” Online Marketing Manager,
Multi-Channel Retail Company
When the private infrastructure has a limited scalability and
is not automated sufficiently, a solution is found in diverting
these modern web applications to IaaS services of cloud
providers.
Start small, think big: Proof of Concept
Would you like to transform your infrastructure into
a business enabler? When you identify the gain or
compelling business event, then the next step is a
Proof of Concept for testing your cloud concept in a
short time frame.The small investment in a PoC is only
a fraction of traditional IT project costs.The usual PoC
project will take about four to six weeks.This small
step will provide a solid ground and sufficient support
within your organization, which you need for bigger
further steps.
Morgan Clark is a business technology consultancy
company with extensive experience in next generation
infrastructure projects. Next to supporting and defining
your business case, we assist in executing your
transition to the cloud. Our consultants, architects
and program managers will support you during your
thinking process, demonstrate in which cases IaaS will
and will not work by using a PoC, and they lead you
through the transition, among which the necessary
reorganization of your infrastructure department and
stakeholder management.
Since 2010 Morgan Clark has performed over 60
successful projects for clients in industries as
finance, telecom, media and service.These projects
concerned transformation programs, next generation
infrastructure, user mobility and data driven solutions.
37%
Up-Front Investment
49%
51%
62%
69%
85%
0% 25% 50% 75% 100%
Technology Immaturity
Legacy Applications
Lack of Business Support
Lack of Internal Skills
Lock-In Existing Partner
Source: McKinsey, January 2014
Biggest hurdles to upgrading IT infrastructure