CSC Launches Hosted Private Cloud, BizCloud VPE

MSPAlliance MSPWorld™ The World’s Premier ManagedServices and Cloud Computing Event The MSPWorld 2012 conference will focus on: Managed Services Leadership Course for Executives Financial and Business Matters Facing Cloud and MSPs Managed Services Professionalism & Ethics Strategies for Evaluating Vendors Managed Security Cloud Infrastructure Development, Management, and Provisioning Managed Services NOC & Help Desk Practices

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NEW! Simplifying Cloud Confusion Podcast by Michael Jackson, Q4 2011

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Scratching Beneath the Surface: Enterprises Increasingly Adopting Private Cloud Management in Wake of Challenges

these are not automatic in a virtualized environment. In fact, they are still very hard to do…realizing them is primarily about changes in business processes.”

To truly deploy a cloud, Brown insists that companies sit down and really think about how to standardize their service offerings, making them available via simplified portals as well as track usage and cost information to report or charge back to their business partners.

One may think that the strict competition in private cloud vendors is also a roadblock, but not necessarily so. Just like an industry or market, plenty of companies – whether startup or seasoned – will tell you that they are the only one with the alternatives and the “sweet spot” that you need.

Steve Pelletier also added this piece of advice: “To realize the full potential of your private cloud environment, you will also need to address several key concepts that are not so easily defined. These involve squishy terms like ‘management, automation, and orchestration’ that need to be defined in terms of where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow.”

The article concludes by explaining that in order to handle things such as management and automation, decision makers will have to know exactly what it is he or she is trying to manage and automate. It seems the message of this article is to take one thing at a time; anything is possible in this day and age of technology – even for larger enterprises.

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Expo, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct 2-5, in Austin, TX. The Cloud Communications Expo will address the growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. For more information on registering for the Cloud Communications Expo click here.

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GoGrid Brings Private Cloud to Amsterdam

- Alert) and as a "Champion" by Info-Tech Research Group in 2011.

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OpSource, Zadara Offer On-demand Virtual Private Storage Arrays to Businesses

- Alert) ISVs and other enterprises with demanding applications to centralize their cloud resources and simplify management.”

A 2011, Forrester Research report, entitled “Market Overview: Public IaaS Clouds, Q4 2011 Part 2,” on public IaaS clouds, highlighted the performance efficiency of OpSource’s SLAs and disaster recovery solutions for IaaS services. OpSource offers, Disaster Recovery (DR) solution atop its IaaS services, according to the report.

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Public vs. Private Cloud? It's Not An 'Either / Or' Decision

- Alert).

“The industry is moving from the early adopter stage to a mainstream form. We see cloud adoption rising rapidly, both in public and private and we see many different adoption patterns, not just one or another since there is not one single model that covers everything,” says Wang. “Businesses want the freedom to make their choices and to even change their mind.”

Companies must consider business criticality of the applications they want to move to the cloud, regulatory issues, required service levels, usage patterns for the workloads and how integrated the application must be with other enterprise functions. But regardless of which model an organization selects after evaluating how to best implement cloud, they are going to make certain trade-offs in either direction.

“What’s great about public cloud is it’s a form of outsourcing. There is a tradeoff between the control you get in private cloud versus the visibility you get with in a public cloud. If it involves integration with your own data center, it’s made easier in a private model,” explains Wang, who says there is currently a wider-spread adoption of private clouds.

With the public cloud, companies are paying for the service as an operating expense, whereas with the private cloud organizations are encumbering both capital expenses and OPEX.

“It’s like buying versus renting a house. The idea that public clouds are always cheaper is a myth if that enterprise has sufficient economies of scale. If they have sufficient scale, private clouds can be cheaper at some point during the breakeven period,” says Wang.

A public cloud can gives companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses, the flexibility they need – but they surrender direct control, according to Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing at Infoblox (News - Alert).

“I don’t have to build it, I can try it. It is that utility mindset. All I really need to do is how to manage that SLA,” says Garrison. “But if I ask for a change, how fast does that happen? The real reason why everybody wants to try public cloud is that it means no CAPEX averted. Because you aren’t building it you are just treating it like a utility, and I am writing a check every month to pay for it,” adds Garrison,a notion that comes with the drawback of not fully understanding what’s happening behind the scenes.

“When I don’t build it, I don’t learn it. I don’t know what’s going on under the hood,” he says.

Another so-called tradeoff is security. The term “cloud security” may sound like an oxymoron. Certainly, we know that cloud computing is imposing change to IT strategies, but is security a real or perceived threat in the cloud, and does a private cloud mean better security?

“There’s perceived differences at least about the security around private and public cloud. It’s a hotly-debated topic, one that is perception-based,” maintains Wang.“In a private cloud, an organization has control of and perhaps greater confidence in security. In a public cloud you are entrusting someone else controlling that for you. There is a basic tradeoff between private and public. We see people adopting both on a case-by-case basis. Organizations are making the decision based on ‘should I put this in my private or public cloud.’ So it’s not a question of which, it’s a question of both.”

In further breaking down the concept of security, there are three core issues that are intertwined, according to Wang: 1) Data loss or unauthorized access because of an attack; 2) privacy and the idea of isolating customer data from neighboring customer data from one tenant to another tenant; and 3) regulatory issues that dictate where data must reside.

“First the technology itself needs to be secure. Next, the data centers themselves that house the technology has to be secure. There is also the physical security of the data itself,” explains Wang.

“Some industries are more sensitive to regulatory issues or are simply more conservative, so they may have a preference for private clouds. They have the resources, the scale and the structure to move in this direction,” Wang concludes. “As far as public clouds – today there are a lot of them and they are quite popular. Public clouds tend to offer one thing and they do it particularly well – it’s a standardized offering.”

Hybrid: The Best of Both Worlds?

As cloud computing matures, the term “hybrid” has taken on an ambiguous connotation – but in its fundamental form, a hybrid model draws on the resources of both public and private clouds. Hybrid clouds can meandifferent things to different people, explains Wang, as there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all cloud solution.

With hybrid, there is reference to“cloud bursting,” a type of overdraft protection, which allows businesses to move their workloads from private to public cloud, or from within their own data center into the cloud. There is also hybrid across the application lifecycle, which means organizations might do tests in one cloud and might do deployments in another cloud. Another definition of hybrid is one that is used across a business process.

“It’s a little bit like integration across clouds in that you are putting one business process in one cloud, and another part in another cloud,” Wang explains.

In the recent report, “Hybrid IT: How Internal and External Cloud Services are Transforming IT,” Gartner states that although businesses have adopted public cloud services for non-critical applications, they are still using internal IT functions for core capabilities.

“IT organizations are taking an ‘adopt and go’ strategy to satisfy internal customer IT consumerization and democratization requirements,” says Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner.

“Many IT organizations are adopting public cloud computing for non-critical IT services such as development and test applications, or for turnkey software as a service (SaaS (News

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Fujitsu to Roll Out Enhanced Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track Solutions

MSPAlliance MSPWorld™ The World’s Premier ManagedServices and Cloud Computing Event The MSPWorld 2012 conference will focus on: Managed Services Leadership Course for Executives Financial and Business Matters Facing Cloud and MSPs Managed Services Professionalism & Ethics Strategies for Evaluating Vendors Managed Security Cloud Infrastructure Development, Management, and Provisioning Managed Services NOC & Help Desk Practices

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