FOCUS CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE
Issue 20, Feb/March
. . .from page 44
business users, such as inventory management or payroll. But, at the root, if platforms are to be truly viable, providers will need to offer – and IT leaders will need to look for – reusable business services, integration capabilities and extension capabilities.
In general, the more services that can be shared on
a common platform – from
financial management services to inventory management – the easier it will be to handle the inevitable integration challenges, to hold down costs, and to demonstrate the true flexibility of PaaS. These services can be hosted as part of the platform, and should be run and maintained with a set of SLAs. In many cases, they are optimized for the infrastructure on which they are running. When evaluating PaaS options, IT leaders also have to be alert to the likelihood and consequences of platform lock- in. As they’re assessing platform choices, they need to be careful that one part of their cloud strategy doesn’t undermine another.
For instance, the selection of a PaaS may affect
their ability to use hybrid cloud for processes where seamless operation across on-premise and off-premise systems is needed.
HYBRID PLATFORMS
Some platforms make it difficult to seamlessly move services and applications back in-house from the Cloud. For example, users of Force. com are tied to that platform – it is not designed to accommodate an in-house version of its software stack. If users wish to move services back inside, they have to commit to some level of redevelopment. By contrast, other platforms, such as Azure and Cloud Foundry, do provide this flexibility because they allow users to replicate the stack in their own data centers, making it fairly straightforward to move services or data back into their own environments.
These types of platform are useful for cloudbursting scenarios – handling overflow loads such as those incurred by seasonal sales spikes or year-end processing. Even more crucial, they simplify the difficult issues of data distribution, such as when some parts of customer data must be kept in-house for
FOUR CLOUDS FOR IBM For IBM, cloud will represent US$7bn in revenues by 2015
I
BM has four approaches to cloud: SmartCloud application as a service, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering; SmartCloud Foundation, a hardware and software approach complete with fast starter kits for partners and for getting users to adopt cloud; Smart Solutions, part of its smart planet push we are all familiar with; and SmartCloud Ecosystem, which touches partner supplied private cloud, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
Doug Clark, an IBM cloud evangelist, says: “What clients are struggling with in the enterprise is, ‘How do I move?’. IBM has developed a number of key services to help clients move to cloud and help them understand what the cloud business models can be. Today we have a suite of offerings – ranging from IBM service delivery to Tivoli service automation. This range allows us to quickly spin up and manage virtual machines in tens or thousands.” All of this is positioned as an extension of its
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private cloud solutions. And, in the mission- critical space, the company declares the issues as being about security, open standards and having the capabilities to deliver against them.
The SmartCloud Ecosystem covers private cloud, IaaS and SaaS delivered through ISVs, managed services and colocation. This is a major partner play for IBM. “Where we don’t have cloud presence we are working with local partners to deliver IBM cloud services,” says Laura Colvine, cloud leader at IBM UK.
“Because we have built a secure system, it means that before the move we can match the legislation requirements and address what clients are doing about compliance and meet the functionality they require the cloud to provide.”
This is IBM’s approach to addressing
the challenges that exist with different legislative frameworks, which make for different national clouds.
In the mission-critical application space, IBM already has specific cloud offerings around SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP). It is promising a whole roadmap around process orchestration, rapid application orchestration around customer relationship management (CRM) and other mission- critical applications that will enable clients to opt in and opt out as necessary. Matching this service provision to exact workload and use has yet to be achieved by anyone at a mission-critical level, but building the infrastructure from which to deliver it is ongoing.
SmartCloud will be delivered from an IBM data center in Canada and the firm is building for cloud in the markets where adoption is expected to be most rapid – that, of course, means Asia, with one cloud-specific data center in Singapore and a large ongoing Chinese building program.
policy or regulatory reasons. Another desirable characteristic of hybrid platforms is that they offer some insurance if the PaaS provider isn’t meeting a company’s SLAs, or if the security risks of using as-a-service technologies are deemed unacceptable. In effect, they provide an exit strategy, allowing companies to pull the applications back in-house when necessary.
These types of platform, however, have not dealt significantly with reusable business service catalogs to date, and the services that exist are typically hosted third-party services. In such scenarios, bringing services back in-house is still uncharted territory – both technically and in terms of business issues such as licensing.
One important guideline to bear in mind is this: the use of PaaS offerings looks a lot more like outsourcing, so when you’re picking a platform, you’re in effect picking a partner rather than a software vendor.
See more at
www.accenture.com/ SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture- Technology-Vision-2012.pdf#zoom=50
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