Are we near to seeing IT consumed from the cloud as easily as ordering a film from the Internet?
Working within one of the leading Hybrid Cloud software vendors it is evident that Enterprises are now wanting to leverage hybrid cloud compute portfolio’s to gain access to flexible workload and application mobility. Every day we meet many industries looking at how we can help deliver against multiple business outcomes however, more and more we have seen a common theme coming through from key verticals wanting to leverage cloud services from multiple hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure or IBM’s Softlayer and Cisco’s own Powered Provider network.
I feel though that here is slight caution on fully embracing cloud based services, maybe this is because of the maturity of what is a relatively a new utility model combined with some caution around cloud solutions being safe and adhering to compliance regulations, for me this strangely feels like we are back in 1999 when WIFI was first launched. Customers were again cautious, making employees find alternatives around gaining access to WIFI by buying Access Points from a local retailer and simply plugging the WIFI box into a RJ45 socket nearest to their desks. Could Enterprises be forcing their line of business’s to go outside of IT to gain access to the immense power of the internet combined with gaining access to a huge amount of cloud centric services from voice, business applications and compute platforms.
Why aren’t all Enterprises adopting IT as a service as quickly as say, a heavily regulated organisation like the Government, who state ‘cloud first’? The issue I see slowing down this wave of new IT services is getting the perfect balance between keeping everything behind the Enterprise firewall and then trusting certain workloads and applications to be pushed out across highly secure TLS tunnels to third party Service provider data centres.
In this modern world of the Internet of Everything, CxO’s have the opportunity to grow revenues, enter new global markets and innovate. So how does a CxO gain the knowledge of new waves of IT which is moving at an incredible rate and, importantly, trust where key company information is being stored and then can the business still be audited by industry regulators; surely this is hardest decision a CxO has to make today when considering cloud based services and the power of IOE.
If Enterprises are going to empower their IT departments to take back control and build out a highly secure, agile and cost effective strategy then they also need to become a service brokerage practice across multiple providers. However, this will bring many complexities especially around determining what workload should be moved, what kind of SLA needs to be associated with the Application, where should that workload be moved to and increasingly, what cloud services are already being purchased from within the business already.
A simple way of collecting all this data is to set off an auditing software tool (Cisco’s Cloud collector) which analyses the network to collate which cloud services are being used today, what workloads are moving in and out of the DC and any cost associated with this. Once a business has visibility of cloud usage and by which departments you then have to set the right kind of policies to ensure compliance, Opex approval sign off gates and reporting of where workloads reside and then importantly, can you retrieve those workloads at a flick of a switch.
My strong opinion is that many organisations need to evaluate a way of gaining the right balance between what needs to stay within a Private cloud and then what can move out easily to a Cisco CMSP partner or a Hyperscaler. Fast IT needs to be as simple as buying a film from Netflix or saving photo’s to iCloud…leverage Public and Hybrid clouds by simply installing Cisco’s Intercloud fabric software.
