The Mission-Critical Cloud: Overcoming the Barriers

Security and other concerns have stopped some CIOs from adopting cloud computing. But new tools and approaches are helping them make the move.

By Karyl Scott

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Has the move to the cloud hit sur-prising turbulence? Some industry watchers note that while much of

the “low-hanging fruit” of enterprise appli-cations and systems has been migrated to the cloud, the prospect of moving certain core, secure applications to the cloud has many CIOs hesitating.

Many companies are reluctant to deploy mission-critical applications to the cloud or to integrate new cloud systems with existing data centers. In fact, only about 20 percent of the companies recently surveyed by advisory firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) have integrated the two. Until that integration occurs, IT departments will continue to manage silos of computing.

The key sticking points, explains EMA Senior Analyst Torsten Volk, are security requirements, lack of staff expertise, poor understanding of application performance issues, and migration of legacy applications and related business processes. In fact, nearly 60 percent of the survey respondents said their move to cloud services had been impeded by concerns over security.

This may be changing as CIOs and their enterprises begin to understand the unique security requirements of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, says Sheetal Mehta, Global Head of Enterprise Security Services at Wipro Technologies. “Before moving mission-critical applications to the cloud, we advise our customers to do a risk assessment,” Mehta says. “Based on the outcome, they can determine if the app is fit for the cloud and, more importantly, which cloud model — private, public or hybrid.”

Also helping is the way cloud providers and enterprise customers alike are starting to adopt strategic security controls in the cloud, including next-generation identity and access management, and that single sign-on and federated single sign-on are offered as cloud services.

In addition, cloud service providers are helping customers define risk-management approaches to cloud computing and adopt-ing consistent threat profiles across all layers of the cloud architecture. Service providers can also implement monitoring platforms that provide a single view of all cloud environ-ments, Mehta says. He cites Gartner research that predicts 10 percent of overall enterprise security capabilities will be delivered in the cloud over the next two to three years.

Many companies are not waiting. Instead, they’re adopting cloud computing

to run their enterprise applications, but with “green field” applications that provide entirely new business functions and have no functional equivalent in the data center. Then, as they gain experience with cloud services, some are moving “brown field” or existing enterprise applications to the cloud as well, says Volk of EMA, who is the author of a 2013 research report, “Demystifying Cloud.” These include business intelligence and analytics, email and collaboration, HR, payroll processing and custom applications.

In addition, software delivered as a service also provides an opportunity to reimagine decades-old applications and business processes. “It’s a new dawn for IT,” says Gijo Mathew, VP for Product Man-agement, IT Business Management, at CA Technologies. “Cloud computing exposes new technologies and new ways of deliver-ing services to users. IT needs to look at this as an opportunity to focus on the business user and how quickly it can provide services to enable the whole organization.”

Speed DriversThe need for security in the cloud is borne out by a recent survey, jointly conducted by research firm Everest Group and the Cloud Connect conference. In their report, “Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey 2013,” they found that one of the strongest drivers of cloud adoption is the ability to reduce time to market.

Perhaps this is why SaaS is the most widely adopted type of cloud service. More than 56 percent of the Everest Group survey respondents said they had already adopted enterprise applications with SaaS, and another 22 percent said they plan to do so in the near future. This contrasts sharply with other cloud services, such as Platform or Infrastructure as a Service, which had a 35 percent adoption rate, the survey found.

For example, SaaS provides new ways for marketing departments to create, manage and analyze advertising campaigns that span traditional and new media channels such as social and mobile. The services provide new levels of agility with which mar-keting professionals can deploy campaigns, view the results and make informed busi-ness decisions. The popular applications offered by Salesforce.com, for instance, deliver sales and marketing capabilities as services that can scale on demand with-out the need for hardware purchases or software-license upgrades.

Hybrid-cloud company Rackspace recently launched a marketing campaign using a SaaS tool. The goal: monitor social sentiment among potential cloud custom-ers in conjunction with the campaign. The project was undertaken jointly by the IT business-intelligence group and marketing. Within three weeks, they selected a tool and had it running. The team could then quickly correlate campaign results and social-media mentions, says Mark Roenigk, Rackspace’s COO, who is also responsible for the com-pany’s IT services. The project also shows how SaaS can accelerate business decision- making, he adds.

Cloud computing has also brought a sense of empowerment to Rackspace, says COO Roenigk. In the recent past, he says, the IT department had a business intelligence (BI) approach that “was not user-friendly and took too long to generate reports,” he adds. Rackspace’s IT department responded by adopting a cloud-based BI tool. The ser-vice was modern, had an intuitive interface and enabled business users to produce reports for themselves in a matter of hours rather than weeks. Today, more than half of Rackspace’s employees use the BI service directly. “The new self-service approach has

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Tech Chatter

Top Mission-Critical Applications Moving to the Cloudn Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

n Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

n E-commerce

n Business intelligence/analytics

n Web applications

n Collaboration and content management

n Custom business applications

n Application development and testing

n Email

n Disaster recovery, storage, archiving

SourCe: Everest Group and Cloud Connect, “Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey,” global survey of 302 enterprise IT buyers, solutions providers and consultants, March 2013

The Mission-Critical Cloud: overcoming the Barriers

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improved user satisfaction and turnaround times,” Roenigk says, “freeing up BI team members to focus on better stakeholder out-comes, rather than churning out reports.”

Some companies that have moved mis-sion-critical applications to the cloud say the results are pleasing. Earth Networks is a Germantown, Md.-based operator of real-time sensor networks that collect weather, lightning and greenhouse-gas information; this data is then delivered to customers as cloud-based applications, including the well-known WeatherBug application. Mov-ing to cloud services, says Andy Rosenbaum, the company’s Director of Web and Desktop Development, means “we’re no longer in the business of managing data centers.”

Other early adopters of cloud applica-tions and infrastructure services include application developers and product engi-neering teams. Apart from the fact that technologists are often among the early adopters of new products, putting the appli-cation development in the cloud means IT departments don’t have to purchase dedicated servers. Cloud computing also isolates the applications under develop-ment so they don’t impede the day-to-day operations of the data center. For example, Fujitsu, a global provider of IT products and services (including cloud computing), uses cloud services to demonstrate its products to prospective customers.

The beauty of the cloud is that a technical sales team can build a customer test bed in a matter of hours, says Carey Blunt, Chief

Architect for Service Management Tooling at Fujitsu U.K. “A salesperson can log in to a cloud service portal, drag and drop a series of icons that represent service attributes, and press a button to provision service,” he says. In the past, servers and software had to

be shipped to a site so a demo or proof-of-concept system could be built. This would take weeks, further delaying the sale.

Another technical company, Qualcomm, adopted cloud services among its R&D and engineering teams. As a result, the San Diego-based company, which develops chip technologies for mobile devices, has seen a two-month reduction in its product- development cycles, says Matthew Clark, Senior Director of IT. “Now that we’ve imple-mented cloud computing, our application developers and engineering teams can pro-vision systems far more quickly,” he adds. “They don’t have to call anybody or create a ticket. It’s all done behind the scenes, and it’s more than four times faster than the manual process we used to follow.”

With new mobile devices coming to market on a weekly basis, it’s essential for Qualcomm to innovate and be first to market with the latest enabling technologies. Cloud computing has taken much of the cost and complexity out of its business and fostered a new way of doing business.

If industry analysts are right, Qualcomm will have plenty of company soon. Market research firm IDC estimates that U.S. com-panies will increase their use of the cloud next year by 130 percent over this year. The big drivers? Lower costs, less complexity and faster speed to market. Those are goals any organization can view as mission-critical. n

Karyl Scott writes about technology and business from San Diego.

Service management has evolved from maintaining hardware and software in the data center to automating business service delivery in the cloud. This critical shift has come about as a result of cloud-based technologies and the growing need for IT depart-ments to empower their business counterparts to innovate faster than ever before.

CA Nimsoft Service Desk is a new Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that lets IT teams automate and optimize service delivery to the business units that need on-demand computing resources. Nimsoft Service Desk removes some of the traditional cost and

complexity from the IT management equation through standardization, a service-oriented architecture and a rental model for business services, says Lokesh Jindal, General Manager for IT Business Management at CA Technologies.

The solution also provides an intuitive interface for business users with embedded social and collaboration capabilities. Ease-of-use is one of the big demands in

business today, says Gijo Mathew, VP for Product Management, IT Business Management, at CA Technologies. “People don’t go for training for their personal apps such as Facebook and LinkedIn, so why should they for business apps?” he asks.

There is no extra hardware or software to purchase, as CA Nimsoft Service Desk comprises a service catalog, incident reporting, change management and other features over a cloud infrastructure. Action-driven agents direct IT professionals through management processes, thus implementing best prac-tices and improving consistency in the service delivery process.

The point-and-click interface provides workflows that can be changed for business processes without the need for custom coding and system integration. Since there’s no on-premises soft-ware to install and maintain, feature upgrades are automatic.

The goal: speed service delivery by making the IT department more agile and more closely aligned with the business units they support. Thank you, cloud. —K.S.

MiSSion-critical Service ManageMent to the cloud

cloud computing drives Business innovationReasons why corporate execu-tives support cloud computing

n Drives down overall business application costs

n Reduces application-configuration time

n Enables virtual and distributed organization

n Speeds application implementations

n Provides ability to predict future application costs

n Enables access to best-in-class applications

n Lets executives focus on transforming business rather than IT

n Encourages managers to adopt business best practices

n Enables business units to quickly adapt to emerging opportunities

Source: The London School of Economics and Political Science, The Outsourcing Unit, survey of 1,035 business and IT executives, 2011

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We live in the era of the network. Over the years, I have come to believe in the power of networks as the most fundamental driver of progress. Everything is con-

nected, and information flows through networks with ever greater intensity. This interconnectedness changes everything, both inside and outside of companies. In turn, it means more challenges for the CIO, and also more opportunities.

What are some examples of these changes? Traditional mar-kets are disappearing, and they are morphing into networks of information with the customer at the epicenter. As the outside world becomes more interconnected, companies have to create their own ecosystems as well. Enterprises that don’t evolve in this manner won’t match the speed, intensity and impact of the forces outside their company walls.

Three-Month Strategies: Tents, Not PyramidsLet’s not forget, we live in a world where volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) reign. As the pace of this world accelerates, it becomes nearly impossible to plan for the long term. As a CEO recently told me, “We have a new five-year strategy every three months.”

The same rapid-fire pace applies to the IT department. The CIO has to rev up to the clock speeds of the rest of the company and of the outside world. As a result, the CIO focus will shift, and there will be only one primary goal for the company: offering customers the best possible experience. The entire organization will be geared toward this aim, and the CIO will have to act more swiftly — building tents that can be deployed or taken down quickly, not pyramids that require lots of planning and work. The CIO will have to lead innovation, help redefine the company’s strategy and product set, and provide guidance for business expansion. In short, the role will become much more strategic and less operational.

Redefining Corporate HierarchiesAt the same time, the IT department will be set up as a network, too. Hierarchy will no longer be the accepted organizational mode. The team will function as a connected set of individual special-ists — each responsible for his or her project in a larger mesh of interrelated projects that all support the flow of the business.

Terms such as employee retention will need reexamination, too.

Employers in a networked world will no longer be interested in keeping people on board for life. A couple of months ago, I spoke to managers of a company that encouraged people to have friends and relatives join the company. The idea was that having a family network inside the company would keep them on the job. But going forward, employees will no longer seek lifelong employment, and this company will definitely need to change its HR policy.

Employees — an “old normal” term — will switch from one project to another, from one company to another. Long-term loyalty is out. Even family loyalty, illustrated in the example above, will not tie professionals to a company for life. One of the most important functions inside the new IT department will be that of the recruiter, who will attract top talent for short-term engagements.

Taking an Outside-in ApproachThe evolved work environment will require a completely new mindset by the CIO. The most important challenge will be to con-nect the outside world to the inner workings of the department. Trends and technologies — such as social networks, the cloud and the consumerization of IT — will have to be incorporated inside the IT department, too. The speed of change taking place in the outside world must be mirrored by the speed of change in IT.

I have long urged CIOs to get out of their ivory towers; staying inside is no longer an option. I strongly advise you, as IT leaders, to spend lots of time looking out of your window. Observe how networks are pushing innovation, and then make that connected disruption your own. n

PeTeR HiNSSeN is co-founder of Across Group and Chairman of Across Technology; a speaker and coach; and the author of The New Normal (Mach Media, 2010).

“The evolved work environment

will require a completely new

mindset by the CiO.”

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IT in the Era of the NetworkNow that everything is connected, CIOs must make creating a great customer experience their top priority.| By Peter Hinssen