Achieve Economic Synergies by Managing Your Enterprise Assets In The Cloud

Achieve Economic Synergies by Managing Your Enterprise Assets In The Cloud

By Orblogic, March 3, 2014

KEY POINTS TO CONSIDER

CLOUD SOLUTIONS ARE PRACTICAL AND EASY TO IMPLEMENT

Time to market and rapid response to market demands are now utmost priorities for any size organization. When compared to conventional internal infrastructure, Cloud-‐‑based solutions meet this requirement better than ever. Cloud-‐‑based solutions are easy to implement, more cost efficient, and robust

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enough to meet enterprise demands such as auto-‐‑scalability, disaster recovery, and fail-‐‑over.

SOME ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE MAY BE NEEDED TO GET STARTED

Your organization may require some cultural change in order to embrace Cloud services as part of the overall enterprise architecture and portfolio. Cloud benefits have to be communicated well from the top down. Both technical and non-‐‑technical training about Cloud offerings can help facilitate better awareness about Cloud services at the enterprise.

A HYBRID OF INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES

A dynamic infrastructure portfolio might feature mix of on-‐‑premises and Cloud services. This hybrid infrastructure can help drive economy of scale and promote business agility.

Why Cloud? Cloud implementations are already becoming popular enterprise solutions. Many businesses have found they need a concise, comprehensive technology portfolio strategy. Until recently, most enterprises adopted Cloud as needed, on an ad hoc basis. Now, many of these initiatives are driven by developers contracted to meet business deadlines that internal IT teams may not have the capacity to deliver. Bottom line? Cloud solutions can begin performing an integral role in your technology mix starting now.

Cloud Services Serve As New, Flexible Resources for IT Teams

Cloud solution innovations help improve the overall response organizations can deliver. Now, the demand for scalability and availability can be fulfilled dynamically as the user base increases. Responsiveness can be faster, enabling companies to better meet time-‐‑to-‐‑market and business demands. Because Cloud platforms are highly dependable, applications and security can be quite reliable. This enables a business to focus on innovation and progress instead of dealing with IT infrastructure issues.

IT executives who have adopted Cloud as a part of their IT initiatives have been positioned to respond more effectively to business requirements. Many organizations that have adopted Cloud Services have selected SaaS or PaaS Cloud offerings.

To help make Cloud solutions affordable, vendors offer Cloud services that are designed to address a wide range of business requirements in a cost-‐‑efficient way. A well-‐‑planned Cloud strategy can help address many tactical business objectives.

Strategic Goals Quantify the Business Value of Cloud Services for Your Enterprise The primary role of Cloud should be to speed up responsiveness to business changes or requirements — separately from existing, on premise solutions. The business value can be quantified in terms of revenue growth, customer response, user base increases, and lifetime customer value.


Update the Enterprise IT Portfolio to Accommodate Cloud Offerings Cloud offerings may be very well-‐‑suited to your enterprise IT portfolio. That doesn’t mean existing IT implementations must be replaced by the Cloud platform. Consider similar IT industry changes you’ve experienced. Enterprises that can adapt to technological change are better positioned to meet IT needs over time. When Web technologies were introduced in the 90s, enterprises made them part of their IT portfolio. Cloud services are yet another evolution.

Prepare the Enterprise for Change Strategic IT portfolio changes may be required. You may need to update IT infrastructure delivery services, IT operations, and management processes. Your business may leverage consulting services rather following a rigid in-‐‑house build process. This will create an environment of openness — with more options. There can be a more collaborative relationship built out to all tiers of your organization. Your change strategy should clearly define the top

priorities. It can be critical to implement first, and then monitor the way broader changes are handled thereafter to help reduce change-‐‑related chaos.

Change can be difficult to adopt and risky to implement. But results from adoption of Cloud services can transform your enterprise to better respond to business demands.

Cloud Provides Business Flexibility Cloud technology has proven its business value through implementations at many enterprises. It has also been accepted as new way of managing business and infrastructure needs according


to business requirements. Often at enterprises, some role players can be against change at first. Establishing a Cloud Strategy at the program level of your enterprise can raise awareness and help crystalize the potential benefits.

Key target audiences include:

Business Stakeholders Many enterprises rely on packaged applications to facilitate business processes and fulfill operational business requirements. There needs to be a good understanding among business stakeholders that the business will utilize Software-‐‑as-‐‑a-‐‑Service packages such as Enterprise Asset Management and/or Workforce Management (Human Capital Management). Cloud-‐‑based business applications are rapidly and widely adopted by enterprises. The trend is growing fast.

Orblogic provides its full suite of products via public Cloud (Amazon).

Cloud-‐‑based applications can help improve business availability, continuity, and performance. Because business executives must be concerned with financial resources, the pay-‐‑for-‐‑use model can be an attractive option. Budget constraints can also serve as a driving force toward convincing business decision makers to seriously consider Cloud solutions.

With the SaaS model, business does not depend on IT Services for new deployments. It’s the vendor’s responsibility to fix bugs and provide upgrades. This helps cut cycles short and serves to meet business demands.

Application Development and Management Stakeholders Many businesses also rely on development and application stakeholders to manage servers, applications, libraries, API, and application management tools. Cloud technology offers a complete custom build platform for deployments — very similar to your on-‐‑premise infrastructure. In fact, most Cloud providers offer the virtual equivalent to your on-‐‑premise platform, including servers and automatic deployment services.

Orblogic application packages can be deployed at the enterprise in customized Cloud platforms selected by application development and deployment teams irrespective of the Cloud service provider.

Many enterprises already use a kind of in-‐‑house Cloud platform called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This platform is based on virtualized servers, storage, network services and automated deployment tools. The main purpose of these kinds of Cloud services is to expedite application deployments and updates for existing services. There are two benefits to these

platforms. First, Cloud platforms help decrease time spent on hardware, software, and storage procurement. Developers can provision the instances for rapid development and deployment through the Cloud. Second, infrastructure services are not dependent on humans to configure databases or application servers.

Target Stakeholders with Cloud Delivery Architectures

Available Cloud Architectures Public Cloud Most Cloud offerings are available through public portals such as Amazon Web Service (AWS) Cloud, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, or IBM. Public Cloud offerings are easy to get and quick to implement. This strategy can be both cost-‐‑ and time-‐‑efficient. All Orblogic products are available through AWS Cloud for quick and cost efficient deployments. Easy access to the products helps you save time and money — and also enables you to respond faster to market


demands. It’s an outsourcing strategy much like your Website hosting or using a third-‐‑party to host your data center. Using a public Cloud provider can help you achieve economic synergies with infrastructure expandability and application availability. If you do choose public Cloud services, your business may need to factor the implications of compliance and security.

Hybrid Cloud A business can use a hybrid Cloud implementation where in-‐‑house applications are integrated with Cloud-‐‑based SaaS applications. There may always be a desire to integrate internally managed applications with public Cloud deployments. For example, Amazon VPC service can facilitate connectivity between an enterprise and Amazon Cloud Services. Hybrid Cloud is a combination of public Cloud with intra-‐‑enterprise deployments to fulfill the business need. Most Cloud vendors provide tested hybrid Cloud integration patterns.

Private Cloud An intra-‐‑enterprise Cloud is a good example of a private Cloud. Most of enterprises use this to help mitigate security and compliance concerns. An on-‐‑premise Cloud can help provide the same kind of services as a public Cloud, but with limitations to meet enterprise demands. Patterns are created to provide the applications and infrastructure to meet low to medium to high load business demands. A private Cloud can offer the most secure applications for an enterprise.

Most enterprises find it difficult to develop a private in-‐‑house Cloud. It can be much easier to use virtual servers, storage, and networks when compared to creating Cloud architecture with multi-‐‑user environments, automated scripts, and monitoring/management services.

There are also financial and technical challenges to building a private Cloud. You must develop enterprise-‐‑level expertise to manage an in-‐‑house Cloud.

Cloud Solutions Can Be a Practical Approach for Enterprises An enterprise may need out-‐‑of-‐‑the-‐‑box IT infrastructure to meet immediate business requirements. After the invention of Cloud this problem is certainly solved – most public Cloud offerings fulfill this need with handful of services. For example, Amazon Cloud offers storage (S3), load balancer (Route 53), databases (RDS) and many forms of Amazon Machine Images

(AMI). These services can be created in a matter of minutes based on requirements — and can be delivered to development and deployment teams. This was a developer’s dream before Cloud technologies existed.

Though these benefits are there, enterprises still face security and in-‐‑house training challenges. Cloud vendors worked hard to overcome these hurdles. Better support can be achieved through the following:

Provide Better Security Cloud vendors implemented their installations in high quality data centers to help meet the vast majority of availability requirements. Because Cloud vendor security is more granular that enterprise perimeter security, vendors have implemented per-‐‑application, per-‐‑implementation and/or per-‐‑infrastructure resource component security controls that are far better than in-‐‑house enterprise security implementations. Most Cloud vendors are compliant with security standards that include SSAE-‐‑16 audits, ISO 20001, 27001 operational certifications, and requirements enforced by US government’s new Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

Improved Reliability and Availability Most Cloud vendors have exceptionally improved reliability and availability. Now, there is much less concern over outages. This reinforces a customer confidence that Cloud vendors can fulfill customer’s reliability and availability needs.

No More Vendor Lock-In As in the early days of any technological innovation, some vendors have tried to lock-‐‑in the customers. Many Cloud vendors did the same thing, but this is changing quickly for number of different reasons. First, products based on open source standards are readily available. Products such as OpenStack and OpenShift help insulate customers from vendor lock-‐‑in. Many different applications running on different Cloud providers can be integrated using XML integration standards. For example, Representational State Transfer (REST) communication protocol for integration of applications hosting on different Cloud providers.

Private Cloud is Becoming Popular Cloud vendors now offer private Cloud solutions to their customers through Amazon, IBM, and Oracle.

Your business can now choose Cloud vendors after analyzing Cloud reliability, availability, and other services. Enterprise strategy should clearly prioritize organization’s requirements to select the Cloud vendor.


Enterprise Cloud Strategy Create a plan to transition toward Cloud computing services as a strategic option. It can start with smaller implementation experiences and progress toward larger implementations. This can help draw a bigger adoption of Cloud services for an in-‐‑house service provider. It is essential to adopt a comprehensive Cloud strategy that spans many years.

Cloud Business Strategy Your business strategy should identify the business goals to address with your business investments. A synergistic Cloud computing plan can help accomplish these milestones. The best approach to accomplish this is to focus on the business needs that can help streamline business processes and help generate increased revenue. Your plan should help business stakeholders better understand how Cloud investments will save money and effectively meet business demands.

Amazon conducted an analysis that depicts the ROI difference using on-‐‑premise versus Cloud Infrastructure:

Cloud Technology Strategy Your strategy should list the Cloud technologies needed and suggest providers that can best address those needs. This way, technology is used to help power the business to meet goals more efficiently.

It is essential to have Cloud Technology Reference Architecture in place at the enterprise level. That should be clearly communicated with IT and business stakeholders in the enterprise. A business and IT capability synergy map can provide effective language for IT and business stakeholders. If the strategy addresses both business and IT problems and how effectively resolve them, it is better positioned to succeed. IT strategy must empower business, so the business can maximize success at each turn.

Create a road map for Cloud implementation according to a business impact analysis. It should include milestones and list business goals.

Cloud Strategy Execution Once the strategy is in place, start prioritizing which business capabilities should be addressed first. Most enterprises begin by choosing one business capability to move into the Cloud — such as Enterprise Asset Management or CRM. Other businesses may launch one big initiative, moving many capabilities in one big cluster. Either approach may work as long as the execution plan is well thought out.

Develop In-House Cloud Expertise Without in-‐‑house Cloud skills, Cloud adoption may be more difficult. Cloud technology can be a cultural transition requiring new skills and talent. It may include IT leadership, IT architects, Managers, Developers, Security professionals, Operations department and financial specialists.

Security and compliance department personnel must be involved in Cloud initiatives to help guide stakeholder through related risks. Security experts must help ensure that a Cloud vendor meets enterprise security and compliance requirements. The first implementation can be done by a few in-‐‑house experts along with Cloud provider consultants. For example, Amazon has partner network program to help assist Cloud implementations. To future-‐‑proof the enterprise with Cloud computing – it is helpful to onboard new sources with Cloud expertise and train existing personnel.

Change Your Execution Process Conventional strategy execution may be inadequate for managing and governing Cloud implementations. Most Cloud implementations have to move faster than traditional IT policies and procedures typically allow.


Cloud resources offer a pay-‐‑as-‐‑you-‐‑go advantage, so budgeting and procurement processes may need to be changed.

Cloud Strategy Optimization No matter how well-‐‑planned, expect there to be a learning curve. There will be missteps and successes along the way to learn from. Cloud adoption can be a long process — enterprise adoption of Cloud can unfold over many years. This program requires the following:

Strategy Impact on Business Outcomes Measure how Cloud strategy will impact business outcomes. What will be the return on investments with Cloud solutions at enterprise? Use an ROI calculator to help quantify your projected assumptions. The key is to focus on business success rather than just the IT investment.

Reporting and Benchmarking of Solutions In-the-Cloud Collect complete business performance reports. Evaluating real results can be a strong tool used to support and adapt your Cloud strategy.

Realize Cloud Strategy Cloud strategy can’t be realized in few successful initiatives in limited time. It has long term effects that may span to multi-‐‑year engagements. It’s not only the introduction of Cloud technology, but the transformation of how enterprise IT, key personnel, and the business perform.