Flying blind white_paper-final

Flying Blind into the Cloud

whitepaper

Key Success Factors for Cloud Computing Operations

www.sciencelogic.com 02

Flying Blind into the Cloud whitepaper

Executive Summary

A recent ChangeWave Research survey showed more than 1

in 3 respondents plan on increasing their overall public cloud

spend while only 1 in 100 plan to decrease this spend. The

shift is clear; the amount of budget spent on cloud computing is

actually decreasing the amount spent on other IT products and

services for 1 in 5 respondents. But as you move to the cloud,

are you sure you’re not “flying blind”?

This white paper discusses the requirements enterprises have

for the cloud. Whether forming a strategy for an existing cloud,

or creating a strategy to move to the cloud, there are a number

of key considerations for success. John Enck, Managing VP at

Gartner, and Antonio Piraino, CTO at ScienceLogic, provide

specific recommendations to be used in the evaluation phase,

during the actual move, and once your cloud is operational to

set yourself up for success.

As companies navigate to the cloud they may be flying blind.

With resources and services on premise and in the cloud, the right

management processes and tools become critical to maintaining

service levels and operational efficiency. But what are the key

considerations to make before, during and after migration to the

cloud? What type of cloud service provider should you use? And

what staffing considerations do you need to make?

This whitepaper addresses those questions by summarizing the answers given by leading experts John Enck,

Managing VP at Gartner, and Antonio Piraino, CTO at ScienceLogic. Watch the video for their full responses to

help you determine the right selection for your cloud computing needs.

Are you more Cost eFFiCient with the Cloud?

1,165 respondents involved in their company’s buying decisions participated in this survey:

Cloud spending is decreasing company’s budget for other IT products and services

21%

Cloud spending is increasing company budget for other IT products and services

15%

Could spending is having no effect on company budget for other IT products and services

49%

Don’t know 12%

Source: ChangeWave Research – a service of 451 Research

37% report they plan to increase their public cloud spending over the next 6 months:

Companies currently using public cloud

Current survey

July ‘12

Increase overall spending 37%

Decrease overall spending 1%

No plans to use cloud computing in next 6 months

8%

Remain the same 54%

Source: ChangeWave Research – a service of 451 Research



why Cloud?will the move to cloud computing result in the

movement of all it infrastructure and services to

external service providers?

At Gartner, we think the norm is going to

be that everybody will have a mix of

on-premise equipment and also a mix of

consuming cloud services. Where the

equipment exists is an interesting debate;

however, the more interesting question is what happens to the IT staff, what happens to the people.

If all of my equipment goes into the cloud or if even half of my equipment goes into the cloud, does that mean I

reduce my IT staff, does that mean I have no IT staff? We think that the role of the IT staff is still very important,

even in cases where all of the equipment moves to the cloud. Now having said that, I must clarify and say that

we think it’s important, but the role of the IT staff must change. IT must go from being a technology administrator

and monitoring the silos and the technology to more of an IT service broker. IT must be in a position to be able to

negotiate between the business units and the different cloud providers to deliver those services.

what are the biggest trends in corporate it? why is cloud computing so important today?

Antonio Piraino says most enterprises hope to accomplish one or two things that cloud computing

can give them today but not all of the things that perhaps an external service provider who’s

really focused on this cloud computing game can offer them: formal flexibility and agility,

automation, and orchestration capabilities.

Antonio Piraino, CtoScienceLogic

John enck, managing VPGartner

“most of the tools that you have in place to do monitoring of your existing infrastructure won’t extend into the cloud.”

John Enck, Gartner



Fundamental to all of this is the management of all of those systems because there’s a realization that the

underlying infrastructure’s fast becoming commoditized but the person who is able to best have a grasp of

all of that IT infrastructure and how it works is going to be best positioned to exploit this movement into cloud

computing going forward.

I’ve previously observed this move to cloud computing over the past four-and-a-half years as the head of Tier1

Research, and it’s really the reason why I moved to ScienceLogic: this realization that there was going to be such

a massive need for enterprises and service providers alike to manage this entire transition of IT into the cloud.

getting reAdywhat does gartner recommend for selecting and planning the move of an application to the

public cloud?

John Enck says there are two types of moves you need to distinguish:

•In the first type, you’re replacing an on premise application with the new application in the

cloud. In that case, you simply need to make sure the application is feature compatible, or

even better compatibility than the existing on premise one, and you also need to make sure

you can get the existing data migrated to the application in the cloud.

•The second case is when you’re actually migrating an application from on premise into the cloud. This is the

more common case that we think about and it’s what most people think about when we talk about moving

into the cloud. Gartner recommends that the first step is to virtualize the application and all the components

of use. We also recommend you look at the data concern separately.

The next aspect to look at is the service level agreements. What are they going to guarantee? Are they going to

give you availability guarantees? Are they going to give you guarantees for backup? What kind of remediation

are they going to have? Take a hard look at the contract.

And finally, once you’ve done that contract, the question is, who’s going to monitor all that? Are you going to let

the service provider essentially watch itself and tell you when it’s out of SLA compliance or tell you when it’s in a

contractual violation?

We suggest a better alternative: you be the watchdog; you come up with tools that are going to allow you to monitor

your applications; you monitor the cloud to make sure that the cloud provider is in compliance with your business needs.



what needs to be in place before moving to the cloud?

If you’re an enterprise organization today and you’re not executing or evaluating your cloud plans

right now, you’re in deep trouble. You have to consider a number of things before you do move to

the cloud. The way of thinking about this is really from the top down, so the business services that

you’re trying to accomplish, who you’re trying to accomplish them for. But you have to understand

the context within which you’re making this giant leap into the cloud.

The things that you want to consider are: what is your budget today that you’re operating under, what is your

internal IT competency, and what are your corporate governance needs in which you need to operate all these

things. Once you have that context refined, you then have to look at your internal assets. You may want to have

a management tool in place today that really comes in and says, “These are the assets I have, here is the stock I

have, here’s how everything is functioning and here’s how it starts to function if I move it externally.” And that’s

why management tools are so critical today in making these decisions.

dAy 2 mAnAgementwhat are the long-term consequences of cloud computing on management tools

proliferation? will it be forced to maintain two toolsets for traditional data center and cloud

computing?

Instead of having a bunch of discreet tools that just monitor the application or just monitor the

platform, Gartner is seeing vendors create tool sets, where I can have one tool that is going to

monitor my complete cloud environment. We always prefer fewer tools. If I can have one tool that

monitors my cloud environment, that is going to be far superior because it’s less complex than

having ten tools to do the same.

Enck recommends a proof of concept. He says to bring the tool into your environment, run some testing on it,

because you will very quickly see if that tool is well-integrated or poorly-integrated. You will see how well it fits your

environment and if you can see cracks between the different modules, then it’s probably not the right tool for you.

how important is it to have a holistic view into what makes up the service before it can be

managed adequately in the cloud?

Gartner thinks the holistic view is extremely important because managing infrastructure in silos

just doesn’t work. Trying to have a silo of server technology, of storage technology, or network

technology, of database technology, really isn’t effective.



I may show green lights on all my servers, I may show green lights on all my storage equipment, I may show

green lights on all my networks; however, I may have significant application problems and that’s because there

is so much connective tissue between these different silos that just by looking at the silos, you can miss a lot of the

interactions between them. Therefore, we prefer a service view that aggregates the components and resources of

the silos and all that connective tissues and monitors at the application level or the business service level.

how will migration to the cloud impact it staff?

Research has shown that there has been push back from a lot of people that feel very unsure

about whether their jobs are secure as their corporation and IT services move into an external

cloud computing environment.

In my years dealing with service providers and enterprises who have gone through this transition,

I’ve only come across one person who actually reduced his staff headcount because he felt that he may or may

not have needed that staff as he moved to a cloud computing environment.

In fact, he told me the biggest problem he had was the dissent from cultural change internally, so it was really

about his IT staff not willing to accept the new tools and responsibilities that they were going to be handed.

More and more responsibility is actually going to go to the IT provider to take responsibility for the way in which

those services operate from a cost-effective manner to make sure that all business units are more productive, that

they can be more flexible and agile. It’s no longer about losing your job, but simply converting the way you think

and realizing you have more responsibility in the organization today.

In fact, our independent research has shown that most organizations today, when looking at their staff, are not

looking to augment their staff or change their staff but make use of their current staff today.

what are the pitfalls and impediments to be concerned about when moving to the cloud?

We continue to hear over and over, as people have moved to the cloud, the things they worry

about the most are simplicity, control, cost, and security. Even though we keep hearing about

cultural change and acceptance internally, even on an ongoing basis, the three big ones are

really around: don’t create more work for me, continue to make this simple for me going forward

as I keep operating in that cloud environment and moving things there.

Demand that your service provider make things visible to you so you can understand how everything is

operating. Make sure that you have the tools in place that will give you all of that visibility.



It’s easy today, and it’s something ScienceLogic does very

well over a single code base; giving you that visibility

and control that you deem necessary from your service

provider if they’re not giving it to you.

what does gartner recommend for monitoring

the performance of applications in private

clouds?

Enck says most of your existing investments

and tools aren’t going to work. Most of the tools that you have in place to do monitoring of your

existing infrastructure won’t extend into the cloud.

Most cloud providers do provide monitoring tools. However, you can’t rely on those as your sole

source of monitoring. You really need to invest in additional tools that are cloud-specific and able to drill into the

cloud and use all the APIs and all the interfaces that are available. Look for a tool that is going to give you the

depth of monitoring and a level of visibility that you need to make sure that your applications are functioning

well. You want something that really meets the needs of what it is that you’re looking to monitor.

what is the number one need for enterprises and service providers as they move to the cloud?

One thing for sure is that we’re finding internal enterprise IT departments are acting more and

more like service providers themselves with the same responsibilities for the top line and the

bottom line. Yet at the same time, we realize that there’s this great fluidity that’s come to being

with cloud computing today. Your applications and workloads can find themselves in any given

environment – on-premise, off-premise, physical, or virtual – and there is a massive need to

manage all of those things.

Here at ScienceLogic, we’re extremely proud of the work we’ve done building a brand new, unified code base,

which means you don’t have to pull bits and pieces of different code together in order to get a holistic view of

this very flexible and fluid environment. It gives all your constituents the ability to be far more collaborative, far

more agile, in deploying these services at the end of the day, and all through one, unified space that really adds

validity to what you’re trying to accomplish with your business services.

demand that your service provider make things visible to you so you can understand how everything is operating.

Antonio Piraino, ScienceLogic



Watch the video to see the full responses to these questions

and to learn the answers to:

•Is enterprise IT becoming more like a service broker?

Is the industry ready for this shift?

•What guidelines are there for evaluating cloud service

providers?

•And more

P Flying Blind into the Cloud – gartner and sciencelogic webinar

“most cloud providers do provide monitoring tools. however, you can’t rely on those as your sole source of monitoring.”

John Enck, Gartner

http://www.sciencelogic.com/resources/webinar/flying-blind-cloud-webinar-preview

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ScienceLogic is the award-winning developer of Smart IT™ software. Our mission is to empower companies to visualize, automate, and modernize their IT operations, maximizing efficiency and effectiveness with the operational intelligence needed to run the business smarter. We provide unified monitoring and management solutions for modern IT environments – from the data center to public, private, and hybrid clouds – and deliver the scale, security, automation, and resiliency necessary to simplify the exponentially harder task of managing resources, services, and applications that are constantly in motion.

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