CLOUD COMPUTING -- WHERE DO YOU START?

Cloud computing is a disruptive phenomenon, with the potential to make IT organizations more responsive than ever. Cloud computing promises economic advantages, speed, agility, flexibility, infinite elasticity and innovation. How will you phase your organization into cloud computing?

Key Challenges to overcome in Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing forces you to wrestle with three key strategic, operational and people challenges:

• Governance:

Cloud computing enables speed, agility and innovation. You need to move from the drawing board to deployment. Is your organization ready to adapt? You need a clear vision and effective processes, skills and organizational structure to drive cloud innovation in your enterprise. 

• Cloud Computing Environments:

You need to choose a cloud computing environment that's right for your organization. Should you consider private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud solution? More and more organizations are moving services, storage, email, collaboration and applications to the cloud. You need to decide whether to choose to support private, public or a hybrid cloud mix. What's the right mix of infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and application (SaaS) environments for your organization.

• Security & Privacy:

If someone else is running your computers and software, you need strategies to stay secure. Your security policy depends on how many pieces you control – the more you own, the more you control. Are you ready to extend your enterprise security policy to the cloud? You need to break through the resistance and increase confidence that cloud is safe. You need to keep your data safe from prying eyes. You need your security team to buy in to your cloud initiatives. That's a tall order.

By 2015, at least 20% of all cloud services will be consumed via internal or external cloud service brokerages, rather than directly, up from less than 5% today. (source- Gartner)

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Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing have become fixtures in the enterprise.

Organizations are beginning to realize how profoundly a Cloud-Centric IT architecture differs from their legacy on-premises architectures and, with that, how different their management and monitoring needs will be.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing have become fixtures in the enterprise, and that trend is sure to continue for a long time to come. But the reality is that, to date, those gaining real benefit from the cloud at the enterprise level have been limited largely to isolated pockets.

These include software development and operations teams leveraging infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service (IaaS and PaaS) to slash costs and improve agility; sales teams licensing their own SaaS CRM systems; or lines of business "going rogue" and sidestepping IT by using apps like Dropbox to facilitate easier file sharing inside and outside the company.

There are still some fundamental obstacles to widespread adoption of cloud apps. The two biggest are security concerns and a lack of confidence in app or service performance and availability. Recently, a study was conducted asking IT teams about their current and planned use of cloud apps and services within their organizations. A few particular points stood out:

• Fewer than 20% of the survey respondents felt that their tools were doing a good job managing their cloud-based apps. The rest were at best ambivalent; more than 20% said their tools just aren't up to the task.

• More than 40% of the respondents had no tools at all to monitor and manage their cloud apps.

IT teams adopting cloud apps often find themselves in a challenging position. Their users and business management still look to them to "own" application availability and performance, even though they no longer own the application hosting environment.

The tools that they have used to manage their on-premises applications don't give them the same visibility and control in the cloud. Most of these tools have evolved alongside the on-premises applications, operating systems, server, and network infrastructure they have been used to managing.

As they adopt more cloud applications and services, organizations are beginning to realize how profoundly a cloud-centric IT architecture differs from their legacy on-premises architectures and, with that, how different their management and monitoring needs will be.

For businesses to fully embrace the cloud, they will need management tools that are designed from the ground up to support the remote, distributed nature of cloud apps and services.

For more details visit us @ www.urssystems.com

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