As companies look to augment their IT infrastructure by resources deployed in some form of a cloud, a need arises to adjust governance models to ensure that their use of cloud resources is in line with business and security requirements and that the savings promised are realized. A comprehensive approach to drafting a governance model becomes ever more crucial for a company that integrates cloud resources into its IT strategy.
Guidance that HP Critical Facilities Services provides to customers of its cloud-building offerings is heavily based on version three of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) – a comprehensive set of best practices for aligning business and IT for best results.
Ken Hamilton, director of Data Center Synergy and Cloud Portfolio at HP Critical Facilities Services, said ITIL was the de facto management model for delivering Infrastructure as a Service, which includes best practices for strategy, design, deployment, operations and continual service improvement.
HP uses a model that adopts these service delivery components for cloud-based delivery. “That basically provides you a governance mechanism that’s accepted on a worldwide basis,” Hamilton said.
COMMON GOVERNANCE MODEL FOR DISPARATE GROUPS IS A MUST
One adjustment companies need to make to their governance models is to create a common one for various groups within an organization – such as servers, storage, facilities – that have traditionally been governed separately.
“A lot of our enterprise customers are not really looking at the overall picture of the environment,” said Ken Owens, VP of security and server technologies at Savvis. “They still have a computer group and a security group and a network group and a storage group.” These groups do not communicate enough to ensure a comprehensive strategy. Owens said: “IT organizations are kind of taking too much of an oversimplified view of cloud computing.”
To develop adequate governance for each application deployed in the cloud, an organization needs to define priorities for that application’s needs, such as network quality of service, memory and CPU.
Some firms give customers freedom to decide how they are going to allocate cloud resources. Not every customer wants such a hands-off approach, however.
Some customers want to go in and provision and de-provision resources themselves, while others want an assessment of their existing capabilities and their needs and guidance on how best to deploy a cloud service.
The third type of customer wants to hand everything that has to do with the back-end infrastructure for their application to a provider.
The amount of guidance on how best to approach the resource allocation the provider offers a client also depends on that client’s level of engagement. While some suppliers are not likely to spend a lot of time on helping a customer spending “a few thousand dollars a month” deploying their cloud-based infrastructure, a bigger client will get more attention.
MOST CLOUD-FRIENDLY APPLICATIONS
AT&T has a similar hands-off approach to providing cloud services. “We give customers the flexibility to make their own decisions on policy management,” said Chris Costello, AVP of product management for AT&T hosting and cloud services.
“There are several we see that are the most appropriate use cases,” Costello said. “We’ll share those.” These applications include test and development, warm standby for disaster recovery, data back-up, shared drive in the cloud, public data, Web 2.0, digital catalogs, employee portals, batch processing, data archiving and short-term apps like demos.
Companies should include the following business characteristics in the decision-making process when developing a cloud strategy: variability of their compute requirements and their seasonality (relevant to businesses like retailers); success-based growth, whereby a company’s IT resources need to grow along with the size of their business; and need to expand global reach.
Companies need to have policies that specify which cloud-service providers they can use, since different providers have different levels of functionality, speed, security and availability SLAs.
When companies decide which provider to go with, security is always a priority for them. Another important consideration is the provider’s strategy for ensuring their infrastructure is large enough to accommodate growth.
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Keywords: Technology, network, infrastrucure, enterprise,cloud computing, cloud provider, public cloud, private cloud |
