By Jack Nichols, Cloud Client Executive
Traditional IT operations required a data center and data centers were required because IT services and applications became “critical” to the business and needed to be protected. To protect those applications and services an environment that was cool, humidity controlled and static free was required. Conditioned power that was backed-up with UPS systems and generators were also needed so if the power company suffered a failure from a storm or some other event, the data center and the business continued to operate.
The number of “business critical” applications whether actually “critical” or not ballooned and the test/development environment grew with every infrastructure life-cycle purchase. The amount of expensive environmentally controlled floor space required continued to increase. While virtualization technologies brought efficiencies to the server infrastructure, data centers still either needed to be expanded or new ones had to be built. Building data centers is very expensive, particularly when there are requirements for business continuity/disaster recovery in secondary locations. With the amount of budget required to support IT operations it is little wonder that the hardest part of a CIO’s job becomes making the business case for IT. So how does a CIO meet the IT needs of the business in the most cost effective manner? Is it expanding the on-premises data center, co-location in 3rd party data centers, Private Cloud, Public Cloud or Hybrid Cloud?
In the Federal space Cloud computing is a new possibility. Until recently, IT capabilities were always delivered from on-premises data centers or leased co-location space serving as an extension of on-premises facilities. With a programmatic approach to security concerns in place, it’s now possible to have some Federal IT services delivered from a multi-tenant cloud services provider bringing with it a host of possibilities. There are cost savings and efficiencies versus traditional infrastructure but also relief for resource constrained data centers, cap-ex avoidance for facility upgrades, facility and personnel resources for new initiatives, consolidation of data centers and savings from actually being able to turn down portions of a data center. While the promise of cost savings and efficiencies is real and achievable, cloud is not the answer for every IT service. Placing the wrong IT service in the cloud can have serious consequences, the least of which could be wasted time and money. The question then is which of your IT services can or should be delivered from cloud? The full answer is to this question is different for every enterprise.
In Federal and other areas where on-premises has been the norm, it is important to carefully assess where cloud is the right fit for a given IT service. Our recent data from commercial IT leaders indicates 1/3 of IT professionals we surveyed have either moved something back to on-premises from the cloud or are planning to. This demonstrates the importance of having a technology partner that can help you through all phases of your cloud strategy. The right technology partner will incorporate investments one has already made whether recent infrastructure purchases or an enterprise wide application rationalization effort. Working with a technology partner will help identify what in the IT environment is best suited to a cloud service, which type of cloud service and which cloud service provider is the proper fit for each unique requirement.
Identifying what is not a good fit for the cloud is equally important in order to avoid what 1/3 of the IT professionals we surveyed are experiencing. Once a list of good cloud candidates has been developed, those candidates need to be looked at through a security lens. This is particularly important in the Federal space. Are there any security control gaps between what the candidate app/service needs and what the cloud provider’s infrastructure provides? It’s tedious, specific and very important. The right technology partner won’t leave a customer to chase compliance after something has been migrated to a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure.
Finally, the only reason to do any of this is to achieve cost savings and efficiencies. Showing the savings is critical. The savings includes cost avoidance of infrastructure purchases but it’s much more than that and it usually spans multiple budgets. It’s about facility savings, as well. Data Centers are wildly expensive to build and to maintain. They are built, outfitted and maintained based on the totality of the IT services the data center needs to support. When portions of data centers can be decommissioned or turned-down (because some IT services are now in the cloud) there are real savings. When data center expansions or builds can be avoided altogether, there are tremendous savings. When new IT services can be added because the facility and/or personnel resources can now support it, the organization is no longer stymied. A partner with a full-range of cloud services capabilities can be an invaluable resource to an organization seeking the cost savings and efficiencies that the cloud can bring.
Jack Nichols is the Federal Cloud Client Executive for
