The three top issues currently facing the enterprise IT industry are cloud readiness, security and creating value, but what does this actually mean for business? Channel partners and resellers are facing a critical decision: how to move both their own organisations and their customers to the cloud in a non-disruptive yet effective way. Most businesses are ready to transition to the cloud, but the real challenge is selecting a provider that can not only meet the demands of today’s market, but also the IT demands of the future.
Cloud readiness is one of the many buzz phrases around today. Senior executives frequently ask their IT departments and providers how the company can benefit from moving workloads to the cloud, and why core business applications aren’t already in the cloud. As organisations move to the cloud, there are several entry points to consider, including ready-made Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings from the likes of salesforce.com, and internal enterprise architecture options.
While SaaS options offer an easy on-ramp for ready-made offerings, there are many more factors to consider when developing services internally. These include issue such as private, public or hybrid models, the ability to move workloads into and out of the cloud, compatible operating systems and the cost of dedicated hardware. Buying a cloud-ready solution will be a lot less work than developing your own but it will not be personalised to your business or offer you competitive advantage as it is available to all.
As organisations think about their cloud strategy, hybrid cloud has emerged as perhaps the most viable model.
The term “hybrid cloud” commonly refers to cloud management that spans both on-premise (or dedicated resources at a hosting provider) and multi-tenant public clouds.
The idea behind a hybrid cloud is that resources can be made available to users as easily as if they were accessing a public cloud while keeping the process under centralised policy-based IT management.
Cloud computing has certainly gained a level of market maturity and we are well on our way to a time when it is becomes the accepted norm of operating IT infrastructure. In the meantime, for many, cloud is still a thrilling new technology alternative that holds promises of huge potential but that should be approached in the same deliberate and thoughtful way as any other strategic IT product.
X-head] Security
Security of applications and data is a key area. Cost savings mean nothing if the solution your organisation is deploying cannot guarantee the security of your data.
At one level, protecting against data breaches in the datacentre is a fairly straightforward security initiative. IT professionals have been doing this for decades. However, times are changing and some of these changes relate to connectedness and scale. While security models have been shifting from walled perimeters to defence-in-depth, cloud-based applications made up of services from multiple sources requires organisations to think about security and data in new and innovative ways.
X-Head] Creating value
The key to being cloud-ready is to be flexible. Open cloud architectures are built on lower cost industry standard hardware with software technology built, maintained and updated by the open source community. There is no vendor lock-in, and organisations can experience improved value through reduced costs and increased security.
Businesses are often tied into one vendor and this can cause major issues, including products not keeping pace with technology advances, limited integration choices and high maintenance costs, cost of switching and inability to implement best-of-breed solutions from a broad vendor base.
Companies which rely on technology as a competitive differentiator in their businesses should avoid vendor lock-in situations and leverage the best technologies available to solve their most pressing problems to deliver tangible business results.
Only an open hybrid cloud can deliver on the full value and promise of cloud computing. It brings the efficiency, agility, and cost benefits of cloud to more of your IT infrastructure and to more applications and more users.
An open hybrid cloud leverages your existing IT investments in hardware, software, and training–letting you build a cloud in an evolutionary way while reducing costs and risks. It lets you select the best technologies for your users, now and in the future it prevents one vendor from controlling access to the greatest innovation, the lowest costs, and the best economic model.
Many businesses have already embraced change and adopted new business models. These organisations have created their competitive differentiation and have already moved to where their customers want to be in the future.
Opportunities for partners and resellers
Through discussions with companies that have made the decision to take the journey towards an open hybrid cloud, partners and resellers will get a much deeper understanding of how these companies operate and where they are heading. Moving to a hybrid cloud model will put the partner or reseller in a great position to offer the building blocks and services to jointly build an open hybrid cloud environment with their customer.
The hybrid cloud is bringing together both public and private clouds. As a result it is strengthening relationships between businesses and resellers.
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