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Cloud computing has reached the next stage of its evolution. Adoption of cloud is rising rapidly across a wide variety of industries, while cloud architecture has been re-envisioned and re-designed according to software-centric principles by cloud providers. This stage in the development of cloud computing is impacting the industry in critical ways. To understand the impact, we need to examine the context and features of the cloud as it stands today.
IT is empowering the business
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Today’s cloud customers span the C-suite and beyond. Chief Information Officers, Chief Digital Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, VPs and Directors of Product Development, R&D directors all purchase and utilize cloud services. In fact, non-traditional IT buyers (like Chief Marketing Officers) make more than half of today’s cloud purchases.
This expansion of cloud customers marks an evolution in the role of IT and requires a shift in IT mentality. IT leaders today need to adopt the mindset that they are business leaders and educators. Given the paramount role that technology plays across business units and departments, IT now plays a pivotal role in business operations and outcomes. To rise to the challenge, IT leaders must build and grow relationships with stakeholders and develop a thorough understanding of the specific needs of business units adopting cloud – while educating them in how cloud can simplify their day-to-day tasks.
Cloud providers must in turn tailor customer service to the needs of their diverse range of customers. Just like the IT department, cloud providers should have a deep understanding of cloud customers’ business objectives and challenges to deliver the optimal technology solution.
It’s software-defined
We are in the early stages of the Software-Defined Everything (“SDE”) era, which includes Software-Defined Networks (SDN), Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) and Software-Defined Storage (SDS). The Software-Defined model gives customers greater control over their workloads and helps facilitate predictable performance -- a key benefit that was noticeably missing from cloud services in the past and prevented customers from receiving the best value for their investment. This level of control, flexibility and ROI is only the beginning.
Resiliency has reached a new level – literally
Cloud hardware is moving towards a commodity platform that is intended to fail in place rather than have a level of resiliency. In this context, commodity platform refers to white labeled hardware that is not from an industry name such as HP, Cisco, Dell, etc. These platforms are becoming more popular in cloud provider environments because of density and low cost. The term ‘fail in place’ refers to allowing hardware to fail while the hypervisor moves the guest operating system away from the failed hardware to a functional location. Availability of the guest Operating System (OS) and application is improved because the incident is reduced to the relocation of workload versus repair of hardware.
A commodity platform is usually low cost because there is little in the way of redundant hardware. The platform becomes redundant when processing and memory power are grouped together under a logical software layer such as vSphere or Xen (hypervisors). Failed hardware is replaced in normal maintenance cycles versus in an unexpected window as was the case in the past.
There was a time when everything had to have a mate for resiliency to occur: two network cards, two storage controllers, redundant fans, etc. This was all held within a server chassis, but it was expensive to maintain and took up a lot of space. In the era of SDE, modern clouds have boiled away a lot of the physical bulk with software and virtual components and now, redundancy at the compute level has been reduced from the server level to the chassis level. For the customer, this is more of a cultural change than anything else.
Mobile applications and 24/7 commerce are drivers for higher levels of availability. Because of this change, the industry has started to move away from hardware resiliency to a software defined model. Modern services do not solely rely on the presence of multiple physical devices in a single location to provide availability. Services that are aware of changing availability patterns and can migrate workloads to different data centers or geographic locations provide an advantage to the 21st century business leader.
Data encryption is the key to security
Security continues to be the main concern among potential cloud customers. Even as enterprises increasingly move mission-critical applications to cloud environments, worries about data protection remain, and understandably so. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, encryption protects data in the cloud and can be deployed in different forms to match the cloud environment. There are multiple methods for encrypting data in the cloud. From full disk encryption—available for businesses with full access to the operating systems—to hypervisor based encryption—which is placed between the cloud environment and private network or data center to encrypt and decrypt data in real time, and everything in between, encryption methods can mitigate risks in specific use cases and offer great options for businesses unable to hire full-time security talent.
