How Will Enterprise Cloud Computing & Services Disrupt IT in Coming Years?
I had the opportunity to represent Verizon at Cisco Live’s Cloud Executive Panel this year. The panel included SVPs, CTOs, and other senior executives in the enterprise cloud space with representation from Verizon as the service provider, Cisco as the platform vendor, Kaiser Permanente as a cloud customer and other executives representing application and data integration services. The discussion focused on how Internet of Everything, continuous delivery and other innovative concepts are pushing IT organizations to evolve at a more rapid pace than before. There is a significant push at all organizational levels within the enterprise to:
a) Identify the real unmet needs of the business
b) Understand how cloud computing really meets these unmet needs
c) Understand the different permutations of cloud (public, private, hybrid)
d) Determine real limitations, if any, in the cloud
e) Develop strategies to overcome these limitations to solve business problems
The true unmet need of enterprise customers is to run workloads efficiently and cost-effectively to improve business performance. When push comes to shove businesses don’t really care about gigahertz of CPU, gigabytes of Memory and terabytes of Storage capacity, or even the number of servers and network ports and storage arrays. They want technology to solve a business problem – and if they find the right solution they’ll invest in the appropriate technology. IT departments need to recognize this and focus on delivering solutions not just technology. They need to think about how they will drive profits, not just how to lower expenses.
Enterprise cloud computing can help. In many cases, IT departments in the enterprise are already offering on premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). They need to move up a stack, add automated provisioning and expansions of the underlying infrastructure, stitch together the resulting IaaS platform into the cloud and begin to provide workload centric, SLA-based, services instead of application/hardware based services. Additionally, they need to develop a hybrid cloud strategy focused on seamless workload mobility between different services. A mix of on premise, off-premise enterprise and commodity cloud with the ability to move workloads between all as needed and on-demand will be the strategic direction for CIOs in the next five years.
The panel discussed the differences between enterprise cloud services and commodity clouds including public and private options. There is a place for all permutations of cloud platforms in the enterprise. Businesses may choose several or all of these options depending on their specific needs. For example, businesses may reduce significant capital and operational cost by moving small scale test workloads into commodity clouds, development and production into public enterprise clouds. Due to unique requirements such as security requirements, high-scale performance, etc. some businesses choose to deploy private off-premise clouds – fully managed by their cloud service provider – while still taking advantage of capital and operational cost savings opportunities. Many businesses will choose on premise clouds for workloads they are not comfortable moving into shared or off-premise clouds. The key requirement here is to enable seamless workload mobility for on premise to off-premise cloud extensions with enterprise class features such as security, reliability and availability SLAs.
Cloud represents a significant opportunity for IT organizations and will disrupt the way IT work is accomplished. Enterprises want to focus entirely on their core business and not be distracted or get left behind because they are unable to keep up with the ever changing technology due to lack of capital or resources. IT organizations have already begun evolving their strategies to include some level of workloads permanently located in the cloud. There will always be some workloads businesses will never migrate to the cloud; however, in the next five years enterprise clouds services will be an essential, if not the primary IT strategy to help businesses succeed.
