Cloud (IaaS) is not just about Infrastructure!!

Thu, 20 May 2010 06:36:00 GMT

We were recently sponsors of the cloud expo in New York held from 19 April – 21 April. I had three speaking spots during the event and although I could blog about these, instead I've decided to write about a perception held by many who attended the conference which I disagree with. After attending a few presentation sessions and speaking with delegates and vendors, I get the impression that the true value of "cloud" is not clearly understood. Many people are talking about how cloud, in this case IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is great because it offers greater infrastructure flexibility and the ability to be more agile. Now don't get me wrong, this is true but I think many people are missing the key point...cloud is about automation *capability*.

Yes you can achieve infrastructure savings by scaling up and down based on demand. You no longer have to provision for your peak load and hence achieve savings on infrastructure. But if you take your application and your existing manual processes and put them on the cloud then this is all you will save. This is great, but as a percentage of your overall application / IT management costs the infrastructure piece is but a small chunk of the overall cost structure. Ask any CIO who is being honest with themselves what their greatest cost is, and they'll say people. So how does cloud – an infrastructure service – help save you money on people? Easy. Cloud is built for automation.

Automation capability is the most important benefit that IaaS provides. The emphasis here being on *capability*. On it's own cloud doesn't offer automation, you need to build that on top which is what we've done. However cloud is built around APIs and web 2.0 standards which allow you to integrate the infrastructure into your management workflows. What you give up in physical control by migrating to the cloud you gain in automation control. At Virtual Ark we take this concept further than any company I've spoken to. We're all about squeezing as much automation and integration out of the cloud as we can. We use a number of tools (third party and internally developed) to automatically provision and manage customer deployments on the cloud. For us deploying a new customer for one of our ISV partners can be as simple as filling out a web form and clicking go. Our automation engine integrates with all our management tools through APIs to do tasks such as provision the servers on the cloud, configure security services such as firewalling and VPNs and all the other services a managed service provider offers (DNS, monitoring, backups, service desk etc). What used to take days in a traditional environment can now be done in less than an hour with only 10 minutes of operational effort. Yes, scaling up and down is great, (of course we've automated this) but it's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the benefits that can be achieved by migrating applications to the cloud.

Now I'll be honest with you, it's not all sunshine and roses. The end product is fantastic but it's a lot of work to get there. We've invested considerable time and resources into automating our management services and we've still got a long way to go. In fact I think it's a never ending project as there's always more that can be automated. However in our case the effort is definitely worth it. We use automation across all of our customers – meaning the once off automation investment is used over and over again producing cost savings for us and our customers. Automation investment is definitely something that needs to be weighed up, there's no point automating tasks that are only performed once in a blue moon. But if you're a large enterprise there's a good chance the biggest benefit of the cloud will be automation, even if you don't know it yet!

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Emma

Cloud (IaaS) is not just about Infrastructure!!