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Over last couple of years, cloud computing has become one of the most promising IT solutions. The promise of cloud computing is quite clear, reduction of operational expenses by maximizing the utilization’s of IT infrastructure. The utilization rate going from single digit to 60-70% is not uncommon using carefully designed cloud solution.
In order to achieve such goal, what are the experiences and patterns that are emerging from the early adoption of cloud computing? The adoption of cloud computing can discussed from many perspectives. So even to discuss emerging trends, it makes sense to keep the same level of discussion.
Client side vs. Server Side Virtualization: The growth of cloud computing on server side has been a spectacular 1000% over last one year. On the other side, desktop virtualization seems quite negligible. This makes perfect sense as the server side infrastructure remains stable and is heavy on investment.
Core vs. Non-core Applications: Most of the applications that are moving to cloud computing in the first wave are non-core applications. Not that core applications cannot be or should not be hosted in virtual environment, it’s where you start with cloud computing. Most of the organizations are starting with non-cores applications first. Once they see value and become confident of cloud computing, even core applications get moved to cloud as concerns such as security, privacy and governance get resolved in early pilots.
Private vs. Public Cloud: What type of cloud one should select? This is a relatively complex decision as compared to previous two. There are many factors that play a part, core vs. non-core application, security & privacy concerns for the application, governance issues, size of organization, growth of company (and so supporting IT infrastructure). It has been observed that lot of companies are adopting a hybrid approach. The hybrid approach certainly provides lot more flexibility to an organization. In general, companies that are smaller in size tend to lean more towards public clouds as it provides them a low capital expenditure solution with options to grow rapidly. Companies that are sensitive towards security and privacy tend to adopt private clouds.
Approach towards Cloud Adoption: It has been observed that the approach towards adopting cloud cannot be piecemeal. An organization cannot look at one project and try to optimize it. By taking that approach, operational cost of that project might become lower but overall cost of the organization will become higher. It is critical that one looks at the portfolio of projects an organization is undertaking as a holistic program from cloud enablement perspective and then drives the execution plan from there.
Change in IT Department: All of these selections, different approaches are certainly changing the IT departments. IT departments are becoming heavier on skills like strategic planning, business analysis, project management and quality assurance.
There are several types of cloud computing deployment scenarios. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is emerging as the preferred provider of the de facto definition of cloud computing and the distribution models, seen here with some ESRI examples.
The public cloud is the most commonly referenced regarding the topic of cloud computing, where the infrastructure and applications are owned by the organization selling cloud services. However, since many traditional vendors and users are not quite ready to jump into public cloud computing or are restricted from doing so, the cloud service tiers are replicated within a private cloud environment, behind the firewall, and maintained within the parameters of the host organization. Many believe that the sweet spot for cost optimization in an organization will rely on a delicate balance of public, or community, and private clouds. However, since this hybrid cloud solution is commonly bound together by proprietary technology, it will only be embraced by enterprise computing in the future as standards are developed.
On-Demand GIS and Mapping: ESRI and the Cloud
ESRI considers cloud computing and technology important in the development and vision of the ArcGIS platform. Several options are available for companies that want to improve productivity and efficiency while reducing expenses and freeing up valuable IT resources to concentrate on newer business initiatives.
ArcGIS Server is a viable candidate in an on-demand architecture. Cached map tiles can be uploaded to cloud computing vendors, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), to create a data center in the cloud.
ESRI's current SaaS offering is ESRI Business Analyst Online, which allows the consumer to combine GIS technology with extensive demographic, consumer, and business data for the entire United States. This enables the delivery of on-demand analysis, boardroom-ready reports, and maps over the Web. Because ESRI hosts Business Analyst Online, consumers need not worry about managing data or technology updates. Furthermore, ESRI developers can leverage ESRI's PaaS offerings via the ArcGIS Web mapping APIs, such as JavaScript, Flex, and Silverlight/WPF, hosted by ESRI on ArcGIS Online.
ESRI has been providing software plus services (S+S) for some time, allowing customers to leverage their on-premises solutions with on-demand services. ESRI's ArcGIS Online map and GIS services provide S+S users immediate access to cartographically designed, seamless basemaps to which they can easily add their own data in an ESRI on-premises product. MapIt is another implementation of software plus services, allowing business information to be displayed and more accurately analyzed through access to online data, basemaps, and task services from ESRI and Bing Maps, as well as through support for the Windows Azure Platform and Microsoft's SQL Azure. As a community cloud, the ArcGIS Online Content Sharing Program enables users and organizations to contribute geographic data content. Leveraging Amazon's EC2 and S3 compute and storage services allows ESRI to host the content and provide access 24/7. ArcGIS Explorer users can consume ready-to-use basemaps and layers from ArcGIS Online Services in the S+S model. And ArcLogistics provides software and access to online services that help you create optimal vehicle routes and schedules.
As cloud computing continues to move farther into mainstream IT to become a convention in business, ESRI will continue to offer solutions to allow customers and prospects success in the cloud.
Despite a rising interest in cloud-based services and the benefits they offer, organizations have been adopting a cautious approach towards deploying these services. So where does India stand on the cloud computing map and what lies ahead for organizations looking to walk towards the clouds?
A Walk In The Cloud
Though Cloud Computing is one of the most discussed topics in the current IT implementations scenario, adoption levels are low globally and especially in India. While organizations across the country, such as Bharti, Ashok Leyland, Asian Paints, Infosys, Maruti, and Tata Elxsi, are tuning in to the cloud computing station, certain concerns prevent them from buying the basket of services that the cloud has to offer.
An organization in the country could essentially opt for any of the services provided by global cloud vendors such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, Cisco, EMC, and others. However, due to certain challenges, the quality of these services within India are debatable. Also, it is only recently that companies such as Netmagic, CSC, and Wipro have looked at offering such services from within India.
There are customers in the country who have adopted cloud services by either global or local cloud providers, but very few are pro-actively talking about it. This nascent level of adoption coupled with the ‘emerging’ image of cloud services has made it difficult to gauge an addressable market in India, the success or failure of these services here, and the associated challenges.
Cloud: Value For Money?
The cost at which the vendor offers these services needs to justify the level of service that will be provided. If the cost of having data and applications on the cloud over a period of time surpasses the cost of having it on premise, it would not really make sense for a customer to adopt a cloud-based solution. Instead it would make better business sense to deploy the necessary infrastructure on the company’s premises and bear the additional investment costs.
The Power And Bandwidth Challenge
One of the primary issues in India continues to be bandwidth. In some cases, bandwidth availability and price is an issue; in others, the quality of the available bandwidth is an issue.
“Bandwidth is low in emerging countries such as India. User experience at a speed of 8-10 Mbps is not that great when offering a cloud-based solution. Providing an entire desktop experience to a client via the cloud, in a country like India, would require a high bandwidth pipe which can bring such an experience from the cloud to the user’s dumb client,” says Diptarup Chakraborty, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner.
“Most previous IT models are based on large internal networks and few Internet touch points. Cloud computing changes that model and often requires a much larger connection to the cloud to prevent latency issues,” says Tom Frazier, Strategic Account Director, Verizon Business.
Shoppers Stop’s decision to look at cloud-based services as a solution to some of its business challenges has been affected by bandwidth challenges. Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate and Group CTO, Shoppers Stop, says, “One of the challenges we foresee is the pressure on connectivity and the associated costs with incremental bandwidth.”
Power availability is another issue that could hinder vendors from offering cloud services from within India. Many parts of the country, which are key business centers, face a power shortage. Areas around these towns or cities are plagued by power outages and load shedding to compensate for the higher power demand by locations having a chunk of industries and other commercial infrastructure.
How Secure Is The Cloud?
An issue which could impede cloud implementations for some time is security. This issue is not only applicable to cloud services in India but also to other countries globally. Since data will be stored outside the premises, the access to this data is a cause of concern for organizations looking to adopt cloud-based solutions. With data being stored remotely, the organization has no control over the security of this data since it is the cloud vendor who enforces the security and compliance measures.
The Interoperability Factor
Interoperability and vendor lock-in are key issues for organizations looking to offer cloud services and for those looking to adopt them. A cloud vendor may have proprietary file, application, and data formats defined for customers deploying its cloud services. On one hand, this requires the customer to rewrite his applications to port them on the cloud; on the other, this renders him dependent on the cloud for his data and applications. For instance, applications on Salesforce.com are written in Apex while those on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud are written in Ruby; applications on Google App Engine are written in Python and Java.
Service Level Agreements
Service Level Agreement (SLA) in itself poses a challenge since customers already have apprehensions about the aforementioned risks when migrating to a cloud-based architecture. Having the infrastructure internal to the organization ensures that demands in terms of performance, security of applications and data, network speed and latency are met. However, if data and applications are stored in a third party data center, the vendor will be required to provide an additional level of assurance that requirements will be met, well within the costs.
The Case For Public Versus Private Cloud
In spite of the challenges surrounding the adoption of cloud services, it is not really the end of the road for organizations looking to adopt cloud services. To deploy services on a cloud, an organization needs to first decide whether it really needs to deploy cloud-based services. While the decision to deploy a cloud-based service is generally driven by the need to reduce the cost associated with growing storage or computing requirements, it is also necessary to decide whether cloud services are the best possible solution to an organization’s growing infrastructure demands.
‘Cloud’ Is The New Buzzword
Most analysts and vendors believe that India is still a nascent market for cloud-based services. However, with the large SME/SMB population and the emergence of many start-ups, the scope for growth is huge, provided the concerns over the adoption of these services are addressed. While there is a certain level of awareness about what services and benefits the cloud has to offer, organizations are taking a cautious approach and are still experimenting and testing both public and private cloud services.
Cloud computing and virtualization is changing the IT world in a way which is unprecedented in the last decades. The economy of scale and predicable performance is pushing cloud computing and virtualization across the enterprises. A significant part of the cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure available in world consists of reliable services delivered through data centers such as Amazon. In principle, cloud computing and virtualization customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider.
Although cloud computing is a very promising paradigm, still not every company would want to use public clouds. Especially for core applications and applications with sensitive data, enterprises lean towards private clouds. However, the advancement in the so called virtual private cloud area are currently bringing private and public clouds closer together.
There are many technology options available today for cloud computing and virtualization.
VMware
VMware was and still is a pioneer in the Virtualization and Cloud Area. Most of the virtualization and cloud software running in Enterprises today comes from VMware, where they still have an enourmous market share. High availability, performance, reliability and the advanced management infrastructure are the key strength of VMware.
VMware brings unique characteristics to the table, designed to serve the needs of businesses that want production-level performance and reliability.
VMware vSphere: Leveraging key technology advancements found in VMware vSphere, users get the assurance that applications can be managed, moved and operated in the cloud both public and private clouds. VMware vSphere aggregates and holistically manages large pools of infrastructure—processors, storage and networking as a seamless, flexible and dynamic.
VMware ESXi and VMWare Server: Besides vSphere, VMware also offers VMware ESXi, which can be used as initial virtualization platform. Once a user is convinced of the value, he can move to more advanced VMware vSphere stack.
Both VMware vSphere and VMware ESXi / VMWare Server are players in the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) area.
Microsoft
Microsoft's cloud offerings have the Hyper-V and the Windows Azure Platform
Hyper-V: Microsoft Hyper-V is a traditional hypervisor based virtualization system that can be used for computers on an Intel basis (x86). Hyper-V can be used to enable a very cost effective virtualization solution. Hyper-V supports mixed OS virtualization with Windows and Linux systems. Hyper-V is a player in the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) area. This means that any type of OS and any type of applications / services on top of the OS can run on Hyper-V. There is no vendor lock-in since the applications / services running inside the Virtual Machine can easily be transferred to a different IaaS offering.
Windows Azure platform: Windows Azure Platform offers a familiar Microsoft development environment to create cloud applications and services. In order to do this, the Windows development environment is mandatory. Because Windows Azure offers a development platform, it represents a so called PaaS (Platform as a Service). This means an application or service has to be specifically developed to run and take advantage of this platform. Once developed, the application or service is bound to this platform (vendor lock-in). The big advantage is that the application / service can use the Azure built-in services that enable e.g. enormous scalability.
Open Source Hypervisors (Xen/KVM)
Xen is an open source hypervisor project initiated by Citrix. The latest offering Xen 4.0 adds significant memory and security optimizations that will drive virtualization infrastructure forward.
In the open source community it is currently unclear if Xen or the hypervisor that is built into the Linux kernel (=KVM = Kernel-based Virtual Machine) will prevail in the future. This unclarity will further strengthen the already very strong position of commercial hypervisor vendors like VMware.
