Organizations are increasingly opting to migrate some or all of their IT services and functions to the cloud for a wide variety of reasons. Consequently, colocation and data center providers are seeing a huge uptake in their private and hybrid cloud solutions. But today’s “private” cloud has evolved from the private infrastructure of yesteryear, just as cloud solutions have undergone an overhaul to keep up with changing customer demands.
Sungard Availability Services has been in business for more than 30 years, offering a variety of managed IT services through a worldwide network of data storage and colocation facilities. The company has seen firsthand how its customers’ needs have evolved and how cloud infrastructure has morphed to keep up with demands.
According to Simon Withers, vice president, Global Cloud Product for Sungard, traditional private cloud setups consisted of dedicated infrastructure within a data center, with customers having some control over their equipment while turning over routine functions to colocation providers. This model can be both expensive and inefficient, however, leading service providers to offer a new breed of cloud.
“The Hosted Private Cloud typically offers dedicated cloud infrastructure with cloud-like management and orchestration and more of an Opex business model over a set term,” said Withers. “SaaS and IaaS have [also] offered increasingly greater degrees of flexibility, efficiency, performance, and optimized availability. There are a number of understood and known business critical implementations for shared cloud based on a SaaS capability, however, there is still some reluctance in moving to the cloud.”
Withers said that some of Sungard’s customers, and especially those in vertical markets ruled by strict governance and compliance requirements, prefer dedicated solutions for some types of services. And those customers have driven growth of the company’s private cloud offering, which is a set of private services featuring open source orchestration and automation with an Opex pricing model. Industries with the greatest rates of cloud adoption include financial and business services, IT outsourcers, manufacturing, retail, telecom and ISV providers.
The uptake in private services does not mean that customers aren’t interested in the efficiencies and costs savings afforded by hybrid solutions. According to Withers, hybridization is happening within a number of levels of infrastructure like BSS as well as the push for common orchestration through open source, and common credentials and authentication. Those initiatives are being driven by a need for uniformity, while customers also want to maintain the private services that offer them high levels of security and customization.
“What we are seeing at Sungard Availability Services is high growth in private services,” said Withers. “Ironically, at the same time, the majority of our managed cloud implementations are hybrid IT with increasing prevalence in the last twenty-four months.”
No matter what type of implementation they end up with, companies routinely make a number of common mistakes when evaluating a move to the cloud. Withers outlined five important factors all organizations should take into account when contemplating a partial or full migration of services to the cloud.
Poor sizing and definition is one of the most common mistakes. Sungard has observed that when companies attempt to migrate to the cloud on their own, they struggle with making a clean and timely transition because they don’t have a comprehensive sense of the demands on all the layers of their infrastructure. And this can lead to disruptive downtime, ultimately impacting their business.
Withers also mentioned that organizations can be overzealous about both the scope and the timeline or making a move to the cloud. Sungard believes making a phased implementation in manageable chunks is the best way to migrate, with backup and mitigation plans in place if something doesn’t go according to plan. Failure to test carefully is also a common problem, not only for functionality but for load balancing and scalability. Companies should have a clear sense of how each cloud implementation will be used to handle specific services and what impact changes in traffic will have on performance.
Another common mistake made when migrating to
the cloud is not evaluating applications individually to ensure they can be easily ported. Oftentimes, applications are dependent on infrastructure, middleware and management tools and these relationships need to be considered and handled appropriately when making the migration to the cloud.
Finally, poor governance and failure to take business rules into account can be a major problem. “Just because something can live in the cloud isn’t to say it should,” warned Withers. Regulatory and compliance mandates must be taken into consideration with any cloud implementation, as well as internal company policies to ensure businesses are not open to security vulnerabilities.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
