An introduction to Cloud Computing, based on the material from Rackspace’s, CloudU Certification. Chapter 6: Planning for the Cloud

1. CLOUD DISCOVERY
AN INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD COMPUTING
Chapter 6: Planning for the Cloud
By: Alain Charpentier

2. Table of content
• Technical consideration
– What application to move to the Cloud, Security
considerations, Compliance
considerations, Performance
considerations, Migration considerations
• External Business consideration
– What about sunk cost?, Vendor lock-in
• Internal Business consideration
– Shifting IT responsibilities, Objections

3. The driver of the Cloud revolution
• Virtualization – The ability to increase computing
efficiency
• Democratization of Computing – Bringing enterprise
scale infrastructure to small and medium businesses
• Scalability and fast provisioning – Bringing web scale
IT at a rapid pace
• Commoditization of infrastructure – Enabling IT to
focus on the strategic aspects of its role

4. What application to move
Applications that have significant
interaction with external applications or
services
Unique
Applicable Difficult to
to many replicate Applications that are not a point of
situations differentiation between the
Competitive organization and its competitors
advantage
Superior to the
Sustainable competition

5. Security & Compliance
• Organizations should be aware that security is a
partnership between the vendor and the user. They
should therefore clearly ascertain which aspects of
security are the responsibility of the vendor and
which are the responsibility of the user.
• Depending on the type of industry your organization
is involved in, there are a number of different
compliance requirements which may need to be
met. Examples of these include PCI, HIPAA, GAAP,
SOX, and IFRS.

6. Performance & Migration
• Performance
– It is importantly to accurately assess the performance requirements.
For example an application with high database transfer rates, very
high CPU or RAM requirements may be either difficult, or cost
prohibitive, to move to the Cloud.
• Migration
– The bandwidth cost of moving significant amounts of data to the
Cloud
– The time taken to transfer data in the migration process
– In the case of an application, the business process involved in a
migration (downtime, business continuity, training etc.)

7. Architecting for the Cloud
Traditional Web applications
architecture do not rapidly scale and
are not has redundant has Cloud
application.
Traditional applications may need to
be re-architected to fully benefit from
the capabilities offered by the Cloud

8. External Business Consideration
• Sunk cost
– It may make sense for organizations to look to a gradual move to the
Cloud. For an example, where existing applications and infrastructure
are being well utilized, an approach that sees excess capacity
delivered from the Cloud can be seen as appropriate.
• Planning for variability
– The rapid scaling and the on-demand pricing model of the Cloud can
bring great business benefits but new skills may need to be develop
within IT to effectively manage the Cloud.
• Vendor lock-in
– Cloud Computing provider tends to be much more transparent when
it comes to lock in and so organizations should be able to accurately
gauge the risks.

9. Internal Business Consideration
• Shifting IT responsibilities
– As with previous technological shifts, we believe this change in IT
responsibilities actually provides opportunities for IT staff. While
Cloud Computing certainly limits the opportunities for some skills, it
offers up some new ones in the areas of Cloud
management, application customization and agile development
• Formal qualification
– There is a distinct lack of formal Cloud Computing qualifications.
Whereas IT staff can choose from a plethora of formal, specialist
training for traditional IT, in the Cloud world this is not the case.
While this is not surprising given the relative newness of the
Cloud, nonetheless end users feel uncomfortable with the lack of
certification

10. QUESTIONS ?