Tag Archive | "IaaS"

Understanding the Different Levels of Cloud Computing

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS


Business Service Management Commentary on IT Service Management, Service Level Management & Performance ManagementBusiness Service Management Commentary on IT Service Management, Service Level Management & Performance ManagementAs you look at cloud computing, it’s useful to understand that there are three types of services offered:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This gives you access to storage and servers in the cloud. Examples of vendors in this space include Amazon, IBM, Rackspace and Verizon. The advantage of this approach is that you can expand and contract as needed. If you anticipate having a rush coming such as a big sale, you can expand your servers to meet the increased demand, then go back to your normal numbers when the sale period is over. It prevents your system from going down from because you don’t have the server capacity to handle the traffic. This elasticity (scaling capacity up and back as needed) and paying for what you use are two of the hallmarks of using IaaS.
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS): This service provides a platform on which you can build applications usually linked to a particular vendor. A good example of this is Salesforce.com’s Force.com service, a cloud-based development environment for building applications on top of the Salesforce.com service. Force.com gives you access to a number of developer services you can tap into to help you build your applications.
  • Software as a Service (SaaS): Perhaps the most recognized of the three cloud computing types, it provides access to a software service in the cloud.  There are countless examples of this available today  such as Google Docs or Gmail, which gives you access to word processing and email in the cloud. No documents or mail are stored locally and you can access your content from anywhere. All backups and updates are handled on the back end by the provider, greatly simplifying software maintenance.

Once you have a basic understanding of how cloud services break down, it’s useful to think about how these different levels of cloud services could affect your IT environment, how comfortable you might be farming out some of these services to the cloud and what impact it would have on your ability to understand and monitor these different services as part of your overall IT job function.

Photo by Lucien Savluc on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Where Does the Cloud Go from Here? – ITBusiness Edge

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, IaaS, SaaS, Service Providers, Service Value


The Hub Commentary_

Wow!  We haven’t adopted or widely deployed the Cloud and are already asking where it goes.  As I’ve said many times before as part of a business service management practice, it is a delivery vehicle and as part of defining services we must evaluate the best delivery vehicle for the service based upon cost and value to the organization.

As a game changing technology, it is not the killer app.  It provides flexibility in capacity as an IaaS, it provides a low cost option as SaaS for commodity services and enables your in-house staff to concentrate on the value add to the business.  The Cloud will not grow your revenue as a technology, but as an enabler and a delivery vehicle in the right situations.

In the end, it takes a sound business service management practice and strategy to drive growth and be a game changer in revenue to your organization.

How do you define game changer in your data center?

Michele

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Even as many enterprises continue to struggle to determine what, exactly, the cloud is, there is perhaps an even more important question to ponder: “Where, exactly, is the cloud going?”  (Read Full Article…)

Are Open Systems Inevitable in the Cloud? – ITBusinessEdge

Tags: Business Service Management, IaaS, Integration, IT Management, Open Systems


The Hub Commentary_

Today is the topic of integration in Business Service Management land.  The nature of taking advantage of cloud and dynamic resources will require open connectivity.  The subscriber maintains the responsibility for overall management of services to their customers.  This in and of itself screams of open systems and integration platforms.

The role of the data center is changing and will continue to rapidly evolve as the service provider, stitching together the best services to drive the growth of it’s business and operate the business efficiently.  This will require integration of subscribed to software services and the sharing of corporate data, integration of management technologies and feeds from the infrastructure running the workloads the subscriber pushes off premise.  The workloads themselves will need to be intelligent and service enabled providing a view of risk of failure as an early warning system just as organizations have today.

In my opinion, this is the reason IaaS is so popular as a first stab at the cloud.  Providing hardware is a bit less complex, but still requires feeds of data for management and monitoring.

Are you considering your integration strategy as you go ‘To The Cloud’?

Michele

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Few people would argue against the efficacy of open, interoperable systems. And yet market forces being what they are, a fully open IT universe has forever been hopelessly out of reach.  (Read Full Article…)

Verizon Buys Terremark – Gartner Blogs

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Gartner, IaaS, Service Providers


The Hub Commentary_

This week there has been significant buzz around this acquisition and I’ve held off posting and referring to any of the articles.  Lydia of Gartner sums it up well with her blog of yesterday.  One in debt without a sales team and the other in need of data center footprints and a sales force in need of a ticket to the CIO.

Infrastructure and the management of it has no doubt become the commodity in IT.  The acceleration to the cloud and subscription or back to the old days of timeshare on the IBM computers is here.  Now the trick is architecting your services, managing them and the service provider, while balancing costs and value.  This new model has much to offer and is the future, but has many pitfalls that can be a cost drain.

I expect before year end we will hear about how the model fails and what you will find in the middle of what will be a very lengthy article will be a lack of proper vendor and service management.  Renting the infrastructure does not alleviate the instrumentation responsibility to make the workloads intelligent and service enabled back to your management platform or the integration across providers and platforms to manage the end-to-end service.  Then there is that pesky relationship with the vendor.

How are you architecting your workloads of the future?

Michele

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A couple of days ago, Verizon bid to acquire Terremark, for a total equity value of $1.4 billion. My colleague Ted Chamberlin and I are issuing a First Take on the event to Gartner clients; if you’re looking for advice and the official Gartner position, you’ll want to read that. This blog post is just some personal musings on the reasons for the acquisition.  (Read Full Article…)