Business Cloud: Beyond operational efficiency

Early adoption of cloud computing in Global 2000 enterprises has largely been for IT optimization.  The early drivers have been cost savings and faster infrastructure provisioning. As per a Forrester Report (Dec 2008) more than 70% of IT budget is spent on maintaining current IT infrastructure instead of adding new capabilities. So, organizations are looking to adopt cloud computing model for their enterprise applications for better utilization of the infrastructure investments. However, the true “disruptive” potential of cloud computing is in the way it is going to help these large enterprise reinvent themselves and their business models to meet the changing business landscape.

Digital Consumers are driving changes in the way products and services are being consumed and being delivered. Gen Y is sending more and more time online and their purchasing decisions are being influences by the social network. Increasing adoption of information and communications technologies is increasing pace of change; traditional in-house R&D will not be enough to match up. Organizations need to adopting open approach to innovation so that there is an ecosystem of partners and customers who are co-creating innovative solutions.

Recently I have co-authored an article on how business cloud can help organization to look beyond operational efficiency and explore new possibilities.

Read the article.

AHP based application portfolio assessment for Cloud migration

Cloud computing promises myriad benefits for enterprises including operational excellence through reduction of CAPEX and OPEX, faster processing of internet scale data, increased business agility. However there are considerable concern and skepticism because of varied reasons like security issues, loss of control over applications, compliance risks and lack of standards. Thus Cloud’s economies of scale, elasticity and flexibility can both be a friend or foe based on how it is put to practice in an enterprise. Some of the questions businesses need to ask themselves before undertaking cloud initiatives are:

• What factors should be considered for cloud enablement of enterprise applications? How to judge different competing priorities?
•  How to identify applications and services that are best suited for cloud migration based on business priority and technical fitment?
• How to prioritize applications and services for phase wise cloud enablement? How to avoid "gut feeling" and bring objectivity into the evaluation?
• What are the different risk involved?

There is a need, therefore, for an application portfolio assessment approach to evaluate enterprise applications suited for cloud environment.

Recently my article on how Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based multi-dimensional statistical approach can be used to undertake application portfolio assessment for cloud enablement got published on IBM developerWorks. The article explains different aspects of the assessment including criteria hierarchy definition, criteria prioritization and application scoring using examples and formula.

Read the full article.

On demand test and development environment on Cloud

Cloud computing holds a huge appeal for enterprise IT organizations in that it helps ramp up/down infrastructure resources in development and test environments based on demand. Test/development environment otherwise is a tricky area:

• In a typical IT environment, a considerable part of infrastructure is ear marked for development and testing environment, but they remain under utilized almost 90% of time.
• Discrepancies in test and production environments results in large number of problems faced by deployed product/project. However, creating a test environment which is an exact replica of production environment is not a practical option in most cases because of huge cost involved. Moreover testing has to be done for varied hardware/software platforms which the product has to support which is all the more expensive proposition.

Thus cloud based on-demand test/development platform will be of great value to IT managers:

• Substantial cost savings: no need of maintaining a dedicated testing/development environment which otherwise remains idle most of the time.
• Reduced time-to-market: development/testing will not have to wait for availability of a suitable environment and can be undertaken as planned.

A typical cloud based test/development platform should have provision for service request management, automated resource provisioning, resource management, configuration management, user self-service, charge back (metering and billing), SLA management.

What route should an enterprise take for realizing this platform – private, public or hybrid cloud?

• Enterprises that have already made considerable investment in internal test/development infrastructure should go for resource visualization and then transition to private cloud based test/development platform. The cloud can then be shared among business units or groups that don’t share resources today. Further usage of cloud resources can be tracked and charged back.
• At times private cloud will not be able to cater to all needs. Private cloud will be relatively smaller and can scale up to a certain limit. For example for very high end performance testing, once private cloud resources are exhausted, additional resource has to be provisioned from public cloud. Here we have hybrid cloud scenario.
• Small and medium enterprises that haven’t yet made substantial investment in internal test/development infrastructure can leverage public cloud for the same.