CLOUD COMPUTING—IT’S ALL ABOUT

THE SERVICE. Brochure

Fulfilling the promise of the cloudFor IT decision makers, the cloud has become alluring with its enticements of flexibility, agile development, rapid innovation, and reductions in capital costs and infrastructure complexity. But much like the aromas drifting from a restaurant kitchen, the promise goes unfulfilled until the dish is plated and the waiter delivers it to the dining room. It’s the service that satisfies. Consequently, as you consider a cloud computing model for your organization, take heed of how cloud-based services will be delivered and consumed to match the business goals of the enterprise. That means developing an IT strategy that can meet the appetites for a broad range of workloads, characterized by varied expectations for security, availability, performance, and compliance standards.

The emergence of the cloud compels IT to become a service broker for the enterprise. It’s an evolving role that requires you to determine if you should build IT services or purchase them from a third party, then subsequently manage the services with an insight into their unique requirements. It also requires a firm understanding of SLAs and security standards for each area of the business. This is a task that’s best achieved by striking a balance among IT domains, spanning traditional internal IT, private, and public cloud environments. Such a balance makes it possible to deliver the right services―represented by the right applications―in the right environment, at the right cost, and at the right time.

But how do you achieve the right IT balance for delivering cloud services?

Serving a balanced IT dietUnder the traditional IT model, you were responsible for provisioning and managing internal IT assets to meet specific project needs. And with the application delivery process safely behind an enterprise firewall, you could maintain full control and visibility to service standards such as performance, availability, and security. But with the rising expectations for quickly delivering high-quality applications within increasingly tighter budgets, you should be embracing alternatives to the traditional IT model. Cloud computing provides you with the potential to offer new levels of flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency. But conversion to the cloud also calls for a shift in perspective.

It’s no longer possible to be just a builder and manager of technology; it’s your role to be a broker of IT services across the enterprise. Consequently, you need to design an IT environment that offers the flexibility, efficiency, and security to meet these expectations and aligns services with business needs. The emerging best practice calls for an optimal mix of traditional IT with private cloud and public cloud sources―a hybrid delivery model―that offers a reliable, secure, and compliant end-to-end experience.

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Essential attributes of cloud servicesThe transition to a cloud-based services model is an incremental journey that starts with the goal of establishing an optimal service mix. With that goal in place, the next step is to acquire a lay of the land―identifying the scope of services and applications demanded across the enterprise while understanding the requirements for each service:

1. Flexibility and speed: Understand how often a particular service needs to be initiated or changed. Frequent change is a clear trigger that a cloud model is likely to be a good fit. Additionally it’s important to know how quickly the service will be expected by the user, how long it will be needed, when it will be stopped, or how much demand will fluctuate.

2. Compliance: Establish usage policies to ensure that services comply with business requirements, and implement a mechanism to audit these policies and prompt remediation should the services fall out of compliance. Compliance requirements don’t preclude cloud. In fact, private cloud models can even simplify compliance by automatically tracking changes.

3. Security: Protect against external threats and safeguard mission-critical data and intellectual property. Again, tight security requirements don’t preclude cloud, but deeper due diligence is a must.

4. Availability: Understand the uptime expectations. While for some services, cloud can provide disaster recovery capabilities that are more cost effective than in traditional IT environments, it may not suit the most demanding applications.

5. Cost: Evaluate the total cost of managing and maintaining an application. It may be beneficial to change the emphasis of your IT budget away from asset ownership and maintenance to operational expenses. Leveraging traditional and cloud resources can reduce IT investments and complexity and shift workloads during periods of peak capacity.

6. Performance: Success is measured by the end-user experience. Ensure that your application response times can adhere to SLAs, and prepare to monitor performance to meet ongoing requirements.

7. Customization: Assess how important it is that a service be tailored specifically to the requirements of your business. The less customization needed, the more suitable the cloud becomes.

Core, context, and the cloudAs you consider a cloud model, the overarching challenge for the IT leader is to determine which applications can be delivered from public cloud sources and which should be managed internally in private clouds, and which should stay in traditional IT environments. One effective approach is to distinguish between applications that are “core” to the business and those that are “context.”

In his book Dealing with Darwin, economist Geoffrey Moore defines these concepts. A business activity is “core,” Moore says, if it represents an investment that sets the business apart from its competitors. By contrast, the business activity is “context” if it can be categorized as a support function. Moore uses Tiger Woods to further elaborate on this distinction. For Woods, golf is clearly his core business. His product endorsements, while highly lucrative, are only possible because of his success as a golfer and therefore represent the context.

Applying this method, you can identify the less-sensitive context applications in your portfolio, where factors such as customization and availability may not be such a high priority. Context applications are typically support services, such as human resources or CRM. Core applications are those that are mission critical to the enterprise and represent a competitive advantage. These can include applications that constitute proprietary data and intellectual property—necessitating greater security and availability.

Once you’ve drawn the demarcation between context and core in your portfolio, you’re in a position to determine the ideal sourcing strategy. Context applications are more easily entrusted to a public cloud environment, or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Core applications are better suited to a private cloud―the deployment of infrastructure as a service (IaaS)―or in a traditional IT environment.

HP CLOUD DISCOVERY WORKSHOPThe HP Cloud Discovery Workshop simplifies the cloud by using human-sized displays, which lay out strategies to utilize this complex new computing environment. Our experts will discuss explanations of the possibilities, risks, and business implications of the cloud. They also make recommendations for using the cloud as part of a service provider and portfolio strategy for your business.

This workshop targets C-level decision makers, IT managers, strategists, architects, and key business stakeholders. It helps organizations quickly get stakeholder buy-in and make decisions about cloud opportunities while getting everyone on the same page and level of understanding. The workshop is designed to be highly interactive and visual. It provides attendees with an opportunity to discuss shared services transformations, cloud concepts, service portfolio concepts, governance, security, business case issues, and HP solutions.

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Key takeaways•Cloud implementation requires IT leaders to become

the builder AND the broker of IT services.•Effective delivery of cloud-based services requires end-

to-end visibility of the service needs.•An optimal mix of traditional IT, private, and public

cloud (hybrid delivery) environments is necessary to support a diverse workload.

•Identify core applications and context applications before determining how to deliver those applications (internally or externally).

Take the first step toward defining your cloud future by visiting http://www.hp.com/go/cloud.

Talk to your HP representative to sign up for an HP Cloud Discovery Workshop.

HP CLOUDSYSTEMHP CloudSystem provides IT with a unified way to offer, provision, and manage services across private clouds, public cloud providers, and traditional IT. It enables the flexibility to scale capacity within and outside the data center, it’s extensible to existing IT infrastructure, and it can support heterogeneous environments.

HP CloudSystem enables businesses to build and manage cloud services across private, public, and hybrid clouds—without having to know, or care, whether those services come from the CloudSystem “on-premises” resources, from your existing infrastructure, or from the public domain.

HP CloudSystem makes it easy for IT to present cloud services to internal customers in a way that makes resources (such as services, applications, servers, storage, and networks) flexible, dynamic, and on demand. It makes it easier to take on outside competitors in a way that is secure, scalable, and extensible.

© Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

4AA3-9222ENW, Created January 2012