Winning with Private Cloud

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Today there are many enterprises which are migrating from traditional Datacenter environs to Private Cloud scenarios. Here are some of their best practices, challenges and solutions.  At a time when enterprise move towards embracing the next generation technology, traditional datacenters are typically fragmented environments, with various applications installed on different types of operating systems, often running on specialized hardware. Server virtualization is the first step to simplify this but typically when it comes to application deployment this is still done the old-fashioned way, meaning these applications are installed and configured manually. This is not only a time consuming process, it’s also error-prone.

Multi-tier enterprise applications are increasingly being deployed in private cloud environments to realize the benefits of consolidation, flexibility and reduced deployment time. However, administrators still follow the same time-consuming practices for installing, configuring, and deploying all software (operating system, database, middleware, applications, etc.) in virtual machines that have traditionally been prescribed for physical environments.

The Migration Scenario
When migrating enterprise applications to a private cloud, a new approach is required. Software components must be standardized and pre-configured in the form of software appliances to be rapidly deployed. These appliances must be easily customizable to suit the unique requirements of the particular deployment.
Enterprises have begun initiatives to build private clouds to reap the same benefits of scale, agility, and cost efficiencies of public clouds such as Amazon and Google while maintaining security, privacy, governance, and control over their IT infrastructure. But making a transition to a private cloud is not an easy task because no single vendor provides all the best of breed and cost effective components necessary to build a private cloud.
Enterprise customers need to evaluate and select a wide variety of vendors and technologies to build private clouds. Internal IT teams need to learn and buy the technological expertise and navigate the organizational, operational, and cultural issues to make the transformation.
Here are some of the issues which an enterprise needs to look very closely before moving towards a private cloud strategy.

• How to develop a cohesive and cross-functional cloud strategy
• Application strategies as part of larger private cloud initiatives
• Integrating a private cloud with existing monitoring and management tools

Why Private Clouds Make Perfect Sense Today?
Large enterprises have huge investments in IT infrastructure. It will take several years to fully amortize and depreciate those assets. Furthermore, this infrastructure represents a heterogeneous mix of platforms, including mainframes, databases, applications, and services. Thousands of applications – at least 20-30 percent of which are mission-critical – still run on old-world hardware that is tightly coupled to other applications and infrastructure. Therefore, not all applications will be able to move to the public clouds.
With public clouds, enterprises are also concerned about lock-in and whether they can meet their needs in terms of security, scalability, compliance, cost, performance and latency. This lack of control over mission-critical assets and concerns about security and privacy are driving many enterprises to build their own private clouds.
Today’s enterprise community have access to the same cloud technologies, automation tools, sustainability tools, containerized data centers, and other options that public cloud vendors use. With these powerful cloud building blocks, there is no reason why enterprises cannot leverage private clouds to dramatically decrease IT maintenance and operational costs while increasing business innovation and agility, particularly for strategic and mission-critical applications that drive business value.

Many companies have made foundational investments in cloud building blocks such as virtualized infrastructures and some level of automation and workflow for targeted use cases. But moving forward and in order to fully achieve some of the promise of a private cloud infrastructure, enterprises must drive towards End-to-end automated management solutions; Enterprise Service Orchestration and Business Driven End-user self service, and elasticity.

And in addition to all this, many large customers are evaluating their global data center strategies as well. They should do this in conjunction with building a private cloud computing strategy to ensure that their infrastructure capabilities meet the strategic needs of the business and application stakeholders going forward.

It is very important to note that the architecture of a well-structured private cloud initiative goes far beyond the technical components. In fact, it encompasses shifts in key support and business processes while also fundamentally impact the ways that organizations deploy human capital. The far-reaching impact of moving to a private cloud forces us to think first about the importance of corporate governance.
Although the benefits of moving to a private cloud are often compelling, it puts pressure on the organizations to address governance issues in a new light. This includes dealing with issues such as asset ownership, financial accounting standards, and capital investment. Business justification begins to take on a corporate perspective versus departmental or business unit oriented.

And hence, in order to execute on a successful cloud initiative, enterprises must build a program strategy that encompasses people, process and technical transformation. This function should create and manage the organizational strategic blueprint for all Cloud Initiatives. Once the strategic vision is created, the enterprise cloud then begins to focus on building the proper transformational framework under which the cloud initiatives will operate.
Typically, this level of cloud framework can include 3 critical elements of the change process: organization, process and technology. For each of these 3 areas, a realistic assessment needs to be done to evaluate the organization’s readiness and maturity to aggressively pursue and realize the benefits associated with the strategic vision. From there, a transformational roadmap is generated that is then managed by the Cloud ecosystem holistically across all functions.
One of the critical starting points in the journey towards a stronger governance model is in the creation, implementation, and adoption of a service availability catalog specifically geared towards the business and technical services that will be supported by the private cloud initiatives within an enterprise.
And there are times, when this requires a deep understanding of the underlying business objectives tied to applications that will reside within the private cloud. These objectives inherently influence the thinking around issues such as service levels, performance and availability criteria, and reporting.

As the corporate enterprise moves to a structured service catalog, the catalog will then serve as the vehicle to assist with the implementation and realization of corporate governance. Automating the catalog will provide for the ability to build services, present those services based on entitlement, and orchestrate complex workflow based upon those services. It is through this integration of the user requests with orchestrated workflow that the corporate enterprise team can begin to envision and realize the benefits of a lifecycle private cloud management model.

As cloud lifecycle model, the service availability catalog is a cornerstone that can give an enterprise, a directional guidance on the technical and process elements that will be important to architect the cloud infrastructure adequately and properly at various levels and stages of development process.
With the huge emergence of many vendor cloud solutions, the industry is driving towards pre-integrated frameworks to support the implementation of private clouds. This is a step in the right direction in terms of philosophy but falls short in some key areas that will be important to most enterprises.
On the positive side, the concept of pre-integration implies a well thought out and constructed view of an end-to-end management model for those cloud based services. Most enterprises will need to go beyond this, however, and examine the need for integration with existing process models, services and technical architectures. And there are many examples of this which can be found in the areas like Convergence of operational processes and personnel to support the new architectural framework while maintaining existing infrastructure. Integration with existing monitoring and management tools. Evolution of architectural standards to incorporate emerging cloud models and Integration with reporting, financial, and asset systems.

The Application Strategy
As the enterprise move ahead on its journey to embrace private cloud, the application component of the cloud strategy presents a significant opportunity to realize the promise of cloud computing. While many companies have invested in virtualization architectures as an enabler of private cloud solutions, few companies have really invested in a fundamental transformation of their application landscape.

There are a lot of enterprises which have implemented an Infrastructure as a Service layer and begun the process to migrate their existing applications to that infrastructure. For those clients, methodology and skills around application profiling, assessment, workload sizing and migration processes becomes important.

A more promising component of cloud lies in the refactoring of applications and the establishment of a Platform as a Service layer within the private cloud. Many companies are starting to evaluate the strategic approach to their application frameworks, from building a maintenance approach for legacy applications while implementing new services on modern application platforms.
And as enterprise customers seek to leverage the promise of flexibility and scalability with cloud capabilities, it is in the integration of these Platform frameworks with the Infrastructure components that provides long-term strategic value by enabling application mobility and portability to an enterprise.

Key Factors that an enterprise can consider before moving towards a Private Cloud strategy
As traditional enterprise customers make this move, the movement towards private cloud itself spans organizational, process, and technical layers. Companies should consider the following steps to ensure a successful transition to private cloud deployments here are some best practices like establish a program strategy that provides a strategic vision and guiding principles for the corporate initiative along with program management resourcing, tracking, and oversight. As part of the program strategy, develop clear business objectives and use those to guide and influence corporate behavior. Establish an enhanced governance structure, supported by a sanctioned service catalog. Once the service catalog is envisioned, the orchestration of lifecycle management functions becomes an enabler for agility and operational cost savings. Assess your application portfolio and map out your application transformation roadmap. This becomes the differentiator that helps companies drive innovation and differentiation in their overall business model.

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