Cloud Computing: Do you or Don't you?

There's a "new" talk of the town. Media, analysts and blogs have IT professionals running to the well for this bottled elixir dubbed cloud computing. For all its popularity, this sometimes nebulous phrase can be both promising and frightening.

According to a recent analyst report, enterprise IT is just opening up the book on cloud computing. Awareness is there, but what about adoption? Let's take a closer look at cloud computing, what it means, what are the benefits, and what you should do when you decide to enter the cloud.

Silver Lining
Forget sliced bread; cloud computing may be the next best thing since virtualization.

From your standpoint, you're able to rest easier since the hardware and software is owned by the cloud vendor. Most cloud vendors use some sort of server virtualization, which boosts benefits such as flexibility even more.

Device independence is achieved. Applications are connected regardless of their location. Also, you have the ability to move applications from an internal service to external clouds based on business needs.

What happens if you have large resource demand due to a business emergency or unplanned growth? The cloud can be scalable enough to flex with the demand.

Another nice addition is the ability to pay by consumption. Business units can be charged individually for their use of resources by measurement in hours or seconds consumed instead of by server or a monthly fee.

The benefits are numerous. At the Gartner Data Center Conference in December 2008, audience members were asked when they expected to use external cloud service in place of internal IT. Here are their responses, according to an article in Data Center Knowledge:

• 20 percent already using cloud services
• 11 percent expect to adopt them in 2009
• 20 percent expect to use cloud services in 2010
• 24 percent will use cloud services later
• 11 percent expect to never use external cloud services

The article noted that respondents that voted may have been from the same company, which could influence the percentages.

Turbulence Ahead
There could be a storm brewing on the horizon. If cloud computing is the next best thing since sliced bread, many users may experience management issues with cloud computing.

Cloud computing offers a lot of positives, but you should be wary of the following:

• Performance management
• Security
• Decentralized management
• Monitoring
• Enterprise Planning

Using workloads can help. Workloads are valuable tools for both performance management and capacity planning. The provide a way to subdivide the resource consumption on a server, making it possible to analyze performance in terms of the assets being utilized by each business service delivered by IT.

Security is another dark cloud looming over most IT professionals looking into cloud computing. An IDC report cited 75 percent of its respondents were concerned with security issues associated with the cloud.

Unfortunately, users lose control over certain sensitive data. Your information and critical IT resources reside outside the firewall and may be vulnerable to attack.

Monitoring, decentralized management and enterprise planning are other potential issues. Who is looking at what? How do you migrate application and infrastructure changes? Are vendor tools ready to handle the collaborative nature of cloud computing?

Sunny Days Ahead
With vendors such as Amazon already in the fray and Google, Microsoft and Yahoo expected as soon-to-be players, cloud computing will gain a larger user base soon - perhaps even in the enterprise.

Before taking on any project, do your homework first. Identify the right amount of resources required to meet service demands now and in the future with proactive planning.

Cloud computing, coupled with the right capacity management tools, can help IT organizations become more productive, spending less time fighting fires and more time proactively thwarting performance issues before users are impacted.

Very few IT organizations fully understand that correcting capacity and performance issues costs a lot less before deployment than after, according to Forrester.

For more information on TeamQuest software and how it can help you with your IT solutions, visit our solution briefs.