(With iTKO's guest blogger and Solution Strategist, Ken Ahrens) Your boss wants you to "do Cloud," but you’re not sure ... so what now? At least you are not alone in coming to grips with Cloud. We recently saw this article from one of our favorite columnists Joe McKendrick, covering a CA Technologies-sponsored survey of both IT execs and practitioners. Check it out:
There are a number of interesting data points about Cloud adoption in the article that made us think:
1. 44% of executives name security teams as primary opponents of public cloud (27% private)
First of all, your leading public cloud provider should have more resources exclusively dedicated to "perimiter security" than your team can muster, and they should be able to address many of the typical concerns of external access like firewalls, authentication, etc. So the real question is: how securely designed are your applications themselves?
This is a great reason to start by moving Dev and Test activities to the cloud. In most mature enterprises the non-production systems shouldn't be using real customer data anyway. What better way to ensure the protection of the data? How about by first moving the desensitized or "clean" data into virtual data models that meet the needs of dev & test teams; and then running lots of analysis to make sure none of the "safe" information gets out during the process, or in deployment through use of the software. This would be a prudent 2-step approach to the problem. We outline aspects of this in our latest paper on "Service Virtualization and the DevTest Cloud."
2. 52% of IT managers fear job losses
Although we don’t normally comment on this kind of thing, it’s interesting to think that this would be a viable concern. The point is that employees should move up the value chain, and concentrate on providing more vital services to their employer, and therefore its ability to deliver for customers. Managers should be focusing on how much more agile they can make their teams in rolling out new features and functionality to the market, and Cloud approaches should be malleable to these efforts.
3. 80% of all enterprises (and 92% of large enterprises) have at least one cloud service
Shouldn’t this stat vindicate the security and control concerns? If we’re already doing Cloud, we can point to a project to determine if control has been lost or data compromised. These case studies should be reviewed seriously to determine the correct course of action for the next round of services. We just talked about this "Cloud Creep" in a previous blog -- so if it’s already happening, you’d be much better served to figure out how to get on board.
4. Mature adopters of cloud are already virtualizing.
Not a big surprise here that once you have grips around server virtualization, moving to the cloud should be much more straightforward. The two naturally fit together. But all this cloud infrastructure puts even more of a strain on key "over utilized" systems that cannot be virtualized, especially in a Cloud environment. For more on this, see our paper on "The Next Frontier for Virtualization: Over-Utilized Systems."
What about all of those mainframes, ERP systems, third party service providers, and large databases? How will they cope with additional systems looking for access? That's where Service Virtualization is an applicable practice -- productizing the practice of simulating those over-utilized systems is also a way to bring "off cloud" and out-of scope systems into scope.
What are your Cloud concerns? We only covered a few of the points in the article, so let us know and we'll talk about them here. Thanks to Joe for the overview and CA for making these empirical survey results available.
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Posted by: apps review | July 13, 2011 at 01:07 AM