Cloud… The name recalls the images of a shadowy fog that is always out of reach. The reality of cloud computing can only seem mysterious. Before entering into this nebulous border in IT, it is important to separate the hype from reality.

In assessing these assumptions related to the cloud, researchers focused specifically on public clouds and made a simple question: Fact or Fiction?

Fiction – But Maybe Not For Long

While migration to the cloud is not yet universal, there is no doubt that it is a wonderful trend that will only grow with increase of its adoption and importance. According to a 2011 survey of Advanced Micro Devices, approximately 37% of companies are already using cloud. And 24% of respondents to the survey in 2011, among data center managers, retailers and engineers, said they have plans to follow or implement a cloud computing in the next 18 months. According to a recent IDC report, worldwide revenue from IT services in public clouds exceeded $ 21.5 billion in 2010 and projected to reach $ 72.9 billion in 2015.

Regardless of which one is more accurate, it is clear that the cloud market is growing – and is much higher than suggested the news a year ago.

Why The Problems And Delays?

Although providers have improved data security and privacy considerably since the beginning, persistent concerns over access to proprietary data, location and transfer continue to limit distributed adoption. The flexibility of the system in general is another concern with public clouds. Additionally, blackouts in various cloud providers are probably reason enough to discourage some businesses that depend on the availability of fixed network for survival.

Switching To Cloud Means That You No Longer Have To Worry About Downtime..

Fiction  

If your company switches to an external cloud provider, the risk of a blackout is simply transferred to their data center provider. The only change is the control. In its own data center, you control the infrastructure and availability of your network and data. This control, of course, brings many problems of ownership and responsibility with it that may have been a factor in the shift to cloud first. The control means responsibility, and the burden of responsibility for ensuring network availability is something that some IT managers prefer not to be responsible.

If your organization chooses private cloud, you can gain a measure of fault protection for a single server, but the damage caused by a total blackout in the data center continues to be destructive. To maintain a robust infrastructure, power and cooling, it is critical to support a private cloud infrastructure. The management and monitoring of data center becomes even more critical.

Finally, it is important to remember that simply switching to cloud does not eliminate the concern about downtime or damage that may cause a blackout to your business. Customers remember the  network failure – not the fact that the failure was the fault of your cloud provider.

Cloud Computing Solutions Always Reduces Costs And Workload

Fiction

This is a common argument for the adoption of cloud, but depending on the applications you plan to support with the cloud, this may or may not be true. At least in the short term, it is likely that a transition to cloud is very laborious.

Businesses that switch to this type of work do so to meet a specific need and leverage resources previously unavailable (especially dedicated servers) that, through the cloud, are available on demand.

But cloud services adapted to the specific needs of your business require a transfer of culture that can be difficult to manage. Even when the setting is appropriate, classifying what can and can not be changed for cloud is a process that takes time. The increased operational efficiency can be light at the end of the tunnel, but it is a short tunnel.

In terms of costs, cloud customers save money only when performing on specific cloud platforms. On the other hand, the report says that maintaining a private data center continues to have the best cost benefit.

The use of information technology as a competitive advantage is already out of the question because of its efficiency and necessity. Another issue now demands the attention and decisions on the part of CIO’s – the profound transformation experienced today, where the traditional models of provision are to live with offers based on cloud computing. The avalanche of new solutions and services available via the Internet and cloud model puts more “connected” new services, new lines and granular cost (or demand) into the hands of users. These services are noted for their ease of acquisition and speed of activation. Curbing the use of these solutions in the cloud means showing the user that the company or its governance processes in information technology are late and are very conservative.

The solution to meet the demands of internal customers with the speed and cost is appropriate to adapt the processes and solutions for use in cloud computing model. This is something similar to the services that the user already uses, but within the processes and security policies and provisioning defined by the company. Once that is done, control of the use of IT is to be rescued by CIOs and security mechanisms will regain their efficiency.

In this scenario, IT departments are looking for implementations of cloud applications customized to your environment. This migration planning for part of their environment or implementation of new applications in the cloud requires a use prior here consulting and provisioning prior to ensure lower costs, greater speed and efficiency in project implementation. This is where the Cloud Facilitators comes come in, companies specializing in analysis of the current scenario, considering the complexity of the production environment of IT companies. The Cloud Facilitators know how to turn this environment, or a portion thereof, for use of cloud-based models.

In addition, Cloud Facilitators are responsible for ensuring the security of information that travels on the corporate network and are now, in part, acting in an external environment (even in private cloud). Cloud Facilitators also manage the environments and provisioning between the traditional atmosphere and new environment implemented in the cloud. This process of outsourcing creates a new model of outsourcing that we are calling CloudSourcing.

Rather than make use of information technology, the implementation and use of cloud solutions by enterprises is changing the methods and processes of acquisition and deployment of IT. This happens primarily because the mechanisms for provisioning, purchases are made in periodic demands and are geographical (by area of interest). A second issue to be addressed is the fact that the cloud solution is governed by its acquisition contracts and at the same time, strict service levels (SLA).

Thus, today’s IT managers must have specialized tools to manage traditional contracts, outsourcing contracts and contracts for CloudSourcing. We are living in a transitional phase in which all these models can live together in harmony. One way the corporation meets the challenges of the present moment is to rely on the expertise of cloud facilitators. People ahead of these companies can help the CIO to carry out environmental management. This is done to ensure IT staff to deliver essential and summarized information that may allow monitoring of what happens, even to the point to understand what impact does the use of new technologies and providers make to increase efficiency of business results.

Often we discuss technology trends and the changes they cause. We debated the technological complexities involved and estimated its rate of market adoption. But most of the technical articles forget one key factor: the driving force behind the adoption of any technological change is the economic factor.

When looking at the future of IT, we can learn something from the past and how organizations and society invested in these technologies. In the past, a few mainframe companies had access to computers (the computers were too expensive) and the expectation was that IT would enable them to automate their business processes, to make them faster and cheaper. Later we saw the emergence of the distributed model, client-server, which cheapened the cost of acquisition of technology, allowing you to create solutions aimed to generate more speed and functionality demanded by specific Departments. However, the rapid proliferation of different systems has created a demand for integration that culminated in the emergence of the ERPs.

The situation today is very different from years ago. The Internet is already a part of our daily life and is ingrained in the IT business. The companies did not begin to settle more in just reduced costs. This is “business as usual”, the duty of every self-respecting manager. IT has already done much in this sense, “how to create shared-services center and consolidate its data centers?“. IT now has the opportunity to be looked at from the perspective of revenue generation and as a platform for creating new business and support growth strategies and not just an operational area.

To view IT as revenue generator is a different “mind-set“, because IT was always seen as supportive for the business, but now, it generate new revenue. Now IT can be seen even as its source of income. The adoption of IT cloud computing allows you to generate revenue and profits. We can start talking at the end. Cloudnomics.

Cloudnomics can be translated as a new economic model for IT, where metrics like TCO lose enough of its importance and IT begins to be seen through the eyes of a business case. In fact, any business is started to go forward, generate revenue and profitability!

As cloud computing enters this process?

With public cloud. IT will no longer install, configure and upgrade physical servers, and the standardized and automated processes that characterize a cloud environment, the number of technicians dedicated to support greatly decreases. IT can focus on innovation and value creation for the company. The cost models also change with cloud and its concept of elasticity. You pay for the use of resources consumed, which can be directly linked to revenue generation, increased use of IT, more revenue generation. It is an economic model that changes the rules of the game. It costs the same to rent a server for 1000 hours to 1000 servers for one hour.

A practical example of how the current IT model limits the generation of significant revenue: To explore new business opportunities that have a short life. In the current model, it is not economically justifiable to purchase a technology platform and put it into production (with high up-front investment) for it to operate for only a few months, taking advantage of a unique business opportunity. The bill probably will not close. With this cloud, it is perfectly possible. A simplistic example, but it shows the idea: producing an animation, where the defendant is a huge computing power to render final film, much more than the sum of all previous months of production and that after the closure dispensing with all computers. Cloud computers are allocated as they are needed and that there is no turning off computers . The provider, in turn, also enjoys economies of scale, keeping thousands of servers to be shared by hundreds or thousands of customers.

The conceptual shift is much larger than technological change. Comes the entrepreneur CIO, attached directly to the CEO. A profile is much less technical and more focused on business and entrepreneurship. In fact, a suggestion of an MBA could be “Entrepreneurship in IT” .

Among the structural changes to IT, we see the start of an organization aimed at supporting other sectors of the company to a revenue-generating industry and the transformation of an organization focused on building activities and support systems and computing power for an organization aimed at creating a computing platform where new businesses will be generated. The choice of applications and consequent utilization can be moved to their users.

This new IT may act as an incubator for business start-ups within the company.

Finally, IT is a business unit which is simple to write, but hard to put into practice. Sure, it’s not going to happen from one day to another, but a process that will happen over the next year. But can get started today.

Objectives of any business can be achieved through excellent customer service and different types of services are provided by following Cloud Service Models:

1. SaaS (Software as a Service):

A software release model, SAAS is hosted centrally in the cloud along with its allied data and can be accessible through users by means of web a browser. SaaS is also referred as “on-demand software”. For many business applications such as, accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management, business enterprise resource planning, human resource management, content management and service desk management etc, SaaS becomes a general delivery model.

Usually the term SaaS can be precisely used where most of the initial application service providers focus on managing and hosting third-party independent software vendors who are capable enough to build up and run individual software. Also by means of currently used software architecture, cloud computing service providers make a separate instance of an application mandatory for each business, so, to design an application in view of providing multiple businesses and users with corresponding partitioning of data, a multi-tenant architecture as a service solution has been utilized by existing web-based software.

2. PaaS (Platform as a Service):

Using a Cloud service model called as PAAS, applications can be used effortlessly, exclusive of any complication regarding the cost and management of the required hardware and software. As PaaS supports the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services by facilitating design, development, testing, deployment and hosting itself.
Services like team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, facilitation of developer community, application versioning and instrumentation, etc. might be provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.

All these facilities permit customization of the existing SaaS applications which is comparable to the facility of packaged software applications such as Microsoft Word. But, every time developers and users of PaaS need to subscribe SaaS applications, in view of developing a comprehensive environment, stand-alone PaaS environment has been proposed which is free from any type of technical, licensing or financial dependencies based on specific SaaS applications or web services. Still, some PaaS  applications require improvement in the development, debugging and testing capabilities to provide hosting-level services such as security and on-demand scalability etc.

In PaaS, under the concept of Open platform as a service, developers can use any programming language, database, operating system and server too.

3. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service):

To release infrastructure as a fully outsourced service, IaaS is a capital investment-sourced model. As by means of IaaS, all the resources like servers, software licenses, data center space and network equipment etc can be purchased by clients as fully outsourced service only. Hence concerning the customer’s significant project, IaaS through a dedicated hosting environment is the most stout, safe and sound policy.

Advantages of IaaS:

1. Dynamic scaling: capability of scaling up and down the various resource aspects in close to real time, according to varying business requirements.

2. Usage-based pricing: This strategy of IAAS helps customers in purchasing the precise infrastructure which may be required at any particular time by ensuring “just pay for what you use”.

3. Reduced capital and personnel costs: Reduced in-house infrastructure considerably eliminates capital expenditures and enduring cost for workforce and enables any organization to concentrate on core competencies in view of developing and filtering market product offerings more willingly than purchasing hardware accessories.

4. Access to superior IT resources: Unaffordable Enterprise-grade IT infrastructure and engineering resources become accessible to IaaS users.

Data protection in the cloud is now becoming more complex problem because the user does not know where the information is processed in the cloud. Therefore, it is important to protect the data by using encryption. It is not always clear how and what should be encrypted so that the information is not flowed outside, but on the other hand, it should not affect the performance of cloud computing services as well.  Actually, security and processing efficiency are the two major problems – found while doing research on cloud computing. Let us try to understand how to combine both of these problems. The primary means of data protection is cryptography.

However, you can encrypt data at different levels. First, consider the structure of a typical cloud application. It consists of a storage subsystem, database, application server, web server hosting, network and client application. Now look at what will encrypt each of these levels.

Encrypted Disk: It can be a separate virtual disk that is mounted to a virtual machine in the cloud. This encryption protects against leakage of the entire virtual disk, for example, during the backup. Protects against insiders encryption on the side of the operator and attacks by other users. However, if an intruder has penetrated inside the virtual machine to which the disk is mounted, such encryption cannot be protected. In fact, it’s the same encryption product to encrypt the server drives.

Encryption of Records: You can implement encryption at the database level, where the encoded data of individual fields of tables contain the most valuable data. Implementing this encryption can be either at the database, either by the application server, which works directly with the database. It is possible to organize the system so that the table field will be encrypted, which is used for database searching. Such a scheme will not slow sampling procedures from the fields, since decryption is not happening.

Encrypting The Virtual Machine: Since the cloud virtual machine is an ordinary image file storage and processes, access to these files may give an attacker a lot of valuable information. Therefore, it would be nice to provide encryption of virtual machines themselves when transferring them between hosts and storage in the inactive state. Unfortunately, the encryption mechanism must be implemented at the hypervisor level, that is, by the provider of virtualization.

Encrypt Communication Channels: You simply need to encrypt communications between the cloud and the client in order to prevent interference with this interaction, and protect against attacks such as “middle man”. Here the solution is worked out with the SSL protocol and hardware acceleration at the entrance to the cloud. Perhaps more correctly architecture would be SSL- encryption directly into the virtual machine, but it also needs to be supported at the level of the hypervisor or virtual network driver.

Each of these encryption methods have advantages and disadvantages and requires a different approach to programming and its own mechanisms for distributing keys. It is clear that encryption is only one part of the cloud. To do this, efforts are needed not only from a customers side who wants to keep the data secure, but also from the cloud computing provider and the operator of software for it.

Cloud services are very serious alternative to traditional models of access to IT, and their popularity among companies is growing rapidly. The advantages of such services may be to reduce overall costs, increase scalability, quick to provide solutions and simplifying management. On the other hand, to entrust the key components of technology to another company, then loosen control over them and create a risk that must be managed. The experience of outsourcing has led to a recognized approach to contracting to mitigate risks and maximize the benefits of using external services. However, the provision of services via multiple access cloud platform includes some of the nuances in the negotiation and conclusion of agreements. Therefore, CIOs should consider the following points.

1. Make sure that the terms of the agreement are under negotiation

Although the agreement in terms of the agreement during the negotiations may seem self-evident, many cloud providers do not usually allow you to make changes in its version of the agreement, arguing that the special conditions for various clients undermine model for community access and positioning service providers in the market. This does not mean that companies should not use the services on standard terms. But it is necessary to realize the risks involved.

With flexible terms of service you need to make sure that they are more beneficial than any standard agreement or such that you can only express my agreement by clicking the mouse. And also the fact that an agreement cannot be changed unilaterally. If these conditions are not met, your company must retain the right to terminate the agreement with a significant deterioration in its terms, without bearing any responsibility.

2. Make sure that the price structure does not preclude advantages of cloud solutions

Cloud services offer the possibility of rapid scaling-making, better asset utilization and overall cost savings. But the agreement may impose restrictions on these benefits. For example, providers of SaaS limit the number of available jobs, providers of IaaS – the minimum duration of use of infrastructure. You should ensure that the agreement do not restrict the company’s ability to control costs under proposed models of the clouds. Negotiations on the use of software needs to be carried out in accordance with established practice, and you assume discounts depending on the amount or term of the contract, the differentiation of licenses in accordance with user roles and limitation of price changes in the future.

3. Develop a service level agreement with the light of experience

Service level agreement (SLA), as is the case with any IT service should reflect the full range of services. For example, because the cloud provider will be responsible for Internet connectivity and infrastructure, availability of services should not be determined by monitoring the server in data center. The agreement may specify a particular user interface and query performance, timeliness of the major package of tasks and response time / removal in case of failure.

The goal is to develop a limited set of metrics, which ensures that customer satisfaction is in complete constitute and not  a violation of SLA. For each metric should be removed with no clear exclusion criteria (eg, service interruptions caused by the need for urgent repairs, and the concept of “urgency” is not defined). Your company should pay attention not only to compensation for breach of SLA, but also a thorough analysis and eliminate its causes. Ultimately, your company must guard against downtime and have the right to break the agreement in the presence of chronic problems.

4. Consider the impact of collective platform for the company’s work

Your company must assess the impact of providing services through multiple access platform and proactively address potential problems in current operations. For example, the agreement with the provider should provide that your organization will receive a choice acceptable to its break in service for the technical work in advance and will be notified for all actions affecting the service.

Release Management procedures must comply with the company, which will be entitled to use the penultimate version of the software. It should be possible loss of functionality of the release (or a change of software packages as an optional feature) and to mitigate this by determining the minimum period of notice, the right to work indefinitely with the previous version and break the agreement without indemnity provider. Try to pre-assess the needs in the management of releases that may occur as a result of social integration, when agreeing prices for access to test environments. Otherwise, you risk on getting a big bill for reference.

5. Note the shift in the cloud computing and out of it

Deployment in the cloud and the expiration or termination of lease also requires careful attention. As for the transition to the cloud, then you must make sure that the actions of the provider are clearly defined, and agree SLA with installing and configuring applications, as well as the downloading of data. If you receive additional professional services to deploy, should ensure that by default, they were tied to key cloud services. When not to use the cloud provider should help in the organization of migration, including export data and schema in a consistent format. It should also consider the requirement to periodically archive data to mitigate the current or connected with the peculiarities of contract difficulties in the way of an orderly transfer. The best protection is a proven ability to easily switch to another provider at a different decision. CIOs should be aware that a lack of confidence in safe transition to another provider weakens the position of the company in negotiations and narrows the range of options available.

According to the analysis for the market of “Software As a Service, SaaS“, it is grown by 20.7% in 2011 as if compared with 2010 and reach $ 12.1 billion, and it will continue until 2015 – first and then the sales will amount to 21.3 billion dollars, i.e. more than twice as many as in 2010.

Under the SaaS, it includes software, which are owned, managed and delivered remotely by one or more service providers. Consumers use the software by subscription or on contract and pay for services as consumption.

Analysts say that the popularity of this model to applications is growing. They explain this by saying that budget cuts forced businesses to look for cheaper ways to use the software, services, SaaS becomes more mature, and cloud computing technologies are attracting more interest. In connection with the development of SaaS services and the prevalence reduced initial concerns about security, response time and service availability. Vendors expanding network of partners to provide these services, increased industry specialization of services, strengthening community partners and consumers.

In the last couple of years some buzz around SaaS subsided and shifted towards cloud computing – a broader concept that also covers technology and SaaS, which is a layer of applications in the general stack architecture of clouds. However, the key indicator of the success of SaaS cloud computing concept is now about 75% of services and SaaS can be considered as cloud services, and by 2015 this figure will reach 90%, since the SaaS model will become more mature and fuse with the cloud solutions model.

The biggest market segment of SaaS is customer relationship management (CRM). According to forecasts, in 2011, its volume will reach $ 3.8 billion (in 2010 – $ 3.2 billion) and will be 32% of the market SaaS. According to analysts, with the development of services “CRM-on-demand” is expanding its distribution.

Revenue from the delivery of ERP SaaS model will reach $ 1.7 billion (in 2010 – $ 1.5 billion). In fact, the ERP market share in the SaaS model accounted for only 7%. With the SaaS model most commonly used means of human resource management and enterprise resource management and production approach, SaaS almost does not apply.

If you go into a cloud environment, above all, prepare a checklist for a successful transition into the clouds. Without a doubt, the cloud has became a hot topic all over the world because of the mobility and flexibility at lower cost. Cloud Infrastructure is the next-generation platforms that can provide tremendous value to any business. Many companies are now moving to the advanced and cost-effective concept of cloud hosting.

Successful migration to the cloud requires a sober assessment of all pros and cons. Here we try to touch up on some of the considerations in the transition to a cloud environment to help you to decide whether you need a transition into the clouds or not. Here are a few basic steps before moving to the cloud.

First, assess how much in demand and popular your website is, and what time is an acceptable downtime for you.

What level of control do you expect?

If you want to have total control and you want to use all the resources in the network, select the personal cloud.

What are the options you have access to?

Determine your need for access in advance.

What applications do you have now? It sounds too corny, but to go to the Web, make sure that these applications are Web-based applications. You can choose a few simple tools to convert them when necessary. If your application was originally designed for. NET / Java, you must understand before the migration and technological aspects of the compatibility options for these technologies in the cloud, where you plan to migrate.

Do you interact with other technologies?

Make sure that these technologies are also supported in the clouds, in which you want to migrate.

What type of database do you use in cloud computing?

It is important to make sure that the targeted cloud infrastructure support your database. If not supported, please check whether you can change the database or run an application in the cloud using its used in the database.

Flexibility and portability in cloud solutions: Check whether you can move between cloud providers. If you have access only to a specific provider, after the application is deployed, it can impose restrictions on your ability to migrate to another cloud platform.

Scalability: Able to indicate whether you provide dynamic scalability and redundancy of your application server. If your application is not able to scale dynamically, should not go into the clouds.

Security risks in the cloud, above all, evaluate the conditions of the provider and its reputation. After that, evaluate the security risks that can be detected when the client is accessible from any system connected to the network.

Upgrade costs: Check the different suppliers and packages that they offer, with detailed specifications. Weigh the costs and technical implications for updating your applications.

These are just some of the most important things you should consider before migrating into the cloudy environment. We hope that this will help you to choose the right kind of cloud hosting and help you achieve maximum benefit.