Just three years ago, one of my friend came in incredibly irritating mood, when he went through a new phase of technology development. “But what, really, is this cloud computing? – He said at the time – I have no idea what all are talking about. This is nonsense!”.

Sorry, Friend. Today, even you must admit that cloud computing does not only exist, but have become almost the main topic in the field of information technology.

Ultimately it is about to do the work of organizations more efficient and profitable.

Below are four recommendations for IT managers.

1. Decisions regarding the cloud services should be guided by the needs of business and not for technical reasons.

The benefits should be a key factor in determining the application of the cloud. Cloud is increasing pace of development of the organization, helping people work smarter and collaborate more effectively. But IT budgets are usually planned at least a year, which does not resolve issues as quickly as required by the cloud model.

How did I do? Include the cost of cloud computing in the monthly operating expenses. This will provide the flexibility to use all the Cloud tools necessary for new business initiatives.

2. Out the best in the cloud to your opponents endorsed the idea of additional expenses.

U.S. Department of Defense has demonstrated flexibility of this technology, when applied cloud in the aftermath of the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti. There has been no basic communications networks. The military used what they called a computing environment with fast access (Rapid Access Computing Environment, RACE), as a platform for exchange of information to serve the rescuers in this impoverished country. Rescuers have resorted to this tool for collaboration. They came out in social networks, looking for worldwide local translators with knowledge of Creole and consultants who helped them solve problems. In the traditional computing environment, this would require much more time. Of course, not all companies decide matters of life and death, as it was in Haiti. But they need a fast and qualified answers to their questions, which often depends on the success or failure of the event.

3. Good e governance services provides the necessary foresight. But should not replace the cloud.

Mobile employee who establishes a customer or another product, and has made presentations to them and perform other tasks on the spot, cannot wait until the IT department will find and acquire the necessary tools to them. In the era of Web 2.0 such employee can find everything he need, and buy cloud version. Of course, in this case there are problems in management and some tough questions. For example, how can we allow the provision of service, if you do not have a clue how many people will use them and how they access it? Or this: who can guarantee the safety and reliability of these instruments? But all this does not prevent the conclusion of contracts. IT managers should work with vendors, seeking to cloud resources were effectively deployed in the enterprise. Through policy management, user training is conducted, in which they can, say, to ensure their own safety. After all, IT architecture, in which all functions are carried out centrally from within the company, rooted in the past.

4. Be prepared to adjust its interpretation of “measured success”.

Ultimately, as a cloud services to be primarily a tool of business and only secondarily – a technical resource, you cannot fully express its value to quantify, as we did in traditional IT environments. Instead of analyzing, for example, statistics on its use, you will need to develop new indicators. Something like: “creating new business opportunities.”

While India can be called a “cloud country” solely in terms of its climate. In the development of cloud computing, our country has not yet succeeded. Nevertheless, to attribute the cloud to the number of unpromising directions for India would be premature and erroneous. Just the opposite: that “cloud computing” may be popular as anywhere in the world, and there are several prerequisites.

Factor of geographical distribution, logically, should be the main catalyst for the transition to “cloud services“. It is in terms of territorial fragmentation minimize the costs of providing IT services is becoming increasingly important. Construction of large data centers and the creation of “cloud services” on their basis will lead to an increase in supply in the market that will make cloud computing more accessible and economically beneficial for both business and private users.

Now efforts have been made to improve the accessibility of state institutions and their services for citizens. Instruments of such integration processes should serve as information portals that are created on the principle of “single windows“. They can become a single access point for information exchange between public authorities and consumers of their services. For the functioning of such information systems in a distributed environment, you need to create a distributed and adaptive execution environment, the role which can take on a cloud for a vertically integrated structures (government, health care, e-governance services, tax and customs services, etc.).

What prevents the clouds

However, there are a number of objective and subjective factors that hinder the implementation of cloud services in India. So, now broadband internet access are developed only in large metropolitan areas, where there is the main controlling structure of enterprises. The principal business assets are often located in regions with poor telecom infrastructure, forcing the owners to form the IT assets on the ground and prevents the creation of even private clouds within a single business entity.

Another constraining factor – it’s psychological unpreparedness of top management to the use of cloud services. The main concerns managers associated with release of data by making them outside its network, including the transfer of their open channels within their own clouds. Also significantly increase the risks of leakage for companies whose business activities are not very transparent (double entry bookkeeping, the partial use of unlicensed software). Lack of physical access control to information assets, according to managers, increases the chances of their competitors or government regulatory authorities.

Many managers lack the required quality of guards services. Cloud services market in India is in the initial stage of formation. First and foremost, providers of these services should serve providers of communications services, but so far they are not very interested in this. Firstly, they are not willing to provide the required level of quality of service (SLA), and secondly – are not eager “to throw” investment in the sector unformed demand. Lack of adequate legal framework, within which it can  resolve disputes regarding the quality, is also a deterrent to form a “cloud” of the market.

Often the limiting factor in the transition to the cloud (including – and private) is opposed by its own IT department. Employees fear reduction or wage cuts due to reduced demand for their services – the transmission of information assets to an outside service or reducing the physical objects in their area of responsibility.

As cloud services are only at the stage of formation (in terms of technology, and in terms of services), then there is no unambiguous prescription for the transition to their use. Therefore, the decision on which services to make the clouds, and how to preserve the traditional approach should be taken individually. This decision may depend on the areas of business, the type of software, legislation, etc. However, according to experts, today, it is highly undesirable to make a cloud in a public accounting system, resources that contain personal data (and processing their IP) information containing trade secrets and confidential information; internal software solutions that are tailored to specific enterprise.

Examples of failover mechanisms include:

Load sharing redundancy – two or more systems loaded with up to 50 percent of the total load. When a device fails, other devices share the load with little or no interruption.

Instance feature redundant – two or more instances of resources loaded with up to 50 percent of the total load. When a court of appeal fails, other instances of resources share the load.

Retrying connection alternative – if the network outage lasts longer than two minutes, try to reconnect to another server via alternative connections.

Security in cloud computing service:

The security service’s cloud can be undermined by weak credentials, exposure of the protocol and failure to implement in remote management. The reuse of IP addresses can lead to a Denial of Service (DoS) unintentional.

SaaS can be intentionally affected with a virus that results in a DoS. Hackers have used PaaS, and decks IaaS as centers of Command and Control (CnC) to direct operations of a botnet (robot network of computers) for use in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and malware installation of software in the cloud.

The log should show the kind of security problem that a type of cloud service had and when and how the problem was fixed.

Issues to consider

Despite their service provider typically being responsible for computer systems underlying the cloud, you still have legal responsibility to ensure that their systems meet regulatory requirements and goals, that the practices are reasonably safe, that the officers cannot access your data without authorization and that an SLA is in force.

Make sure you understand how the SLA works, how to limit policy would affect the SLA and what are the procedures and expectations if your service provider disappoints.

Important components of the SLA are the availability of uptime, performance standards, response times of emergency, and security solutions for violations.

Discover how the threshold levels may differ from those specified as performance standards for uptime availability of the SLA. They should not be set in patterns of availability or above them.

Choose the availability of uptime (97 or 99.9%) and then the threshold levels that best meet your needs and budget of your business.

In the case of a breach of SLA, solutions must be provided. For example, your service provider shall issue a free credit or a refund if you miss a SLA (slow responses in the creation of additional instances of resources in the clouds).

If the provider does not meet the SLA several times in three months, you should be allowed to terminate your service. Ensure that the termination clause is included in the SLA and read it carefully.

The SLA states who and where the power authority would be if you and the provider disagree on the duration of an outage? You should know how long to wait after an event for filing a claim.

Review whether your insurance policy covers items that are not covered in an SLA, including loss of revenue, damage to reputation or data breach.

Conclusion

Set a limit policy for dynamically balancing the workload demands that require advance planning to address the problems of creating additional instances of resources in the cloud environment.

Developers should communicate with the consumer and cloud providers on the issues of economies of scales (public versus private clouds) and development limit policy for testing and production applications.

Use capacity planning in advance to prepare your system to allocate additional resources to instances when the workload demands of reaching the threshold level.

Types of Market Segments

For each type of cloud service, the policy limit varies from one market segment to another. The policy can be influenced by type of organization, organization size, market conditions, workload demands seasonal economy, mandates changes, emerging
technologies and frequency of adverse weather conditions.

The number also depends on the data center market segment. For example, the government sector is a heavy user of data centers and has been seeking ways to save costs, hiring on demand services to ensure availability and security of operation in the cloud computing environment.

I have already mentioned some market segments as examples – retail, energy and utilities, financial markets, e- governance services, health care, telecommunications and petrochemicals. Besides these, there are others.

• Aerospace and defense
• Automotive
• Construction
• Consumer Products
• Education
• Electronics
• Forest & Paper
• Insurance
• Biological Sciences
• Media and entertainment
• Metals & Mining
• Tourism and transport
• Manufacture and assembly
• Industrial products
• Biological Sciences
• Shipbuilding
• Distribution and wholesale services

Let’s compare and contrast the retail market segment and petrochemical-based considerations for policy limits. When the system detects each market segment demands of the workload that exceeds the threshold level, the system quickly creates
additional instances of resource demands to balance the workload dynamically. As the demand of the workload falls below the threshold level, the instances of resources that were allocated are released.

The segment of the retail market consists of small and large companies engaged in the sale of finished products for consumer end users.

The petrochemical market segment of industrial and small and large companies that invest in oil, gas and chemicals and sell these products to consumers industry.

Peaks in workload demands for the retail market segment are generally predictable (such as time-critical Diwali shopping).

The peaks for the petrochemical market segment are generally based on different factors that are not so easy to predict, however, they generally follow: the economy, the demand for supply chain optimization, investment in oil drilling deep
and climatic conditions Adverse unpredictable (as in warm winter one year, snowstorms in the next).

The differences in the types of transactions (vs. industrial. Retailers) and the option of clouds public, private or hybrid affect the creation of the policy limit.

The transaction types are used to group items of revenue and expenses according to business groups or products.

Good policy of the Internal Boundary

Good resource management is important to balance the resource consumption in the cloud environment. A policy limit ensures that the consumption of resources is dynamically balanced for testing and production applications.

The test application may have different threshold requirements than those for production. Use capacity planning in advance to prepare your system to allocate additional resources to instances when the workload demands of reaching the threshold level.

Although IT professionals are used to thinking in abstract terms, a key aspect to address the creation of the policy limit is to remember that a critical component of workload demands is physical. You depend on the rates of physical component
reliability, even with the wireless bits.

The policy should set out what should be a threshold level as the threshold level of 75% or 85% of the capacity of one or more disks. Should include mechanisms for logging and monitoring of resource consumption.

Besides the capacity, when the level is reached, the number of instances of resources allocated and the response time in the allocation of instances should be in the logs. Moreover, the logs should include:

• Quality of stateful application
• Points of resumption
• Failover mechanism
• Security in cloud services

Stateful Quality:

Stateful quality refers to the state of the application that responds appropriately to subsequent stages of the application functions in the cloud environment. For example, a state should go to the next state function following this very simplified scenario:

• The consumer selects an item online retail
• The retailer places the selected item in the basket of the shopping cart
• The customer provides credit card information
• The consumer sends the request
• The retailer validates the credit card information
• The retailer provides an order number and estimated delivery time
• The retailer thanks to consumer demand by
• The consumer gets an e-mail order confirmation
• The consumer gets an e-mail that the request is being sent

If the state function step 2 has not gone to stage three, what would cause the problem?

The new application builds broke the logic?

When the system detects the threshold level exceeding the demands of the workload, the threshold level was set at a too high level, so that the remaining resources were insufficient to continue the operation..

Resumption points:

The system must create a recovery point (the varieties planned, and manual installation) at different points of time before a problem occurs in the system.

Snapshots of disks that contain points of recovery should be backed up to disk on the local system and on another disk in a different remote location. The log should indicate the time at which the recovery points were created and what the point of
recovery was used to restore the system.

Engine Fail over:

The system must also be able to initiate failover mechanisms to continue the availability of the operation.

The failover mechanisms must include alternative connecting wired or wireless case, for example, the provider of telecommunication accidentally cut the fiber line or shut down the wireless network connected to the physical installation of the consumer. The log should indicate the type and location of the device used in the failover.

In a cloud environment, a policy limit is an important desirable attribute – it is used to check and manage resources when the workload demands need to be dynamically balanced after reaching a level of pre-determined threshold.

The policy causes the system to create instances of resources depending on how many workload demands exceed the threshold level.

Before going into more detail on considerations for establishing and using a political boundary, with the goal of balancing the demands of the workload, dynamically create and release resources automatically, we set the policy limit in this context.

Overview of Policy Limit

Let’s take a look at some key attributes of the policy limit.

01. Response times:

The response period between the time the system detects that the workload demands have reached the threshold level and the time that creates the instances of additional resources should be as close as possible to being instantaneous.

When workload demands return to a point below the threshold level, the system deallocates those resources and puts them into another use.

02. Considerations on influence:

The information that must be a limit policy are influenced by factors

The type of cloud service that the consumer rents.
How much control the consumer has on operating systems, hardware and software.
The type of market segment in which the consumer is (e.g., retail, energy and utilities, e-governance services, financial markets, medical and petrochemical).

03. The service provider and policy:

The service provider may be internal cloud in a data center controlled by an organization or be hosted externally by a member of the telecom market segment.

The provider should ensure integration with administrative support functions, such as requests, supply, measurement, classification and collection, billing and other support functions activities and consumer transactions.

04. As the policy limit may be applied:

An example is the case of a consumer segment’s retail market in a cloud service that had a large-scale application in a data center that performed the validation of credit card in the cloud while the workload demands were below the level limit.

When it was time of Diwali shopping, the system detected higher workload demands, exceeding the threshold level. In response, the system quickly created instances of additional demands to balance the workload dynamically.

As the retailer went out of the critical time of purchase, the demands of the workload fell below the threshold level, so that instances of resources in the cloud that were created were released.

As the organization has some control over the hardware, it is able to negotiate with the service provider cloud based on the terms set out in policy. It’s always good to negotiate the parameters of the policy before the critical time of purchase.

The rest of this article provides some background on the types of cloud services and shows how a policy to limit a type of cloud can be different from the policy to another type of cloud.

In addition, it discusses the policy limit on resource management for testing, production and capacity planning applications and notes some of the most important issues to be considered as impacts of a policy to limit a service level agreement (SLA) .

Types of cloud services

First, consider which of these three types of cloud computing services meet your needs:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

We will also discuss how the size of your operation can influence whether your best option for a type of cloud service is public or private.

01. Software as service:

Suppose, as a consumer market segment of retail, you get a license to a SaaS provider for your company in order to run an application to use the Web as a service on demand.

You choose a subscription or payment method in accordance with use, because you have no hardware or software to buy, install and maintain, no need to update the application.

The only control you have is to use the provider application from a desktop or a remote device, process, business tasks such as billing and computerized billing and human resource management.

Although you do not manage deployed applications, operating systems, storage and networking, you need to know a policy limit on the provider’s resource management if there is a peak, planned or unexpected, demand of workload:

You should know how the provider sets threshold levels to ensure continuous operational availability of SaaS.
Must know what are the terms of the SLA and the backup policy of the provider.
If the service fails because the provider could not handle a surge in demand dynamically, you should know if you can get credits, rebates, free months or terminate the SaaS as determined in an SLA.

02. Platform as a Service:

With PaaS, you can develop retail applications from creation to implementation to application testing (or production as a service).

Unlike SaaS, you can control all the applications located on a lifetime of business integral to the platform. For example, spreadsheets, word processing, backups, recovery, processing payroll and billing.

The provider controls the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure in which applications are running. The provider can develop, implement, execute and manage updates and patches on all the features of, say, a retail management
application.

Of course you want a policy limit of PaaS provider:

You should know how the provider sets threshold levels to ensure that PaaS is still available.
If the service fails because the provider could not handle a surge in demand dynamically, you must obtain credits, rebates, free months or terminate the service.

03. Infrastructure as a service:

With IaaS, you can control the operating systems, network equipment and applications deployed on the virtual machine level:

• You can scale the number of virtual servers or blocks of storage area for up or down.
• You can use the infrastructure pay for these resources in the traditional computing environment in the cloud.

You will need to know a limit policy for the IaaS infrastructure provider:

You should know how the provider sets threshold levels to ensure that IaaS will be maintained when there is a peak in workload demands.
Must be able to negotiate the terms of the policy limit and the SLA with your IaaS provider company.
If the service fails because the infrastructure of computing resources could not handle a surge in demand dynamically, resulting in slow response times, you must obtain credits, rebates, free months or terminate the service as determined in an
SLA.

04. Scale of operations: the public versus the private

As an example, my company generates revenues greater than 1 Crores. We think private clouds may be more economical than public clouds.

A cloud has many private domestic business of the same features that a public cloud, but with much higher rates of e governance, security, availability and resilience of small businesses with revenues of, say, less than 1 Crore.

With a public cloud, data can be stored in unknown locations and cannot be easily retrievable. This is in contrast to a private cloud that allows a consumer to recover data from known locations in a particular jurisdiction.

Unknown locations are not suitable for storing test data for compliance, privacy and confidential. They can be in geographical areas in which privacy regulations and compliance of a country are different from this kind of law in another country. Laws vary from one country to another with respect to export controls data.

When creating a policy limit, my company requires the highest levels of dynamic balance of workload demands in a cloud environment. The system must be able to quickly create additional instances of resources when the workload demands exceed
the threshold level.

Due to the large size of operating my business-oriented workloads per transaction are higher than they would be for small businesses. The range and number of transaction types are higher for small businesses.

As the types of transactions are identified by code number or character of two or three bits, a large company or small business needs to associate a category of business transaction to each type. A category of business transaction suitable for a large company (such as financial leasing) may not be suitable for a small business.

While attending a event on Cloud services, an IT manager told me that he was already using cloud for a long time. I got interested because I always try cases of success or failure. The failure is very interesting because I learn a lot from mistakes.

When questioned, he told me he had almost all their servers virtualized. The questioning continued, but the answers stop there. Yes, that’s it. In the view of IT manager, virtualized servers meant to be in cloud services.

Unfortunately, I had to frustrate him and show that virtualization is not a single cloud. It is only the first step, provided there is a strategy to get there. If virtualization is the ultimate goal, it will not reach the cloud. Cloud architectures demand changes in technology, e-governance services, funding models and relationships with users and customers.

Many companies have adopted virtualization in order to consolidate their servers and reduce hardware costs and energy. Or even to prevent the construction of a new data center, the proliferation of physical servers.

However, soon discovered that pass, for example, of 100 physical servers to 50 servers – but with 300 or more logical servers virtualized – create immense management problems with consequent cost increases.

My suggestion to him was to take the following steps:

Virtualization abstracts the applications and infrastructure can be the basis for building a cloud strategy.
We still have to adopt the standardization and automation of computing environment. It is a gradual process.

With a virtualized environment, we can focus on operational improvements, creating mechanisms that enable a provisioning and allocation of resources more quickly and automatically. The user himself can request computing resources via a portal.

Of course at that stage we will have to rethink the bureaucratic procedures and manuals that we adopt today. When a request fails to pass the server administrator for a human and becomes automatic (via self-service portal), and the provisioning time is no longer than two or three weeks to just minutes, the procedures should be reviewed.

The adoption of cloud services should follow a well-defined strategy. Overall, a great company starts with a private cloud, in an exploratory manner, with certain well-defined and restricted strategy.

A good example is the development environment and testing. It is a good way to start putting the cloud into practice. The lessons learned will be very useful, since the spread of the cloud model to other contexts, such as the production are important.

Cloud brings the review of the relationship-user data center, including allowing a more accurate view of resource consumption and thus making room for a revision of funding the company.

The self-service opens up new challenges from the perspective of security and management. For example, in a test environment in the cloud, any developer can allocate a virtual server or are there clear rules on who can allocate these resources.

Very well, begin to explore a private cloud. The next step will probably be adopting hybrid clouds, with some applications and services running on public clouds. New challenges are emerging, ranging from security to integration. Inter-operate as an application that is in a private cloud with one that is in a public cloud.

Why think of hybrid clouds?

Often you will need to deal with peak periods that do not justify the purchase of assets (dedicated server) which will become idle below.

An example?

The development environment itself, and testing can go through periods of extraordinary peak and short duration. Allow it to expand temporarily to a public cloud causes no need to buy new servers.

Another point we should consider is that many applications and services can run, even in public clouds, they meet the criteria of security and corporate governance. In this case, the hybrid model becomes constant. In my opinion, the majority of medium to large businesses will move to that model in the coming years.

This year, we see an acceleration significant use of cloud providers. In an exploratory way, it’s true, but as we learn to use it and feel its benefits, the rate of adoption will be much accelerated.

Some estimates suggest that over the next year about two thirds of large companies will be using private clouds to a greater or lesser degree. Hybrid clouds will be the next step and soon after we lose the fear of using public clouds.

Therefore, IT managers are facing a future that is already doing this: the enterprise in cloud, i.e., the post-virtualization.

The question that arises is: are we prepared?

The evolution of the terms “electronic governance” or “networked governance” must be seen as the crossroads of two major issues – e-Governance itself is the information revolution. The issue of “governance” has been under discussion for some time. The first trials of classical political science on the subject talked about the concept of “governability”, which made the rule of law that became the basis for the development.

The emergence of new e-Governance (Electronic Governance)s (information and communication technologies) also had a profound impact on the development of networked governance. e-Governance (Electronic Governance Services) has replaced two basic elements of production – the “work” and “capital” by “information” and “knowledge” for the first time in two centuries. The Internet has created the same break generated by the press in the fifteenth century.

It shapes the ability to communicate, share, distribute, exchange, formalize, and networking using the information at a speed never experienced before. The processing power of microchips is doubling every 18 months with a decreasing trend from 20 to 30% in prices for the quality setting of computers. This means that computers are getting cheaper, more powerful and present everywhere, enabling more to government networking and automation services. Moreover, political activism is also using the space with more public interest groups and community organizations or volunteers are spreading their needs and activities in the electronic network.

The principles of bureaucratic governance are being replaced by a trend of network governance horizontal, linear and dynamic. Administrative reform and development have lived TQM (Total Quality Management) in 80 years and “re-engineering and reinvention of government” in 90 years. The network of governance reflects this process of reinvention and re-engineering in governance and aims to adapt the administration to the flow of information increased, accelerating the process of decision making by optimizing resources and becoming self-regulatory mechanism decision-making. The concrete objective of this governance is to support and simplify governance for all parties – government, citizens and businesses.

Some say that this mode of network governance ” uses electronic media to support and stimulate good governance “. But what is meant by “good” is relative and varies significantly in practice and reality. For example, the quality and efficiency in all phases of the life-cycle of the law that are reflected in correctness, consistency, transparency and efficiency in transactions (the government). The network of governance is a radical shift from the traditional bureaucratic government. However, it may or may not promote good governance. ” It may serve to strengthen, as good or bad, effective and ineffective government practices or to introduce new “ways of doing business,” which involve social actors of the private sector with little interest in public affairs.