Finding Value in Cloud Computing – Part 8: OpEx Management

Organizations have learned that acquisition and implementation costs are only a small part of their total cost of ownership (TCO). To reduce and contain OpEx, prudent organizations are seeking to reduce management costs. The Cloud Computing paradigm reduces the physical IT estate, integrates service management tools, and enhances service management effectiveness. These reduce service management efforts and costs, and contribute to reducing and containing OpEx.

Organizations can achieve further OpEx reduction and containment through the service-orientation and SLA-driven aspects of the Cloud Computing paradigm. Composing applications from discrete loosely-coupled services reduces development, enhancement, and maintenance costs. Automating the dynamic management of fluctuating workloads and changing priorities reduces service management demands on costly professional resources. Service orientation and service level delivery leverage automation, process improvement, resource sharing, virtualization, economy of scale to reduce and contain IT OpEx.

__ Joseph Starwood (www.linkedin.com/in/JosephStarwood)

Finding Value in Cloud Computing – Part 6: Elastic Capacity

A highly elastic, scalable, and flexible IT environment is critical to organizations seeking to remain competitive or enhance their competitive position. The Cloud Computing paradigm provides elasticity to support changing workloads and business priorities. Applications, services, and infrastructure can be scaled up or down as needed. “Elasticity is a trait of shared pools of resources. … Elasticity is associated with not only scale but also an economic model that enables scaling in both directions in an automated fashion. This means that services scale on demand to add or remove resources as needed.” __Gartner, Press Release, 2009-JUN-23, ( http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1035013 )

Organizations can leverage the elastic capabilities of Cloud computing to serve varying workloads; from small departmental applications to large enterprise applications, and from routine transactions associated with daily operations to large transaction spikes from special promotions. Enterprises can also leverage the service-oriented capabilities of Cloud computing to evolve transaction processing as business requirements change, to improve resource utilization, and to manage costs as well as allocate costs by allow business units to pay only for capacity that is actually used.

The relevant question is how to begin transforming the IT estate so that applications and workloads can effectively and efficiently benefit from Cloud computing to better support the business. Organizations seeking to leverage their IT environments for competitive advantage are beginning to transform their data centers to enable and automate their ‘Core’ and ‘Differentiating’ business capabilities and processes cost effectively using the Cloud Computing paradigm.

__ Joseph Starwood (www.linkedin.com/in/JosephStarwood)

Finding Value in Cloud Computing – Part 3: Business Focus

Most business and IT executives would rather invest in those business capabilities and processes that are essential to serving their customers and that differentiate them from the competition. They are focused on enabling and automating their ‘Core’ and ‘Differentiating’ business capabilities and processes.

The Cloud Computing paradigm allows organizations to focus their professional and technical resources on building and delivering functionality that provides business value. This minimizes investment in business capabilities and processes that are not ‘Core’ or ‘Differentiating’.

Whether in the form of a Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, or Private Cloud, organizations can leverage the service-orientation within the Cloud computing paradigm to focus IT investments on solving business problems and enabling business capabilities rather than technical details.

__ Joseph Starwood (www.linkedin.com/in/JosephStarwood)

Partly Cloudy: Are the new technology buzz words worth it?

My Nexus Muses:
I wish you all a wonderful and safe holiday season!
If your family is like mine, you know how excited some family members become over the newest technologies they receive as gifts. They can’t wait to get the newest game system or the latest smart-phone.
It seems to me that business and technology professionals often become excited about the newest technologies.
I recently met with a Chief Information Officer (CIO) who is interested in using new technologies to reach his customers. He was particularly excited about “Cloud Computing” and “Software as a Services” (SaaS).
As a profession with many years of experience, I wonder how much the newest technologies are really repackaging of existing ideas. I also wonder about the value of the new technology buzz words.
During the past decade, great attention was given to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). I recognized that SOA was really a repackaging of the best practices for information technology developed since the mid-1960s. SOA embodies many proven concepts including: structure, encapsulation, abstraction, separation of concerns, loose-coupling, high-cohesion, etc.
Some executives and managers used the SOA message to re-examine and improve their efforts around the embodied concepts. They established Enterprise Services groups and Enterprise Architecture teams. Others became mired down in adopting the new SOA approach; leading to the question, “Is SOA dead?”
Today, we face new technology buzz words: Cloud Computing, Software as a Service, Fabric, etc.
Are the new technology buzz words worth it? What do you think?
__Joseph Starwood (http://www.linkedin.com/in/JosephStarwood)