Building the cloud

In this Industry Insight I will get to the rather slippery practicalities of cloud. I will follow the logical progression through strategise, design and build phases. It is important to move procedurally through the phases, as skipping directly to design or build can mean the business imperatives of what users should try to achieve with cloud, are missed.

Cloud computing enables users to build services without regard to resources.

Gareth James, solution strategist, CA Southern Africa.

In the strategise phase, one should take three steps back from technology and consider what the key drivers are for the cloud initiative. The key drivers will vary from business to business. Business agility, for example, would be a key driver for an enterprise building a private cloud, and rapid time to market would be a key driver for a service provider.

Other drivers could include efficiency, reducing costs, driving revenue, rapid time to market and simply cutting man hours. These drivers should frame the progression, and they will help to define first the services that are wanted, and thereafter, the appropriate underlying infrastructure.

Cloud is not a destination - it's a vehicle!

In strategic terms, cloud computing is very entrepreneurial by nature. Vivek Kundra, US chief information officer (White House), highlighted efficiency, agility and innovation as the three primary sources of business value from cloud. Efficiency and agility are the values one would expect; innovation is an important addition.

In strategic terms, innovation is that thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition. A local business leader - Andrew Le Roux - recently back from Harvard Business School noted to me that entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to the resources currently under one's control.

Cloud computing enables users to build services without regard to resources - companies can scale or lease on demand.

What has to be asked is - what can cloud do for your business?

Too many companies are building cloud on the premise that it is the next technology wave. However, this is not the case. Cloud can take many existing technologies and re-frame them in the context of a new business model. There are, of course, some changes, but this is primarily at an orchestration layer. So this brings me back to - why? And this is the first hurdle to be overcome. Without a carefully considered why, the company will achieve an elegantly crafted solution from a solution vendor that bears little relevance to it.

The business should first put in place a strategy team. This should comprise personnel with a business focus, and some high-level technical architects. This team will be responsible for drawing up the business case for cloud. This team will evaluate the business value of taking existing and new services, and delivering these as a cloud service. Generally speaking, a good place to start is with low-risk, high-value services - changing these services would deliver a relatively high business value. A readiness assessment of likely candidates should then define how the company orders migrating these services to the cloud. Complexity and deep integration into legacy systems would be aspects to consider as part of a readiness assessment.

Let me take the example of a software provider. In this scenario, there is an existing software package and it is delivered as a cloud service - the strategy team would then need to examine how much more depth will be gained from their existing market segment, and will this help to drive business into new markets.

Enterprise businesses are on the opposite side of this - they will examine services that are not core to business profitability. For them, the value is in being able to enhance focus on resources that are profit drivers, and less time just keeping the lights on. Enterprise businesses are currently adopting either private or hybrid cloud models. The financial sector is primarily building private internal clouds, whereas other sectors are looking to adopt hybrid cloud - a split between internal and external services.

A practical cloud strategy will additionally take into account the existing software landscape. Application services that have recently been upgraded are lower on the value scale, whereas new services and services nearing the next upgrade cycle will offer the most benefit.

Every effort should be made to avoid considering the impact of software or hardware at this juncture. If the feedback from this initial phase is a bill of materials, then it can be safely assumed that the infrastructure decisions are driving the strategy, rather than the strategy driving design.

The outcomes of this initial strategising phase should be the inputs for the potential service catalogue. These are those services the company wishes to offer using a cloud-based platform. It would assess the benefit of moving a service or application to the cloud, and then multiply that by the potential number of users. These services should be ordered in terms of business value as an input for the design phase. This will also assist the company later, in building a business case for cloud.

* Subsequent Industry Insights will cover the design and build phases in greater detail.