AN INDEPENDENT INSERT BY MEDIAPLANET
Making the move
What is involved in
migrating to the cloud?
Knowing the risks
Ask the experts
Deciding whether the
Why the cloud might
pros outweigh the cons be right for you
No. 1/ Sep ’11
UNDERSTAND THE
BENEFITS
Experience: Jane Moran, Global CIO at Thomson Reuters discusses their
move to the cloud, and what it has meant for their company
Why cloud computing is ideal
for any economic climate.
Turn to page 3
PHOTO: MOJO SOLO/THOMSON REUTERS
CLOUD COMPUTING
2 · SEPTEMBER 2011
AN INDEPENDENT INSERT BY MEDIAPLANET
CHALLENGES
Cloud could ﬁnally allow enterprises to stop spending time on keeping
the lights turned on and start focussing on innovative ways to operate.
But there are bumps in the road which need to be smoothed out says
Emma Taylor, founder of The Cloud Circle
Head in the clouds,
feet on the ground
ost people are
now au fait
with the potential of cloud. In
the main, that’s
scalable computing, delivered on a utility-style ‘pay as you go’
pricing model, which can provide
increased collaboration, remote
working functionality and reduced
infrastructure costs.
So, if you have a high volume of
customer throughput on your applications over a concentrated timescale, you don’t have to shell out to
have the computer power on-site to
handle that demand and then rot for
the rest of the time.What’s more, all
businesses can, ostensibly, compete
on an even footing, as start-up costs
are dramatically reduced and they
access the same facilities.
M
Solutions
UK businesses are certainly
taking note. When The Cloud
Circle began, in 2009, as the UK’s
ﬁrst independent business and ITfocussed cloud computing community, 57 per cent of enterprises said
they did not know enough about
1
cloud computing or were not ready
to commit to it. Two years on, our
newly published 1st Industry
Trends Report reveals that 77 per
cent of organisations are implementing, testing, or actively researching solutions.
But it’s by no means a ‘no brainer’ for everyone just yet. Issues
need ironing out, with security top
of our members’ concerns, even
though suppliers maintain that,
for small enterprises at least, public clouds offer far better security
than anything they will be able to
provide for themselves. Nevertheless, placing one’s fate in the hands
of another is never the most comfortable of things.
Reliability
There’s also the reliability issue. The very public outages
suffered by Google, Microsoft and
Amazon recently won’t have aided
consumer conﬁdence. And cost remains an issue, too. Many have remarked that though cost efficiencies are promised,the actual pricing
structures can be impenetrable;
meaning the total cost of ownership
and ROI is difficult to calculate. As
2
Emma Taylor
Founder, The Cloud Circle
MY BEST TIPS
Get organised
The challenge with the cloud
is often an organisational
one – concerning the culture
within the enterprise – as much
as it is a technical one. In our Industry Trends Survey, 35 per cent
of IT-based respondents highlighted ‘lack of management understanding’ as a concern.
1
Analyse your needs
No one is saying the cloud is
a magic bullet. It’s not a solution in itself – it has to be aligned
with a business need.
2
we all know, accountants, investors and board members like certainty when it comes to cash.
However, suppliers often maintain that the issues are overplayed. They say people present
barriers to guard against a shift
in control, a reduction in head
count, or less money in the capital budget as the IT spend shifts
to an operational expense.
Buzzword
The cloud is certainly a buzz
word at the moment. But here
at The Cloud Circle we’re not getting
carried away. There won’t be a total
overthrow of the current status quo
– our members told us that in ﬁve
years they expect to see an even
split between on-premise and
cloud-based solutions.
It does, however, offer huge opportunity for streamlining operations and it opens doors to functionality which simply could not
have been achieved before. The potential of what could be achieved
through this is too great for it to
just be a ﬂash in the pan. Some
businesses won’t need it; for others, it could make or break them.
3
WE RECOMMEND
PAGE 9
James Caan
Former dragon on
BBC’s Dragon’s
Den, business
entrepreneur and
founder and CEO of
Hamilton Bradshaw
‘For small and
medium sized
businesses, it’s
often far better to
use cloud technology
as it is an operating
expense and not a
capital expense’
We make our readers succeed!
CLOUD COMPUTING, 1ST EDITION,
SEPTEMBER 2011
Managing Director: Willem De Geer
Editorial Manager: Faye Godfrey
Business Development Manager:
Hannah Butler
Responsible for this issue:
Project Manager: Gordon McCracken
Phone: 020 7665 4409
E-mail:
[email protected]
Distributed with: City AM,
September 2011
Print: City AM
Mediaplanet contact information:
Phone: 020 7665 4400
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Mediaplanet’s business is to create
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4 · SEPTEMBER 2011
AN INDEPENDENT INSERT BY MEDIAPLANET
NEWS
MOVING APPS
TO THE CLOUD
OQuestion: How do I migrate
my applications to the cloud?
OAnswer: The choices facing
your company are varied — as
Richard Watson, the author of
a recent report on Cloud
Computing, makes clear
You’ve made the decision to move
some of your business to the
cloud — but that’s the easy part.
How you get your applications
into the cloud is another matter
entirely and, potentially, a technical can of worms.
Richard Watson, analyst at information technology research
and advisory company, Gartner,
is the author of a report called
Migrating Applications to the
Cloud, which aims to tackle this
problem head on.
“There’s a lot of information
from cloud vendors about the
facilities they offer,” he says.
“But when it comes to migrating applications, IT teams start
scratching their heads and wondering how to go about it.”
In his report, Watson identifies five alternatives for companies looking to operate from a
cloud platform: they can Rehost,
Refactor, Revise, Rebuild or Replace applications.
Rehost and Refactor
“Rehosting is a little like a forklift,” says Watson. “You’re picking up an existing application
and setting it down in another hardware environment.” This
takes place on an Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS) model — an environment familiar to IT teams
— and is the easiest option for a
company to take. “However, the
advantage is also the drawback,”
says Watson. “Because you are
not changing the structure of the
application to run more effectively on the cloud, you are not
taking full advantage of the architecture of the cloud.”
If you Refactor an application — on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model — it means
that some changes may have to
be made to the software’s code.
“It does depend on the individual
application,” says Richard, “but,
typically, while it will remain
Richard Watson
Analyst at Gartner
and author
of Migrating
Applications to the
Cloud report
relatively intact, you will need to
tweak it to run it in the cloud.”
Revise and Rebuild
A widescale change to make an application more ‘cloud-friendly’ is
known in the report as the ‘Revise’
option. “This is the most complicated option,” says Watson.“Yet it’s also
the one that is, potentially, going to
get you the most beneﬁt from moving your apps to the cloud. However, you shouldn’t underestimate the
amount of highly skilled software
architecture work involved.”
If you have an out-of-date application that doesn’t work well,
you can retire it and Rebuild it on a
Platform as a Service (Paas) model.
Finally, there is the Replace alternative, using software delivered on
the web in a Software as a Service
(SaaS) model. This is a rent (rather
than buy or build) option, the major advantage of which is that you
won’t need a development team to
help you to use it.
“The drawback is that you don’t
have control over the application,” says Watson. “You have to
accept the functionality it has —
and work your business processes around it.”
TONY GREENWAY
[email protected]
AN INDEPENDENT INSERT BY MEDIAPLANET
SEPTEMBER 2011 · 5
Choosing the
best route for
your business
How does a firm assess
which of the five application
migration options to take:
Rehost, Refactor, Revise,
Rebuild or Replace? It
depends on your individual
business goals and
constraints
“There is no one reason for a business to migrate its applications to
the cloud,” says Gartner’s Richard
Watson. “Different organisations
have different reasons because they
have different goals.”
Of course, the perceived wisdom
is that cloud adoption has increased
among businesses because it reduces costs: but, says Richard, that’s only one small part of the story.
Agility
MIGRATING TO THE CLOUD
The ways in which a
company moves to the cloud
will depend on their goals,
and will vary greatly from
business to business
PHOTO: ZAHRADALES/SHUTTERSTOCK
“When I speak to clients who have
begun to migrate their IT workloads into the cloud,” he says,
“they tell me they are looking for
business agility and the potential
to deliver new services more rapidly to users.”
When moving to a cloud platform,companies can Rehost,Refactor, Revise, Rebuild or Replace applications, as outlined on page 4.
Some of these options are complicated to implement, however, and
still require the expertise of highly
skilled software architects. This also makes them expensive.
Yet some of the easier options
may not be best for your business.
So how does an SME determine
which option to take?
Constraints
“It depends on an individual company’s goals,” says Watson. “For example, does it want to preserve capital? Or leverage existing investments? Or provide wider access to
consumers on mobile devices?
“A business also has to look at the
constraints it faces. Does it have a
software development team? Does
that team have operational experience in running cloud systems?
And does an application a business owns contain core intellectual property? If it does, a company isn’t likely to throw it away and
rebuild it or replace it with a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.”
Because of the number of vendors crowding the market, Watson
admits that choosing a cloud migration path isn’t easy. “But, hopefully, focussing on the ﬁve options
ﬁrst clears the air a little bit,” he
says. “There are undoubtedly vendors and services out there that
can help you achieve your aims,
ultimately; but thinking through
the ﬁve possible ways to migrate
apps may help a business think:
‘What do we want to achieve by
moving to the cloud?’”
NEWS IN BRIEF
Cloud ‘top business trend’
OBusiness software ﬁrm Cordys
says that, according to research it
carried out at the Cloud World Forum in London, the overwhelming majority of UK businesses
believe that the move to cloud is
one of the most important trends
in IT over the next few years. Of
those asked, cloud was a pivotal
issue for 59 per cent.
Whitehall embraces
the cloud
OIn its IT strategy, published in
March, the Government talked
about its intention to ‘push ahead
with its agenda for data centre,
network, software and asset consolidation and the shift towards
cloud computing.’ The Government is set to publish its Cloud
Computing Strategy in October.
Is the future hybrid?
OLast month, IBM announced
a new hybrid cloud solution. According to analysts, say IBM, 39
per cent of cloud users report that
hybrid cloud is now part of their
strategy — and the number is expected to increase to 61 per cent
in the near future.
TONY GREENWAY
TONY GREENWAY
[email protected]
[email protected]
6 · SEPTEMBER 2011
AN INDEPENDENT INSERT BY MEDIAPLANET
NEWS
QUESTION & ANSWER
James Caan,
Business
entrepreneur
and founder and
CEO of Hamilton
Bradshaw
O Why did you move Hamilton Bradshaw to the cloud?
We have recently expanded
Hamilton Bradshaw to include an advisory division,
Hamilton Bradshaw Venture
Partners, that focuses on supporting growing SMEs around
the country. As a consequence,
we now have members of our organisation operating in locations outside of London that
need to collaborate with our
head office in real time. Cloud
services help facilitate this in a
cost-effective way.
!
NEW POSSIBILITIES
Moving to the cloud can
allow you to access and
manage your data from
almost anywhere
PHOTO: YURI ARCURS/SHUTTERSTOCK
Data management:
easier from the cloud?
OQuestion: Is managing
corporate data easier from a
cloud-based platform?
OAnswer: It can be, because
cloud offers instant data
access from any location with
an internet connection, while
giving SMEs the option to scale
capacity up or down
‘People are
now logging
on in public
places such as
coffee shops’
SHOWCASE
Increasing numbers of companies
are moving to the cloud. But what
are their reasons for doing so?
Tim Cowen is Partner at international business law ﬁrm Sidley Austin and author of a recent ResPublica
report called Capturing the Cloud.
“Initially, it was thought that
ﬁrms were adopting cloud solutions
because of the cost-savings beneﬁts,” he says. “However, a Cloud Industry Forum survey recently demonstrated that the adoption rate is
going up because cloud increases a
customer’s agility.”
Indeed, cloud can offer a new way
to manage data — one which vastly
increases productivity.
“Traditionally, a ﬁrm may have a
number of business processes that depend on computing,” says Cowen,“but
its computing power is housed in a
building that is locked at night.That’s
good from a security point of view; but
it’s not good for productivity.
“Say, however, that you run your
email system from a cloud service.
Tim Cowen
Partner at Sidley Austin
This is a shared resource that is a)
cheap and b) accessible all the time.
Because, in the end, a business needs
operational effectiveness to do well.”
Access
Logging into the cloud — where all
your data and design tools are waiting for you — means that you don’t
need to have applications clogging
up space on your own in-house systems. It also means that staff can
access this data from any computer.
“People are now logging on in public
places such as coffee shops,” says Cowen. “They’re not going there just because of the coffee, either.They’re going because of the free Wi-Fi access.”
Cowen also points out that if a
company has heavier workloads at
certain times of the month or year,
then cloud allows users to scale
up and down as necessary. “If you
have a lot of data to process at short
FACTS
O A 2009 study by market intelligence ﬁrm IDC notes that the
shift to cloud computing has
been calculated as contributing
US $800billion in net new business revenues in 52 countries by
2013. SOURCE: Capturing the
Cloud, ResPublica
O Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption
Study (March 2011) found that
39 per cent of SMEs expect to
be paying for one or more cloud
services within three years.
O The Microsoft study also found
that SMEs adopting Software as a
service (SaaS) and Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS) are larger, more
growth-oriented and more interested in additional services, such as
uniﬁed communications.
notice, you can get more capacity
on a pay-as-you-go basis,” he says.
“This ability to turn power up and
down is very attractive to SMEs.”
Search
A business may have three computers in its existing deployment
— but a cloud provider will have
thousands. Therefore, says Cowen,
if something goes wrong, a company using cloud can switch its data
processing to a different server. “It
also means you can process your data more quickly,” he says.
Plus, cloud offers effective search
— although it pays to choose a provider wisely.Ask how they store the
data on their system and what security measures they have in place to
ensure that your information cannot be accessed by others.
In fact, data security in the cloud
is still the main business concern;
but Tim Cowen believes this is
misplaced to a degree. “The most
well-known data lapses have been
because laptops have been left in
the back of taxis, or because discs
and data sticks have been sent in
the post and gone astray,” he says.
“In the cloud that can’t happen, as
the data is not transported in the
physical world, and in the electronic world the cloud service may
also be encrypted.”
TONY GREENWAY
SOURCE: MICROSOFT
[email protected]
O What kind of cloud do
you use?
We use a cloud-based file
sharing tool and a cloud
-based CRM system.
!
O What kinds of benefits
do you see in the cloud?
Has it saved Hamilton
Bradshaw money?
The use of the cloud has allowed us to quickly expand
our operating scope in a way
that was previously not viable.
For small and medium sized
businesses, it’s often far better
to use cloud technology as it is
an operating expense and not a
capital expense.
!
O Can you give an example
of what the cloud allows
your company to do that it
couldn’t do before?
Manage a wider regional
workforce at no extra cost.
It also helps us collaborate to access and update client information while on site, via mobile devices. We have had unanimously
positive feedback from our clients on our delivery speed and
customer service, so it has actually translated into a competitive advantage.
!
O What tips would you give
any entrepreneur thinking
of moving their business to
the cloud?
Generally, I think it’s
about researching the
companies on the market, getting recommendations from
colleagues and other business
people, and consulting trusted
information sources.
!
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8 · SEPTEMBER 2011
AN INDEPENDENT INSERT BY MEDIAPLANET
INSPIRATION
QUESTION & ANSWER
Ken Johnson,
Product Director of
Voice and Uniﬁed
Collaboration,
Global Crossing
STORMY WEATHER?
There may be issues with
connectivity, so it is
important that you choose
the right network
PHOTO: MICHAEL D BROWN/SHUTTERSTOCK
Making the right
connection
OQuestion: What are some
of the issues surrounding
cloud connectivity?
OAnswer: User perceptions,
cost, security, latency issues
and compliance problems,
to name a few, says Stephen
Simpson, UK Cloud Lead
at Logica
‘If you’re in
the sticks and
don’t have a
3G connection,
that’s an obvious
problem’
SHOWCASE
When you’re thinking about shifting to the cloud, you also have to
think about good connectivity. For
peace of mind — and uninterrupted
access to your data — you need a resilient network.
“That’s right,” says Stephen Simpson, UK Cloud Lead at business and
technology service company Logica.
“But if you have a private cloud, you
expect the service provider to take
care of that side of things for you — although you do pay more money for it.
“For example, one of our clients
had many data centres which we’ve
consolidated to two, with dual networks from different suppliers running between them. That’s a robust
system. But when you’re talking
about the public cloud…you do have
to dance a lot more.”
Major examples of public cloud
outage — such as Amazon and Microsoft — have made headlines this
year. Many customers can be affected by such outages; but others, says
Simpson, will have the foresight to
engineer a solution that ensures
Stephen Simpson
UK Cloud Lead, Logica
their connectivity in a crisis. Yes,
their performance may be affected — but they’ll still be able to run
their businesses.
Availability
Then there are connectivity issues
surrounding so-called road warriors. These are staff who may be sitting in,say,a coffee shop,wanting to
hook up to their office in the cloud
— but to do so they’ll need access to
a strong signal.
“They will,but that’s the ‘back end’
of communications,” argues Simpson. “That’s an issue about how you
connect to services hosted on the
cloud, and nothing to do with the
cloud itself. People have long been
able to sit in cafes and log-in to work
with their laptops or mobile devices
— so that situation hasn’t changed.”
FACTS
O In August , the BBC revealed
the results of its 3G survey, to
provide a true picture of 3G
mobile data network coverage
in the UK.
O More than 44,000 people
took part in the survey. The BBC
ﬁndings concluded that “overall, people are getting 3G about
three quarters of the time.”
O The BBC also noted: “While
most of the big cities are well
served by 3G, it can be a real
challenge getting a decent connection elsewhere.”
O As a result, the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has called
for ‘significant improvements to
3G coverage’ noting that older 2G technology is typically
around 10 times slower than 3G
‘mobile broadband’.
SOURCE: BBC AND CIF
Of course signal availability will
vary, depending on where you are.
“If you’re in the sticks and don’t
have a 3G connection, that’s an
obvious problem,” agrees Simpson. “But it can even be a problem
in the city where you’re sharing
highly solicited resources.”
Security
For Simpson, there are various issues surrounding connectivity
that need to be resolved. “Cost, for
example,” he says. “With private
cloud it can be expensive.
“Once you get into the public cloud,
you can experience latency issues if
your data has to do ‘round trips’ via
satellites across vast distances.”
Then there are issues around
compliance: data privacy rules
and data sovereignty, for example.
Plus there’s connectivity security. “All of the classic security
models isolate people and applications,” says Simpson, “but we’ve
got to understand a person’s context in order to give them different
rights of access. We have to ask:
who are they? What are they doing? What device are they using?
And, crucially, where are they? If
they’re in the office or at home,
that’s one thing… but if they’re
sitting in a café in Baghdad you
might want to scale their authority to act back.”
TONY GREENWAY
[email protected]
O If a company is looking
to shift to the cloud, what
should it do first?
Scott McNealy famously
said: ‘The network is the
computer’ — and so it follows
that the network is critical to
cloud computing. Without a
solid, reliable and resilient LAN
and WAN, your network doesn’t
stand a chance. They both exist
outside of your business and
can’t function if your network
fails; so before you consider deploying cloud solutions, you
should ensure your network is
IP-ready,secure and robust.
!
O Companies are concerned
about data security in the
cloud. So how can companies make sure their data is
in good hands?
When it comes to cloud
computing, security is one
of the biggest barriers to adoption. Most concerns focus on
the location and protection of
the data itself, but businesses
should also have a back-up plan
in mind in the event that a
cloud provider fails, is
inﬁltrated, or destroyed
ﬁnancially. Ensure your IT
team is ready for the change in
approach and shift in levels of
control and put together a mitigation plan that can be implemented should your cloud solution malfunction or fail.
!
O Cloud appears to be ‘the
next big thing’. Is it inevitable
that it will go ‘mainstream’?
While it’s certainly gathering pace, the move to
cloud is not inevitable and it’s
important to balance the hype
with a sense of pragmatism.
While there are signiﬁcant
cost, efficiency and ﬂexibility
beneﬁts to cloud solutions,
businesses shouldn’t necessarily decline a dedicated noncloud offer; many services can
still be ‘hosted’ off premise,
but may not cost as much.
!
10 · SEPTEMBER 2011
AN INDEPENDENT INSERT BY MEDIAPLANET
PROFESSIONAL INSIGHT
4
Global news and information company Thomson Reuters moved part of its business to the
cloud a number of years ago, and has an ongoing cloud migration programme. Jane Moran,
Global CIO, explains why cloud is so important; and what difference the platform has made
to the Thomson Reuters business, its staff and customers
JANE’S BEST TIPS
Focus on your
business needs
Cloud has made us more agile
“The cloud,” says Jane Moran, Global CIO of worldwide news and information company Thomson Reuters,“has made a big,positive difference to us. There are many deﬁnitions of what ‘cloud’ is; but what it
means to me is working with a vendor partner who bears the burden
of managing all of the hardware
and networking so that we don’t
have to.” They, then, are responsible
for security and availability.
Thomson Reuters made its initial foray into cloud computing in
2005; so it should have been no surprise when, earlier this month, it
was announced that the company’s human resources and payroll
data is moving across to the Workday cloud platform.
“Not everything we do is operated in the cloud,” says Moran.“We’re
a very large corporation with hundreds of internal business systems. The strategy was to become
more efficient and effective across
the corporation — and, as we standardise and rationalise the business architecture, moving to the
cloud enables us to be more agile.”
40 per cent of any given on-premise
project installing hardware and kit
in our data centres,” says Moran. “I
really feel as though cloud computing is making a step change in the
way that businesses work.”
The other big beneﬁt for Thomson Reuters has been speed. The
timeframe to move the company’s
human resources to a cloud platform is 18 months, start to ﬁnish.
An on-premise upgrade would have
taken four years. Because the company is able to realise cloud solutions quickly, this speeds delivery
and beneﬁts its customer base.Plus,
of course, because the applications
are sitting in the cloud, upgrades
are automatic. Cloud-based computing is an increasingly important tool to leverage efficiencies.
“Because it is browser-based, it
makes it extremely easy to roll out
applications to Thomson Reuters’
employees across the world,” says
Jane. “There’s also a beneﬁt within
IT, because the resources needed to
maintain cloud-based applications
are far less than those needed for
on-premise ones.”
Benefit
Specialist
The major reason for this agility,
says Moran, is that, with a cloudbased solution, Thomson Reuters
doesn’t have to focus on installing
and maintaining the hardware in its
data centres. “We spend about 30 or
Security is one of the main reasons why companies are wary of
migrating to a cloud platform;
but Moran has conﬁdence in her
Thomson Reuters solutions
providers. “If you think about what
‘I really feel as
though cloud
computing
is making a
step change
in the way that
businesses
work’
Jane Moran
Global CIO,
Thomson Reuters
cloud vendors do for a living,” she
says, “then you realise that they
spend a lot more money than any
individual company ever could on
security solutions.
“Every one of these cloud providers is dedicated to keeping data secure; and I also like the way they
work very closely together to share
best practices.”
Cloud technology is specialist,
however. Which begs the question:
how did Thomson Reuters make the
move to its cloud platforms? Did it
use an external migration team?
Did its vendors help? Or is Thomson
Reuters’ lucky enough to have its
own expert in-house IT knowledge?
“A combination of all of those,”
says Moran. “We have used an
external systems integrator in the
past; and the vendors themselves
are very strong in terms of their internal capabilities to make sure you
(make the move) successfully.
“But the entire industry is changing and people change with it. If
I look at my IT team — and I have
roughly 1,000 people in this group
— they are upskilling themselves.
We are providing training; but
we also ﬁnd that staff are training
themselves because they can see
that this is the way the industry
is going.”
TONY GREENWAY
[email protected]
For any SME thinking of
moving to the cloud, pick
one area where you have
a business problem that you’re
trying to solve. Then partner
with a suitable vendor and work
with them to build a road map.
1
Work closely with your
business partners
Have a conversation with
your business partners
about the business problems you are trying to solve. This
is not about swapping like-forlike technology, because the
whole paradigm of cloud is completely different.
2
Bolt-on if necessary
We can’t customise the
applications we use —
that right sits with our
vendor partners — but we can
conﬁgure them. If companies are
nervous about (not being able to
customise apps), they should
consider that many cloud providers encourage their customers to write bolt-on applications.
3
Be prepared to work in
a different way
Cloud is a different way
of working. It’s not about
a team of IT people going
away for a year to work on a software programme. It’s true collaboration between the people
who need to use these platforms
to solve their business problems
and the people who work internally in your IT department.
4
AN INDEPENDENT INSERT BY MEDIAPLANET
SEPTEMBER 2011 · 11
PANEL OF EXPERTS
Question 1:
How does a ﬁrm assess if it
should migrate to the cloud —
and how does it choose which
cloud company to use?
Question 2:
What are the perceived main
advantages of cloud?
Question 3:
What are the challenges
cloud technology still needs
to overcome in order to go
‘mainstream’?
Andrew Greenway
Global Cloud Computing
Program Lead, Accenture
Chris Gabriel
Marketing and
Strategy Director,
Logicalis
Andy Burton
Chairman,
Cloud Industry
Forum
Cloud should be for most ﬁrms, whether that’s moving back office applications
like email to a secure public cloud, or using private cloud to transform the way
business applications can be run internally. A full cloud assessment should be
considered when choosing a service provider, establishing readiness to migrate
and providing a structured view of what
applications and services can be moved
to a public or private cloud infrastructure.
Public cloud transparency is key: where
is it? What jurisdiction it is in? And what
SLA will be offered?
To me the questions are more about what,
when and how rather than if. That said,
for most the adoption of cloud will not be
wholesale in the foreseeable future but case
by case.Which areas of IT move to the cloud
and when will be driven by the characteristics of the application area being considered.
Issues such as integration with other applications; the regulatory environment (such
as the need for data to be stored in a specific jurisdiction); in-house skills and time to
market all inﬂuence the priorities and the
deployment model.
For many businesses, the question of
cloud still comes down to a cost-beneﬁt comparison. Increasingly the cloudbased IT services available on the market
are proving good enough to win on cost
grounds, as well as bringing much greater speed, agility and ﬂexibility. At a higher level, cloud services allow you to speed
innovation and launch new services and
businesses in new markets. The choice of
service provider will be driven by a careful comparison between the services that
providers are offering and the requirements of the customer.
Cloud is simply another way of delivering ICT service to your business — nothing more complicated than that, with the
advantages spanning from how internal
IT departments acquire, pay for, and run
IT systems, through to the speed at which
new applications can be delivered to business users. Internal Private Cloud beneﬁts
include reduced server growth through
more efficient usage, reduced operational overhead and faster delivery of internal business applications, overall making
IT more efficient and more responsive to
business demands.
Rapid operational scalability, elasticity
of consumption (allowing scaling up and
down), pay-as-you-go and improved resilience of service due to its architecture.However, arguably the biggest advantages lie in
the enablement of business transformation.
Beneﬁts such as rapid access to new technology can reduce time to market of new solutions which when coupled with predictable
low costs drives innovation and process improvement. Cloud has a game-changing capability that levels the playing ﬁeld between
the smallest and largest organisations.
Cloud services are currently helping organisations reduce costs, enhance scalability, increase implementation speed, and
improve applications and business processes. Whilst cost savings are still seen as
critical, Accenture is increasingly seeing
business agility as the main driver. Business leaders are under immense pressure
to move quickly, get closer to stakeholders, launch new products and communicate with people wherever they are and on
every device. Cloud-based services are often built with this agility at the centre of
the design.
Cloud technology is ‘mainstream’; but
for many ﬁrms, cloud is rightly part of a
longer term migration and transformation
strategy. Private clouds are already in place
in many City ﬁrms, but public cloud offerings today have not been suitable for the
highly regulated demands of City life. But,
with public clouds now becoming available
in the UK, and built on technologies from
trusted vendors, these trusted private and
public clouds will start to convince a sceptical City that cloud is a reality.
In my opinion the issue of data security has
practical solutions,and I remain optimistic
that access to high -speed internet through
cable and the licensing of 4G will continue
to improve the pervasiveness of connectivity.The real challenges to overcome in a
fast-growing market relate to driving clarity and standards of contracts/service level
agreements provided by service providers
and enabling inter-operability and portability of data — all of which will strengthen
customer conﬁdence.
For many IT services, cloud is already
‘mainstream’. It’s at the core of everyday
voice and data communications, email,
CRM, analytics, collaboration, social networking, training; the list goes on. Its
awareness amongst consumers is also
increasingly evident, with services like
Gmail and Apple’s iCloud paving the way
forward for mass-market acceptance.
When it comes to business, organisations,
big and small, are using cloud services today, at scale. Increasing sophistication and
choice is opening up new opportunities all
the time.
Let’s
Call us today to move your
business to the Cloud
0844
583
0777
or visit www. fasthosts.co.uk/cloud
© 2011 All rights reserved. Fasthosts and the Fasthosts logo are trademarks of Fasthosts Internet Ltd.
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