Cloud computing growth will be driven by the proliferation of cloud brokerages, offering packages of cloud services from a selection of different providers and adding value through managed access or enhanced security.
This is the view of Ken O’Hagan, chief technology officer of HP Software for the UK and Ireland. O’Hagen told Techworld that the cloud brokerage model is going to become a new market segment, with brokers offering highly transactional systems comprising applications, web and database services.
“Right now, we see a lot of cloud providers offering individual components that any kind of composite business service would have to be built from. So you have some providers offering cloud databases, some offering cloud application servers, and of course web servers have been available through ISPs and hosting providers for some time,” said O’Hagan.
“To build a business service on those three foundation blocks, you potentially need to span three or more different cloud providers, which makes the whole process very complex – and, by the way, most organisations are not systems integrators, they just want to consume services. What brokers do is take resources from multiple providers, white-box them and present them as an easily consumable package.”
As well as simplifying things for the end user, this also presents an attractive business model for the service provider, explained O’Hagan. Currently, the majority of cloud services are provided by well-established organisations with large amounts of capital available to them to stand up the cost of the servers, storage and networking before taking on any customers; the brokerage model opens the market up to smaller players allowing them to act as “virtual service providers”.
“One of the best features of cloud is that nobody knows how it’s delivered,” he said. “They can set it up on string and yoghurt pots initially, and then roll it up onto nice shiny new equipment once they know that there’s a demand for it. It’s a much more consumer-friendly model for deploying and running services over the long term.”
O’Hagan said another advantage of this model is that it is extremely flexible. Brokers might use databases from one provider one month and then switch to another provider the next month, allowing them to offer services at the best possible price point. If one provider is experiencing performance issues, the broker can simply select another solution.
Organisations are charged for cloud services based on the assets that those services sit on – the infrastructure, the support organisation, the overheads etc. – as well as their usage. Billing mechanisms can be automated and adjusted according to provider.
Taking cautious steps to the cloud
Cloud brokers build on the maturity of the market and on the understanding that cloud is now a viable delivery mechanism for business services. However, not all organisations are necessarily ready to move to a cloud model, warned O’Hagan.
“You might be in a position where you need to start looking at how you automate what you’re doing today. When you get to an automated state, you need to look at how you get commonality across functions and then, using those building blocks, you’re finally in a position to move to cloud and be able to embrace it more fully.”
Moreover, a lot of applications are not ready to be run in a cloud environment. Most organisations are looking at ultimately moving to a hybrid delivery model, where they will have some systems in-house, some systems out in the cloud, and some that are a composite of both.
“A lot of financial institutes still have mainframes at the back end, and I’m pretty sure you don’t get a cloud mainframe yet,” said O’Hagan. “So a lot of applications need to be cloud-enabled, to make them context-aware and understand the fact that they’re running in a multi-tenant high-availability environment. There’s things that need to be designed and engineered into the applications to make them more robust and reliable in that kind of delivery mechanism.”
O’Hagan said that most customers are still just putting a toe in the water, and experimenting with non-essential applications to get a feel for what kind of impact cloud is going to have on their productivity. However, he is confident that business-critical applications will also eventually be run in the cloud.
“Technically, can you do it? Absolutely. Are businesses ready for it culturally? That’s a different question. You have to make the move with your eyes open. Organisations are not going to go from all in-house one day to all-cloud the next. You have to keep the lights on during that transition period, and to do that you need something that is capable of offering a hybrid service environment.”
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