virtualisation & cloud services
SITION
for organisations to consolidate their disparate infrastructure into a sensible , flexible and , dare I say , cloud-like networking , storage and computing platform – which gives you the ability to respond quickly .
Optimal balance In simple terms , what is wonderful about the cloud model is , if used effectively , it creates the optimal balance between demand and consumption . The five year DC business plan with its various consumption and growth assumptions these days appears brave and – invariably – wrong . The contrary cloud model lets you keep consuming and adapting as you learn what you really need , then you make a decision based on experience not on future gazing . Sounds simple enough but in reality there is a degree of work or transformation for many to convert their workloads to that utopian model and they will likely have a bunch of applications and infrastructure that on the face of it may or not make sense commercially and technically to shift .
Most people , when they start on the whiteboard rethinking their infrastructure , will think to either ignore the current crop of enterprise workloads or park them in the ‘ I ’ ll get to it in a while ’ box and focus on those pure digital workloads suited to the ‘ classic cloud ’ treatment . Whilst this makes sense within the current constraint of many public clouds , long term and for the 50-60 per cent of stuff you ’ re not thinking about , it ’ s too narrow for many and frankly unnecessarily restrictive . The challenge with many options presented currently is that you are effectively in a Mexican stand off with a bunch of suppliers who are waiting for you to yield to their way of thinking ( it works for them ) or you strike out and cobble something together that gets it all sort of working together acceptably .
Sketch your digital future Rather than accept this bleak assessment of the current state of IT , you could grab the whiteboard pen to start sketching your digital future . One simple place to start is by creating three buckets of classification for your applications and infrastructure , based on the need to transform or whether they are digitally native :
Never transform – leave as is . Generally applications that cannot be virtualised or predate the current accepted level of infrastructure and OS . Might transform – don ’ t have a strong case for change other than for change ’ s sake . Definitely transform – you need a better , more scalable platform , etc .
Having completed this fairly simple task of outlining what you want to put effort into , as opposed what you simply want to rationalise – what do you do next ? Unless you ’ re lucky enough to be able to say that you only have applications in the ‘ definitely transform ’ bucket , you are likely to want to create a strategy that addresses all of your needs rather than simply pick off the cloud ones . Parking the existing infrastructure is OK , but it ’ s not a long term solution . The target platform you need to be aiming for is a ‘ Digital Enterprise Platform ’.
The current received wisdom is that a Digital Enterprise Platform is a collection of specialists ; cloud , network , managed services and data centres all neatly managed by yourself or an additional third party . The combination addresses all your needs and forms the basis of a transformation project . Not surprisingly , many are thinking this is an onerous obligation that probably won ’ t end well , so simply stick to the cloud thing . As one CIO told me recently the first category should be renamed ‘ if it ain ’ t broke , don ’ t fix it ’. The challenge with this approach is that one day the thing that ‘ ain ’ t broke ’ breaks or is the roadblock to your unified communications solution or bottleneck for your companies M & A strategy preventing synergies .
The key challenge in the above approach is that bringing it all together
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