virtualisation & cloud services
PIECING IT TOGETHER
Richard Blanford of Fordway gives some guidance
on putting together your own jigsaw of cloud services.
S
o you’ve reviewed
your business and IT
strategy and decided
that the time is right to
move one or more of
your IT services to the cloud.
You then have to decide what type
of cloud will best meet your needs.
Do you simply want capacity and
equipment to be provided by a third
party, or would you like management
too? There are three options:
O
n-premises or dedicated
resources provided/managed by a
third party with user self-service,
automation and billing/cost
chargeback – generally referred to
as private cloud.
‘Vanilla’ cloud services, where a
third party provides capacity in
their data centre but you manage
the service or services yourself –
generally public cloud.
Managed cloud services, where
you transfer responsibility for all
aspects of a specific service or
services to a third party provider
or partner and can tailor it
your specific needs within the
provider’s capabilities.
Key considerations include
security, compliance, what resilience
is needed and, importantly, the
recovery/ownership of data. For most
24
organisations the optimum solution
will be a mix of two or more types of
service – what we define as hybrid
cloud. This is in effect just a way of
provisioning services, which could
be IaaS, PaaS or any other ‘aaS’. I
believe hybrid cloud will be a staging
point as organisations continue their
cloud journey and services become
more capable and resilient.
The management services
available ar e also continuing to
evolve to meet the needs of hybrid
cloud. For example, you may choose
public cloud for some services but
there may be applications that don’t
Figure 1: Fordway’s view of the future of cloud
fit – perhaps legacy services, or
something requiring a non-standard
SLA – and so need a specialist
provider. However, you may be able
to manage them from your public
cloud platform. Alternatively, your
specialist provider could buy a cloud
management service which enables
you to manage your entire portfolio,
including public cloud.
Debunking the myths
A number of myths have sprung up
around hybrid cloud. Firstly, many
people assume they are buying fixed
capacity. They don’t realise all variants