Building an Infrastructure with Growth in Mind - Growing with the Cloud (
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Eventually, Chalmers said, the hosted model will morph into the ideal of cloud computing, an on-demand model that allows companies to access services, storage, applications and whatever else they need and be billed on a monthly basis, with itemized charges. Right now, cloud computing is limited to vendors such as Google and Amazon.com, but the future is right around the corner.
A company of 400 employees undergoing tremendous growth may have had its existing infrastructure in place for 10 years, and it is clearly time to upgrade.
With a situation like that, “you might see that as the need for collaboration grows and people need more communication, a lot of stuff ends up on wikis and being done on Google documents, and meetings are being hosted on WebEx or GoToMeeting,” Chalmers said. “All of this is aspiring toward cloud conditions. So even though there hasn’t been an IT directive saying they are going to scale up their servers and bring in extra capacity, by default, that extra capacity is being added through hosting providers in cloud-like ways. It just happens, and it needs to be managed.”
Moving to a hosted model of any type, however, is not without its own challenges, and one of the main ones is cost.
“In some cases, companies might pay more to have their infrastructure hosted but might get better performance, availability, reliability and flexibility in return,” Reichman said. “A lot of companies would rather have it that way, and they would rather pay for it over time than have a big investment upfront.”
When weighing the cost differences, make sure to take into account not only the cost of servers and storage in a company-managed environment, but the cost of integration, staff to run it and the ongoing cost of maintenance and delivery. To further get a handle on the costs, Chalmers recommends using a product such as vKernel to gain cost visibility, which meters resource consumption by department along with the associated costs.
Perceived loss of control, along with trust, are other hot-button issues.
“When you hand over control to a vendor, they make the decisions about how many servers and storage to buy and what architecture to use, but in a lot of cases that’s also tied to the pricing agreement, so you have the wolf minding the henhouse,” Reichman said. “It’s difficult for the customer to know they are paying the right amount for what they are getting and feel a sense of trust that they are getting only as much as they need and aren’t being over-provisioned.” But as service providers’ models become more sophisticated and companies become more used to the model, those concerns will dissipate, he said.
More than anything, though, it’s often an issue of mindset, and there can be political barriers to changing that mindset.
“If a company has already invested in a lot of hardware and software and staff, [decision-makers] are probably going to have a hard time changing their mindset, but if a company is just growing into these needs for the first time, they have a lot more flexibility to decide what’s best for them,” Reichman said.
No matter which route you take, if money is an issue, it is possible to prioritize, and prioritization is simple, Chalmers said.
“Anything that generates revenue should be a top priority,” she said. “Those are the core business processes you should think long and hard about before outsourcing because those are the ones you want to retain control of.”
And discard any preconceived notions of what your infrastructure should look like, Reichman said. “Be open-minded. Think of it not as an IT problem but as a business process problem.”
