SoMoClo part 2: Cloud at the core

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Aberdeen believes that the concept of Social Mobile Cloud (SoMoClo) has several principles required to support the transformation to the new enterprise.

In this second article we build on the theme of the Cloud being the core of this new infrastructure, with mobility its edge, and social the connection between the mobile endpoints.

Public vs. Private Cloud In research conducted in September 2012, Aberdeen found that 44 per cent of responding organisations are a hybrid environment between private and public Cloud.

Over a quarter (28 per cent) of respondents are using solely enterprise owned and operated computing infrastructure and a similar number are completely using platforms offered by a service provider based on shared resource models, public cloud.

IT organisations must decide which functions are clearly an enterprise strategic requirement and manage these in-house as a value-added service.

The remaining processes, which can be handled more efficiently by others, should be outsourced to Managed Service Providers. The right mix between private and public cloud will vary by enterprise, industry and company size.

The sourcing of the IT stack will vary between public and private Cloud offerings:

Data: The volume of data enterprises manage is exploding, on average doubling every 2.5 years, as reported in Aberdeen’s Storage Virtualization study.

– Private Cloud: Enterprises should keep data within the confines of their own data centres if that data is business-critical, growing at a defined rate, and requires minimal latency accessibility. – Public Cloud: The main advantage of public Cloud for data accessibility is the ability to scale rapidly, without limitations, to meet the need for additional storage capacity.

Data Storage: Choosing the right location for storing enterprise data is a key IT responsibility.

– Private Cloud: In research published in March 2011, Aberdeen demonstrated that enterprises with the highest percentage of their in-house storage devices virtualised are able to deploy new applications 77 per cent faster and reduce application downtime by a quarter. – Public Cloud: An Aberdeen report publishing this month shows that companies with the highest percentage of their data stored in the Public Cloud have been able to reduce their overall cost of data storage the most.

Computing Platforms: This includes both servers hosting applications and desktops.

– Private Cloud: A 2011 Aberdeen study found that organisations with more applications virtualised (60 per cent of applications virtualised compared to the average of 49 per cent) reduce their time to deploy new applications by 35 per cent and are able to support 30 per cent more applications per server. – Public Cloud: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers can offer flexible, elastic and cost effective computing platforms with a per-month cost, shifting some IT spending from a capital expense to an operational expense basis.

Governance, Risk Management and Compliance: Regardless of which elements of their computing structure are hosted where, organisations must ensure that all elements are covered by and conform to enterprise security and access control standards.

Data protection, methods of access, and data management procedures must be enforced in-house as well as via SLAs with external service providers.

2013 With the Cloud as its base, SoMoClo offers the CIO a converged vision and a roadmap for the future of IT infrastructure.

The opportunity for the CIO in taking this unified approach to infrastructure decisions is to improve the infrastructure’s support for mobile devices and the work styles of the new enterprise.

Much work remains to be done before the SoMoClo vision is fully enterprise-ready: cloud security, social business compliance, and mobile application development are only a few of the challenges.

Pic: Kevin Dooleycc2.0