In the beginning, the statements on “cloud computing” were more reminiscent of a mist – the definitions were opaque. But in fact, cloud computing is already an old hat. Webmail services or website hosting are already part of this.
Virtualization and standardization
But many companies still hesitate to outsource business critical data or applications. The concerns about security, availability and performance are great. With new technologies and the development of a private cloud, enterprises can meet all policies while providing data, applications, and resources to their employees at the click of a mouse
Encapsulation and automation
But is the company and its data center ready for the (private) cloud? To answer this question, an analysis of the degree of maturity is necessary. This can be determined, for example, by means of a catalog that contains about 250 practical questions for all areas.
Organizational requirements
The topics covered range from access to the data center, service management and energy efficiency. With the help of pre-defined answers, the cloud maturity for technical and organizational areas can be assessed quickly and objectively in five stages. This questionnaire should, however, be answered not only at the beginning, but at all project stages. This is the only way to tell if the company is on the right path to the cloud.
In the cloud arrived
Furthermore, the existing and necessary procedures for the cloud must be known. This includes all sub-steps, from the requirement in the web portal to the provision of the services to the automated cost accounting. It is important to examine the extent to which existing structures, storage, applications, rights and management solutions support these processes.
One of the most important prerequisites is, for example, a vast virtualization of the infrastructure, ie network, server and storage. Most companies already use them, as the virtual load balancing of virtual capacities allows a significant reduction in the required application and storage resources. In addition, virtualization provides the highest level of resilience because switching to other resources is quick and user-friendly.
In the area of standardization of hardware and operating systems, however, most companies are not yet ready. This standardization is needed to achieve fully automated processes that are required to deploy cloud services.
If different version numbers of the software, different patch levels or even different interfaces for automation tools are used, exceptions will increase complexity and thus possible sources of error. The high investment costs to unify heterogeneous structures are quickly amortized by the much more efficient processes of automation.
The virtualized systems must be encapsulated within dedicated functional blocks to keep the complex cloud technology transparent. The encapsulation also increases the degree of virtualization, which makes it even easier to structure and unify processes.
Encapsulated infrastructures integrate servers, storage and network into one system. They can be installed like a complete package in the datacenter and provide services accordingly quickly. With these homogenous blocks, a virtualization rate of nearly 100 percent can be achieved. In addition to faster implementation of projects, this also leads to better capacity utilization and greater energy efficiency.
The automation of IT infrastructures brings numerous advantages. For example, IT administrators no longer have to perform time-consuming, unproductive routing activities and reduce the error rate.
In addition, the reboot of servers and the provision of services and rights are much faster. This results in a more stable and secure operation of the data center as well as less downtime, complexity and costs. Critical processes, such as restarting after an incident and frequent processes such as the examination, categorization and processing of incidents, are suitable for automation.
The best office apps
But also rare, but complex processes like the provision of services belong to it. While this takes weeks or even months manually, they can be automated in a few minutes or hours.
In addition to technical and organizational requirements, the implementation of cloud computing in the company's data center must also be considered. This is how the different departments of a company have to work together. This is because the necessary processes also include the management and allocation of rights in the Active Directory, the internal and, if necessary, external performance accounting as well as the establishment of all if-then relationships to ensure a smooth automatic process.
Although the graphical surfaces of the automation and orchestration tools allow quite simple technical implementation, not every software is suitable for every scenario. Therefore, the respective functions should be aligned with the processes to be automated. Depending on existing structures and requirements, the time and costs are very different, but is usually higher than expected. However, thanks to automation, companies benefit not only from more stable, faster and more secure processes, but also from higher service quality and transparency.
It is only after the introduction of automation that the service catalogs to be provided for cloud computing can be developed from modular and industrial building blocks. In order to achieve a service-oriented operation as well as an agile production model, product management for data center services has to be introduced. Only after all this has been done, the Cloud Services can be rolled out and made available throughout the company.
Depending on the employee structure, training or written instructions are necessary. However, this mostly concerns only older or few internet affine users. Most people already have experience with cloud services, such as web-based file storage or social networking, from their private lives.
In addition, some already use the cloud, such as Dropbox, as a business model. In order to prevent this, companies must offer appropriate private cloud services that are available quickly, flexibly and individually.
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