Cloud computing has become the preferred model for how personal, business, and enterprise users consume IT resources, and is being adopted either wholesale, in a private cloud or as a hybrid solution. Cost savings are not, however, a given, and while customers often know that they can achieve efficient IT operations with the cloud, they don’t know how. Without expensive and extensive in-house expertise to manage their cloud resources, many organisations end up with a mismanaged or non-optimised cloud solution that is as costly as an on-premise counterpart. And with the ever-broadening vendor landscape and array of new technologies and applications, managing cloud resources is not an endeavor for the technically weak-hearted.

Managed service providers (MSPs) can assume the position of providing IT services to companies lacking dedicated IT personnel. Hosting companies are also uniquely positioned to compete in the recent industry shift towards cloud-enablement, and many hosting companies are already MSPs that offer IT services and support. As suppliers of the primary conduit through which customers access the cloud, the hosting and MSPs of today have the opportunity to use cloud management solutions to manage their customers’ cloud applications for them, shaving cost and complexity from the operations that would otherwise have to be done in-house.

Adding the skills and expertise into the MSP and hosting businesses costs money but cloud management tools offer a unified cloud computing and storage platform that make it easy for existing staff to deploy customised solutions for customers. Cloud management solutions allow multiple cloudbased solutions to be connected within a single platform, mitigating complexity and simplifying management and billing with one interface. By alleviating these pain points, hosting providers and MSPs can focus on creating more value for their customers – whether it be it be in increased cost savings, customer service or quality of service.

With their responsibilities no longer confined to keeping the data center managed, running, and backed-up, MSPs can now focus more on customer cost management. By decreasing management complexity for themselves, they can, in turn, extend the value and time/cost-savings to their customers. To be successful they must, however, provide the right combination of applications and resources to meet and manage their customers’ diverse requirements (particularly in a hybrid cloud scenario) while at the same time minimising the burden of management.

MSPs that can help customers take advantage of metered, scalable computing resources through the use of integrated cloud services and management solutions can be instrumental in making the cloud accessible to all sizes of business. A good MSP will equip itself with the tools to combine the best-of-breed on-premise solutions with leading cloud offerings.

Equally, for hosting providers to stay competitive and help customers transition from an on-premise or standard hosted solution to a hybrid or full cloud deployment model, they need to offer the best-in-breed tools and applications to ensure optimal delivery. As more hosting and MSP entrants saturate the market, effective use of cloud management solutions will be one of the primary differentiators of success. For providers with hosting-only or limited cloud offerings, the opportunity will rest in their ability to offer more cloud and managed services.

With the current industry momentum and adoption rates, there is no doubt that firms large and small are setting their sights on the cloud. Companies know they need to get there to be competitive, if they are not there already. MSPs and hosting providers using cloud management solutions can effectively bridge the distance between their customers’ current legacy infrastructure and cloud-based offerings.

ABOUT CRAIG DEVESON//

Craig Deveson partners with cloud leaders such as Amazon to build products and solutions for the local and international market. His first company Devnet was sold to Cloud Sherpas. He is active in the AWS users group and many start-up groups. His current start-up is Cloud Manager.

Cloud computing is a combination of layers of new technology combined with business model innovation. The revolution in the core technology behind the creation of ‘the cloud’ enables us to approach business differently, creating new business models and is driving tremendous changes in how businesses (including the IT department) consume computing and software. As the shift to cloud computing grows rapidly and the rate of change increases, here are some of the impacts that it has begun to have on productivity and innovation:

1. Cloud layers
The cloud is formed from layers that can be broadly thought about as a pyramid of infrastructure, platform and applications. In industry terms we call them infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS), platform-as-a-service (PAAS) and software-as-a-service (SAAS). The latter was the first to take off and is the most widely used at the moment; however IAAS and PAAS have great growth potential in the coming years. Businesses are likely to use a combination of these as-a-service cloud technologies in the future to respond to business IT requirements on an as-needed basis.

2. Business models
In the past computing and IT projects were very capital intensive. This generally meant long project time lines and due to the funds involved a conservative or traditional process. Competitive advantage was short-lived as competitors could easily copy the conservative automation.

With the advent of cloud computing experimentation is more affordable, so teams can experiment by only paying for resources on an as-needed basis. This means the feedback loops are shorter and staff have the confidence to try things knowing the process isn’t going to be excessively expensive or time consuming, which breeds new business opportunities and innovation.

3. Cloud consumption and use
Cloud is often best used when the workload is variable. Examples of this might be end of month processing where increased processing ability can be added to cope with the extra workload getting results faster and at a lower cost. Dev and test environments can also be provisioned on tap, so money doesn’t go to waste purchasing large amounts of hardware and software that sits idle. Cloud offerings also mean that disaster recovery and off-site backup are easier and more cost effective, since online archiving can be as little as a cent per GB per month.

4. Consumer expectations
Consumers have got very used to the Gmail, Facebook or LinkedIn cloud world and expect all applications to work this way on the device of their choice, be it desktop, mobile or tablet, in turn boosting productivity. Most mobile apps are cloud-based or have a cloud-based backend. Applications were not built this way in years past but now this is the base-line against which any new application will be judged.

5. The changing IT function
Right now the IT department is broken in most organisations! I’m not scaremongering – users are bypassing IT because they want the same sort of applications and service they are used to using outside the organisation so they are going direct to providers who can offer the service on an as-used basis. The IT and organisational challenge is how to connect these initiatives without stifling them. This means that IT personnel will become more analytical and developer-centric. We can also expect to see more of the IT function contracted out in the future.

ABOUT CRAIG DEVESON//

Craig Deveson partners with cloud leaders such as Amazon and Google to build product and solutions for the local and international market. His first company Devnet was sold to Cloud Sherpas. His current start-up is cloudsafe365 which enables, integrates and accelerates cloud usage.

The use of the word ‘iCloud’ by Apple probably guaranteed the word would become mainstream, but cloud computing is still not properly understood.

Many users have a negative perception of cloud computing, however, they are happy to use Facebook or Gmail which are two examples of large cloud computing-based services.

Cloud computing in its purest form is known as ‘public cloud’. These are the massive data centre facilities housing thousands of servers where peoples’ information is hosted in a muti-tenant facility operated by the likes of Google and Amazon. Private cloud is a large, purpose-built data centre typically used by large companies and governments. Many saw this as virtualisation re-inventing itself, however it now has a loyal following.

The ‘hybrid cloud’ is the combination of public and private clouds which are adopted on an as-needed basis by organisations, enabling businesses to opt for the best-price performance environment. This means moving to the public cloud in the  irst instance and adopting the private cloud for specific business, technical, legal or legislative reasons.

So how will these uses of cloud play out in 2013 and beyond? I believe that best-of-breed cloud applications will lead the next wave of innovation.

The momentum in the enterprise segment and the continued hyper-growth of cloud computing will force legacy suite vendors to attempt to buy their way more deeply into the cloud markets.

Cloud computing means the death of the suite: Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others have pushed software suites over the last 10-20 years but now the pendulum has swung the other way to open source and best of breed applications.

In some cases this even extends to best features-based applications. It will be easier to use single purpose plugins and many single purpose applications that work well together.

FIVE CLOUD MYTHS UNPLUGGED

Myth 1: The cloud is not secure

Truth: Public clouds are fundamentally multitenant to justify the scale and economics of the cloud. As such, security is a common concern. Whereas the traditional security perimeter is a network firewall, the cloud security perimeter now becomes the hypervisor and/or underlying cloud application. So far, security in the cloud has been good, but this is very dependant on each cloud implementation and requires a solid design and operational rigor that prioritises security.

Myth 2: The cloud is not reliable

Truth: No system has 100 percent uptime, and neither does the cloud. Given the scale, however, cloud computing services are typically designed to provide high redundancy and availability. While the same levels are achievable in-house or with dedicated hosting, it’s generally cost prohibitive except for the most critical systems. The cloud enables a higher level of reliability at a fraction of the cost. It is also common for well-designed clouds to “just slow down” rather than stop altogether.

Myth 3: Customers lose control in the cloud and get locked-in

Truth: There are different types of clouds that offer different levels of customisation and flexibility. Clouds that implement standard technology stacks have good APIs and provide their customers with reasonable data and application migration options are generally best.

Myth 4: The cloud is too complex

Truth: Again, there are different types of clouds and levels of complexity. Many clouds simplify management and involve little to no change in your application to move it to the cloud. Other clouds offer more power and control, but involve a change in application architecture.

Myth 5: Pay as you go cloud pricing will cost me more

Truth: Cloud computing has huge economies of scale that get passed on to the consumer. In addition, cloud computing transfers what is typically capital expenditure into operating expenditure and enables pricing to be commensurate with usage. There are also many cloud pricing models that can save you more money if you can predict your usage better.ABOUT CRAIG DEVESON//

Craig Deveson partners with cloud leaders such as Amazon and Google to build products and solutions for the local and international market. His first company Devnet was sold to Cloud Sherpas. He is active in the AWS users group and many startup groups. His current startup is cloudsafe365 making the AWS Cloud secure and easy.