Published on the 08/04/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Enterprise appetite for local and global infrastructure as a service (IaaS) continues to mount – but without proper checks and balances businesses are facing bill shock and integration challenges…
There has been a proliferation of Australian IaaS deployments, particularly for test and development according to Dion Williams, CEO of Sydney-based IT services business UXC Keystone. While IaaS is lauded for the speed at which infrastructure can be deployed, Williams said that CIOs were increasingly finding that when it came time to deploy systems developed on IaaS there could often be insufficient understanding of the dependencies between information systems operating in a cloud and those still in the enterprise production data centre.
Williams estimated that 30-40 percent of companies have rogue IaaS deployments which are not monitored or controlled centrally. He said that State Governments, tier 2 finance companies and retailers seemed to be particularly vulnerable.
New Zealand companies did not seem to face the problem to the same extent, possibly he said, due to the country hosting fewer of the large IaaS vendors.
For those companies which do have IaaS sprawl, Williams warned; “At the click of a button they can stand up thousands of servers,” without really considering the ongoing cost of that service.
“We are working with one of the State governments and they are looking at the cost of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. When they got the first bill they were horrified,” he said.
They might of course be less horrified next time around as Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are engaged in a price war which has seen the cost of IaaS plunge in the last month by between 27 percent and 85 percent depending which vendor bundle is selected.
Whatever tactics the vendors employ, it still makes sense to have control and visibility of costs and systems. UXC Keystone has developed an application for one organisation which uses ServiceNow to stand down its IaaS at 6pm each day, and wind it up again each morning to avoid overnight charges. Williams said that the company had also used ServiceNow to develop a front-end service catalogue for IaaS which tracked use and costs associated with cloud infrastructure.
