Why is IT all still Cloudy?

Those who say ‘cloud computing’ is yet another buzzword for whatever was existing earlier – Utility, Grid, SOA, <<x>>aaS and even the internet, I would say are both right and wrong. Right because it is all of the above. Wrong because the skepticism on adopting, attempting to improve something just because it exists (in pieces) already doesn’t help. Technology gets better when we find synergy between existing solutions. Cloud computing, even after being on top of the I.T hype cycles for couple of years, still not emerged as an underlying principle of enterprise architecture and I wonder why.

One of the key reasons I think is about the ambiguity on the internal versus external debate. For some, its still about resource virtualization or about using external data centers for hosting their systems, with the additional feature of ‘pay-as-you-go’. For others, anything that’s ‘internety’ is already cloud, so why waste any more time on something that’s already there.

On top of it, some of the recent analyst reports doubting whether adopting cloud environments will really benefit enterprises, as well as some attempts to define boundary/standards for the paradigm also sent out wrong messages about cloud computing. Also many (especially virtualization product vendors) projected it as a resource optimization mechanism, and not as a front-line business enabler.

Important enterprise concerns about security, ownership, regulations that protects their assets, interoperability standards are not addressed adequately as well. Also some of the key service delivery issues such as supports, network requirements and other governance aspects are not being well addressed. In my opinion(and I mentioned it here on multiple occasions), the fundamental problem here is people don’t look at the cloud of the larger spectrum of Information System services that can be provisioned on-demand by connecting a network of internal and external resources.

Cloud and virtualization

In his Cloud Interoperability Magazine blog post title “Cloud Computing Surpasses Virtualization in Popularity”, Reuven Cohen writes

"I was recently looking at Google's trends & insights tool and noticed something very interesting has happened over the last month or so. For the first time the term "cloud computing" has surpassed "virtualization" in terms of search popularity. What is all the more interesting is it took cloud computing a little over a year and half compared to nearly 5 years for virtualization to see the same level of search volumes. Astounding growth to say the least.


I think this is no surprise. Virtualization addresses only one part of cloud computing paradigm IMO – how to realize it technically. A cloud is much more than that, covering the larger spectrum of I.T services and not just the infrastructure. As I wrote here earlier, cloud computing is multi-dimensional and should cover the presently fragmented

1. Cloud of infrastructure services(IaaS, PaaS)
2. Cloud of internal enterprise shared services (the ‘internal cloud’)
3. Cloud of externally provisioned software services (SaaS)

We need Cloud - of services; not of server racks

In this Forbes article, Andy Greenberg quotes McKinsey analyst William Forrest, stating that cloud computing in its present form could turn out costlier for (large) enterprise users. Now my question is what is the ‘present form’ of cloud computing? If your answer is a ‘completely externally hosted I.T infrastructure, provisioned on-demand, charged on a pay-as-you-use basis’, I agree, the benefits are not much beyond SMEs, risk is high as well. But if it’s about ‘Provisioning and consuming I.T capabilities as shared, distributed, on-demand services spread across a cloud of computing infrastructure that include external and internal environments’, I would say the result will be very positive.

Firstly I think we should get away with this ‘Amazon and Amazon only’ mindset when talking about cloud computing. Cloud is a ‘cloud of IT capabilities’ and not a ‘cloud of server racks’ IMO. Now these I.T capabilities could come from your internal shared services environments, it could come from the externally hosted high capacity systems or it could come from externally hosted shared business services. I think then only it forms a true ‘cloud’.

So even if you are a cautious enterprise user who would not want to completely trust an external vendor to take care of your information technology needs and still want to manage it all in a cost effective way, I say a hybrid cloud approach sure will help you. Firstly, by having internal, shared services, you have achieved a level of normalization and streamlining of your I.T environments (Let me not use SOA here). Secondly by using external environments for high intensity processing jobs (on which I’ve written on multiple occasions here), you get rid of a large cost factor. Thirdly, by consuming relevant external business services (Yes, from SaaS providers), you further reduce investment and maintenance requirements.

Now I’m no MBA to tell you what are your ‘ROI’ gains by having such an approach, all I can say is if you smartly plan, architect and re-arrange your I.T environments leveraging both internal and external computing capabilities, that becomes your cloud, which becomes your cost effective I.T that we always talk about.

Business services – an essential cloud capability

People who talk about cloud computing often divide the environment as a three layered structure - an infrastructure layer, an operating platform layer and an application layer. But in my opinion, this is not the cloud layers I would subscribe to in future, I would say the most important of them is going to be a – a services layer, comprising business services that aggregates capabilities from all the three underlying layers. This is what should be utilized by enterprise users, to take full advantage of the platform. Services and even process automation systems should be part of clouds.

Now you might ask isn’t it a little too much to imaging that companies will leverage externally defined and hosted business processes? I say they should, as long as they are definable, configurable, automate-able, service aggregations to make full use of cloud environments. Now I’m no technology expert on cloud computing to advice on how it can be achieved etc, all I would say is this is how I envisage a true shared services model to work. I would also say that utilizing the same infrastructure, same applications and storage doesn’t mean the services should give exactly the same output to every customer as well, they should be agile too.

Building Enterprise Services Network

In a recent blog post titled “SOA without service-enabled applications?”, Joe McKendrick points to a big misconception in the I.T circles about achieving an enterprise-wide service oriented environment - that every providing system has to be ‘service enabled’ to achieve SOA. He is right, services that are built from the functions of the underlying applications need not be part of the applications themselves, in fact in many cases it should not be too, in my opinion.

Everybody (including those saying SOA is a dead cow; no more milk-able that is) accepts the importance of building a ‘business services network’ in enterprise I.T these days, and such a layer can be built as an isolated layer above the business applications, though I wouldn’t say we would need a ‘ commercial SOA stack’ to achieve the same. Taking this approach has many advantages, including composing coarse grained business services from multiple underlying system functions as well as achieving better loose coupling levels.

Another advantage that I see is that, as enterprise environments are consuming more and more externally hosted services(yes, I mean the SaaS, Cloud stuff), the business services layer will help provisioning these services to the enterprise consumers easily because all we have to do is to connect it through the business services layer. This kind of an approach I would say make one of the key enterprise I.T concerns today - how to replace internal systems with Cloud/SaaS services - addressed better as well because now there is a clear abstraction between the consuming systems and the providers, the consumers just have to point to the same end-point in the business services layer no matter whether that service is provided by an internal system or an external one.

Let's offer GaaS

I agree with analysts on this - high time Indian I.T sector look at the new computing models and make use of them to provide better, wider, more ‘value-added’ services to customers. But my question is have we realized it? Even if we have, what are we doing about it? If we look at the current trends, enterprise I.T is becoming more and more services based(ok, ‘oriented’ - to rhyme with the industry buzzwords). More than the products, it’s the services that are going to be important for the customers(When was it not? Till vendors hijacked enterprise I.T landscapes). That’s the good thing for us, we are already in the services industry and what we need to now look at is to improve our services with the changing information technology landscape.

One such area is offering I.T governance as a service (I don’t want to shorten it to GaaS though), by hosting and provisioning enterprise I.T monitoring and management environments as services along with well defined governance strategy and processes so that customers don’t have to invest in costly monitoring tools and employ costly consulting teams to come up with an IT governance strategy. Some of us may be doing such services already, but we need to have much better solutions evolved in this space, say for example monitoring environments that fetch only meta-data through deployed agents from business environments so that customers are less worried about business data being shared.

What's your take?