Many of the motivations for moving to a cloud
environment come from a business perspective.
Many of the motivations
for moving to a cloud environment come from a business perspective. The freedom
to provision IT resources as needed reduces time-to-deployment for applications
and allows business units to explore new initiaives without waiting for the IT
department. However, as InfoWorld contributor David Linthicum recently noted,
many organizations still make a case for cloud hosting and similar services from primarily an IT perspective.
Adopting cloud
technology for the wrong reasons can lead to deployments that do not meet
expectations. For instance, Linthicum noted that IT leaders often look to the
cloud for the purpose of shifting from a capital to operational expenses model.
While this is beneficial in some cases, it will not be an advantageous shift
for every organization. As a result, it is important to consider factors other than
cost and differences in pricing models when considering cloud hosting vendors.
"The true value of
cloud computing - or any technology, for that matter - is its ability to make
the business function in ways that can maximize its growth and value,"
Linthicum wrote. "This means allowing the business to move in new and
innovative directions to capture new markets, or to keep up with the market by
growing as quickly as the market will allow."
Unlocking the cloud's
potential
In order to support
growth, organizations can focus on factors such as agility. As Linthicum noted,
the ability to rapidly respond to changes in demand and different expectations
in an organization's market is more valuable than simple reductions in IT
spending. However, it is important that organizations approach the cloud from a
business perspective early on, so that the technology is optimized according to
the needs of key stakeholders rather than just the needs of the IT department.
Business agility is one
of the defining factors of PayPal's cloud deployment. Powered largely by the
software-defined data center approach, the company relies on the
cloud to fuel business centric goals, PayPal
senior director Saran Mandair told TechTarget.
"That means we need
to bring everything that we actually do manually today into an 'as a
Service,'" Mandair told the news source. "That is, we're going to
have a software-defined API, and it's all going to be wrapped under an umbrella
called software-defined data center over the next two to three years."
Mandair emphasized the
role of OpenStack in fueling PayPal's cloud strategy. The availability of APIs
and the abstraction between hardware and software offered more freedom to pick
the technology that best suited the company's needs. However, he noted that
there were some barriers to adopting the platform for his company's purpose.
For example, some of OpenStack's controller nodes did not meet high
availability demands. In addition, load balancer as a service was not available
at the time of PayPal's initial deployment. The company created its own load
balancer to fill this gap, highlighting the strategic power of customizing
cloud platforms and taking into account both IT and business needs.
Author Bio:
Author Bio:
Brain
Brafton loves and lives technology. A big data geek and an information
retrieval junkie he consumes, analyses, interprets and process data like he was
a machine. On a continual learning iteration his believe life is a journey not
a destination. To keep in contact with Brain find him on Google+ or on Twitter