Insight On Cloud Projects

We came across research on adoption of Cloud, where most of them concentrated on the opinion of executives or industry representatives.

IBM recently held a different search, coordinated by the IBM Academy of Technology, focusing on who was or is involved with projects in different cloud clients: architects and software engineers. The project generated a very interesting report called Cloud insights from 110 Implementation Projects .

The report describes how the architects have implemented projects for real clouds and how customers are seeing their adoption, in terms of who is directly involved with the implementation projects.

Analyzing the insights

Let’s summarize some of these conclusions.

As the clouds are implemented

The survey showed that only half of the implementations followed the strategy of a cloud, while the other half consists of isolated initiatives without clear objectives and well defined goals. It also became clear that most current projects are still pilot projects which are well located. Few initiatives of enterprise scope. But in fact, as cloud is still a novelty, most customers begin their journey with experimental projects, to gain experience and draw more appropriately broader actions. A good starting point for a trial is to create a private cloud to the development environment and testing. Thus, minimizing the risks of security environment somewhat isolated yields significant gains and tangible results to move forward with new projects.

Adopting the model cloud will force revisions in IT e-Governance processes. This was the general feeling of the companies that have implemented pilot projects.

In research, we identified that 70% of private initiatives were clouds and only 30% of public clouds. Sure there is the caveat that the projects were large customers – who often begin their trial by private clouds. If the search was conducted on smaller clients, it is likely that the relationship was reversed. The survey also revealed some interesting information: in private clouds the dominance of the projects was IaaS, followed by PaaS. Already in the public cloud, SaaS has dominated the scene, backed by IaaS projects.

It was also noted that customers feel that cloud is an irreversible trend and that in two to three years, many critical systems are running on clouds. Among the applications most frequently cited as the next cloud to come were: business analytics, collaboration and web.

Once the suspicion of security is unsuccessful, the next challenges identified by the report are the issues of integration and interoperability between different clouds and between applications that will run on-premise cloud.

An important and decisive for the successful adoption of cloud services is the standardization of images. This opens space for new demands on management resources based on ITIL, and Image Management.

Solution inhibitors cloud computing

We see that there are still inhibitors to greater adoption of cloud. Safety comes first. In the projects assessed by the survey, as the cloud model used was private cloud, security issues are minimized. In this case, the cloud is operating inside the firewall and security policies of the company.

Moreover, the projects demonstrated clear benefits. Although the cost has been one of the initial calls, the flexibility offers to the cloud users today are their main attraction.

The speed with which the demands for features and ease of IT, which were measured in weeks, they will be done in minutes. This opens new opportunities to create innovative applications in much shorter time and also facilitate trials of new products and systems.

Trends to be observed

The report also points out some trends such as:

• The model of pay-as-you-go, typical public cloud, should also be adopted in the private cloud – with agreements between IT and lines of business.
• Even large companies will adopt public clouds with greater intensity, generating hybrid clouds, with parts of applications running on clouds part in private and public clouds. Back again to discuss the issue of integration and interoperability.
• Environmental Governance in clouds is an additional challenge, because many processes should be reviewed. Extensions and adaptations of the ITIL disciplines are expected. We can cite the example of Image Management as an important new discipline, and changes in Service Design, Service Strategy, Service Operation, Service Transition and Service Improvement.
• Applications from now on, will tend to be increasingly multi-tenancy. They are currently in multi-tenancy and shall require significant effort by the software manufacturers and will require new skills for developers in enterprises.
• Conclusions and ideas for the expansion of the cloud

Looking at the report we can arrive at some conclusions that I would like to share with you:

• Begin the journey toward the cloud of pilot projects, identifying and implementing workloads better suited to this model. It is a gradual process, with the experience being gained over time, with the evolution of projects.
• Changes in organization and process of IT governance are needed.
• Have a strategy for adoption of cloud and not simply try to implement projects to experiment without having the model and the next steps are well defined.
• There are obstacles such as immaturity and complexity of some technologies for implementation of private clouds, but that must be resolved over time. Fears for public safety with clouds also tend to be minimized.
• The use of cloud services will accelerate significantly in the next two to three years.