This is the second part of
the blog “Clouds, Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain”. In the first part,
I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation makes cloud more
than a technology initiative, I will describe in this section how it requires
people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as
critical as is the choice of right tools and technology.
People: Most IT organizations have a
fairly complex organizational structure. There are different groups, managing
different pieces of the puzzle, and yet, they don't always work together.
Provisioning a new application therefore may require a request to float
endlessly through system administrators, DBAs and middleware admin worlds –
resulting in long delays and constant finger pointing. Cloud users expect
end-to-end automation - which requires these silos to be greatly simplified, if
not completely eliminated. Most customers I talk to acknowledge this
problem but are quick to admit that such a transformation is hard. As hard as
it may be, I am afraid that the status quo is no longer an option. Sticking to
an organizational structure that was created ages back will not only impede
cloud adoption, it also risks making the IT skills increasingly
irrelevant in a world that is rapidly moving towards converged applications and
infrastructure.
Process: Most IT organizations today
operate with a mindset that they must fully "control" access to any
and all types of IT services. This in turn leads to people clinging on to
outdated manual approval processes . While requiring approvals for scarce
resources makes sense, insisting that every single request must be manually
approved defeats the very purpose of cloud. Not only this causes delays,
thereby at least partially negating the agility benefits, it also results in
gross inefficiency. In a cloud environment, self-service access should be
governed by policies, quotas that the administrators can define upfront . For a
cloud initiative to be successful, IT organizations MUST be ready to empower
users by giving them real control rather than insisting on brokering every
single interaction between users and the cloud resources.
Technology: From a technology
perspective, cloud is about consolidation, standardization and automation. A
consolidated and standardized infrastructure helps increase utilization and
reduces cost. Additionally, it enables a much higher degree of automation
- thereby providing users the required agility while minimizing operational
costs. Obviously, automation is the key to cloud. Unfortunately it hasn’t
received as much attention within enterprises as it should have. Many
organizations are just now waking up to the criticality of automation and it
still often gets relegated to back burner in favor of other "high
priority" projects. However, it is important to understand that without
the right type and level of automation, cloud will remain a distant dream for
most enterprises. This in turn makes the choice of the cloud management
software extremely critical.
For a cloud management software to be
effective in an enterprise environment, it must meet the following
qualifications:
Broad and Deep Solution
It should offer a broad and deep solution to enable the kind of broad-based transformation we are talking about. Its footprint must cover physical and virtual systems, as well as infrastructure, database and application tiers. Too many enterprises choose to equate cloud with virtualization. While virtualization is a critical component of a cloud solution, it is just a component and not the whole solution. Similarly, too many people tend to equate cloud with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). While it is perfectly reasonable to treat IaaS as a starting point, it is important to realize that it is just the first stepping stone - and on its own it can only provide limited business benefits. It is actually the higher level services, such as (application) platform and business applications, that will bring about a more meaningful transformation to your enterprise.
Run and Manage
Efficiently Your Mission Critical Applications
It should not only be able to run your mission critical applications, it should do so better than before. For enterprises, applications and data are the critical business assets As such, if you are building a cloud platform that cannot run your ERP application, it isn't truly a "enterprise cloud". Also, be wary of vendors who try to sell you the idea that your applications must be written in a certain way to be able to run on the cloud. That is nothing but a bogus, self-serving argument. For the cloud to be meaningful to enterprises, it should adopt to your applications - and not the other way around.
Automated,
Integrated Set of Cloud Management Capabilities
At the root of many of the problems plaguing enterprise IT today is
complexity. A complex maze of tools and technology, coupled with archaic
processes, results in an environment which is inflexible, inefficient and
simply too hard to manage. Management tool consolidation, therefore, is key to
the success of your cloud as tool proliferation adds to complexity, encourages
compartmentalization and defeats the very purpose that you are building the
cloud for. Decision makers ought to be extra cautious about vendors trying to
sell them a "suite" of disparate and loosely integrated products as a
cloud solution. An effective enterprise cloud management solution needs
to provide a tightly integrated set of capabilities for all aspects of cloud
lifecycle management. A simple question to ask: will your environment be more
or less complex after you implement your cloud? More often than not, the answer
will surprise you.
At Oracle, we have understood these challenges and have been
working hard to create cloud solutions that are relevant and meaningful for
enterprises. And we have been doing it for much longer than you may
think. Oracle was one of the very first enterprise software companies to make
our products available on the Amazon Cloud. As far back as in 2007, we created
new cloud solutions such as Cloud
Database Backup that are helping customers
like Amazon save millions every year. Our cloud solution portfolio is
also the broadest and most deep in the industry - covering public,
private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no
coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud
today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the
industry. And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our
years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies.
I will dedicated the third
and final part of the blog “Clouds, Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain”
to Oracle Cloud Technologies Building Blocks and how they mapped into our
vision of Enterprise Cloud. Stay Tuned.
