Infrastructure Managed Services for the Cloud

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 Infrastructure Management

Jul 27, 2010 | Total views: 41

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As businesses begin to understand and adopt cloud computing, the initial focus is on zero capex based effective on-demand server capacity provisioning. The elasticity has been addressed by many specialist utility-based hosting service providers by utilizing the large amount of compute and storage infrastructure investment and provisioning virtual machines with middleware application server platforms. The compute capacity enhancement, virtually on demand that operate in complete isolation from one another is difficult to manage. Cloud computing enables the business or service consumer the ability to build and provision operating and application environment with great agility. As the service providers aggressively build the cloud ecosystem over time, the potential benefits to the business also grows.

While Cloud Computing holds tremendous promise to the business, the management needs are not necessarily getting any simpler. Cloud computing infrastructure built on distributed systems is inherently complex and holds new sets of management challenges and issues. The real challenge post-establishing cloud-based ecosystem is maintaining the service that considers the inherent complexities, thereby maximizing benefits with minimal downtimes and issues.

Are you challenged with some of these questions?

- Can cloud-based systems support mission-critical business applications?
- How do I manage change to my cloud ecosystem without breaking it?
- Do you have visibility into your cloud computing environment components, system and services availability during runtime and plan your capacity needs?
- How much of your business or operational change will be managed by cloud provider?

Today, most cloud initiatives do not provide affirmative answers because there are not many credible implementations which have invested a sound service strategy. It is during economic downtrends that organizations look at maximizing performance with optimal capacity. When technology begins to drive business model as is what appears to gain some ground with the advent of cloud, a clear focus on service governance begins to blur. Without a credible operational and governance solution, most organizational initiatives on Cloud computing, private or public, could spiral into an unmanageable complex set of services due to lack of visibility on performance, influence on optimization, configuration changes and therefore agility to respond to business needs.

In my subsequent blogs, I will talk about evolution of models in cloud computing and managed services for each of these models.