IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES^®
Analyst Corner

February 2011 EMA Analyst's Corner:
The Road to the Responsible Cloud

Undoubtedly, cloud computing implementations have the potential to drive significant improvements in operational efficiency and reductions in operational expenditures. To ensure reliability and efficiency in a cloud infrastructure, however, organizations should adopt service management practices and infrastructure designs consistent with what EMA has referred to as "the Responsible Cloud." These initiatives have process, organizational and technology implications that should be viewed synergistically rather than as purely separate areas of focus.

When these come together to effectively support a top-down, service-centric system for assimilating and optimizing cloud investments, the role of IT shifts towards being more of a "service broker" than a territorial provider of technology capabilities.

This is a new paradigm for a well-managed, secure, reliable, compliant cloud that delivers consistent and efficient business services. Organizations can achieve a Responsible Cloud model in part through the introduction of key disciplines and by enabling management tools that aid in appropriately sizing the infrastructure, ensuring high-availability, and minimizing operating expenses while ensuring that SLAs are met and user experience remains as good as or better than it was before the introduction of cloud services.

The Responsible Cloud Model

Careful planning and step-by-step process improvements should be employed to achieve the Responsible Cloud when developing on-premise and private cloud deployments. These types of deployments require a cloud implementation that is well-managed to support the delivery of secure, compliant, and high-quality business services. More haphazard approaches can result in a failure to meet business expectations and, in some cases, may have to be redone. In an EMA survey of businesses that have deployed a cloud infrastructure, 28% actually saw an increase in operational expenses and 30% reported decreased flexibility, principally due to inadequate management practices. Moreover, current research from Operationalizing Cloud shows that 70% of cloud initiatives need to be rethought or redone.

Ensuring value in a cloud investment begins with deployment and continues through the entire lifecycle of the infrastructure.

Responsible Cloud Building Blocks

Specific technologies, of course, gain unique importance in a cloud computing environment, such as virtualization, automation, usage-based accounting, and self-service provisioning portals or service catalogs. However, all of these technologies existed before cloud computing became a much hyped phenomenon. Therefore, it is important to understand that building the Responsible Cloud is an evolutionary process, not a technology revolution, which depends on a series of building blocks. EMA recognizes fundamental building blocks for cloud computing as following:

• Virtualization – Virtualization is one of the key technology components that organizations can use to build a Responsible Cloud service delivery environment. While other technologies such as grid computing, cluster, and distributed computing are available, virtualization has been the most popular base technology under a cloud infrastructure due to its capabilities for dynamic elasticity and its resulting cost effectiveness.
• Automation – Versatile automation across all areas of infrastructure and service management are critical to the "Responsible Cloud" paradigm. This is true whether it's to provide quick cross-domain diagnostics, rapidly configure and provision new services, or optimize workloads with an eye to application inter-dependencies and business impacts or accelerate diagnostics based on critical, business-impacting behaviors.
• Service and network integration – Cloud is essentially a cross-domain versus siloed technology. It can support the standardization of certain higher level services (not all services are appropriate for standardization), and ideally delivers them via a business-facing service desk/service portal, integrated with a service catalog, backed by a CMDB/CMSwith dynamic application-to-infrastructure awareness for superior visibility and control.
• Accessibility, security and compliance – It is important to ensure that accessibility, security, governance, risk management, and compliance are implemented at every step, as dictated by business requirements, legal regulations, privacy policies, and accepted standards.

The Road to the Responsible Cloud

Moving toward a mature cloud infrastructure can improve service visibility, accessibility, and increase overall IT productivity. The proper processes and administrative activities can be implemented efficiently and cost effectively if this is done through a well thought-out and well communicated maturity process. This step-by-step approach to cloud implementation can be facilitated in part by leveraging EMA's maturity model. The EMA maturity model for system and service management can be used to define process and organizational building blocks as well as technology clusters on the maturity curve toward a more evolved infrastructure and service delivery environment. This model translates into a well disciplined model for effective cloud lifecycle management.

Figure 1: The Responsible Cloud Maturity Model

It should be made clear that while cloud computing is not a paradigm so much as an often confusing mixture of enabling technologies – the Responsible Cloud Model is in fact a system that includes leadership requirements, process definitions and effective technology adoption. Mapping cloud to this progression, as in Figure 1 above, is most useful when it's viewed as a rough approximation, rather than a clear-cut, linear association. And although the two can be mutually reinforcing, it is the horizontal axis that should be viewed primarily as an enabler on the road to a more dynamic, business-centric service model.

Last-Mile Challenges on the Road to the Responsible Cloud

With any new-stage technology, every organization must face the challenges of dealing with the unexpected in deployments. As the diagram (see Figure 1) indicates (in yellow), organizations are spending much more time in the virtualization stage before moving up to the next stage of self-service. In that stage, new challenges emerge as IT organizations gradually make the transition toward Responsible Cloud with fully accounted, monitored and optimized services. As indicated earlier, EMA research shows that human and political issues are often the top barrier (40%) to cloud deployment.

While there is no silver bullet for many of these challenges, EMA's Maturity Model provides a handy sketch for how and where to cluster technology priorites. Beyond this, EMA consulting has determined that communication, clear phased objectives, effective stakeholder and process definition, and effective executive leadership are paramount for any strategic, cross-domain initiative that can, and in fact must be, transformative in order to succeed.

It is unlikely that all organizations will be able to fully convert their environments via cloud technologies, and doing so isn't necessarily desirable. Cloud services, for all their value, are in the end a means to an end, not an end in themselves. They are enablers for more effective service delivery. Thus, any given organization can assess and justify where to start and when to move on to the next stage, slowly building them into their cloud maturity – from virtualization, improving through automation, service integration and security/compliance to a fully mature cloud service model.