TL;DR Like many others, I used to believe Cloud was just a computer somewhere else. I've since come to the realization that Cloud is an application that abstracts and virtualizes the operational details of the servers, software, networks and storage required to deploy modern Internet-based applications. If Enterprise IT is to survive the onslaught of Cloud, they must adopt the same operational efficiencies as AWS and other public cloud providers.  This includes exposing IT as a Self-Service Application or Portal. Only then will they be able to stave off Shadow IT and offer their customers the ability to develop, deploy, and manage applications without the day-to-day involvement of IT Operations.

I freely admit it took me a while to come to terms with the term "Cloud". For years I used the infamous Visio cloud shape in my network diagrams.  Still, it was difficult to buy into "cloud" as a revolutionary new place where data could be stored centrally and transferred locally over high-speed Internet. "Cloud" became a term that I viewed as spin on the old: mainframe, client/server, web hosting, ASP, MSP, CSP.  In short, "cloud" was a new term for the same thing – my "stuff" is stored and running elsewhere. And yes, I admit to getting a kick out of watching Larry Ellison poke fun at Cloud Computing back in 2008. With his usual flair, Ellison pointed out that "Cloud Computing" covers everything we were already doing. In the late 2000’s, everything and anything in the computing industry was described as Cloud, Cloud-ready, or Cloud-enabled.

For years I wholeheartedly agreed with anyone that claimed that “cloud” was just a marketing buzzword. With time, though, my attitude slowly shifted.  Cloud isn't necessarily a set of servers that live on a faraway network. A true cloud is a software application, complete with its own UI, API, user management, and a suite of opaque services. Virtualization at the server, network, and storage levels allow users to interact with abstractions that look and feel like physical systems. Cloud architecture is yet another example of Marc Andreessen's declaration that "Software is eating the World", only this time it's enterprise IT being served up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

With the right amount of vision and execution, enterprise IT stands to benefit from cloud computing.  But it will require them to provide users the ability to utilize resources on their own terms. This is a delicate balancing act:

• Too many restrictions from IT will drive users into the arms of public cloud providers while fueling shadow IT.

• Running a wide-open environment will come at the expense of security, reliability, and maintainability.

If enterprise IT is going to survive and thrive in the face of public cloud, they need to balance corporate governance needs against user self-service and operational agility that encompasses what the leading public cloud providers are already doing – certainly no easy task.

First this requires embracing the fact that service desks and request tickets are relics of IT past. Users (specifically developers) want fast, easy, and reliable access to IT resources and the freedom to experiment and innovate without the overhead of passing everything through IT operations (ITOps). With the new enterprise Cloud, developers and product teams become responsible for the deployment and management their own applications.  ITOps provides the platform for enterprise cloud applications (web-based or otherwise) which manages all the backing networks, systems, and storage. Unless a problem percolates up to the application level, users have little-to-no visibility into what's happening behind the scenes.

As a test of this model, think of AWS. Do you frequently file trouble tickets with AWS? Do you constantly hear about day-to-day operational difficulties at AWS? Do you find yourself waiting until some AWS team returns from lunch to get the servers or services you requested? If your enterprise IT team is embracing what I feel is the true meaning of "Cloud", then asking these same answers of your enterprise cloud should yield the same resounding "NO!"

The first business computer, the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO), went into service in November 1951.  It ran applications for a British tea and catering company.  In the decades that have followed, information technology (IT) has become an integral part of nearly every aspect of business.  Try to imagine work without computers, without devices, without ready access to information anytime, anywhere.  Computing is a constant and necessary part of our lives.  

So why is it that in so many corporate environments, core IT services are still requested and delivered through restrictive processes managed by technologists?  One answer is that's simply the way it's always been.  Like the wizard behind the curtain, users were shielded from the great an powerful force of computing.  Precedent, however, does not imply perfection.  If, as Stewart Brand observed in 1984, "information wants to be free", shouldn't information systems be readily accessible?

Another argument is that computing is comprised of expensive and highly complex systems that only a dedicated, highly trained staff can manage.  Technological changes like cloud computing are changing that, though.  The National Institute of standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as

“a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” 

Read that description a second time and compare it with traditional IT.  What a contrast!  Cloud is surely appealing to anyone frustrated with their central IT department.

I love the history of technology.  My favorite place in Silicon Valley is the Computer History Museum.  It’s a living timeline of computing technology, where each of us can find the point when we first joined the party.

It’s great to learn about technology pioneers – the geek elite.  Years ago I took a course on computer operating systems.  We were studying the evolution of UNIX, and we’d gotten to Lions’ Commentary on UNIX 6^th Edition, circa 1977.  (As an aside, the entire UNIX operating system at that time was less than 10,000 lines of code.  By 2011 the Linux kernel alone required 15 million lines and 37,000 files.)  As we studied the process scheduler section, we came to one of the great “nerdifacts” of computer programming, line 2238, a comment which reads:

* You are not expected to understand this.

That one line perfectly expresses my joys and frustrations with computing.  The joy comes from the confirmation that computers can do amazingly clever things.  The frustration is from the dismissive way I’m reminded of my inferiority.  And I think that sums up how most people feel about technology.

“Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold.”

In the corporate world, end users have a love-hate relationship with their IT departments.  It’s true that they help us to do our jobs.  But rather than giving us what we need, when we need it, our IT folks seem to always be telling us why our requests cannot be fulfilled.  Throughout my career I’ve been on both sides of this conversation.  Early on, I was the requester/supplicant who’d make my pleas to IT for services or support, only to be told to go away and come back on a day that didn’t end in ‘y’.  

Later, I was the IT administrator, then manager.  In those roles I was the person saying ‘no’ – far more often than I wanted.  It wasn’t because I got perverse pleasure out of disappointing people.  That was just the way my function was structured, measured, and delivered.

Almost without exception, the two metrics that drove my every action in IT operations were cost and uptime.  Responsiveness and customer satisfaction were not within my charter.  Simply put, I got no attaboys for doing things quickly.  While this certainly annoyed my customers, they knew and I knew that they had no alternatives.

The Age of Outsourcing

Things began to change in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s (yeah, I go back a ways) when large companies decided to try throwing money at their IT problems to make them go away.  So began the age of IT outsourcing, when companies tried desperately to disown in-house computer operations.  Such services were “outside of our core competency”, they reasoned, and so were better performed by seasoned professionals from large companies with three-letter names like IBM, EDS, and CSC.

Fast-forward 25 years and we find the IT outsourcing (ITO) market in decline.  There are many reasons for this.  The most common are:

• Actual savings are often far less than projected
• Long-term contracts limit flexibility, particularly in a field that changes as constantly as IT
• There is an inherent asymmetry of goals between service provider and service consumer
• Considerable effort is required to manage and monitor contracts and SLA compliance
• New technologies like cloud computing offer viable alternatives

Just as video killed the radio star, cloud computing is a fresher, sexier alternative to ITO for enterprises searching for the all-important “competitive advantage”.

Power to the People!

Cloud computing isn’t just new wine in old bottles; it’s a fundamental change in the way computing resources are made available and consumed.  Cloud computing focuses on user needs (the ‘what’) rather than underlying technology (the ‘how’).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines five essential characteristics of cloud computing.  One of these is ‘On-demand self-service’.  Think about what that means.  For the end user, it means getting what we need, when we need it.  For business, it means costs that align with usage, for services that make sense.  And for IT, it means being able to say ‘yes’ for a change.

For too long, we have been held captive by technology.  Cloud computing promises to free us from technology middlemen.  It enables us to consume services that we value.

At its core, cloud computing is technology made understandable.

CloudBolt is a cloud management platform that enables self-service IT.  It allows IT organizations to define ready-to-use systems and environments, and to put them in the hands of their users.  Isn’t that a welcome change?

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If you’re an IT administrator, there are good and bad ways to offer cloud services to your end users.  Get it right and your customers purr contentedly.  Get it wrong and you get a claw to the face.  Here’s what to watch for.

1.   Taking Too Long

(“Where the @%#$’s my server?”)

Been to a restaurant lately?  How do you feel if you can’t get a server?  The same applies to the IT end-users.  Do they want to wait weeks for servers?  No!

Why not let users serve themselves?  Better still, why not give them all they can eat?

 

2.   Being TOO Cloudy (Not being the broker)

Public clouds are very powerful tools that enable business agility.  But as a cloud consumer, you have an important choice to make.  If you choose to use a single cloud provider, you end up locked into their services and UI.  If you use multiple clouds, you must master multiple toolsets and UIs so that much of the agility is lost.

You can get the best of both worlds by deploying a Cloud Management Platform.  This makes you a services broker and allows you to leverage the power of hybrid cloud from a single UI.

3.   Making Manual Mistakes

                                

Fulfilling requests by hand takes time, which irritates the requestor.  Manual entry is also prone to fat fingering, resulting in VMs that are incorrectly provisioned.  The same goes for tracking costs.

Automating VM builds takes mistakes out of the picture.  Why provision systems by hand when a cloud management platform can do the job automatically, from a single UI?

4.   Leaving Money on the Table (or in the cushions)

 

To paraphrase management wisdom, you can’t charge for what you can’t measure.  Call it what you like – chargeback, showback, shameback – but you’re making a mistake if you don’t track your cloud costs.

Cloud management platforms can track costs for you and your users automatically.

5.   Losing Your Control

                         

You are asking for trouble if you can’t quickly and easily answer these 5 questions:

• Who owns the system?
• Where it is deployed?
• Why does it exist?
• How long does it need to exist?
• How much does it cost to run?

Just like a bank, you must have clear visibility of assets.

Be sure to choose management tools that enable you to answer these questions.

6.   Living Below the Clouds

 

The one who lives above the cloud, reigns.  Don’t lock yourself into one vendor.  Build a provider-agnostic environment that allows you to standardize IT, introduce new technologies, and transition between clouds without your end-users even knowing.

Make sure you’re able to choose the right cloud for each job.  One size does not fit all.

 

7.   Being the Worker Bee, Not the Queen Bee

 

The Queen Bee empowers her Worker Bees to do everything on their own. The same applies to IT admins and end users.  IT need to empower their end users to build and manage their own environments while still maintaining oversight of security, capacity, and performance.

By empowering end users, IT can save time and money.  And, most importantly, it makes IT an enabler rather than a barrier.

There is a war among the clouds, the public and private providers are fighting to see who will reign supreme.  Public vs Private, Public vs Public, and Private vs Private. It is chess match to see which vendor(s) will capture the largest share of the market.  This non-stop battle has made it  more challenging for the customer, the normal people, to make the best choice.

Large companies have ruled the land for years: VMware, Red Hat, and others have their stake in the ground. In recent years AWS, GCE, OpenStack and Azure have established control and are now eating away the edges of the market; corrupting the business models of traditional vendors. In a market that is redefining itself every year, how do you make the right choice? First you have to look at the state of the clouds:

Public

The public clouds are simple and easy to use. Public cloud’s destiny is manifested by pushing at our most basic needs: gain control, lower costs, increase speed, and deliver simplicity. However, public providers don’t want you to know how much you will owe them until after the fact, post billing. You don’t get locked in, but clearly the goal is to be the stickiest product that you use with their growing toolset.  The on-premise security you need might not be provided by a public cloud which creates a need for a private cloud with the ability to move between the clouds.

Private

The private/internal cloud providers will reel you in continually attack your budgets with their ever expanding set of services. Layering in so many different tools from their “suites” that you are never quite sure which tools you are using, which tools you have bought, or which you are being charged for. Be wary, these vendors lock customers in at the root level of your infrastructure to the point where you’ll have no choice, but to renew, renew, and renew. There are so many varying levels of integration between these tools that it becomes complex and hard to manage, forcing you to buy professional services. More professional services means more money, and the vicious cycle continues.

So who is the right choice?

The answer is a hybrid approach. For various reasons, maybe it is cost or security or ease of use or vendor lock-in, you will come to use a variety of these tools and they will continue to challenge one another. They will have tunnel vision with one goal in mind: how can we lock our customers in with an vendor specific set of products.  This makes none of them fit to rule the throne, so whose turn is it?

It is time for “choice” to be your weapon. Come above the clouds to be the broker, the king of clouds and give yourself the choice. Enough is enough with vendors ruling you! Take control of the clouds and manage them. Claim your place on the throne by putting the power of the clouds in the hands of your people so they can manage their own IT resources without getting caught up in the fog of vendor war.

So you want to sit on the throne?

To lay claim to the throne is to be the “broker of clouds” above the fray.  End users must be happy, if they aren’t happy you will know and hear about it. Users are ok with paying an IT team to be their broker as long as resources are delivered quickly and correctly. Users care that the job is done, not how you do it. Private and Public clouds have become a commodity, it is time to make the delivery of this commodity readily available. Waiting hours, days or weeks to get commodity resources is no longer sufficient.

When you look at what is preventing private and public clouds from being readily available, you see the following issues: complexity of multiple UIs, slow provisioning, IT overwhelmed with tickets, inability to track costs between clouds, and VM sprawl. IT is spending so much time servicing complexity that they can’t service their users. Solution? Simplicity.

Simplicity is the Vaccine for Complexity

Kings and Queens can’t do it on their own, they need an ally. A tool that reigns above the clouds; a Cloud Delivery Platform that provides you the nimbleness, flexibility, and agility that you need.  Give users a simple intuitive interface that eliminates multiple UIs and gives users the single portal that spans the entirety of your realm of clouds. If you are truly going to lead your users, public, and private clouds, then for every resource you need to know: Who owns it, What is it doing, Where is it, When does it expire, Why does it exist, and How much does it cost. CloudBolt is a vendor agnostic tool that is worthy of the title “Hand of the King/Queen.”

Conclusion

By this point if you’ve read this far you must be somewhat interested. Reach out, schedule a demo, and see how a cloud delivery platform like CloudBolt will put you on the path to the throne and bring the convenience of the clouds to all of your users.