Paper five Cloud Definitions, Deployment Considerations & Diversity
Conclusion Cloud Computing has become established within the vocabulary of the IT profession, but concerted effort to clarify and educate the wider market on key terms, definitions and implications are needed to achieve a common understanding of the meaning, opportunities and the risks associated with this rapidly growing sector of the market. 1. IT project/solution deployment options are increasingly flexible and diverse creating both a commercial opportunity and an IT management challenge. 2. Cloud should be considered a complementary solution option in many IT strategies, not a wholesale replacement for on-premise computing. 3. There is no nirvana Cloud solution that meets all organisational needs today. Rather organisations will typically find themselves managing a portfolio of deployment options at any given time from on-premise through to co-location, hosted services, managed services and Cloud solutions. 4. Cloud Computing should be assessed more in terms of organisational enablement and impact rather than in terms of technological change. 5. Cloud is best defined in terms of service delivery models (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) and technical deployment models (Private, Public and Hybrid). 6. The choice of Service and/or Deployment Models for a specific Cloud solution will be influenced by a combination of technical, commercial, governance and legacy investment factors. The choice of Service/Deployment Model for a specific solution in one company may not be true for an organisation of similar size in another industry. 7. Legal and Regulatory factors drive considerable uncertainty especially in regard to matters relating to Data Sovereignty and Security. Where relevant, this tends to encourage end users to seek the lowest risk deployment, which in the case of this research was to prefer UK hosted data. 8. 85 per cent of organisations actively consider the option of Cloud services to assess viability for new projects. Individuals accountable for IT Strategy should ensure they update their assessment criteria to enable a practical determination of which deployment options are valid for any given IT project. 9. IT Governance needs to embrace the notion of services delivered on-premise and those delivered remotely, and where relevant the integration in between. IT departments need to determine the criteria to be complied with for monitoring, alerting and reporting for remote services. Appropriate tools and responsibilities need to be implemented to enable effective management of the distributed IT operations as a whole.
Š Cloud Forum IP Ltd 2012
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Individuals accountable for IT Strategy should ensure they update their assessment criteria to enable a practical determination of which deployment options are valid for any given IT project