Choosing the best route to the cloud

There are two approaches to migrating to the cloud: the revolutionary and the evolutionary. The revolutionary approach makes use of “new world” applications that are both written and deployed in the cloud. These “cloud native” applications are designed from the ground up for greater scalability and used across a multitude of servers, providing an efficient and responsive end user experience.

There are three key conditions that should make IT professionals think about taking the revolutionary route to cloud computing:

• If there is no legacy infrastructure in place;

• If the business needs to support scalable cloud Web 2.0 applications;

• If the aim is to build to such a scale that resiliency and availability are better architected into software rather than handled by physical infrastructure.

If, however, the business has a large virtualised environment and is working with traditional applications, an evolutionary approach to cloud computing makes perfect sense. With this approach, a company gradually builds its private cloud by layering capabilities such as automated provisioning, usage-based billing, resource pooling and a self-service portal on top of virtualised infrastructure, as it adapts processes and policies to the new model.

Once an approach has been set, businesses need to consider whether to host their private cloud internally or find a provider. Companies best suited to create their own private cloud are those who already have a mature IT infrastructure and have advanced beyond server consolidation into datacentre automation. Internal private clouds appeal to those who want to control security and data availability and to integrate legacy environments. The downfalls of this approach are that businesses need to account for the capital expenditure and may be hamstrung by infrastructure limitations.

The hosted private cloud alleviates the capital expenditure needed to set up an internal cloud and runs on resources that are walled off with enterprise-class protections. As the cloud is hosted at a service provider’s server farm, they can utilise their cloud specialities to create a customisable protection strategy.

Cloud computing is a service that needs careful consideration, but if assessed properly and strategically, there are multiple benefits for any organisation. IT infrastructure plays an important role in deciding whether an evolutionary or revolutionary approach is best, and whether to host the cloud internally. If organisations do not take their current IT infrastructure into account when implementing the cloud, they can often waste time and money, which careful planning and consideration could easily avoid.

Mark Bilger, CTO, Dell Services