Implementing cloud computing

The adoption of cloud computing among organisations eager to streamline the way they procure IT resources for their end users is growing apace, according to experts.

Research firm Gartner estimates that companies worldwide will spend $112bn (£73bn) on software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service combined over the next five years, for example, as IT departments move to on-demand, pay-per-use models which they hope will offer a flexible combination of cost and scalability advantages.

Public cloud
By the end of this summer, government quango Remploy will see all its applications remodelled as subscription-based or pay-as-you-go, on-demand cloud-based services hosted by systems integrator 2e2. These include enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, case management, back-office and finance applications, serving about 3,000 disabled employees in 34 recruitment offices and 54 factories across the UK.

The five-year contract will cost a sizeable £5m, though Remploy IT director Chris Jones did not make a price comparison compared with on-premise application provision because the organisation’s in-house IT infrastructure was not up to the job of supporting the planned service expansion. Rather than cost reduction, the attraction of cloud-based applications for Remploy revolved more around flexibility and ease of management.

“We want to go to a model where there is a full subscription per user, but that does not make sense in every case,” says Jones. “Everything is virtualised so it can scale and we pay for virtual capacity as we use it – we start paying for a virtual server when it is created and stop paying for it when it is brought down. That way we can add things when we need them.”

Before the migration, about 50 to 60 per cent of the Remploy IT department’s role was “pressing buttons and looking after hardware” but staff are now freed up to take on other roles and other third-party IT contractors have been dropped.

Like other organisations, Jones concedes that not every IT service or application can be successfully moved to the cloud – some have to stay in-house.

“At the other extreme we have a legacy BARN application running on Unix kit which will have to sit in a corner,” he says.

Cost benefits
The cost benefits of using public clouds are often more acute for smaller companies such as the Sinclair Scott accountancy practice in Ayr, which recently moved all its applications to a hosted environment jointly provided by IRIS Practice Hosting and managed service provider CI-Net.

Since December last year, the IRIS accountancy practice software, together with Microsoft Office and Outlook, has been delivered to the firm’s 20 staff and partners as on-demand applications to desktop and laptop PCs, and in the future iPads as well, for which it pays a monthly, per-user fee.

“Our older server was starting to play up and we kept delaying a replacement. Vendors were talking about things we did not understand such as virtualisation and mirrored disks, and it all seemed complicated and expensive,” says partner Andrew Sinclair.

“We thought cloud computing was the way to go, especially for guys such as me who do not really understand IT, but know what the organisation wants [in terms of IT provision]”.

Initial performance problems were put down to broadband issues, but after dealing with IRIS for the past 10 years, Sinclair was happy to put his trust in the company to sort out any issues with hosted application delivery that may arise.

“The application was running slowly initially, but the speed was good and connection issues were the main problem,” says Sinclair. “Hopefully that is behind us.”

Any similar broadband problems in the future should be circumnavigated by the addition of a second connection, and load-balancing software that determines the optimum data path to use, he added.

Sinclair Scott finds it costs the same to lease hosted applications as it did to own them, highlighting the importance of not having to worry about IT provision in-house as the most important benefit of cloud provision.

“The main reason is not really the cost saving on IT support, rather the management time taken up with dealing with these matters,” says Sinclair. “IRIS says it does not make a lot of money out of it because it has to buy a licence from Microsoft and run the servers.”

While Remploy and Sinclair Scott are sourcing their IT from public cloud service providers, Indian IT services company WiPro recently implemented a shared private cloud environment to streamline the delivery of virtual machines and applications to its employees across the globe.

Private cloud
Previously, requests for storage and CPU time were taking 46 days, with huge server sprawl reducing hardware utilisation to less than 10 per cent, and the proliferation of multiple operating systems, database and applications complicating matters further, says WiPro chief technologist Ram Prasad K R.

“Applications were installed on hardware siloes that could not be shared, and we had server sprawl all over the enterprise,” says Prasad.

“We started evaluating cloud technology in 2008, looking at virtualisation tools and hypervisors, but there was nothing that could manage it. So we developed our own [virtualisation management] tools and built a cloud management layer over the top.”

WiPro hosts its private cloud in its own datacentres and uses it to share its infrastructure with other locations. With the initial pilot and application testing phase complete, the company is now in the pro­cess of transforming its complete datacentre infrastructure to a private cloud model.

“Most likely the project will allow the standardisation of all our processes, including internal and external IT applications, and the aspiration is that it will be completed within this financial year,” says Prasad.

The first stage involved configuring appropriate storage and network resources, and protecting them with firewalls and network monitoring tools. Prasad’s team of 15 engineers then introduced a workflow and workload management layer, topped by a self-service web portal that provides employees with access to server CPU cycles, storage and applications.

“Before, an employee had to get quantified data to justify the need for a server; realise an internal requirement and get approval from the business manager, then request the internal IT department to provide the infrastructure,” says Prasad. “Now the employee logs into a standard setup and gets the application and hardware infrastructure available, and can just click to provision a 100GB machine with Linux, or a 200GB machine with Windows, in less than 35 minutes.”

More than 1,200 virtual servers, in three locations, have been added into the private cloud so far. Lower energy costs have been achieved with physical servers being replaced by virtual equivalents, and of those remaining, utilisation has improved to more than 40 per cent and the cost per server reduced from $2,000 to $800. The company has also integrated software appliances to help control and monitor licence requirements for the hundreds of applications, such as multiple copies of Microsoft SQL Server, it provides internally.

But while the initial cost savings are significant, WiPro insists that speeding up provisioning requests and being able to scale its capacity up and down on demand remain the biggest benefits of its private cloud implementation.

Management complexity
Whereas many organisations opting for public cloud services have done so to reduce IT management overhead, it is not surprising that a company the size and breadth of WiPro has experienced exactly the reverse with private cloud implementation, perhaps inevitably so due to strict security and performance requirements.

“The cloud also brings management complexity, with lots of [additional] processes around provisioning and monitoring,” says Prasad, though these can be mitigated by re-organising them centrally rather than on a divisional basis.

The pilot scheme also threw up some unexpected challenges involving network integration, resilience and application performance, with some apps, whether email, databases or business and analytical, adapting to cloud-based provision more readily than others.

Changing the end user mindset
“We went through a great deal of learning and engineering to find out what kind of things would happen,” says Prasad. “We had more than six hubs on the network and initially did not have proper packet shaper technology to allocate bandwidth to the private cloud and make sure there is a certain number of router hops and points of presence to provide application access to certain PCs, for example.”

With the infrastructure now proven, if not yet fully rolled out, WiPro’s employees are finding ways to use the private cloud to their advantage, including how to harness its infrastructure to aid the delivery of the company’s customer-facing services.

As is often the case, says Prasad, new technology is less of a barrier than people’s attitudes when it comes to using it, with project teams fearing the loss of control of IT resources to which they previously had exclusive access, and that their specific applications would not work in the same way.

“The big focus [of the private cloud] is the delivery of compute resources internally, and it is being benchmarked against a public infrastructure, so there is a big mindset change there,” he says.

Does the cloud put IT staff out of work?

It seems obvious – taking applications and services out of the IT department and putting them into the cloud, whether public or private, is certain to result in job losses, right?

A report from global consultancy AMI Partners published in July this year estimated that small businesses’ IT departments and the contract and channel partners they employ in the US could lose as many as 250,000 jobs over the next decade, for example, as cloud providers offer various services directly to customers.

“Automated service delivery via the cloud will reduce the need for internal IT staff,” wrote the company’s senior vice president of infrastructure research, Anil Miglani.

But according to a recent survey of 1,300 IT professionals conducted by online IT recruitment agency CWJobs.co.uk, jobs may open up elsewhere. Of those polled, 40 per cent said they thought the rise of cloud computing would actually result in more industry jobs becoming available, and only 28 per cent saying there would be fewer.

While the Indian IT services giant refused to go into exact details, or specify whether the people involved had been redeployed or made redundant, the company’s recent private cloud implementation at WiPro certainly resulted in some job consolidation.

“Before, those [applications and services] were in individual departments, which would have their own administrators in separate groups,” says WiPro chief technologist Ram Prasad K R. “The cloud brings those together for integration and combines some of those administrator roles, so there is a reduction in headcount, with more people with combined skills.”

Marion Howard Healy, senior consultant at BroadGroup Consulting, believes that the situation varies enormously according to the size of the company involved. Smaller companies are less likely to have specific IT skills in-house anyway, which makes using cloud services a much easier decision.

But larger enterprises more prone to deploy a private cloud model can offset redundant roles against new positions created in ongoing cloud management, capacity management and provisioning.

“IT often becomes a service within the organisation, and the IT department becomes the service provider,” says Howard Healy. “So things may change in what they need to do – not so much static support, but more an integrated dynamic model – and IT people need to acquire new skills.”

Fewer than half of those polled by the CWJobs survey (44 per cent) believe cloud computing will require specialist skills, though 75 per cent said they would need to gain new skills and experience to work with the technology.

Defining cloud computing: read how to evaluate the options and clarify the benefits you expect from its implementation here