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A Case for Private Cloud
Private clouds will transform how we think about IT as a service, said Sanjay Lulla at Interop
By Varun Aggarwal, NC, October 7, 2009, 1830 hrs
Sanjay Lulla, Director, Technology Solutions, EMC India & SAARC feels that a strong case can be made that most aspects of business IT are poised for a change.
Speaking at one of the sessions at Interop Mumbai, Lulla said that the problem lies in the state of IT itself. “It doesn't matter what survey or numbers you look at—it's only a small portion of each dollar spent on IT that creates direct business benefit. Customers are spending approximately 70 percent of budget just keeping the lights on, and only 30 percent goes to things that truly differentiates the company. The vast majority of IT investment is spent on keeping the lights on, upgrading various pieces of infrastructure, providing redundancy and recoverability—all the non-value-producing aspects that seem to consume 60-80 percent of IT expenditures,” he argued.
Further, most business leaders seem frustrated with the current state of affairs regarding IT investment, and certainly many of the people we encounter in IT organizations are equally frustrated. The Board of Directors of companies is starting to figure this out, and asking: “I hear about these clouds like Google or Amazon. Why can’t we do that–operate our IT with the same degree of efficiency. Or if we can’t get it done internally, shouldn’t we outsource to the clouds? Maybe we should get rid of you IT guys, and we should start spending our money with Google or Amazon,” Lulla said. This may sound simplistic but it is indicative of the frustration that is building up.
Finally, there's a lot of new thinking emerging on how IT gets done. We've got all sorts of relatively fresh concepts to work with: virtualization, cloud, SOA, SaaS and much more. It’s clear that if you believe that IT is capable of structural change, the conditions are favorable in many aspects.
Data centers are growing at unsustainable rates in terms of CAPEX/OPEX, power, downtime and utilization. New technologies are available like virtualization, cloud, SOA, SaaS etc—what matters is how one makes use of them.
Many people see a great number of reasons to maintain their own data center v/s going for a cloud model and a similar number support the contrary. There are reasons to support both.
- A private data center can be trusted, is controlled, reliable and secure whereas the cloud presents its own set of benefits like it’s flexible, dynamic, on-demand and efficient.
- A CIO however needs to take a middle path that can take advantage of both the models. This needs to begin with virtualizing the existing data center and building an internal cloud and deliver services to your end users.
- Then take a decision on which applications should be running on external cloud vs. on the internal cloud. Create a common layer of virtualization between the internal and the external cloud. Having a rock solid security layer between the internal and external cloud is the most important thing.
Private clouds will transform how we think about IT as a service. The impact to businesses will be considerable. Lulla exhorted the audience to exploit new economics with confidence and preserve existing investment in applications and information.
Each step delivers immediate value, and builds for the next, said Lulla.
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