Posts Tagged ‘cloud computing information’

Considerations for Choosing a Cloud Provider

Posted: December 6, 2011, 11:30 am

For many organizations, cloud computing is cost-effective for at least some applications.  Determining which applications are appropriate for the cloud takes careful evaluation.  The following checklist covers some of the factors you need to consider before selecting a cloud computing provider:

  1. Does the cloud you are considering meet your business availability needs?  What information can the provider give about historical and recent cloud availability?  What investment has the provider made in resilience and high availability?
  2. What service level agreements does the provider offer?  What compensation is available if the service is lost?
  3. Do you need the cloud provider to comply with certain regulatory requirements?  Where will your data reside, and is that location acceptable?  Does data archiving meet your regulatory requirements?
  4. o the cloud services meet and exceed your IT and data security policies, or do they fall short?  Will it be in a private or public cloud?  Will it be in a secure data center?
  5. Where is the data actually stored and who has access to the data?  What happens to the data when production tasks are completed?  How are archives accessed?  How is the data finally destroyed?
  6. What will costs be tomorrow?  What are your baseline costs?  Agility, flexibility, and strategy are part of the future costs, but you need a baseline for comparison.  How is the agreement structured?  Can the provider change the cost of the service to you?  If so, how much notice is required?
  7. How viable is the cloud provider?  It is important to select a provider with sufficient resources and services to provide the high levels of availability, resiliency, and security your business requires.  Is cloud computing part of the provider’s core business, or is it a new venture that could fail if it does not attract and retain sufficient customers?  Does the cloud offer multiple, highly resilient data centers with very strong network links between them?

In a business environment where information availability is critical, it makes sense to proceed cautiously, using a deliberate and systematic approach to mitigate risk.  A sensible first step is to testing a cloud provider with a non-critical process.  This lets you gain hands-on experience without risking major problems with day-to-day operations.

Does your organization have a business impact analysis (BIA) that audit all your business processes and defines the availability, resiliency and security each needs?

 

For more information, visit our Cloud microsite

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Seven Ways Enterprise Cloud is Transforming the IT Market – Part II

Posted: December 2, 2011, 11:16 am

In Part I, we recapped four of seven roles cloud computing plays today or will play in the near future, as discussed by Indu Kodukula, CTO of SunGard Availability Services, in an interview with Sramana Mitra  for Mitra’s  blog series,  “Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing.”  Here we complete the discussion with the final three roles Kodukula foresees.    – CM

 

Cloud as CPU and Storage Provider

We are also going to see independent computing components available on demand.  That is, compute on demand, storage on demand and, hopefully soon, network on demand.   Most likely, a relatively small number of providers will exist, and mid-size companies will use such services.  This means their investment in infrastructure is definitely going to go down.

Enterprise Cloud as Services Provider for SaaS

SaaS  vendors who run their cloud application on a commodity cloud will need more sophisticated capabilities for load balancing, monitoring, availability capabilities, etc., as the size and complexity of their businesses grow.  We have a great deal of intellectual property in our services that other providers do not have.  We see a time when SaaS vendors might manage their cloud applications on top of SunGard’s services in a commodity cloud.

That scenario would let SaaS vendors take advantage of both enterprise-grade cloud and the economies of a commodity cloud, if we do not happen to offer the lowest priced infrastructure.   As a result, we could end up with many customers who use our services as part of an SaaS application without our being the cloud provider and, possibly, without the commodity cloud vender knowing—or caring.

Enterprise Cloud as Services Provider to Commodity Clouds

We see down the road that some commodity clouds will buy services from us to use with their clients.   Just like SaaS vendors, as their size and complexity grows, they, too, may need the enterprise-class production services as their businesses grow.

In fact, one company using a commodity cloud has already arranged for recovery services to be delivered from our data center.   Their application is set-up to replicate over to us, because of the sophisticated intellectual property we have in our availability services.

Similarly, one can easily see the entire recovery process—the setup of the replication on an ongoing basis, the migration of the application and the failover of the application—going from, say, Amazon over to our data center.  Or, perhaps, all those availability services will be provided on Amazon’s infrastructure from someone like us—which would open up a price point that could be lower than what we offer today.

To summarize, the cloud is going to transform the industry.  Some people think that is hype, but it is not for  one simple reason: the utility model of cloud computing is amazingly compelling.  It is not just about cost.  The fundamental value of the utility model is you can tie the investment success to the business success.   Beyond that, the cloud lets you combine the applications, the resource management services and the infrastructure in ways that not only minimize costs but also raise the level of expertise available to you.

What applications would you move to a production-ready cloud to lower costs and decrease distractions?

Download SunGard’s white paper, The Real Value of Cloud Computing.

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Seven Ways Enterprise Cloud is Transforming the IT Market – Part I

Posted: December 1, 2011, 11:31 am

As part of his blog series, “Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing,”  Sramana Mitra recently interviewed Indu Kodukula, CTO of SunGard Availability Services, about the many roles he sees cloud computing fulfilling today and in the future.   Today, we recap four of the cloud computing roles they discussed.  In our next blog, we’ll recap three more roles cloud competing could play in the future.    – CM

For nearly 30 years, SunGard Availability Services focused on two specific businesses: disaster recovery (DR)—helping clients recover their applications after a service disruption,  and managed services—running production applications on behalf of our clients.   Today, we have over 10,000 clients, mostly mid-sized companies between $100 million to $1billion in annual revenues.  We have 50 data centers, over 3500 employees and $1.5B in annual revenues, and we have expanded our services to include the cloud computing environment our clients need—enterprise-level and  production-ready.

Our businesses give us a unique perspective on the IT requirements of mid-sized companies.  When cloud computing emerged in 2009, we recognized the opportunity immediately.  But, because of our background and market, we saw the best uses for cloud computing  quite differently.

Cloud as Development Environment.

The first use cases of cloud computing revolved around SaaS software companies making use of the pay-as-you-go pricing model for cloud computing.  This model enabled software companies  to buy  resources as needed, which is a tremendous advantage over laying out a huge CapEx (capital expenditures) upfront—before  you even know if the product is going to make money.   Today, using a commodity cloud, like Amazon, for the development and testing of new products is widely accepted.

However, among our clients, we didn’t (and still do not) see much development of entirely new software applications, so we knew a commodity cloud was not the best choice for our clients.   While we, too, see constraints around CapEx among our clients, what we see more often is overstretched IT staffs.  With this insight in mind, we took a different approach to cloud computing.   We made the decision and, subsequently, the investment to build a production-ready enterprise cloud.

 

Enterprise Cloud Computing.

Many mid-sized enterprises run heterogeneous environments, have special performance requirements or are in a highly regulated industry.   They want to take advantage of the cost-saving cloud computing offers, but their applications are not cloud-ready.

Further, they do not see rewriting applications in which critical business logic –logic that has developed over the last 25 or 30 years—to meet a cloud stack as a compelling business need.   Consequently, they will need a place to house that application for the foreseeable future.   We think the ability to deliver these types of applications over the Web and from the utility of the cloud model is definitely going to be the default model for delivering enterprise IT services five years from now.

The trends has already begun.  We are seeing more and more mainstream departmental applications and new applications moving to the enterprise cloud not for development but, rather, for production.   Even we at SunGard are “eating our own dog food,” so to speak, and converting our internal applications to our enterprise cloud over the next 18 months to take advantage of cloud economies.  That is a pretty compelling message to our clients.

Recovery in the Cloud

From the beginning, our DR business model encompassed a shared inventory that matched the customer’s infrastructure.  Now, by adding production-ready cloud services to our DR services, recovery becomes more about providing a “continuum of availability,” rather than recovering everything at one point when a catastrophe happens.  We call this new approach “recovery in the cloud.”  With cloud computing and DR services together, a client can decide the level of availability it wants for a particular application.   For a tier one applications, it may be no more than 15 minutes of down time; for tier two, no more than four hours; for tier three, 24 hour, and maybe for the rest, a couple days.

Our cloud services let us run tier one applications for our clients or, alternatively, provide a recovery platform where they can run the applications themselves.    These capabilities were deliberate design goals for our cloud strategy, coming directly from an understanding of client needs.

Enterprise Cloud as a Consultant

Many of our clients face challenges involving an IT staff under press to be more efficient, as well as issues around consolidation, new service roll-outs and new revenue opportunities.   We, too, have faced many of these issues and found solutions.

For example, we have significant experience with decision support and analysis using data warehousing and large-scale data volumes.  Similarly, we have production experience with many common departmental applications, and we have a great deal of knowledge about how clouds manage applications and resources.  In addition, we have specialized availability knowledge that even a Fortune 50 company would value.

We  find many of the next generation application service providers need help building applications for the cloud.   So, we are building up a team of solution architects who can sit down with entrepreneurs and help them design their applications.

Cloud application consulting is but one of the new services we expect to offer.  As the cloud environment matures, we expect to see the need for. . . (to be continued)

 

Are you writing your application to make the best use of cloud resources?

Download SunGard’s white paper, The Real Value of Cloud Computing.

 

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Multi-site Options Allay High Availability, Recovery and Interconnectivity Concerns

Posted: September 19, 2011, 11:58 am

Organizations moving essential business applications to the cloud are often concerned that they will gain cost-efficiency and on-demand capacity but loss application availability.  Given the importance of production applications to the continuity of your businesses, those concerns are legitimate.

Fortunately, new capabilities being added to our Enterprise Cloud Services address those concerns.  Today, we are making high availability (at the 99.95 level) part of our Enterprise Cloud Services and including that commitment in our standard Service Level Agreement (SLA).  In doing so, we are going beyond the norms for the cloud computing industry.

Our high availability commitment is possible because of enhancements to our fully redundant architecture.  It now utilizes two geographically diverse production sites integrated with recovery capabilities.  These enhancements afford seamless cloud services continuity and greater availability assurances for your applications.

In addition, we have added a new option for cloud applications that do not require high availability: Managed Multi-Site Recovery.  With this option, a secondary cloud site becomes available for recovery within four hours of an outage at your primary cloud site.  That four hour recovery time objective is backed by your SLA, too.

Because more and more organizations operate in the hybrid world of cloud, co-location and managed services, we are now offering the ability to interconnect applications running on our Enterprise Cloud Services with other environments hosted in our data center(s).  This connectivity can be done within the same site or between multiple sites.  That means data from your legacy environments can be shared easily with your cloud-based applications to maximize business value.

Finally, we now provide active management for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Active Directory and Hosted Blackberry Services to reduce your IT administration burdens and help ensure production workloads are available

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DocuSign Bolsters Global Network Infrastructure with SunGard Hosting and Managed Network Services

Posted: July 22, 2011, 3:25 pm

When you support large financial companies, your data center gets audited. Period. It used to be that clients demanded the audit themselves. Now, with the passage of Sarbanes Oxley in 2002, the U.S. government requires audits on a regular basis. Every 3-party IT vendor for a financial company undergoes the same audit that the client undergoes for its in-house environment. It’s the law.

Another layer of regulations come into play if a 3-party IT-vendor handles records that contain electronic signatures, whether emails, contracts or faxes. Something called “SSAE 16 Type II” went into effect on June 15th of this year. It requires certain tested solutions have to be in place for the network, and practices, policies and procedures across the whole data center have to meet certain standards.

So, what if you’re DocuSign, the global leader in electronic signature technology for the financial industry, and you expect business to grow rapidly? A cloud infrastructure would be perfect to support that growth—technology ready when you need it without upfront costs. What’s not to love?

The catch is the cloud vendor has to meet the same 3-party IT-vendor regulations that DocuSign and DocuSign’s financial customers have to meet. None of this “it’s the customer’s responsibility to…” nonsense. DocuSign is not about to risk their 100% record for passing audits with their Fortune 500 clients or their 99.99% availability record.

Only an Enterprise Cloud with Internet and private fiber networks with managed network services and multi-location facilities that meet SSAE 16 Type II requirements can provide the security and stability they need.

And now you know why we at SunGard are so proud that DocuSign has signed with us.

Which of your applications could fit into an Enterprise Cloud?

Learn more about SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services

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Hybrid Clouds — Use Cases and Considerations

Posted: July 12, 2011, 11:29 am

Hybrid clouds are becoming more popular as companies seek to optimize their applications and data based on risk, architecture and business growth.  As a result, hybrid clouds are taking several different forms.

The Cloud as Partner

The most common hybrid cloud scenario is one in which a set of applications resides in the cloud with the remaining applications residing in the company’s on-site data center.  This arrangement enables the company to take advantage of the flexibility and cost-savings of the cloud where appropriate, while keeping control over more sensitive applications.

 

The Cloud as Proving Ground

Another use of a cloud is temporary workspace.  For example, developers can load an application into the cloud, add and test new features without affecting day-to-day operations.  Similarly, they can set-up a newly purchased application, say an ERP or document management system, run it, build it out and size it before moving it in-house.

The Cloud as Extra Capacity

Some companies use a cloud for burst capacity, letting sudden spikes in traffic call into action the additional resources of the cloud to ensure continuity of service.  In other cases, companies mirror their applications in a cloud to provide a hot, stand-by site.

Hybrid Cloud Considerations

Regardless of the type of hybrid cloud your company implements, certain considerations come into play, especially these.

Network connectivity. You will need to consider your connection, bandwidth, firewall requirements and how changes and upgrades will be handled between your on-site data center and the cloud.  You will probably need a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection to the cloud to provide the level of security your company needs.  Today VPNs typically come in two types. Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) authenticates and encrypts data over the public internet, while Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) VPNs are offered by carriers to provide companies with more secure, but still shared, private IP networks.

User Access. If you are using a Windows or Linux-based cloud, your user identification and authentication can remain the same, but you will need to take into account the fact that your cloud vendor may also have access to the severs they are operating for you.  Consequently, you will need to ensure that your vendor follows access policies that are acceptable to your auditor.

Data Migration.  For small applications, you can transmit your application and data over the network.  However, network transmission is too slow and lengthy for large application, so burning a disk and over-nighting it to the vendor is faster and more efficient for large data sets.

Your hybrid cloud strategy should support your business strategy.   Formulating the right cloud strategy can not only cut costs, but also bring the operational efficiencies and extra capacity your company needs to expand and grow.

How might your company initiate and evolve a cloud strategy?

For more information, visit our Cloud microsite

 

 

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ZL Technologies Transforms Business Model with SunGard Cloud

Posted: July 5, 2011, 2:31 pm

ZL Technologies Transforms Business Model with SunGard Cloud

For the last 12 years, ZL Technologies, Inc. (ZL) has provided large-scale record-management services to top global institutions in the finance industry.  They are specialists in records management, archiving and e-discovery solutions.

ZL’s business has a number of unique characteristics.  For example, firms frequently need to search masses of historical emails for specific information for litigation.  Databases quickly grow as institutions generate more electronic data each day and regulations specify how long records are kept.  Regulatory requirements for security and governance are tight, and regular audits of IT-vendor processes are required.

To grow their business, ZL developed Unified Archive®, a new SaaS offering that leverages the cloud.  The cloud enables ZL to grow their business, as well as meet unpredictable customer demand, without the need to build and staff new, costly IT infrastructure.

ZL selected SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services, configured as an on-demand, fully managed, virtual private data center, to support its Unified Archive application.  This IaaS set-up provides multiple layers of protection, including redundant firewalls, segregated Layer 2 networking and integrated virtual private network (VPN) connectivity—all critical requirements for ZL.  Under SunGard’s managed services agreement, we will monitor, patch, backup, maintain and troubleshoot to reduce ZL’s provisioning and administrative burdens.

Stephen Chan, ZL’s co-founder, termed our Enterprise Cloud services “a highly secure and resilient platform, based on IT security best practices, and architected for compliance.”  He said we are helping them “break a major price barrier,” which will let them”reshape” the economics of their solutions.

Chen said he looked at a number of competing solutions, but found SunGard’s to be the best fit for making their SaaS business model work. Also, flexible and elastic pricing, which turns IT infrastructure into an operating expenditure rather than a capital expenditure, were essential.

ZL is a great example of how a company can transform their business using the cloud.  We welcome them as a new client.

Does your company have special regulatory and security needs that could benefit from SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud offering?

Visit SunGard’s Cloud Computing Microsite for videos, case studies and a host of cloud computing information.

Unified Archive is a registered trademark of ZL Technologies

 

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Posted in Cloud Adoption, Cloud Applications, Cloud Business Drivers, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud security, cloud trends, IT and the Cloud, Uncategorized

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Five Considerations When Evaluating Cloud Computing Architectures

Posted: May 10, 2011, 1:47 pm

An excellent starting point for an organization looking at cloud computing platforms is to examine its IT architecture.  Only by aligning the architecture – compute, network, data center, power and storage resources – with applications can a company be on the path to achieve the reliability and performance it requires within a cloud environment.

In cloud computing, true protection is an outcome of the right architecture for the right application.  Organizations need to fully understand their individual application requirements and, if using a cloud platform, the corresponding cloud architecture.  With that knowledge, they can make informed decisions about what cloud platform best meets the reliability and performance requirements of their specific applications.”

Here are five considerations for companies looking at cloud computing architectures.  

Availability.  Not all applications are created equal, nor are all cloud platforms the same.  Organizations need to tier their applications, identifying which applications need to be highly available, which can accept downtime and how much downtime is acceptable.  They need to understand the business risk associated with a lack of availability of their data.  For those applications that need to be highly available, businesses should consider enterprise-class technologies that have been rigorously tested versus looking at building something internally. It’s also important to look at multi-site solutions and disaster recovery/business continuity planning.  For most businesses, this means working with a service provider or consultant because they usually have access to greater levels of expertise and provide these services as their core business.

Security.  Security is still the primary concern for businesses regarding the cloud.  Concerns include the loss of control of their sensitive data, the risks associated with a multi-tenant environment, and how to address standards and compliance.  Organizations need to know how a shared, multi-tenant environment is segmented to prevent customer overlap.  How is the solution architected and is the service provider’s cloud infrastructure – network, virtualization and storage platforms – secure?  

Manageability.  Businesses need to understand what they are accountable for versus what they expect from a service provider.  Most public cloud vendors do not provide administrative support.  Organizations need to either have the technical expertise in-house to design the right solution or seek the services of an outside provider.  There should be an understanding of what level of management their applications require and have an identified change management process.  

Performance.  As with a more traditional hosting model, it’s important to understand workload demands on the infrastructure.  Companies also need to understand what the bottlenecks are and how the cloud architecture they have or are evaluating can meet those needs. Organizations should perform their own testing to understand how a cloud environment affects compute, storage and network resources.

Compliance. Organizations need to understand where their data will reside as well as who will interact with it and how.  They need to understand which areas of compliance the service provider controls and how to audit against the standards and regulations to which they need to adhere.

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Building Cloud-friendly Applications

Posted: May 2, 2011, 2:05 pm

Today we hear from  Sarabjeet Chugh, Director of Technology Business Development (Cloud Services and Infrastructure)

Cloud adoption is progressing rapidly.  Many companies are in the process of determining their migration strategy, and most vendors are refining their processes to provide a smoother on-ramp to the cloud. 

Now that cloud is a reality, we need to think about how application development has to evolve to fit the cloud.  The application life cycle is broken.  Programmers write code, run tests and “throw it over the wall” to Operations, where technicians then struggle to accommodate the resource requirements of the application.

Old Code is Often Slow Code

Applications heavy from poorly structured code that requires multi-gigabytes of memory and have a huge storage footprint can run in the cloud, but the expense will become obvious.  Further, such applications offer few options and little flexibility to mitigate expenses. 

New Technologies Improve

A cloud-friendly application is one that can be deployed on any platform, locally or in the cloud.  To achieve such an application, new application development frameworks, such as SpringSource from VMware, have emerged that help to tease out the application’s business logic from underlying resource requirements. They also improve developer productivity by providing supplementary web services, message routing, authentication and application-level services, such as memory caching and contingency handling.

By insulating the infrastructure-dependent components and permitting them to be resolved in the production environment, the application can be more portable, reusable and maintainable.   For example, a cloud-friendly application could run in your data center but failover to SunGard if an incident occurs.  Similarly, server images could be transmitted to SunGard and brought up with full affinity and metadata information.

Does your company have standards for writing portable code?

 Download SunGard’s white paper, “All clouds are not created equal.”

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New Measurements for Cloud ROI

Posted: March 30, 2011, 2:12 pm

Even though Cloud may be a relatively new phenomenon for your company, you can still begin to measure your return on investment (ROI) if not in real numbe, at least in the ways it is changing your organization.  Here are a few examples.

New Opportunities

More new opportunities become viable.  First and foremost, the IT investment to support a new product is greatly reduced.  IT resources can flex with a project—robust during development, then reduced, then scaled up as a product takes off.  From a business plan perspective, this means the  Number-of-Sales-to-Breakeven  is lower, and the  Time-To-Breakeven is sooner. 

Better Planning

Likewise, lower IT costs mean your Pricing Structure can have more flexibility and/or better margins.  Because the IT resources to support each new sale is a known cost—rather than a “best we can tell” allocation of blanket IT costs—Profitability-Projections are more reliable.  Finally, no Point-of-Diminishing-Returns exists where IT  hardware and staff are max-ed out and a CapEx infusion is needed for future sales. 

Faster Start-up

The time between approval of a project and the start of work is shorter.  Provisioning the resources takes less time.  No more waiting for a purchase order to go through before the servers can be delivered, installed, configured and integrated.  As sales escalate, the elastic and flexible cloud environment provides the needed support in perfect step with your product’s success.

A Cost Transformation 

Long after you have garnered cost reduction from the move to the cloud, you will benefit from the way cloud computing aligns IT costs with revenues.  Consequently, more business plans can meet your criteria as viable product opportunities.

What previous business ideas would pass profitability requirement in your company if you used cloud computing?

 Download SunGard’s white paper, “All clouds are not created equal.”

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