Infrastructure as a Service – Levaraging Cloud Computing as a Strategic Weapon

It’s time the IT department had a strategic weapon that can enable it to singlehandedly gain an advantage on the competition – with flexibility and more financial transparency than ever before. It’s time companies learn to use the cloud computing solution known as Infrastructure as a Service to their advantage.

As the economic conditions continue to show little signs of strength and budgets continue to be slashed, many IT executives are facing the daunting constraint – to do much more with less. Failure to perform can be disastrous or even career-ending as more companies are holding managers’ feet to the fire to meet their targets, with or without the adequate budgets they need.

As if that weren’t enough pressure, IT is the key enabler to critical functions of all business units such as provisioning employees’ computers and phones and keeping them up and running; protecting data in order to meet the stringent requirements imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI and other regulations and finally, managing data recovery and business continuity should a disaster strike. Under these conditions, companies increasingly need executives who can bring flexibility, scalability, efficiency and innovation to life while simultaneously lowering overhead costs.

With these pressures, it’s no wonder cloud computing has gained so much traction in small and large companies. Imagine a world where you could scale your IT capacity up or down on command, without capital expenditures. Imagine knowing that all your data is safely backed up and can be restored in hours, even in the event of a total wipe-out. Imagine being able to free up your highly skilled IT staff to work on value-added tasks such as development and planning, instead of chasing bugs and installing patches ad infinitum. And now, as the executive in charge of your IT division, imagine doubling your personal market value (read: salary) as you free yourself from tactical concerns and build a path to fulfilling a more strategic corporate role than ever before.

This world exists. It is enabled by a concept based on virtualization of the IT environment known in the cloud computing realm as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS extends the remote hosting concept of Software as a Service (SaaS) to hardware.

If cloud computing and Infrastructure as a Service are new concepts to you, let me provide a basic foundation. Fundamentally, IaaS fits under the broader banner of cloud computing and is primarily focused on providing IT resources – processing power, storage, data center space, services and compliance – on demand, enabling IT to pay for these services as a variable fixed cost.

The rise of interest in cloud computing and IaaS can be attributed to significant increases in IT-enabled business models such as eCommerce, Web 2.0 and SaaS and by the advances in technology that enable it such as virtualization, telecommunications and data center automation.

On demand computing capacity sounds like a dream come true to many people, yet to others it might sound like a nightmare where they lose control of their IT environment, or worse, become extraneous as computing tasks are offloaded to an outside supplier. However, that control does not have to be lost.

IaaS can be viewed as providing several strategic weapons in the IT arsenal, giving a company a strong edge against competition without losing control over the environment.

Weapon 1: Align IT with Your Core Business
Every IT manager’s wish list outlines a world where IT is better aligned with and able to support the core business strategy. Today’s enlightened businesses have realized that IT is not just a tool to help, but is a critical part of day-to-day operations and is frequently instrumental in delivering the end product. With eCommerce, B2B portals, EDI, IP phone systems and even email, today’s applications are fully integrated into the business, so it is critical that they behave the way the business does.

The first step to business alignment is cost control. No additional IT dollars should be spent unless they make a positive impact on revenue. With IaaS and its variable but predictable monthly operational costs, you can more closely match revenue with IT spending monthly instead of on an annual basis.

IaaS enables a whole new and more transparent way of accounting for IT. Today, IT is one line item. You know what you spend on all of your servers, all of the labor to maintain those servers, all of the power, and so on. You total it up and allocate it by business unit. In the IaaS model, precise usage and costs are transparent down to the resource level—blade servers, operating systems, licenses and storage. Because these resources are modular and transparent, IT can begin to tie utilization much more closely to the bill that each business unit receives. This creates a tighter linkage between what the business unit spends and the “service” they receive. Once that link is established, IT can begin to change business unit behavior away from “all-you-can-eat” to prioritization and cost/benefit.

Weapon 2: IaaS – Internal Cloud, Public Cloud…or More Likely Both
One of the misconceptions about IaaS is that when you decide to use this type of outsourcing, it’s a permanent and “all or nothing” decision. Imagine if you had to grow your infrastructure by 10 or 20 percent in 30 days. If you decided to use an IaaS provider to help, you are not permanently stuck in that mode nor have you set a precedent for the future. One of the key value propositions of Infrastructure as a Service is that not only can you scale up quickly, but you can also scale down or scale out without committing yourself to long term contracts.

Infrastructure as a Service isn’t just for public clouds either – it can be the basis for an internal IT delivery strategy as well. As long as companies have a platform like VMware for virtualization, your internal infrastructure can look identical to your IaaS provider. If you wanted to push 30-50 machines out of your data center for 90 days, you could easily bring them back because you’re both running the same virtual platform. This type of hybrid environment is nimble, cost-effective and provides the right amount of control on both sides without any risk of vendor-lock-in.

Weapon 3: Scale on Demand
How often do businesses pass on opportunities because they don’t know the cost or aren’t in a position to scale? Planning IT expenditures on an annual basis can stifle innovation and growth because companies are planning based on too many unknowns.

In business, opportunity implies change, and change can always be a challenge. IaaS enables rapid change because it allows companies to add or remove infrastructure and services quickly. While rapid change can have an impact on stability, with IaaS, you can add horsepower to your IT environment that is already stable and ready to go.

From a business growth standpoint, companies need to be ready to expand, however, it’s not prudent or necessary to spend big bucks on IT resources until they are needed. Let’s say the plan calls for adding six more Fortune 1000 customers next year. IaaS enables companies to put off spending capital on “what ifs” until that event occurs. Even if you put the money in the budget and great things happen, companies still need a rapid way to provision that environment. IaaS can help you ramp up by tapping an IaaS provider until you have built your own capability. By leveraging an IaaS provider companies can have entire environments up and running in days, and sometimes hours, instead of weeks.

Weapon 4: Business Continuity at a Fraction of the Cost
From an earthquake to a virus to a malfunctioning sprinkler system in the office, there are hundreds of ways to lose data, and only a few good ways to recover it. So far, IaaS is the best way I’ve seen. Data can be backed up automatically in real time to a strategic network of data centers that serve as mirrored storage and back-up sites. Thanks to virtualization you can store multiple backup servers on a relatively small physical footprint at the backup site, thereby greatly reducing your infrastructure and operating costs. IaaS providers generally sell these as backup “targets” if you don’t want to make a capital spend by putting your own equipment in a co-location facility. If a disaster is declared, your IaaS provider can supply additional resources out of their cloud on demand until you are back up to full production status. Because the virtual machines are stored in-state, instead of performing a bare metal restore or a reinstall, you simply power on the VMs, which significantly reduces your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The virtual machines also contain all of that precious custom configuration information that is so often lost or under-documented.

The use of a virtual approach also reduces the issues of hardware compatibility. As long as the virtual machines will run on VMware and as long as VMware is installed on the recovery hardware, they will boot. Not only does this help recovery, but it makes testing a lot easier. Most if not all of this activity can be performed remotely since there are no tapes involved. This again saves time because your administrators can avoid the airport and get right down to work.

With weapons like these, it’s not difficult to understand how cloud computing and IaaS will quickly change the face of the IT landscape forever. IaaS adds agility to businesses large and small and with the ability to bring resources on at the right time expenditures more closely match the revenue that caused the need – thereby making companies more efficient users of capital while keeping costs lower, creating a competitive advantage. Finally, the goal of being able to report to the board that a DR strategy is in place that is testable and doesn’t break the bank is on every IT wish list. IaaS providers can provide the platform to deliver that plan and a whole lot more.