Cloud Computing: Where to Start
In this post we’ll cover how the federal government should approach the notion of cloud computing.
- Planning – If cloud computing is where we will inevitably be in the next decade, agency CIOs should be strongly urged to make every new piece of new technology introduced into their IT environments cloud-ready. CIOs should also be made aware of external triggers that could prompt their organizations to move applications into the cloud, such as an expiring software license.
- Enterprise 2.0 as a Catalyst – Collaboration tools seem the obvious place to begin enterprise cloud migrations. These tools are made for the cloud and are relatively painless to integrate into a cloud environment. This seems like a logical and easy first learning application of cloud computing in an agency’s IT plan.
- HR Applications – HR application make sense because they tend to be very seasonal.
- Development and Testing – see HR applications.
- Disaster Recovery – We’re seeing a lot of our customers moving their disaster recovery systems to the cloud. Given the unlimited storage capacity and quick-to-live nature of cloud computing, this seems natural.
Mike Hill (IBM) has said that ITM has been spending a lot of time implementing private clouds for government and banking clients with sensitive data and workload issues. “What we’re finding is that it’s workload driven,” Hill remarked about which applications are ready to move to the cloud.
On the short list of other applications that are cloud-ready:
- case management
- project management
- economic development
- grant management
- service management
- travel and tourism
- and housing applications
Potential Pain Points
IT managers must also be made aware of the potential pain points that are associated with a cloud migration. These include computing, network and storage infrastructure, issues with virtualization sprawl and the need for better management tools, security, and cloud federation.
Tools like IBM’s Tivoli and Microsoft’s System Center handle “islands of automation” but there is no broadly available tool that deals with the overall cloud computing issue.
Next Post: Cloud Computing and Security
Very good article, I’m glad to be a follower.