Key Metrics for your Cloud

Both Cloud Consumers and Cloud Service Providers are looking to reduce costs, optimize the services and further their business goals. In order to achieve these, they need to focus on several key metrics:

Time to Market (Cloud Providers): Time is crucial in the highly competitive Cloud Service Provider industry. The time to market is a make / break factor in any cloud deal. The turnaround time for IT resources to be provisioned enables new services and products to be deployed faster than traditional IT and this is a critical success metric for any cloud service provider. Time & Effort required for provisioning a cloud service / resources is of utmost importance to an organization and is also a concern for cloud service providers.Reducing the time & effort to provision a service results in reducing the burden on IT staff thereby resulting in a reduced cost of the Service.

Utilization of Physical Resources: In traditional data centers, a lot of physical resources are under utilized. Cloud based data centers make use of automated workload management & virtualization techniques that help organizations get better ROI on their investments. From a Service Provider perspective, this helps them to maximize and optimize the usage of their resources.

Retirement of the Cloud Services: Proper service management enables organizations and service providers to have an end date to the services to help them manage, plan and budget the resources. In traditional IT data centers, people tend to "forget" services if they don't use it for a while.

SLA Management: This is the basis of tiered support of services in the Cloud. Service Level Agreements allow the services to be deployed by classifying them for uptime & failover parameters.High priority services obviously cost more to support and will be expensive. If your users expect lower service levels - eg. DEV / QA environments, go for lower SLA levels to reduce cost.

Admin - Server Ratio: A key metric for both the cloud consumers and service providers is the Admin to Server ratio. This demonstrates the optimization capabilities of the provider and the lower it is, the more cost benefits the customer can expect. Automation tools, workflows and workload management helps to reduce this ratio.

Predicting Service Costs: A key metric to look for is whether you can predict & trend your service costs. This can help organizations to predict demand, plan capacity and manage costs.

Apart from the above, there are many other factors & metrics that you can look out for based on your organization needs.

Also posted on BMC Communities.

Cloud - Do It Right!

"Do It Right!" This article was inspired by one of the DNA attributes of my current company - BMC Software! With so much of hype around the Cloud and every organization wanting to move to the cloud, it has become imperative to understand how to implement a cloud strategy in the right way. The Cloud marketplace is becoming more and more crowded making it more challenging for the CIOs to select the right cloud vendor with the right mix of services & capabilities. The cloud services are also moving up the value chain and into the enterprise computing realm, thereby increasing the stakes! The selection criteria for a Cloud Vendor is shifting from price advantages to things such as security, reliability, scalability, control and a trusted vendor relationship. A great focus is also being emphasized on how the End User Experience is.

Cloud computing must be enabled with effective security, resiliency, service management, governance, business planning and the end to end lifecycle management with extensive compliance reporting & auditing capabilities. These are the components of an effective and comprehensive cloud architecture that will enable the enterprise to control the environment more effectively, optimize productivity, reduce the associated labor costs and ensure a safe environment for business users. Organizations should feel secure with the Cloud services being offered - that's the key!

Basically, the cloud architecture should deliver best practices in a standardized way and should have the following characteristics:

• Should be based on open standards
• Should deliver robust security, governance, compliance and privacy capabilities
• Should combine powerful automation and service management with rich business management functions for fully integrated, top-to-bottom management of cloud infrastructure and cloud services
• Should support the full spectrum of cloud service models, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) & Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Should enable the flexible scaling and resiliency required for successful cloud economics and ROI
• Should facilitate seamless integration into existing customers’ environments
• Should be based on best practices to enable continuous improvement 

Your Security focus areas for the Cloud services should include:

• Federated Identity Management (OpenID / Representational State Transfer - REST), Authorization & Entitlements
• Auditing & Comprehensive Compliance Reporting
• Intrusion Detection & Prevention
• Secure integration with your organization's Enterprise Security Architecture & Infrastructure
• Secure separation of Subscriber Domains

I have tried to highlight some of the key things to consider before you proceed with your cloud deployment:

1. Strategize & Plan - spend enough time on planning - this may sound so simple, yet you will be amazed at how many people don't do this!
2. Define & Document the Requirements (both functional and non-functional). This should include use cases, roles, processes, approvals, workflows, automation, integrations etc.
3. Prepare the Logical Design of the cloud solution, and yes, get your Cloud Architect & the entire teams involved at every stage with a strong buy-in from the stakeholders!
4. Layout the Physical Design that defines the details of the implementation of your Cloud.
5. Evaluate Vendors who can support your strategy, plans and designs & finalize the one whose infrastructure is capable of handling all of the characteristics mentioned above.
6. Don't forget to negotiate which I am sure you will not!

Then, your arduous journey begins on a "Do It Right" implementation of your Cloud!

Also published on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more

Questions to Ask Your Cloud Service Provider...

If you were to sign up for a Cloud Service, be it Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), what are the questions that you would ask? I have tried to list down most of the questions, however, feel free to be extra cautious and do due diligence before you sign the dotted line!

1. Where will my information be stored? Do I have any control or say in this matter? What are the Security laws in these locations?
2. Can I physically inspect your Cloud operations?
3. Can I get historical data on your Performance Indicators along with historical downtime records?
4. What are the Exit Charges or Penalties if I want to switch to another Cloud Service Provider? Will you delete all the data if I move? How do you prove that all data has been removed from your systems?
5. What are your Disaster Recovery Plans & Policies?
6. What are your Privacy Policies?
7. What types of logs will you provide? Can I get a sample log file? How long do you keep the logs?
8. What are your policies regarding my sensitive data during a legal investigation?
9. What are your up-time SLA's?
10. What types of encryption policies will be implemented?
11. How will my servers be provisioned / decommissioned? 

This does not purport to be a full list of questions but tries to cover the majority of questions that you need answers before you sign-up...

Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more