Planning a Successful Cloud Strategy Identify existing assets, assess your business needs, and develop a technical and business plan for your cloud

Transcription

1 SOLUTION WHITE PAPER Planning a Successful Cloud Strategy Identify existing assets, assess your business needs, and develop a technical and business plan for your cloud

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary 1 cloud Planning and Design Why Do It? 2 Who Needs to be Involved? Steps to Effective Cloud Planning 3 Step 1: Cloud Service Design 3 Step 2: Cloud Operations Definition 5 Step 3: Cloud Business Planning 5 the BMC Solution 7 learn more 7

3 Jim was debating the architecture of a cloud computing solution for his company. It was clear to him they would need a provisioning engine, a self-service portal, and some mechanism for decommissioning services. However, even before he put pen to graph paper, a few questions were nagging in his mind. Who would all the users of this cloud be? What services would they need and what options should he provide? How would this cloud interact with his existing systems? Something told him he d better take a step back and think through these topics before he started drawing Executive Summary Constraining and defining the role of cloud computing in your organization, including what will be internal, what will be external, and what service levels will be expected, is a critical first step in planning and designing your cloud. You are going to have many groups associated with the cloud effort producing it, operating it, regulating it, and consuming it. Identifying all those who will be affected, whether they are initially engaged or brought in later, will help prevent surprises along the way for all concerned. Benefits of Cloud Planning and Design Top-down design of cloud services Operational design of cloud architecture and capacity needs Integrated cloud architecture and IT management processes Business planning for hybrid cloud delivery Consider how the cloud will interact with the rest of the data center environment. Are there shared management tools? Security requirements? Compliance rules? Or is your cloud an island? Now think beyond your data center. Will you be leveraging public cloud resources, as well? As you answer these questions, you will need to define the requirements, including compliance and security, outline the different options, identify the costs associated with delivering each option, and create an implementation plan. Key steps to cloud planning and design include: Cloud Service Design To meet the needs of both your initial users and IT s broader customer base, it is important to identify which cloud services are needed, how the public cloud might be leveraged, which service tiers and service levels to offer, and how best to create a corresponding bill of materials. Cloud Operations Definition To make sure your cloud will operate at its best, define your cloud reference architecture, map out necessary performance and capacity planning, and determine any operational compliance and security requirements. Cloud Business Planning In order to ensure your cloud meets not only IT s needs but also the needs of your business, you must consider your current and future demand, manage cloud service providers, determine service costing and pricing, and guarantee regulatory compliance. 1

4 Cloud Planning and Design Why Do It? A little IT planning saves millions of dollars and prevents failed projects, unmet expectations, and general frustration. As with any business problem, before uncoiling a single network cable or procuring a single 64-way box, it makes sense to take a step back and consider the best approach to addressing the challenge. In the case of the cloud, that problem is often characterized as more resources faster or less CapEx on the books or even halting the surreptitious use of public cloud resources outside the boundaries of internal IT. These types of statements imply some defined goals and expectations for your cloud effort. The other primary source of motivation often comes from industry buzz, in which the topic becomes so hot and hyped that individuals in the organization feel someone better look into what we re doing with cloud. This second type of statement usually implies that there are not defined goals for the project. However, if you wish to be successful with your cloud project, those goals should be articulated. A good cloud plan can be created in a few short weeks, with the right people and the right motivations. Armed with a plan, technology decisions will be easier to make, stakeholders will have properly set expectations, and the implementation team will have a strong go-ahead to move forward. Who Needs to be Involved? Cloud planning not only engages the initial stakeholders in an organization, but also envelops users from across IT and across the business. Gathering stakeholders early in the planning stage will ensure that their goals are properly represented and that you continue to get their support as the project progresses. By considering differing perspectives, you can also hedge against the risk of omitting key requirements that might significantly impact the group. The goal is to set the tone of incremental delivery against the cloud requirements, with collaboration along the way, when needed. Potential cloud stakeholders to consider: The cloud architect, if one exists in your organization, charged with designing the cloud environment The capacity and performance team, whose job it will be to ensure the cloud performs as well as or better than the physical alternative The network team, upon whose resources and skills you will rely to network the cloud The storage team, whose storage boxes will be critical to supporting cloud workloads and for whom demand may grow significantly with this new technology The applications team, who are often the de facto users of the cloud unless that premise is examined Other individuals within the organization can also shed light on the cloud planning process. These might include representatives from finance (who can help determine how a cloud environment is funded and how it charges its users) and business representatives (who can help identify projects that could best utilize the cloud). For example, if a bank is looking to increase the transaction capacity of its online systems, the target growth numbers can help inform the capacity decision. While it is important to consider all the stakeholders while designing a cloud, it may not be critical to actually include all of them on an early cloud design team. Some organizations have found success by starting with a small tactical team to build out an initial cloud with future broadening and ongoing development in mind. The initial cloud offering would include only a handful of service offerings, and demonstrate the power of cloud. The small initial team would then strategically expand its membership as it further pursues long-term options. 2

5 Steps to Effective Cloud Planning Step 1: Cloud Service Design Service design is aimed at designing what to offer users through a service catalog. At its most basic, a service catalog is a listing of services from which a user can choose, thus initiating the cloud service provisioning process. When designing a service catalog, it is helpful to identify your cloud users to determine their needs. Potential users to consider while designing critical services offerings include: The development team of software engineers R&D groups (for example, those engaged in scientific research) The application team in charge of building and maintaining internal applications The challenge of service design is that there is a natural tension between users, who want the ability to completely customize their offerings, and the IT group, which has to maintain tight controls on the services in the environment. The role of the service catalog is to bridge that gap. The service catalog enables IT to define the areas of configuration and choice that users can select, according to their role. Users then feel some measure of customizability of their cloud services. The following attributes are often defined in the service catalog: Resource configurations including CPU, memory, and storage allocations Operating systems Middleware stacks Applications offered Networking options for both simple network configuration and multi-tenancy support Compliance packages Monitoring tools Service levels Prices associated with each component, if desired Inherent in this list is the ability to define multi-tier and single-tier application stacks, differing deployment alternatives for each based on size and service tier, and all the configuration options a user might require. These elements are defined as individual Service Blueprints within the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution. Once defined functionally, they are then characterized in business language as service offerings, which are stored in the service catalog. It is from these offerings that end users select their cloud services. 3

6 Service Blueprint: The definition of the functional elements and the communication paths between them S M L Servers Networks Public Clouds Storage Deployment Model: One or many different deployment sizes or locations for deploying the Service Blueprint Cloud Service Offering Menu Option 1 Option Option 2 1 Option Option 3 Option 2 1 Option Option 3 2 Option 3 Service Options: A set of configurable options associated with a Service Blueprint for users to select at the request time Service Offering: The cloud services, presented in business language, to requestors, based on their role Figure 1. Building the Cloud Service Offering Menu IT can choose which cloud services to offer to users and how customizable those services will be. At one extreme, users can be offered a choice between only two or three non-customizable full-stack configurations. On the other extreme, users can be offered an extensive set of choices for each component, enabling them to fully customize their stack. A common middle-ground approach is for IT to determine which broad offerings should be presented, which elements should be optional and which required (like compliance or monitoring), and which users will be presented with which options. Beyond the contents of the service catalog, service design also includes the design of the workflows that support each provisioning process. For many, the workflow will be an automated series of approvals. However, for some, human approval might be required, due to the sensitivity or scale of the request. Designing these workflows is critical to service design. To address the needs of cloud service design, you should: Design internal and external cloud services Define service tiers and service levels Create a bill of materials for each service 4

7 Step 2: Cloud Operations Definition A cloud may feel like a clean slate upon which a whole new, properly working, well run, solidly architected infrastructure can be built. It often includes new or reasonably new hardware, storage resources, and networks, as well as new stack elements (such as virtualization) and new paradigms (such as workload mobility). There are probably also some new elements, such as customer self-service and the service catalog. At the same time, the cloud is still part of the IT infrastructure. It is still serving many of the same customers, hosting most of the same applications, bound by the same security guidelines, and audited according to the same regulatory compliance rules. All those previously built processes and policies should move seamlessly onto the cloud infrastructure. The process of defining the interplay between traditional management and cloud management is the cloud architecture challenge. IT seeks to ensure that the best of operational compliance, performance management, change management, and countless other nontrivial process investments are applied equally to the cloud preventing the need for a recreation for the new environment. New emphasis will also be placed on capacity management in the cloud environment, ensuring all services are right-sized to meet business needs efficiently. Meanwhile, many of the archaic process and workflows can be optimized to further automate a cloud environment, removing manual approvals and other barriers to efficiency in the cloud. Working together with BMC, you can: Define cloud reference architecture Design performance and capacity planning Define operational compliance and security Step 3: Cloud Business Planning The business components of planning for cloud are paramount to the financial success of the endeavor. Cloud environments are designed to further business priorities by delivering more flexibility, lower cost, and more responsiveness. Thus, the business decisions of cloud drive many of the operational decisions. First, it is important to estimate supply and demand needs of the cloud environment, incorporating appropriate growth estimates. When virtualization was first implemented, people found that requests far exceeded their expectations for virtualized resources precisely because there was pent-up demand. Cloud will only ease the procurement process and lower its costs, releasing more of this pent-up demand. Capacity elements can be anticipated once the cloud is up and running, such as: Over time, more and more of those existing workloads will move to the cloud environment There will likely be a queue of requests that can be immediately fulfilled by the cloud environment There will be more new requests than originally anticipated 5

8 In addition, IT should consider the possibility of using overflow capacity from a public cloud. Criteria for those decisions can include: Compliance requirements both operational and regulatory Security requirements The complexity of configuration needed Proximity to large data sources (moving lots of data tends to be inefficient, both financially and practically) Splotchy consumption of resources The price of external resources After isolating the cloud services you can potentially send to the public cloud, it s time to investigate options and develop a relationship with a public cloud vendor. Map the appropriate services to your needs and run the financial calculations to ensure you re making sound financial decisions. This introduces the second element: the financial costing of the cloud. IT typically needs to have an idea of what things are going to cost. In the cloud, however, it s even harder to associate costs to the department that is incurring them (since there s no easy correlation between one physical server and one cloud service). Even if IT cannot implement true chargeback (the billing of each department based on its usage), at a minimum it should be able to do show-back (the presentation of the theoretical bill, even if real money will never change hands). Consequently, during the planning stages, an organization needs to develop a costing model for the cloud environment, based on the organizations own costs. With a chargeback model, users can see the prices for the services they are choosing in the service catalog. Indicating a price will change behavior of the user. Just knowing it takes three times (3x) the amount of money to support a cloud service with more resources will often drive people to select the less costly alternative. Another benefit of costing is to demonstrate to IT leadership some of the costs associated with delivering the value of the cloud. Because IT always has to build out a cloud environment in advance of the requests for service, all investments are made before a departmental purchase order. That investment is best justified with some financials on the current environment, including the cost of operation. Thus, planning around costing is supportive of a growing cloud environment. The third and final business planning consideration is one of regulatory compliance. Often considered part of ongoing operations, the regulatory status of both a private cloud environment and any public cloud resources utilized can have significant ramifications on the business. A key part of planning, therefore, is the identification of regulatory requirements governing certain workloads, and the creation of a plan for: Excluding them from any cloud environment which has costly implications Developing rules and policies that ensure their regulatory compliance within the private cloud Identifying potential public cloud services that are in compliance with regulatory requirements Together, these three components ensure that the priorities and needs of the business are designed into your cloud environment, along with the technology choices. Plan for demand and manage cloud service providers Define service costing and pricing Ensure regulatory compliance 6

9 The BMC Solution Cloud computing promises to deliver significant benefits, but the road to designing and building a cloud is not always straightforward. With BMC s prescriptive approach, you will quickly establish a robust and scalable cloud computing environment that delivers tangible business value with reduced risk. Work with experts to plan for your cloud. Engage with BMC s Global Services team to conduct a Baseline Discovery Audit, followed by a Cloud Solutions Planning Workshop, to put your organization on the right path. The one-to-three week planning workshop is designed to help you architect a solution, design cloud services, and layer in business goals for your cloud environment. BMC Global Services consultants architect cloud environments that integrate with key IT processes, ensuring that the best of your existing environments carry over to the new, dynamic, efficient cloud. With BMC, you can develop a plan for your cloud computing that will support the unique needs of your organization. BMC has implemented countless cloud environments at enterprises worldwide and has tremendous experience in the challenges both for planning for and implementing cloud environments. With our expertise and your organizational knowledge, together we can plan for a cloud that will rapidly bring value to your organization and continue to deliver for years to come. Learn more To learn more about Cloud Planning, please visit Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software. Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended December 31, 2010, BMC revenue was approximately $2 billion. *225582* BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U. S. or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved.