PLATFORM & INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE

Transcription

1 PLATFORM & INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE Creating New Efficiencies Industry Perspective

2

3 Executive Summary It s undeniable that cloud computing has changed the way that government does business. With the cloud, agencies are now able to gain new efficiencies, quickly deploy IT services, and transform their operations. Everything from HR, financial reporting, and government transparency have benefited from cloud deployments. Along with considerations on the proper deployment model like hybrid, public, private, or community, organizations also face a decision around service models. The three common cloud computing models each have unique features and help solve specific business needs in particular ways. In the public sector, agencies are often deploying numerous clouds, and using various service models. In this report, we will explore Oracle s Platformas-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings. In an additional report, GovLoop explored the power of Oracle Software-as-a-Service offerings. It s critical to note that no matter which service model you deploy, it is likely you will also want to leverage both public and private clouds. Oracle supports public, private, hybrid or community cloud options, providing the same tools and technology across all cloud offerings. With the cloud, you can deliver access to applications anywhere, anytime, helping deliver new efficiency and productivity benefits at your organization. When thinking about the right service model agencies should start by asking the question: Where do I get the best return overall for my agency? said Mark Johnson, Information Technology Strategy Expert at Oracle. IaaS can help agencies find efficiencies with hardware and facilities costs, but PaaS can provide much greater cost savings. Once a problem is defined that an agency can address with a cloud solution, agencies can move towards crafting the right kind of cloud offering, requiring an understanding of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which we explore in this report. NIST definitions of common cloud service models: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through a thin client interface such as a web browser (e.g., web-based ). The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of provider-defined user-specific application configuration settings. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud physical infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly limited control of select networking components. Platform & Infrastructure as a Service: Creating New Efficiencies 1

4 Deciphering Infrastructure-as-a-Service With Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), organizations can take advantage of a cloud provider s economies of scale to find cost savings in their compute and storage layers, as well as gain the ability to quickly scale up and down capabilities to achieve the mission at hand. With IaaS, agencies can access increased computing resources instantly, without making expensive hardware investments. For our clients, IaaS is typically looked at to address two business problems, said Johnson. The first one is the capital expenditure issue and budgeting. If you don t have the capital expenditure to lay out right away, but you ve got a requirement for computing infrastructure, this allows you to use operational funds to get that program going and start serving constituents needs without having to wait for the budget cycle. The second problem that IaaS solves for an agency is managing infrastructure. Patching, upgrading, and otherwise maintaining IT infrastructure is time consuming work that can be offloaded to the cloud provider. IT departments would rather turn management over to someone else and focus more of their limited IT resources on things that are going to help the agency, said Johnson. With IaaS, organizations can expect to gain many benefits. IaaS is really more on the IT side of the house, replacing some of the core, compute, store and backup recovery functions, said Erickson. A few IaaS advantages are described below: Scalable solutions to meet compute and storage capability on demand. Controlling cost through utilization-based pricing. Limited up-front hardware expenditure or investment. Management 40% IaaS is helping agencies quickly get access to new computing capabilities and storage needs. But IaaS is not the only cloud service model and should be part of a larger cloud strategy. That s why agencies should look to PaaS, which offers significantly greater promise in a complete cloud solution. IT Program Costs Hardware 10% Software 12% Facilities 7% Implementation 31% 2 Industry Perspective

5 Understanding Platform-as-a-Service With PaaS, agencies place much more responsibility to manage the cloud stack on the provider, which gives more value and flexibility to the agency. PaaS is an essential development for government, as it s an efficient way to leverage middleware and databases to host applications. PaaS helps organizations gain: Increased capacity for provisioning against physical servers. Optimized application to server ratios and the ability to turn off spare capacity. Improved monitoring of services and proactive alerting. A lot of people ask, does PaaS mean I don t need database administrators (DBAs) anymore? noted Johnson. You re still going to need DBAs, but those DBAs are now going to be concentrating on adding value to the applications of the agency. They re not going to be just doing the simple stuff like patching the database and backing it up. That s what the cloud service pro vider s going to bring and that s much more robust than just an infrastructure provider. As more organizations start to use PaaS, agency IT teams will be freed up to work on more mission critical problems, as a vendor will manage complex IT elements, set up middleware, and provide smaller agencies with Enterprise-class IT systems, even with limited IT staff. IT management is now much easier with PaaS, said Johnson. Since agencies offload more management to the cloud service provider in a PaaS environment, all the agency has to provide is the functionality for a particular application. That s very high value, and gets people excited when they start talking about cloud and benefits it can bring to them. There are many benefits to leveraging PaaS, but one of the major ones is a larger reduction in cost than with just IaaS. As the graphic on the previous page shows, Hardware and Facilities costs make up less than 20% of most IT Program Costs, and these are the only costs that IaaS can affect. PaaS solutions can provide those savings, but more significantly, address the Implementation and Management costs that make up over 70% of IT program expenses. The savings in PaaS often come from consoli dating resources, and reducing or in many cases, eliminating redundant work done by employees. The patching and upgrading of IT infrastructure adds little-to-no value to the mission of government agencies, so finding greater efficiencies in maintaining IT can be a win-win for government. This stands in sharp contrast to IaaS, where the only cost reductions possible are with the hardware and facilities costs, traditionally much smaller in magnitude than the solution maintenance costs. PaaS also offers customers the ability to rapidly host, test and produce applications. When a developer wants to test an application, PaaS can instantly deliver a complete application environment ready for whatever is needed. And if there is high demand for an application, PaaS can scale more efficiently to meet user demands. Infrastructure leaves much of the complex IT work to the agency, whereas PaaS offers new capabilities that governments want to use, but don t want to try to setup or maintain. Rapidly leveraging mobile environments, creating new workflows to streamline organization-wide work, or discovering valuable new insights with big data are all possible with PaaS solutions. PaaS gives an organization an opportunity to deploy complex IT solutions either rapidly, or in a much more controlled manner, said Erickson. Whether it s document management, business intelligence, mobile applications, big data, or other things of that nature, many topics are hard for an IT organization to get their heads around with their business owners. Going to a platform solution that is prebuilt, delivered and then integrated into their existing infrastructure, allows organizations access to a faster and higher value solution Finally, security certifications are more robust with PaaS than with IaaS. Infrastructure providers with certifications like FedRAMP only provide security at the very bottom of the solution stack, leaving 90 percent or more of the security work to the user. PaaS can extend much further up, and simplify the overall process of creating and maintaining a secure cloud environment. Platform & Infrastructure as a Service: Creating New Efficiencies 3

6 Why Oracle? Oracle is one of the market leaders in delivering safe, secure and agile cloud solutions. With comprehensive public and private cloud offerings, Oracle is helping public sector organizations re-imagine business processes through cloud computing. Currently, many agencies are exploring different ways to connect their various cloud offerings, and are looking at assuring cloud interoperability. Having a cloud provider with a comprehensive set of SaaS and PaaS offerings can remove many headaches for IT managers worried about interoperability. Additionally, being able to use familiar tools for managing IT systems on premise and in public clouds eases the burden on IT in the transition to cloud and lowers long-term costs. Oracle provides these tools and services for a complete cloud solution for its public sector clients. We have the most complete cloud offering in the market. For any business solution, platform solution, infrastructure solution, Oracle has offerings available across the board. And our cloud is completely integrated, said Erikson. We consider ourselves a second generation cloud provider, and we have a lot more advanced features in our products, Erikson added. We can comingle data if we have advanced virtual tendencies and we have physical data isolation, which is unique to Oracle. With Oracle, government agencies control the entire stack, from database to applications in public or private clouds. Oracle has been serving the public sector for nearly 40 years, and continues to expand their cloud offerings for the public sector. Globally, public sector organizations have placed their trust with Oracle and their offerings because of the robust security, high performance and lower maintenance costs they can get across all solutions. 4 Industry Perspective

7 About Oracle Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world s most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company. With more than 370,000 customers including 100 of the Fortune 100 in more than 145 countries around the globe, Oracle is the only vendor able to offer a complete technology stack in which every layer is engineered to work together as a single system. Oracle s industry-leading public sector solutions give organizations unmatched benefits including unbreakable security, high availability, scalability, energy efficiency, powerful performance, and low total cost of ownership. About GovLoop GovLoop s mission is to connect government to improve government. We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 200,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government. For more information about this report, please reach out to Catherine Andrews, GovLoop s Director of Content, at catherine@govloop.com GovLoop th St NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC Phone: (202) Fax: (202) Platform & Infrastructure as a Service: Creating New Efficiencies 5

8 GovLoop th St NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC Phone: (202) Fax: (202)