WHITEPAPER Why Businesses are Embracing Cloud IaaS
Why Businesses Are Embracing Cloud IaaS The rise in virtualization means that businesses of all sizes must be positioned to take advantage of the flexibility, agility and cost benefits of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). By moving infrastructure to cloud IaaS providers, savvy organizations are jump-starting these efforts while maximizing their investments in infrastructure, security and IT personnel. Here s what you need to know in order to get started. Virtualization and cloud IaaS are the two most compelling trends in information technology. By the end of this decade most people will access software and share information through the cloud, according to a wide majority of technology experts surveyed for the fourth Future of the Internet survey by Pew Research Center. Forrester Research predicts that the global cloud computing market will grow from around $40 billion today to more than $240 billion by 2020. Gartner says the worldwide cloud services market will reach nearly $150 billion by 2014. Why such dramatic growth and why is the interest in these two related technologies so allencompassing? Primarily because they address many of the challenges businesses and IT organizations are facing in trying to be agile and responsive to the needs of customers while also keep a tight rein on spiraling IT costs. By embracing virtualization and IaaS organizations can: Reduce the total cost of ownership in IT Respond to customers and employees with greater speed and agility Increase productivity of users and IT personnel Reduce both energy consumption and the amount of space taken up by IT equipment Deliver a more scalable, easy-to-deploy and adaptable IT infrastructure Enhance security, disaster recovery, compliance and other critical business/it functions Cloud IaaS accelerates agility, innovation and collaboration while strengthening productivity within the IT department, according to a majority of IT professionals surveyed recently by CA Technologies. In fact, the trend towards the cloud is so compelling that respondents believe the primary role of IT is changing to where it is being defined less as an owner and operator of local infrastructure and more as a manager of an IT supply chain. In other words, virtualization and cloud IaaS are causing organizations of all sizes to rethink how to deploy IT resources most efficiently and effectively for the business. The Rise of Cloud IaaS For most organizations, whether small or even large up to about 1,000 employees in size, the quickest, most effective and most successful path to the cloud is to work with a fully trained, managed services provider, such as Dobson Technologies, that specializes in delivering cloud IaaS. If the experts are correct and most applications and information will be accessed
through the cloud anyway, then moving to a cloud IaaS now is one surefire way to futureproof your business by ensuring that your IT resources will be cloud-accessible. In addition, by working with a company that specializes in delivering managed services, you can be assured of keeping up with the latest available technological advances while reaping the benefits of world-class solutions in security, data protection, disaster recovery and compliance adherence. Dobson Technologies vcloud Powered IaaS offering is available through partnership with VMware, the industry s leading virtualization supplier, enabling customers to virtualize their IT infrastructure. Virtualization is an important part of the foundation of cloud-based services. With virtualization, the operating software and applications are separated from the physical device, so that each physical server can support many virtual machines, leading to increased utilization, lower IT costs, greater IT efficiencies and a more flexible, scalable IT infrastructure. The basic concept of virtualization the idea that IT is delivered as a service and is not dependent on the physical device is what cloud computing is all about. Cloud IaaS offers the potential to take the services-based aspect of your IT infrastructure to the next step, where replicable IT services can be generated and used by non-technical personnel to create new business services for their organizations. This can result in much greater business agility in responding to the demands of customers, employees, partners, regulators and others who can impact the operations of the business. We are in a business environment that is often defined by flexibility and responsiveness with the Internet you must be able to deal with customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is important for organizations to look at how technology can give them enhanced competitive advantage, which is why the push towards virtualization and cloud-based services keeps gaining momentum Rising To the Challenges of the Cloud Deploying virtualization and delivering cloud-based services is sometimes no simple task, even for the largest enterprises with the most skilled and highly trained IT organizations. By most accounts, even those companies that have embraced virtualization are only about 30 percent virtualized and, in many cases, they have not extended virtualization technologies to their most mission-critical applications. The challenges to a more highly virtualized environment have been in dealing with security issues, training of IT personnel, spending money to add new hardware, storage and networks, and in getting corporate management comfortable with the concept of virtualization and the cloud. This is changing, however, because of the strength of Dobson Technologies vcloud Powered services, which provide industry-leading security, data protection and disaster recovery while delivering high performance with virtually endless scalability. With cloud services, organizations can basically turn over the management of their IT infrastructure to a managed services provider that offers a fully virtualized infrastructure
with the hosting of applications and business operations from the cloud. The benefits of taking this approach are: Reduce Infrastructure Cost: Building your own highly virtualized environment that offers the flexibility and the agility of cloud services is a costly proposition, even if it saves money in the long run. There is often an upfront investment in new servers, shared storage and upgraded networks. Then, when the technology cycles through again as it does every few years, there is more to be invested in the infrastructure. With a cloud IaaS solution, you don t have to make that upfront investment and you don t have to worry about falling behind on the technology curve as solutions inevitably become more sophisticated. Cloud services enable instant scalability without any upfront capital costs. Re-Allocate IT Resources: By using a cloud service provider, you can let them spend the time and money in building the expertise required for your IT infrastructure. According to the CA survey mentioned earlier, two thirds of IT executives said the ability to manage service providers is the IT skill that is most likely to increase in importance over the next two years. More than 70 percent said their IT organizations are focusing more time on managing outsourced IT or cloud service providers now versus five years ago, including more time spent on vendor management. Because this is a trend that will become even more prevalent as IT complexity continues to increase, this is one area of IT where you don t want to be a laggard, particularly in the shift towards delivering cloud-based services. Maximizing Security: Security is one of the concerns many business managers have expressed about the cloud but, in reality, with the right solution from a cloud service provider that specializes in IaaS, you can actually have a more secure IT environment through the cloud. For example, with cloud solutions offered by Dobson Technologies, you can eliminate many of the problems with data loss that stem from local problems. Outsourcing insulates organizations from these problems and also enables the business to take advantage of world-class data protection solutions. In addition, because data protection is one of Dobson Technologies core skills, you can be assured that you will be up to date on security technology in the future. Maximizing Backup: Another area of expertise for Dobson Technologies is in data backup, which is a real benefit to cloud IaaS customers who can also take advantage of the latest advances in de-duplication, encryption, disaster recovery and data protection through available cloud backup offerings. Having cloud-based backup will not only enhance disaster recovery through increased recovery speed and improved uptime, it will also strengthen the ability of organizations to respond to stricter regulatory compliance requirements, particularly in industries such as healthcare, legal and financial services. Maximizing Scalability, Simplifying Deployment: VMware s vcloud Director is designed to enable easy deployment, simplified migration and the delivery and consumption of multi-tenant private and public clouds. With vcloud Director,
Conclusion organizations can take advantage of preconfigured applications and IT infrastructure services that enable deployment of virtually any functionality an organization would need. In addition, as new personnel or applications are added, provisioning new virtual machines through the cloud is simple. Organizations also can enjoy maximum flexibility in creating multiple operating system and application environments, each of which can have separate and fully customized application and policy controls. There has been so much hype about the cloud that it s sometimes easy to miss the essential point: In a day and age of businesses operating continually, throughout the globe, the most successful businesses will be the ones that can be the most agile, flexible and responsive to the needs of their customers. Cloud-based solutions offer that kind of agility, and Dobson Technologies suite of cloud services not only offer those benefits, but provide them in a secure, robust and scalable environment that delivers industry leading performance, availability, business continuity, disaster recovery and compliance adherence. When you think about the cloud and the essentials of cloud services, these are the features and advantages that will not only enable your organization to build the most successful solution for today, but to also be positioned for the future.