Emerging Technologies Professional Cloud Solutions and Service Practices The Shift to a Service-on-Demand Business Operating Model and Working Practices By Mark Skilton, CEO, Digital Ecosystem practices, Synthetic Spheres Ltd.
White Paper ITpreneurs is pleased to share with you a deeper knowledge of various frameworks and domains connecting their usage and application for the betterment of the IT profession. Our appreciation goes out to Mark Skilton who has generously shared his invaluable knowledge and experience with us. We would also like to give special thanks to the Cloud Credential Council (CCC) for their contribution in writing this paper. 1
Table of Contents Introduction... 3 The Impact on Skills and Certification to Meet Cloud Demand... 5 Technical Training and Practitioner Certification... 6 Professional Practice Needs to Manage Complex Agile Methods for Publishing Services... 6 Advanced Rapid Cloud Development, User Experience and Customer Experience... 7 Software-Defined Everything and Virtual Private Cloud... 7 Cloud-in-a-Box to Trusted Cloud Appliances... 7 Joining Up the Demand and Supply Plan and Usage... 7 Establishing Authentic Business and Technical Certification... 8 Professional Cloud Certification Standards and Specifications... 8 Frameworks, Modules and Specifications... 9 Step-by-Step Modules in Our Courses... 9 Conclusion... 10 About the Author... 10 Contact... 10 List of Figures Figure 1: Professional Practice for Cloud Computing... 4 Figure 2: Global Spending Forecast by Enterprise on Cloud Architecture... 5 Figure 3: Demand and Supply in Professional Solutions and Practice... 6 Figure 4: Joining Up the Demand and Supply of Business and IT - the New Operating Paradigm... 8 Figure 5: CCC Professional Cloud Certification Courses... 8 2
List of Acronyms Acronym CCC API AWS BC Bpaas BPM BPO BYOD COBIT CSA CX DMTF DR EDM HA IaaS IDE IETF IoT ISO ICT ITIL MDM MVC NIST OMG PaaS POD RACI ROI SaaS SD SDK SLA SOA SOE TOGAF UX VPC VPN W3C Explanation Cloud Credential Council Application Programming Interface Amazon Web Services Business Continuity Business Process as a Service Business Process Management Business Process Outsourcing Bring Your Own Device Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology Cloud Security Alliance Customer Experience Distributed Management Task Force Disaster Recovery Enterprise Mobile Management High Availability Infrastructure as a Service Integrated Development Environment Internet Engineering Task Force Internet of Things International Organization for Standardization Information and Communications Technology Information Technology Infrastructure Library Mobile Device Management Model View Controller National Institute of Standards and Technology Object Management Group Platform as a Service Point of Delivery Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed Return on Investment Software as a Service Software-Defined Software Development Kit Service Level Agreement Service Oriented Architecture Standard Operating Environment The Open Group Architecture Framework User Experience Virtual Private Cloud Virtual Private Network World Wide Web Consortium 3
Introduction The right skills for professional-level cloud computing involves both a technical and business perspective. Organizations today use a mix of cloud and hosted solutions that the IT professional and the business must navigate. Professional-level cloud certifications bridge the gap between technical cloud certification and practical business outcomes. Cloud computing operates as a service lifecycle from searching and selection of a cloud solution or service to consuming, running and maintaining that service. IT has been radically changed by the phenomena of cloud (Figure 1) impacting both the technology and enterprise domains: user experience, operations, buying and procurement of business. Cloud has also changed the required skills for technology professionals across a spectrum of roles ranging from architect, developer, administrator and service management to different roles engaged in business. To maximize the potential of cloud today, IT professionals need the right level of skills in business and technology. These include foundation knowledge and skills to professional practitioner techniques that can best meet the needs of the enterprise and the individual. Figure 1: Professional Practice for Cloud Computing Professional cloud certification means having the professional qualifications that enable the IT practitioner to consider where cloud fits into an organization. This includes the ability to make objective assessments and to define and implement standards and specifications that support effective governance, security and risk compliance: Ability to support vendor technical certification skills such as VMware, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace OpenStack and many others, by providing a set of specifications and templates developed by expert practitioners. The Cloud Credential Council (CCC) Professional Cloud Certification training establishes a complete business and technology cloud environment from business case, selection through design, publication and operation. Ability to define a set of end-to-end working practices that helps manage junior, senior and leader roles into a consistent set of activities and service disciplines that work with ITIL, COBIT and ISO 2700xx procedures. Ability to establish independent international standards based on a set of terminology and methods for cloud computing solutions that can be immediately used to review, audit and implement readiness and cloud effectiveness assessments in your organization. This will help cloud adoption, improve quality of cloud solutions capacity planning, cloud solution selection, monitoring, reporting and governance management. 4
IT professionals with this certification will gain practical guidance and enhanced qualifications for their career development. They also gain enhanced vendor and enterprise cloud practice development. The Impact on Skills and Certification to Meet Cloud Demand Businesses are already using cloud computing infrastructure and services for many business processes. Their investments have shifted from traditional hosting to a range of public, private, and hybrid cloud. This has enabled cloud services for mobile devices, big data analytics and social community collaboration workspaces. The effect of these technology changes has been many, but overall the shift is towards a new digital operating model that affects customers, employees and providers. Cloud Computing is the new mainstream IT paradigm and expected to double its growth (globally) in the next three years. The impact of cloud has been across many industry marketplaces and is predicted to grow 20% in the next three years. Research company IHS Technology expects spending on cloud infrastructure and services to hit $174.2 billion in 2014, up 20% from $145.2 billion last year. Perhaps more to the point, it expects this growth rate to continue with enterprise spending on cloud to soar to $235.1 billion by 2017. That would be triple the amount spent on cloud in the past 3 years ($78.2 billion in 2011). Figure 2: Global Spending Forecast by Enterprise on Cloud Architecture Gigaom, in their article citing the IHS study, also point towards the major IT providers like IBM, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Microsoft all rushing to adapt to the new model and to cloud platforms such as AWS, Google and the many new social and emerging cloud application services. 1 This change has a profound impact on skills and competencies for IT and business services and solutions moving to a new kind of cloud- enabled service paradigm described by NIST in five operating principles of cloud computing: 1. On Demand Self Service: automated consumer centric search, selection, and provisioning. 2. Broad Network Access: cloud service accessible connectivity to a range of devices and networks. 3. Resource Pooling: shared resources for one or many tenants supporting different demand and supply capacity. 4. Rapid Elasticity: automated provisioning and scaling for one or many tenants. 5. Measured Service: metered resource usage with monitoring, reporting, and charging mechanisms. These five operating principles remain the goal of good service and design, but become challenging when planning the enormous potential range of demand and supply of cloud services and solutions available today. These principles are the same whether it be an end user seeking good reliable outcomes and 1 http://gigaom.com/2014/02/16/cloud-boom-is-on-for-real-researcher-says/ 5
services using cloud, or a business professional seeking new operating performance from cloud platforms or an IT practitioner working to provide effective cloud enabled solutions. Today, many organizations are seeking ways to get skills and assurance to drive better outcomes, manage risk and get the return on investment from professional cloud solutions and practices. They realize the need to take a whole lifecycle approach from the legal and contractual perspective of service levels and security to the technical choices of cloud services and their operating characteristics as a service. Cloud computing is a shift in thinking about IT as a capacity model that meets demand and supply for business needs and the IT services to meet those requirements. Today, cloud computing is a foundation for many next generation technologies such as social media networks, big data, mobility and the Internet of Things. Professionals need to learn new techniques to define and manage cloud computing to enable successful and optimal outcomes, manage risk and drive choice, and to realize innovation and value (Figure 3). Figure 3: Demand and Supply in Professional Solutions and Practice Professionals in business and IT roles impacted by cloud must be aware and have practical and effective standards to envision, define, select, design, deploy, operate and change; for cost, growth and competitive advantages. The aims are common for both business and IT stakeholders seeking alignment in the overall outcomes from cloud technologies; creating value, managing risk, enabling choice and driving innovation for their business and customers. Technical Training and Practitioner Certification There are many international standards bodies, as well as leading technology vendors involved in defining cloud practice reference models and standards. ISO, W3C, IETF, ITC, OASIS, DMTF, NIST, The Open Group (TOGAF), OMG, CSA and many others, together with open source standards and proprietary technology vendor practices 2, are all driving ways to define cloud specific practices. These are often built on established architecture design principles and practices, including Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, BPM, MVC and others that make use of rapid prototyping environments and tools sets. Professional Practice Needs to Manage Complex Agile Methods for Publishing Services Cloud solutions in 2014 involve many software engineering and commercial disciplines from a provider and super user consumer perspective. This means having skills to be able to make, buy or subscribe options using off-the-shelf public cloud templates or exploring the choice of blended open source cloud 2 http://www.ecosystempatterns.org/it-architecture-reference-standards-bodies/ 6
development and private cloud options. This also means being able to understand the options and ramifications of not just the technology, but also the business workplaces and commercial, legal IP and security issues. Advanced Rapid Cloud Development, User Experience and Customer Experience There are complexities in the cloud service lifecycle in the adoption of DevOps or use of PaaS IDE and SDK tools for software and Data application development. Cloud enables advanced solutions in Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Enterprise Mobile Management (EDM) and in the field of big data analytics, data visualization engines and data aggregation and content network distribution to proxies and associated network and delivery performance. The role of User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) is now a critical design aspect of cloud-enabled technologies and end-user strategies. Software-Defined Everything and Virtual Private Cloud Cloud operating models are also increasingly shifting towards a Software-Defined (SD) model for storage, compute, network and applications, and data center environments. This is creating a second renaissance in virtualization creating a new kind of agile container strategy that works at the complete stack level. Public cloud providers like AWS are using Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) connectivity to provide enterprise-level availability of cloud capacity environments. Major enterprise solution vendors like IBM, HP, Oracle and Microsoft have invested in cloud technologies to offer similar solutions and services to host and manage enterprise and consumer environments. Cloud-in-a-Box to Trusted Cloud Appliances Earlier ideas of hardware appliances and the idea of modular data center rack and module enterprise software that is shipped in modular appliances, have become increasingly used in specialist solutions. Search, security, API management access, and content acceleration are among the many device appliances that are part of a modern infrastructure strategy to validate and manage cloud service performance. Joining Up the Demand and Supply Plan and Usage Cloud is used for a myriad of enterprise and consumer services. From the perspective of a professional management of systems, cloud computing operating characteristics create on-demand, pay-as-you-go and elastic operating features that change how enterprise, solutions and operating models work. Organizations can bridge these into a consistent roadmap and investment strategy to get better outcomes and services in today s market. Cloud computing enhances and accelerates the need for professional practices in enterprise architecture, solutions architecture and specific operational specifications. Examples of project failure in the migration and use of cloud have often been caused by poor management and understanding of key templates, as well as specification practices to ensure business and IT are aligned and understand how to define and use cloud services (Figure 4). 7
Figure 4: Joining up the demand and supply of business and IT - the new operating paradigm Establishing Authentic Business and Technical Certification Developed by expert practitioners who have designed, implemented and run a variety of cloud solutions, the CCC Professional Cloud Courses are designed to bridge the gaps between technical course skill levels and role-based theoretical training with authentic business expertise and practice. It is a unique blend of content and teaching, based on real-practice experience and examples that augment and support other courses focused on technical vendor certification or theoretical architecture methods. Its aim is to show, through practice exercises, how to best use technical solutions and standards to meet real-life business requirements and challenges in cloud computing solutions (Figure 5). Figure 5: CCC Professional Cloud Certification Courses 8
Professional Cloud Certification Standards and Specifications The Professional Cloud Certifications accredited by the CCC are designed to address joining up professional practices to drive better outcomes for business in cloud IT projects. Our approach is to design business and IT specifications merging real-life business cloud requirement examples and practices that follow international standards terminology, reference architectures and practices in NIST, ISO, IEFT, DMTF, The Open Group (TOGAF), OASIS, OMG, CSA, ITIL, COBIT and many others. Frameworks, Modules and Specifications The frameworks, modules and specifications create a professional, instructor-led course that takes participants through a comprehensive set of practices. Step-by-Step Modules in the CCC Courses The training and workbook structure is designed to take participants through a practical and rigorous stepby-step guide with best practices. The courses align the established foundational vocabulary in cloud computing with independent, internationally recognized standards, glossaries and cloud reference architectures. The courses work through IaaS, PaaS, SaaS examples and special cases in big data, mobile, and social cloud. These are examined from the perspective of different delivery demand and supply capacity planning models and explored in depth as to what the criteria options are for private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud and community cloud delivery. The courses are continually developed to reflect the state-of-the-art in cloud technology and best practices using internationally published and recognized experts. Course learning objectives include: 9
How to understand and unpack the terminology and complexity of cloud computing. Customers, practitioners and providers often face several competing cloud ecosystem models that can result in confusing design and architecture choices. How to evaluate and select the right types of cloud services, covering SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, and deployment architecture options including hosting, private cloud, public cloud, community cloud and hybrid cloud. How to adapt and define workloads for cloud that now include new architecture solutions covering social networks collaboration, mobility, big data and integration. How new business models support and are enabled with the right cloud architecture practices. How to build effective business cases and roadmaps for successful monetization, ROI and to management of unique and common risks in moving and exploding cloud solutions and services. How to develop the key cloud specification templates with your existing TOGAF, ITIL, COBIT and own architecture, security and commercial standards to improve cloud lifecycle management that grow with your business and evolution of cloud solutions. Conclusion The Professional Cloud Certifications provide invaluable practical knowledge and examples for different IT roles. This is achieved by providing an independent vendor perspective, using real-life examples from the private, public and federal industry sectors. These examples are based on proven international cloud standards that can be applied immediately to an organization s technical cloud solution, whether it is a project or marketplace. About the Author Mark Skilton is the CEO and Founder of Synthetic Spheres. He has held senior global director internal and external consulting positions in Information Technology in numerous international industries and organizations. Mark has over 30 years experience in a wide variety of customer facing and provider solutions strategies and consults on a board level in operating model transformations and value creation. Next to his own business, he is also a Professor in Information Systems Management and innovation at Warwick Business School. Last, but not least, he is the Lead Author of the Professional Cloud Solution Architect Certificate for the Cloud Credential Council. Email: mark.skilton@syntheticspheresltd.com Contact May Sau Product Marketing Manager ITpreneurs Tel: +31 (0)10 71 10 260 Email: may.sau@itpreneurs.com ITpreneurs www.itpreneurs.com Weena 324-326 3012NJ Rotterdam The Netherlands 10