Your Guide to Achieving Value and Performance

How to Take Advantage of the Cloud Your Guide to Achieving Value and Performance an e-book by

Contents Introduction: The advantage you need.... 3 The cloud checklist Key considerations when adding cloud to your IT infrastructure portfolio Integrate the cloud into your IT strategy....4 Use the cloud to overcome your business challenges....7 Achieve solutions through the cloud...13 Ensure compliance, performance, and optimization.... 19 Integrate the cloud into your IT infrastructure portfolio...23 About Latisys Latisys is a leading national provider of colocation, managed services, managed hosting, disaster recovery and private cloud solutions to medium-sized businesses, enterprise customers and government agencies. With a heritage of serving business customers since 1994, and multiple high-density data centers across the United States, Latisys offers a scalable outsourced IT infrastructure platform that provides customers with what they need, when they need it. As a client-centric company with state-of-the-art data centers across the United States Latisys is quickly becoming the IaaS platform of choice for companies that demand more from their IT infrastructure partner. All while optimizing clients return on investment. All while delivering more_. For more information, please visit www.latisys.com. About HP HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the convergence of the cloud and connectivity, creating seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.

Welcome to the latest, most flexible component of your IT portfolio Beyond all the hype about the cloud, some companies are achieving great savings. Some aren t. What s the difference? What s the key to using cloud computing to your advantage rather than following the crowds to an overpriced, disappointing non-event? How have some companies big, mediumsized, or small done it? In our experience, the smartest companies address the cloud on their own terms, incorporating it into an IT strategy that addresses the unique challenges facing their industry and position. They identify the primary concerns such as cost control, agility, or scalability that will drive the future improvement they need. Then they study their existing workloads and capacity to identify gaps the cloud can productively fill. They listen to the concerns of both their IT experts (we ll call these folks, lovingly, geeks ) and budget hawks (with equal love, number crunchers ) to achieve cost savings without reducing performance or compliance. Then, with specific objectives in mind, they re able to establish a long-term partnership with a smart, responsive cloud service provider. For these companies, the cloud is not a fad (indeed, they, like Wired magazine, find the cloud a tiresome phrase). Instead it s a logical step in the evolution of their methods of addressing cost control, agility, and scalability. In this e-book we will share those lessons with you. Our goal is to help you make smarter choices about IT resource provisioning whatever those choices may be. We ve tried to enhance this e-book with interactive features because we see it as the beginning of a conversation. We d love to hear your reactions feel free to reach out to us by Web, email, chat, Facebook, twitter, or telephone (1-866-956-9594). 3 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: Integrate the cloud into your IT strategy Today s World Today s IT leaders are being challenged to do more than ever before. They must provide users with complex systems that achieve high performance in secure and scalable environments. They must manage applications and workloads across multiple platforms while transforming legacy applications and processes. Oh, and they have to do it for less money than last year, and in less time. The demand for IT resources is ever-increasing. is far less patient with lengthy development People love rich media, such as videos, highresolution photos and interactive content. responsiveness not only from hardware, but processes. The company demands speed and And without taking up any physical space, the also from everything the IT department does. collections of these materials are rarely purged But how to meet that demand? Few CEOs to make room for more. Rather, more storage are willing to increase the percentage of is added and network capacity is increased budget allotted to IT. They re wary of capitalintensive development efforts, mindful of a to be able to access and use these files. Meanwhile, business users are increasingly legacy of misspent investments in IT. (Anyone dependent on IT services to accomplish their recall this Gartner estimate that half of all work. When email goes down, can anybody get data warehousing projects fail? How about anything done? Suddenly this function has become Gartner s equally gloomy predictions mission-critical as have other formerly lowerprofile functions, such as business intelligence. can t be expanded, maybe money could be for social CRM initiatives?) So if budgets Mission-critical applications require outstanding diverted from other existing IT expenses? performance (so that users don t get frustrated This has been a surprisingly productive waiting for a query response) and disaster approach for the past few years, as many IT recovery (so they won t notice blips). And when leaders have achieved consolidation savings an application is mission-critical, a new version through virtualization but most have already needs to be available right away management gone as far as they can with such efforts. 4 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Integrate the cloud into your IT strategy A Strategy for Tomorrow So where to get the new resources that business users need? Some users themselves think they have an answer: the cloud. (See Sidebar on page 6: What exactly is the cloud anyways?) Thus the pressure from management to force IT to move into the cloud. (Management also has its own motivations, influenced by the number crunchers.) In some companies, users are even bypassing IT to sign up for public cloud services such as those from Amazon and Microsoft. Many IT leaders resist, citing concerns with security, vendor lock-in, performance, availability, and integration. And although these concerns are legitimate, users rarely find them persuasive. They accuse IT of falling behind. Falling behind is not only an ugly, unproductive debate it s also the wrong one to get into. It implies that IT is merely a provider of services. But to be effective, to deliver ongoing value to the company, IT must be more: it must be a strategic player. IT leaders must study how external forces will continue to transform the business, and seek opportunities to move in the right direction (as hockey great Wayne Gretzky said, to skate to where the puck is going to be ). These opportunities will vary by industry you may want to move toward mobility, personal technology, or empowering workers with data and they will vary with the firm s position you may need to improve utilization, reduce capital expenditures, or improve agility. Your IT strategy is your conscious effort to make the best choices to maximize those opportunities while minimizing the associated threats. The business users are correct that cloudbased solutions exist for many of their problems. The value of IT comes in knowing which of the business problems and opportunities are best served by the cloud, and making the appropriately strategic deployments. It also comes in knowing how to avoid threats. What makes IT strategy particularly challenging today is that threats come from two directions. On one side, as we ve mentioned, is the loss of relevance if your business users decide to get their IT from elsewhere. Yet on the other side is the loss of control if the type of cloud you move to results in a loss of performance, security, or the flexibility to change vendors. Negotiating these opportunities and threats requires not just any strategy, but a good one. Let s move to the cloud is not a very good strategy. Of course, neither is We can t put anything in the cloud. The savviest strategy will obviously be unique to your company, but will boil down to the classic challenge of seeking to provide your business users with the services they need while optimizing your budget. The cloud is merely one of many vehicles that will accomplish that strategy. Thus the first step in taking advantage of the cloud is knowing your strategy, so you know what you need. What should I evaluate as I look to add cloud to my IT infrastructure portfolio? Click here to find out. 5 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

According to the National Institute of without investing in new infrastructure, Standards and Technology (NIST), training new personnel or licensing new cloud computing is a model for enabling software. The word cloud represents a ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand metaphor for the way IT resources need network access to a shared pool of not be tied to a specific physical location, configurable computing resources but can be shared over a network. What exactly is the cloud anyways? (And why do they call it a cloud?) (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. In short, cloud service is elastic (users can consume as much or as little of a service as they want at any time), soldon-demand, and fully managed by the provider. More importantly, cloud computing makes it possible to increase capacity and add capabilities on-demand You often hear about cloud categorizations such as three service models (software, platform and infrastructure), and four deployment models (private, community, public and hybrid). But if these distinctions aren t yet clear to you, don t worry: they have arisen because of some of the concerns and benefits of the cloud model that you re about to learn so they should be clearer after you finish this e-book. 6 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Chapter 2: Use the cloud to overcome your business challenges Cost Control Your IT strategy will identify one or more business challenges that will define the coming years. In this chapter we ll take a look at three common challenges and ways that the cloud may be able to help address them. Let s say that, like many IT departments today, your compute and storage requirements are exploding. How are you going to avoid huge future capital outlays to purchase new processors or storage devices? This issue, like so many we ll address in this e-book, often elicits different reactions from the geeks and the number-crunchers but in this case they both point in the same direction. The number-crunchers object to the way the new equipment would be paid for. They re often wanting to shift capital expenses (CapEx) to operating expenses (OpEx), because that shift results in significant improvements in financial flexibility. The geeks object to the way the new equipment would be used. They re always wanting to increase asset utilization rates, because they hate to see a cool toy gathering dust. (Thanks to virtualization, many of your IT assets are more effectively utilized than previously, but there s still room for improvement.) A nightclub that s located next to a church has an ideal opportunity to share a parking lot. By filling it up on both Saturday night and Sunday morning, both entities improve asset utilization. Likewise, taking advantage of somebody else s under-utilization is one of the great promises of the cloud. After all, a parking lot can serve only adjacent buildings, but IT resources can be anywhere as long as you can guarantee quality of service (which we ll discuss in Chapter 4). 7 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Use the cloud to overcome your business challenges Cost Control People are just as important to utilize effectively as hardware maybe even more so. For example, many companies that run their email systems on Microsoft Exchange know that Exchange administrators are hard to find. Likewise, you may have an application so old and creaky that only one of your senior IT people knows how to care for it. This employee has more valuable (and rewarding) things to do, but you can t simply get rid of the app and it s not worth building a new one. If you could outsource such functions, you could reduce your headaches and improve employee morale. Granted, if we re talking about Exchange, you may hesitate to outsource an application as critical as email but remember: email is not your core business. (Electricity is critical to your business as well, but you don t operate your own power plant.) Again, as long as you can guarantee quality of service, you may want to ask if you can save money by outsourcing this function to someone who specializes in it, and can take advantage of scale. Scale, utilization, and CapEx-to-OpEx can drive significant savings for certain functions. (See Sidebar on page 9: How much will I save?) Plenty of caveats certainly apply, and the effect on this year s budget will probably not be as large as the number-crunchers were hoping for. (As you give them the bad news, this article, The Truth about Cloud Economics by two Gartner fellows at the Harvard Business Review blog, may help them understand that your situation is hardly unique.) But when you think about containing potential future cost increases, the cloud can often be a valuable tool. ReTweet this: RT @Latisys: Using cloud resources can control future costs through scale, utilization, and CapEx-to- OpEx 8 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

What Not To Do: If you have unelastic (steady) workloads that run 24x7x365, putting them in the cloud may generate little cost savings compared to on-premise or off-premise colocation or managed hosting. How much will I save? How much you save will depend on your situation. The good news: We know of HP customers that have realized a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings of up to 56 percent. The bad news: We ve heard of other companies that actually lost money. The problem with these other companies was that they didn t have a firm grasp of their workloads. It s like when you got your first cell phone: if you didn t know how many minutes you used per month, and you chose a plan with too few minutes, the overages could kill you. The cloud is a particularly good moneysaving tool for the following situations: For situations of bursting demand, as discussed below. To save on unique resources whether hardware such as tape devices or personnel such as people with specialties in particular software applications, as discussed above. When you need a fast path to revenues provisioning infrastructure could take months under traditional models and just minutes with the cloud, as discussed below. When you want to quickly add value to business units. Developing a new application for customer relationship management or expense management could also take months or even years under traditional models, but can be transforming your salespeople s processes in weeks with the cloud. We could go on, but you know these situations better than we do. You understand your strategy and what you need to do to accomplish it. You know your workloads and your current infrastructure. We can tell you (we d be delighted to tell you!) how and how much you can put in the cloud, but in the end it s your strategy that will determine your savings. 9 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved. What do we mean when we say you know your workloads? Click here to read more

Use the cloud to overcome your business challenges Speed and agility The pace of business today is faster than ever. Your IT department has to keep up. And sometimes what s holding you back are the long, bureaucratic processes associated with your IT resources. One such process is the provisioning of software tools to your information workers. Once upon a time, you could consider investing years in developing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system that would be perfectly customized to your business. To the extent that was ever a good idea, it s not today, because the business is so likely to change before the solution is ready. Instead, many cloud service providers are now offering softwareas-a-service (SaaS) applications to perform such functions. These applications have many drawbacks, including limitations in security and flexibility, but a huge advantage is the fact that they can be available in hours or even minutes. This advantage (and the way some SaaS companies are marketing it) accounts for much of the current hype about the cloud. Less hyped, less transformative, but often boasting a bigger cost/benefit ratio is reforming the process of provisioning hardware. For example, consider software development testing. When you re planning to upgrade an application or website, and you want the upgrade to go smoothly, without disrupting operations, it d be nice to create a simulated production environment for thorough testing. Under the old approach, you might have needed several days to get a server up and running and loaded with the appropriate data. Provisioning infrastructure-as-a-service in the cloud, your new server can be ready in hours. Then, when you roll the upgrade into production, you can de-provision the test environment and stop paying for it. 10 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Use the cloud to overcome your business challenges Speed and agility The same principle holds for the purchase of new hardware. Some companies have developed procurement processes that are extremely complicated. Aimed at reducing CapEx, these processes make the purchase of new hardware a long, tedious slog. With cloud infrastructure, you can provision CapEx-free resources instantaneously. Depending on your situation, you may also be able to improve time-torevenue and agility by using the cloud to accomplish the following: Expand into new customer segments Experiment with expansions of latencysensitive applications (those that require high performance) such as social media, gaming, email, or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), again without the commitment to capital investments required for new hardware Quickly take advantage of multiple site deployment Business selects application Purchase assets Set up Facilities Load OSs Patch VMs, OSs, applications Set approvals, Access controls Test and quality traditional IT infrastructure cloud infrastructure IT planning meetings Coordinate install process Load VMs Deploy application Activate service Install servers Set up networks Set up storage Manage over lifecycle ReTweet this: RT @Latisys: Cloud resources can make for a more agile business with the speed to respond to market changes. Just because you can deploy in hours doesn t always mean you should: sometimes the need for an enterprise-grade firewall outweighs the need for speed. Click here to read more on prevention planning in right-sizing your cloud. 11 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Use the cloud to overcome your business challenges Elasticity ReTweet this: RT @Latisys: Cloud is ideal for variable, elastic workloads but not for predictable, steady state. Maybe the demand for your IT resources is perfectly steady all day, all week, all year and maybe every day you commute exactly 24.3 minutes home to where you and your 1.86 children eat dinner at 6:06 p.m. If not, if there s any variation in demand, you can a) suffer from underutilization, b) crash regularly during spikes, or c) take advantage of cloud resources that can expand and contract with your needs. For example, consider registration for the 2012 Marine Corps marathon, which filled 30,000 slots in less than three hours: that was some heavy website traffic, which probably won t be repeated until next year. Does the event need to build its IT infrastructure to handle that traffic? Or could it burst to consume cloud resources on registration day? There are plenty of examples of bursting demand: when your monthly financial reports are due, after your product is featured on TV, when your oil well is hot and needs to transmit massive amounts of seismic data, or when your daily web traffic peaks. This scalability to react to customer needs is generally of huge benefit to your business users. They can plan more confidently without capacity restraints. They can easily expand to new geographies or markets, execute promotional blitzes, or otherwise quickly respond to market changes. Because of these benefits, many business units are tempted to do the cloud on their own, creating a sort of shadow IT organization by provisioning public cloud resources with the swipe of a credit card. Centralizing such actions may improve economies of scale. But more importantly, centralizing in IT can determine where security may be needed (another topic we ll cover in Chapter 4) and achieve similar results with a hybrid cloud solution. 12 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Chapter 3: Achieve solutions through the cloud Disaster Recovery In the previous chapter we looked at big trends that may be shaping your IT strategy, and how you can harness the cloud to stay ahead of those challenges. In this chapter we ll get a little more hands-on. As you go on your cloud journey, you may want to start by harvesting some lowhanging fruit in the form of certain specific solutions, such as Planning for business continuity is like planning for door locks in a 24- hour convenience store. If everything goes according to plan, the store will never be closed and the lock never used. You have to install a lock because you know everything won t always go according to plan, but you sure hate to spend any more money than is absolutely necessary. Thus disaster recovery is often a great place to start when seeking to take advantage of the cloud. Rather than buying additional onpremises hardware to back up a mission-critical solution, you can back it up in the cloud. You gain flexibility and options and most importantly, only pay for what you consume. Your cloud DR is there waiting for when disaster strikes, but at minimal cost. More than avoiding headaches, you avoid significant expense. 13 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Achieve solutions through the cloud Disaster Recovery The cloud backup is, by definition, in a different location, so you re protected against physical disasters in your datacenter. And if users have concerns about the performance of cloud resources, this is a good trial run: they probably won t notice any failovers, so like the Molière character who was surprised to learn he d been speaking prose all his life, they will be surprised to learn that they have already been relying on the cloud. And on the off-chance that anything does go wrong, you haven t risked your everyday operations you can always blame the disaster! There are engineering concerns. That s why your company needs an IT department rather than simply giving every employee a Dropbox account. Your disaster recovery must be appropriately architected we like to use the phrase converged infrastructure, which involves integrated failover and fault tolerance. You also want to structure the contract with your cloud service provider so that you can spin up resources as you need them (during the disaster) but not pay for them until then. A good cloud service provider will be happy to work with you on this. With these concerns met, disaster recovery can go a long way toward meeting the cost containment objectives (we discussed in Chapter 2). ReTweet this: RT @Latisys: For many IT strategies, disaster recovery is a great first step into the cloud. 14 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Achieve solutions through the cloud Storage (In Chapter 1) we talked about the importance of setting an IT strategy that addresses the growing role of large files. Maybe this means that your company will be harnessing Big Data to better segment your customer base or otherwise gain valuable business intelligence. Maybe it means you ll be shooting and editing more promotional videos. But however it s playing out, your storage needs will almost certainly increase. To meet that storage demand, you can build a new datacenter or two, since you probably need a true secondary site. Now you re talking capital investments in power, cooling and hardware. You re also talking software licenses, staff, and perhaps specialized equipment. The cloud is an enticing alternative. Typically, cloud storage is really cheap storage in that businesses can trade performance for price if all they need is a place to store files. The challenge is that cheap cloud storage is one-dimensional used to store flat files or images but not meant for applications with real-time compute. Enterprise cloud storage is available on-demand as you turn up your virtual private cloud, and it is highly scalable and elastic, so you consume as much as you need and pay-as-you-go. But make no mistake cloud storage / cheap storage is very different from enterprise cloud storage that comes with performance tiers and SLAs. ReTweet this: RT @Latisys: Cloud storage can be cheap or high-performance; the best choice depends on my needs. 15 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Achieve solutions through the cloud Bursting demand As we mentioned in the previous chapter, the cloud is a great solution when you have variable peaks in computing requirements. You may have a seasonal business, daily spikes in Web traffic, or other cyclical capacity demands that extend beyond your current infrastructure. For example, if your software development efforts use scrum processes, your Quality Assurance function involves short intervals of intensive testing. You can turn on a cloud test environment, run the scrum through testing, and then turn off the test environment as everyone goes back to development. Note that there are multiple types of bursts. The one people most commonly think of because it usually offers the largest cost savings is a simple burst to consume public cloud resources. But many companies with the need for tighter security have built an on-premises private cloud to accommodate bursting demand. And some companies for whom the private cloud is too limited have structured a hybrid cloud that consumes public-cloud resources using private-cloud security. ReTweet this: RT @Latisys: The cloud can handle bursty, variable demand in compute requirements. 16 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Achieve solutions through the cloud The Whole Enchilada It s surprising how many people familiar with cloud computing say, If I was starting a company now, I wouldn t buy any IT resources. I d put it all in the cloud. Surprising because these people are, after all, in the IT industry it almost sounds like they re dreaming of outsourcing themselves. Can you imagine a teacher saying, If I was starting a school today, I wouldn t hire any teachers? Again, however, it helps to remember that deploying cloud resources for IT does not represent displacing the IT function itself. (As we discussed in Chapter 1,) IT is about the strategy of empowering workers with information the cloud is merely the location of (some of) the physical resources to accomplish that strategy. So saying I d put it all in the cloud represents dreaming of ultimate freedom in strategic choices. If I was starting a company today, I wouldn t have any legacy hardware or applications to worry about, and by embracing the cloud for all of my needs, I could preserve that freedom and flexibility forever. Far from eliminating IT, this dream is more like making IT immortal. In fact there are some companies for whom such a strategy makes a great deal of sense. Many of them produce nontraditional applications customized for elasticity. For example, consider the developer of an iphone application or game. You build it and put it out on the Apple Store without any idea how many people might be interested. The demand could be huge and instantaneous, or it could build slowly and then burst, or it might not do much at all. Cloud resources help you meet that demand with speed, scalability, and minimal up-front costs. On the other hand, most enterprises today don t need the whole enchilada. They do have legacy hardware and applications (and competencies and talent and advantages!). They do have some workloads that need to be on-premises. Rather than the whole enchilada, they just need if you ll permit us to extend this metaphor almost beyond its breaking point a side of nachos. (See Sidebar on page 18: Is the cloud the right choice for each application?) 17 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

In a word, no. You probably have meaningful competencies and investments in missioncritical, latency-dependent, complex functions that should absolutely stay on-premise or within your current outsourced colocation or managed hosting deployments. There may come a point, in several years, when cloud offerings evolve to become appropriate for even these applications. But you should be Of course, even in these cases it s not quite that simple. As we ve mentioned, cloud services come in multiple service models and deployment models. You may then need to ask if this particular application needs a basic public cloud or a private cloud designed especially for you. (We ve assembled a list of such questions as a Checklist at the end of this e-book.) Is the cloud the right choice for my applications? 18 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved. skeptical of anyone who tells you we re there already. We are at the point, however, where you can ask of each application: Is the cloud the right choice for this? You may discover the answer is yes for situations such as: Truly variable workloads, as discussed above Applications that weigh down your cost structure, for example in software licensing Applications that are giving you trouble, because they re temperamental, old, creaky, crash-prone, memory hogs, user-unfriendly, or otherwise apt to keep you up at night What s more, the cloud metaphor is often used to refer to IT outsourcing in general, whether or not the outsource destination is literally over the Internet. The way we see it, cloud computing is a subset of IT outsourcing, and so the real question to ask is not, Can I send this function to the cloud? but Can I outsource this function, and if so, where? Phrasing the question this way helps identify the strategic goals you want to accomplish financial flexibility, redundancy, security, elasticity and then lets the solution (cloud, managed hosting, managed services, etc.) arise out of the resulting profile of your needs.

Chapter 4: Ensure compliance, performance, and optimization Security and Compliance So far we ve been looking at some of the benefits of including the cloud in your IT infrastructure portfolio. But there are challenges to making the cloud work challenges that should not be taken lightly. We believe that one reason there s been some backlash against the cloud is that cloud-hype often doesn t acknowledge why issues like compliance and performance matter. The geeks are indeed raising important issues here, and the number-crunchers need to understand why they re important and what can be done about them. Maintaining the security of your company s intellectual property and other sensitive materials has always been the number 1 priority of the IT department. And it always will be, just like maintaining the security of your child s home will always top every parent s list. When people blithely talk of dumping entire IT infrastructures into the public cloud, abandoning years of security work, IT people rightly feel violated. Such a move would not only be unwise, it could also be illegal. Depending on your industry, your company may face compliance requirements designed to demonstrate the security of your data. For example, if you use credit cards, you re subject to Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards; in the medical field, there are standards associated with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA); if you work with the federal government, there are new Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements. If you get busted for violating those standards, saying, it was so much cheaper not to is not likely to get you off. 19 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.

Ensure compliance, performance, and optimization Security and Compliance We didn t want to clutter up this e-book with all the details on the SOC 2 reporting framework, but we do think it s important and you can find the details here. ReTweet this: RT @Latisys: The best way to achieve compliance in the cloud is to work with a cloud service provider that understands your needs. So any move to the cloud must account for security and compliance. The best way to address this is to work with a cloud service provider that understands these issues. Perhaps it s a provider who has worked in your industry and knows the ins and outs of your particular flavor of alphabet soup. Perhaps it s a provider who deals with many different types of compliance regimes across many customers and industries, thus giving a macro view of compliance issues. Perhaps it s a provider with an architecture that allows for simpler compliance testing. Perhaps it s a provider who can even sit down with your auditors and confirm that you re following best practices. This is where talking about the cloud can get dangerous because there are so many types of clouds. Many public cloud service providers will give you a resource in a single pool with many other customers. Depending on your security and compliance needs, that may not be a problem. However, you may need a private cloud service provider with a three-tier architecture that meets the SOC 2 reporting framework. Obviously no cloud service provider can assume responsibility for your compliance. But you may find that some providers understand what it takes, and can organize themselves to support your efforts to achieve that compliance. If providers lack these skills, that puts more of a burden on your IT department and isn t reducing that burden the whole point of moving to the cloud? 20 2012 Latisys. All rights reserved.