Is the cloud making you lose sleep?

While there’s much focus on the impact of cloud technologies on enterprise IT, are we thinking about disaster recovery, backups and other essential services delivered by IT?

There’s no doubt that IT managers are under siege as they come to grips with a business landscape that is shifting rapidly. Once we’d recovered from the frenzy of Y2K the next decade was largely about evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change.

Both IDC and Gartner have recently published survey results that place the cloud near the top of the list of things keeping CIOs awake at night.

In Gartner’s survey, cloud computing is ranked three on the list but mobile computing, collaboration and legacy modernisation fill slots two, four and five on the list. In our view, all of these items impact on each other significantly and can’t be considered in isolation of each other. Incidentally, analytics and business intelligence fill the top of the list.

Gartner’s research looked specifically at the question of technology disruption and found that 70% of CIOs cited mobile technologies, followed by big data/analytics at 55%, social media at 54% and public cloud at 51%. The disruptiveness of each of these technologies is real, but CIOs see their greatest disruptive power coming in combination, rather than in isolation.

IDC’s study was complementary. It found that, through a survey of almost 170 IT leaders, 70% of CIO/IT executives expected an increase in confidence in using public cloud services in the next three years for more mission-critical applications and infrastructure.

Suddenly, IT executives are seeing value in using systems outside their direct control as a key part of service delivery. IDC is seeing organisations recognising hybrid cloud solutions as a way to transform business operations, as a way to transition to ‘everything as a service’, where all IT services can be consumed through a cloud-based delivery model at a significant fraction of the cost as well as a reduced implementation time.

Of course, these changes mean more than a change to service delivery. For example, the way businesses attack business continuity, backups and routine troubleshooting have to change.  As businesses have moved towards virtualisation, often as a precursor to considering cloud-based solutions, they have started to look at supporting their infrastructure differently.

Charles Clark, the technical director for Asia-Pacific at Veeam Software, advocates a thorough system audit. “As an organisation configures their virtual infrastructure, they should also map it out so that they gain an understanding of the environment at a host, storage and network layer. This portrays a lay of the land before and after any outage,” he says.

That same process is needed whether those virtualised or ‘as a service’ systems are housed inside or outside the business.

One thing that is changing is that system support services that were traditionally held within the business are also heading out. For example, system administrators might see their roles evolve.

Adam Beavis from Thomas Duryea Consulting says, “The traditional way of doing things doesn’t translate to the cloud. Once someone moves their infrastructure and applications across, then DR [disaster recovery] and backup become part of the service catalogue from that service provider.”

We quizzed Beavis on what he thought has changed substantially in IT departments that they need to adapt to.

“Management is one thing. People are moving to the cloud for a reason. A lot of that reason is to remove the headaches of infrastructure management - everything below the OS [operating system],” he said.

One of the challenges is educating technical staff. When systems are operated internally, staff need to carry out a lot of detailed configuration. With an outsourced solution, all of that is taken care of. As a result, those people need to update their skills to be brokers of service delivery where they focus on managing the service provider and services rather than physical systems.

“They’re not really worried about being down and dirty with the tools, fixing SANs and things like that. They’re more about working with the service provider to ensure that the applications are sitting on the right service level, that they have the right protection and that they have the right performance,” according to Beavis.

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