november 2015 fiercecio the midmarket and smb guide to ... · the midmarket and smb guide to cloud...

The Midmarket And SMB Guide To Cloud Computing

FierceCIOAn eBook from the editors ofNovember 2015

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2 Introduction

4 Understanding Your Cloud Options: SaaS, IaaS And PaaS, Public And Private

7 Sponsored Content: Why CIOs Should Make the Transition to the Cloud

8 The Case For Hybrid Cloud

10 Why Security Is Almost Certainly Better In The Cloud

13 The Case For Hybrid Cloud

Thank you to our sponsor:

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Introduction

Understanding Your Cloud Options: SaaS, IaaS And PaaS, Public And Private

Sponsored Content: Why CIOs Should Make the Transition to the Cloud

Is Cloud Cheaper For SMBs?

Why Security Is Almost Certainly Better In The Cloud

The Case For Hybrid Cloud

The Midmarket And SMB Guide To Cloud Computing // November 2015

An eBook from the editors ofshare: FierceCIO

The arthritic mail server of Acme Enterprises, an imaginary mid-sized company, broke down again this morning, triggering an eruption of wailing and desk pounding among distraught employees.

The owner, disturbed by the spectacle of otherwise composed professionals pulling out their hair, looked away and her eyes rested on the pile of brochures from cloud vendors that has been rising on a corner of her desk for years.

They all promise to simplify computing, improve software reliability, tighten data security and slash IT costs. As she caught a glimpse of the systems administrator barricading himself in his office while a mob of office workers banged on his door, the owner decided it’s time to look into this cloud computing thing. But where does one start? And how do you make the right choices?

A good beginning starts with an assessment of what’s

broken, what you hope to accomplish with a cloud service and how much money you can spend.

“Companies need to do soul searching and understand what their key challenges, needs and requirements are, where they need help, and what kind of money they are able and willing to spend on some of these things,” said Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. “It requires introspection from an organizational perspective.”

Experts recommended seeking feedback and advice from multiple quarters, starting with your employees.

“Learn from your users who are likely to use some cloud services, the so-called ‘shadow IT,’” said Laurent Lachal, a senior analyst of Infrastructure Solutions in Ovum’s Software Group.

It’s also a good idea to consider hiring vendor-independent advisors, and to reach out to and even partner with industry brethren that are on the same quest.

IntroductionBy Juan C. Perez






Introduction








“SMBs should network with peers and work on projects collaboratively across companies. That way they can pool skills and make smarter decisions,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.

You and your staff need to do that kind of homework, because cloud computing adoption is rarely as simple and straightforward as grinning vendors promise.

“SMBs can’t afford or compete with larger firms for in-house expertise. They are mostly at the mercy of the vendors and that seldom ends well,” Enderle said.

Another common mistake by SMBs: Focusing excessively on cost, which often leads them to services that are “oversold and inadequate for their needs,” he said.

Once you start meeting with and evaluating prospective cloud providers, experts recommend looking into elements such as these:

• How good is the provider’s security technology for preventing unauthorized access to your data? How expansive or limited is its use of encryption?

• If you decide to switch to another vendor, will the provider make it easy for you to retrieve your data? In industry lingo: Make sure the provider’s data portability policy and procedures are friendly, so that you don’t find yourself afflicted by the dreaded “vendor lock in” curse.

• Will you have to spend money upgrading your local infrastructure, such as PCs and their operating systems, networking hardware or broadband capacity, to use a provider’s cloud service?

• What service level guarantees is a vendor committing to contractually regarding things like outages and slowdowns, and what relief are you entitled to, such as credits and reimbursements?

• Will you require custom integration work in order to link the cloud service with any systems you keep in your offices, such as the core software you use to run your business?

• Is the provider’s product roadmap in sync with what you’ll need from the company going forward in terms of future features and capabilities?

• And last but not least, you must verify the financial stability and reputation of each provider to decrease the chances of doing business with a company that ends up getting acquired or that flat out goes out of business. n

“Companies need to do soul searching and understand what their key challenges, needs and requirements are, where they need help, and what kind of money they are able and willing to spend on some of these things.”

BOB O’DONNELL, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF ANALYST AT TECHNALYSIS RESEARCH

>> Introduction






Introduction









The Acme Enterprises email server went back up, people returned to their desks and the system admin’s life was spared—for now. There’s no way around it: The hardware is decrepit, the software ancient. It’s an unsafe, creaky system.

The company’s owner began methodically examining the brochures on her desk. She also opened for the first time a folder in her email inbox where she had been parking marketing pitches for years. She started doing online research. Soon, she was overwhelmed by all the acronyms and buzzwords, myriad descriptions and definitions, and available products.

So let’s try to give her a hand.

At a high level, the “cloud” refers to a variety of computing services that a vendor hosts on its data centers and provides to customers over the Internet, billed using a variety of methods, such as monthly or annual subscriptions, or by usage.

A big selling point is that cloud providers own and maintain the hardware and software systems on which their cloud services run, so customers don’t spend money and effort personally doing so in their offices, or “on-premises” in industry parlance.

There are three main types of cloud computing services: Software, infrastructure and platform. They are provided via two main types of data center arrangements: Public and private. It’s important to understand these basic terms so that you can then do more detailed research and analysis, and initiate informed vendor inquiries.

But first, a word of caution: Don’t feel bad if this has proven confusing in the past. And don’t feel bad if it proves confusing in the future. Definitions are fluid and debatable, and as the technology advances and new products come out, boundaries blur.

“No one likes to say they don’t know something, but






Introduction








>> Understanding Your Cloud Options: SaaS, IaaS And PaaS, Public And Private

even for people whose job it is to keep track of this kind of stuff, it’s really hard,” O’Donnell said.

Software as a service This is the type of cloud service with which most people are familiar: Applications of all sorts that vendors host and users can access via web browsers or rich, browser-based interfaces from various devices, including PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Examples of SaaS products include office productivity apps, such as word processors and spreadsheets, and communication tools, like email, and suites for managing business functions, customer relationships, projects, human resources, supply chains and enterprise resources.

The concept is far from new, especially in the consumer space, where online apps and websites for email, social networking, blogging, photo management, music storage and video sharing have been popular among individuals and families for a long time. In those instances, both the software and users’ data are hosted on vendors’ data centers and accessed via web browsers.

SaaS products are usually sold as monthly or annual subscriptions, typically on a per-user basis.

Infrastructure as a service In IaaS, also known informally as “hardware as a service,” a cloud provider leases virtual computing resources—databases, servers, storage, content delivery systems and networking—to the customer on demand and with flexibility of scale.

This means the customer can access the resources immediately, or close to it, any time they’re needed, instead of having to buy, install and maintain these products on-premises, whether they’re being used or not.

IaaS products are typically billed on a usage basis.

Platform as a service PaaS offers additional layers on top of IaaS and can make it easier for developers to build and run apps. With PaaS, users can focus only on the applications they want to build and run because the PaaS provider manages the operating system and other software components like databases, middleware and Web servers.

Public cloud This term refers to cloud computing services that a provider delivers to multiple clients from the same data center servers. In other words, customers are all tapping a common pool of software, infrastructure or platform services.

Private cloud There has been controversy around this term because

Definitions are fluid and debatable, and as the technology advances and new products come out, boundaries blur.






Introduction








various organizations define it in different ways. The underlying concept, however, is that the cloud computing service is physically isolated on dedicated hardware, with each instance reserved for a single customer. This option is popular among organizations in heavily-regulated industries like finance, health care and government, especially for apps and Web services that handle particularly sensitive data.

This dedicated service can be provided out of a cloud provider’s data center. Or the customer can provision its own private server and then locate it on a third-party hosting facility or on its own premises. However, some argue that this scenario in which the customer is buying, configuring and even managing the systems doesn’t qualify as cloud computing. n

>> Understanding Your Cloud Options: SaaS, IaaS And PaaS, Public And Private







Sponsored Content

Why CIOs Should Make the Transition to the CloudBy Don Schuett, VP - Business Development, telx

One of the most interesting facts to come out of RightScale’s 2015 State of the Cloud Survey was that while 90% of respondents are on the cloud, 68% of enterprises are currently running less than one-fifth of their application portfolio on cloud infrastructure.

Clearly, cloud is already a part of most IT strategies. That’s good. But as that stat shows, there’s still a lot of headroom for cloud to continue to expand within modern enterprises.

Whether because they haven’t yet found the right solution, aren’t sure what benefits fully transitioning could bring, or don’t consider colocation and cloud to be complementary, there are still many CIOs who haven’t yet fully committed to cloud. Here are a few reasons why CIOs should make the transition to the cloud:

• Outsourced IT allows you to fully focus on your core competencies. Even if you have the skills in-house needed to adequately manage IT, there’s still the question of whether or not you’re making best and highest use of your employees’ time. Outsourcing part (or all) of your IT infrastructure

allows you to focus only on what you’re best at, without having to worry about keeping up with the rapid change in IT.

• Colocation and cloud services do work together. Despite what you may have been told, colocation and the cloud aren’t mutually exclusive. Enterprises will typically have a mix of colocation and cloud services depending on various factors like security, compliance, predictability, cost, control, and more.

• Making cloud part of IT greatly increases agility. Despite its many benefits, physical infrastructure does limit flexibility, nimbleness, and customization. Making cloud a greater part of your IT can greatly increase all of these things, ultimately making your business more agile in a way that’s just not possible when you’re tied to physical infrastructure.

An organization’s size and the complexity of their IT infrastructure are key factors in determining how, when, and which cloud services should be deployed. Successful deployments to date have already shown that an enterprise should be able to gain efficiencies migrating from on-premise to outsourced data

centers or cloud. However, as businesses evolve, the need for cloud will shift, and so will its best use cases.

One size does not fit all, but hybrid solutions that match the right resources to the right solution can be tailored to fit a variety of business needs. Cloud is considered complementary to colocation and should be worked into your strategy accordingly. Although it’s likely already a part of your IT strategy, today, cloud should be a strong consideration when outsourcing IT resources.

The right solutions for your business exist. In this case, it’s a matter of finding the best ones that suit your needs and making the transition as soon as possible.

Telx, Digital Realty’s (NYSE:DLR) Colocation and Connectivity line of business, fuels infrastructure, interconnection and business progress. With industry-leading 100% uptime and 100% on-time service delivery SLAs, Telx helps companies build more agile businesses faster with reduced infrastructure complexity and broader reach to new markets. Learn more at http://www.telx.com. n

http://www.telx.com

Introduction









There are some obvious and not-so-obvious ways in which adopting cloud computing can have a positive financial impact on an SMB.

Let’s start with the obvious: When an application or service is moved from on-premises to the cloud, the SMB no longer needs to maintain the software or provision hardware for it.

“From that perspective, the cloud can be a major cost savings: The smaller the organization, the greater the cost savings generally,” said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research.

Now for the indirect and less-obvious: When tech employees have less grunt work to do, they should have more time to devote to strategic, high value initiatives with a more direct impact on the business, which should in turn help boost revenue.

“The IT staff has more time to plan projects instead of putting out fires,” said Christopher Chute, an IDC analyst.

And with the cloud provider frequently updating cloud software or services, employees in theory should be more productive.

Moreover, the cloud should make it easier and less expensive for SMBs to switch to a different product than it is to physically conduct migrations on-premises. This could give an SMB more flexibility to move to products it determines are a better fit.

In addition, cloud computing providers are making it possible for SMBs to get access to applications and

When tech employees have less grunt work to do, they should have more time to devote to strategic, high value initiatives with a more direct impact on the business, which should in turn help boost revenue.






Introduction








>> Is Cloud Cheaper For SMBs?

computing services that were out of their reach because they were too expensive to buy via an upfront, one-time license, and too complicated to run and manage in-house.

“For example, an SMB may find that there are CRM solutions available that could be a huge benefit for its mobile sales force,” O’Donnell said.

Just like there are opportunities for financial improvement in cloud computing, however, SMBs should also be on the lookout for potential hidden costs.

For example, does the cloud service require the SMB to upgrade its PC hardware and software, or increase its broadband bandwidth? Are there costs associated with beefing up security now that some software and data reside outside of the firewall?

SMBs must also make sure they understand the pricing models tied to cloud services they’re considering. Moving from one-time, “perpetual” software licenses to a pay-as-you-go model doesn’t always result in savings, according to Lachal.

“Cloud pricing is increasingly complex, so that needs careful planning and comparison,” Lachal said. “A new generation of cloud cost-optimization tools helps, but SMBs need to set in place new control processes to make sure they keep on top of expenses.”

Finally, SMBs would do well to closely examine their vendor of choice. “It certainly pays to go and do as much diligence as you can on the providers,” Osterman said

Some segments of the cloud market are saturated with vendors and thus primed for a shakeout and consolidation. “You want a provider with a good track record that’s going to protect your data, provide good security and so forth,” he said. n

“Cloud pricing is increasingly complex, so that needs careful planning and comparison. A new generation of cloud cost-optimization tools helps, but SMBs need to set in place new control processes to make sure they keep on top of expenses.” LAURENT LACHAL, A SENIOR ANALYST OF INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS IN OVUM’S SOFTWARE

GROUP






Introduction









Although this fear has been somewhat tempered, the idea of putting applications and business data out on a third-party provider’s data center still gives pause to potential adopters of cloud computing.

However, SMBs in particular need to look in the mirror and reason with themselves, being realistic about the security shortcomings of their on-premises systems. Is their data really more secure behind the company firewall than in a data center run by a larger tech vendor with significantly more tech knowledge and resources?

“SMBs are generally going to be more secure with the cloud than they’d be otherwise,” Osterman said. “Cloud providers have the infrastructure and the personnel to protect data in a way that a lot of smaller companies can’t.”

“If you look at the security of data in a typical SMB, it’s not very secure: Someone breaking into the building can get access to it,” he said.

Still, not all cloud providers are created equal, and learning how good or bad those in consideration are on security is extremely important. Here, common sense, some old-fashioned networking and word of mouth can go a long way.

“Gravitate towards brands that have a history of compliance and away from new entries into the market,” Enderle said.

Call up known reference accounts of these providers, and touch base with peers you trust. “This is one of the

“SMBs are generally going to be more secure with the cloud than they’d be otherwise.”

MICHAEL OSTERMAN, PRESIDENT OF OSTERMAN RESEARCH






Introduction








>> Why Security Is Almost Certainly Better In The Cloud

reasons to go to IT events, to build a rolodex of folks you can call,” Enderle said.

And even the ones with the best security aren’t infallible, so it’s important to have a clear idea of, say, how broad or narrow a provider’s use of encryption is, and whether you should complement that by spending extra on an add-on security tool.

“These cloud services do get broken into, so are you encrypting the data in case that happens, so your stuff will still be protected?,” O’Donnell said.

SMBs also need to look into how a provider’s user

authentication mechanism works, how it can be monitored and whether it has features to prevent bad guys from accessing your data from a device an employee lost.

“Many companies have started to put together security solutions that cover one area but not another, and it’s not always clear where they overlap and where there are gaps between these solutions,” O’Donnell said.

SMBs in regulated industries need to understand what government rules they must comply with regarding things like data privacy, protection and retention, and make sure cloud providers can meet those requirements. n






http://www.telx.com

Introduction









Many SMBs that take the cloud computing plunge will find themselves with applications and services both on-premises and on their provider’s public cloud data center: A so-called hybrid scenario. In some cases, there might also be apps and services on a private cloud as well.

This may be because the company leaders don’t feel comfortable moving certain apps and their data to a public cloud, or simply because the on-premises software doesn’t have a SaaS version. Maybe certain

apps must stay on-premises to comply with regulatory requirements.

“Hybrid clouds are relevant to those with specific requirements,” Lachal said. “What they need to do is figure out which data and code need to stay in and which ones can move off-premises. This is not easy to figure out and even harder to implement, but it is something they cannot avoid doing in the brave new world of cloud computing.”

Here’s where the need for custom integrations rears its complex and pricey head, since these systems, no matter where they reside, most likely need to share data and communicate with each other.

The issue of integration is one of the top cloud computing concerns for SMBs, since they typically lack the personnel and expertise to take on these tasks themselves.

The issue of integration is one of the top cloud computing concerns for SMBs, since they typically lack the personnel and expertise to take on these tasks themselves.






Introduction








>> The Case For Hybrid Cloud

“SMBs often don’t have the skillset to do these things, and also it’s not part of their core business generally,” Osterman said. “An SMB could do this, but the question is: Should they? Is it in their best interest? I’d say probably not in most cases, because it won’t contribute to their bottom line even if they do it really well.”

Since SMBs mostly buy cloud computing services from resellers, not directly from the cloud providers, this situation represents an excellent chance for channel partners to step in, prove their worth to their customers and build longer-lasting ties with them, Chute said.

“The tech partner, as the one selling the solution, has the opportunity to go deeper into its customer base and work with them to integrate the solution,” Chute said.

A related issue SMBs should be aware of is the software industry’s age-old debate between those who prefer a single vendor’s suite versus those who recommend cobbling together “best of breed” tools from different providers.

The benefit of the single-vendor approach: The suite components have been designed to work together out of the box, requiring no custom integration. The downside: Some of the individual apps may not be the best available in the market.

By going the “best of breed” route, SMBs can hand-select the best service or app for each cloud function,

but they must be ready to deal with potential interoperability issues among the different products.

Consensus among the experts seems to be that SMBs should lean towards the single-vendor suite, or at the very least favor as much as possible options that have been pre-configured to interoperate with other vendors’ products.

“SMBs can’t afford a ‘best of breed’ strategy. They lack the resources to work out interoperability issues. Focus on total solutions. That way, the vendor does the interop heavy lifting,” Enderle said.

“It could be very complicated to piece together a lot of different solutions,” he said. “But that’s a very subjective call, and people have to decide what’s more important to them based on the nature of their IT staff, their comfort level and experience.” n

“SMBs can’t afford a ‘best of breed’ strategy. They lack the resources to work out interoperability issues. Focus on total solutions. That way, the vendor does the interop heavy lifting.”

ROB ENDERLE, PRINCIPAL ANALYST AT ENDERLE GROUP






november 2015 fiercecio the midmarket and smb guide to ... · the midmarket and smb guide to cloud...

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