Building your own cloud infrastructure

MANILA, Philippines - Today’s IT organizations increasingly take on a service provider role within their enterprises, with many transforming from cost centers to business units.

This shift brings with it heightened accountability to internal clients and a consequent move away from the mere management of hardware toward the delivery of accurately sized workloads to meet business units’ needs.

The resource end

This "provide only what’s needed" model calls for flexibility at the resource end. Cloud computing provides such flexibility and an increasing number of IT organizations are taking a serious look at adopting cloud innovation.

Designed to deliver software, infrastructure and platform resources as on-demand services from a shared pool with a high degree of efficiency, cloud computing is inherently flexible.

This enables IT organizations — and even users themselves — to provide/requisition the exact computing power and capacity needed to dynamically support products and services.

The critical first step of any journey into the cloud

Understanding IT infrastructure options is the critical first step of any journey into the cloud. Cloud research is necessarily flexible so one size at any rate does not fit all.

After deciding which cloud deployment model to use, choosing the combination of the services to be delivered, considering the impact of cloud computing on all areas of the business, and establishing clear goals, the enterprise can at the time come up with a desktop-to-data center cloud infrastructure that meets its particular needs.

As for setting up cloud infrastructure, CIOs can take one or both of two implementation approaches: revolutionary or evolutionary. The choice depends on the number of traditional enterprise applications that need to be accommodated in the new cloud regime, how supportive existing infrastructural assets are of cloud computing, and on the benefits the enterprise wants to achieve.

Its evolutionary cousin, which involves incremental migration toward cloud computing, is more suited for those with existing traditional enterprise applications and that want to build on infrastructure they already have.

A trusted cloud solutions provider to some of the largest cloud builders just as Microsoft and Ask.com, Dell as well offers servers that are purpose-built for cloud computing.

The potential rewards are great

The potential rewards are great. In other respects enabling IT organizations to fulfill their new charter as a provider of high-quality services, cloud computing can help enterprises reduce IT infrastructure maintenance costs during enhancing organizational agility.