Preface - The Enterprise Cloud: Best Practices for Transforming Legacy IT (2015)

The Enterprise Cloud: Best Practices for Transforming Legacy IT (2015)

Preface

Despite the significant momentum and industry buzz about cloud computing, only a fraction of organizations have an enterprise cloud. Most organizations are still planning their cloud transition strategy while incrementally improving traditional IT services and modernizing data centers. Consolidating enterprise datacenters and implementing server virtualization and automation are critical components of any modernization initiative; however, virtualization and automation are only part of the transition to a cloud environment. Although shifting workloads and commodity information technology (IT) services to a third-party hosting provider is not a new trend, cloud computing is a new style of delivering IT that provides on-demand elastic computing capacity through self-service ordering and automated provisioning systems. We have seen our first generation of public cloud providers, enterprise customers building private clouds, and more recently, a shift toward the hybrid cloud. With only a fraction of worldwide organizations already migrating to the cloud, the migration of internal enterprise IT to the cloud will be the most significant transformation within the IT industry.

The shift of traditional on-premises enterprise IT systems (e.g., server farms, storage, networks, and applications) to hosted cloud-based datacenters and providers will dominate the industry over the next 10 years. Cloud-based virtual machines (VMs), storage, and mobile applications are now common and widely available to customers; however, the available public cloud services are still in the childhood years of sophistication and feature depth. The Enterprise Cloud: Best Practices for Transforming Legacy IT will provide insider knowledge and lessons learned regarding planning, architecture, deployment, security, management, and hybrid and cloud brokering — technologies and processes that are now the dominant concerns and focus for enterprise IT organizations. As a cloud subject matter expert with significant hands-on experience, I am constantly asked for more information on what I’ve learned, the necessary business process changes, and the best practices to transition from enterprise IT to a cloud-computing environment. Based on real customers and providers, in commercial and public sector industries, this book also chronicles some of the many successes as well as the less-than-successful cloud deployments, and provides valuable lessons from which we can all learn.

What Is Included in This Book

This book will help you understand the best practices based on actual field experience transitioning on-premises enterprise IT services to a cloud-based environment. Whether you are still planning or ready to implement your long-term cloud strategy, this book will help you evaluate existing cloud technologies and service providers. I cover the cloud from two perspectives: as a consumer of cloud services and as an owner/operator of your own enterprise private or hybrid cloud. Knowledge acquired in the real world is analyzed from the perspectives of operations, security, billing and finance, application transformation, and deployment. Each of these learned lessons are then converted into best practice checklists to save you and your organizations countless dollars and time.

Here is a glance at what is in each chapter:

Chapter 1: Planning and Architecture

In this first chapter, I discuss the basic characteristics, definitions, deployment models, and foundational knowledge necessary to plan your transition from enterprise IT to the cloud. It is essential to understand how IT is transforming from traditional datacenters and IT departments to cloud-centric computing. I take you back in time and discuss the roots of the IT industry to demonstrate how cloud computing is really just a new style of IT service delivery that takes advantage of many computing techniques that were created more than 30 years ago. I analyze key technologies that are used in cloud computing environments, such as virtualization, application transformation, and automation. Concepts and definitions of the cloud, widely accepted since 2010, will be updated and refreshed based on real-world cloud deployments, customer experiences, and challenges encountered.

Chapter 2: Operational Transformation

In this chapter, I explore lessons learned in the area of cloud operations and management. I discuss challenges that were not foreseen when many service providers and customers began their cloud transition over the past years. Topics include virtualization, automation, continuous monitoring, capacity management, operational personnel, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process changes, and best practice checklists.

Chapter 3: Deploying Your Cloud

Moving to a cloud computing environment requires significant planning; careful selection of cloud models and decisions on governance; build versus buying a cloud service; and systems architecture. I analyze experiences gained in the areas of building your own private or hybrid cloud, as well as handling scope creep, customer expectations, release management, automated patching, and modernized backup and disaster-recovery techniques. Detailed guidance and examples are provided for selecting and deploying cloud-enabled datacenters and servers, and network, storage, and software management tools. These experiences are converted into best practices.

Chapter 4: Application Transformation

The first generation of cloud services focused heavily on basic infrastructure VMs and storage services. The assessment, porting, and migration of legacy applications is really where the most time and effort will be in the coming years. Although you can port some applications easily to the cloud, others will require significant assessment, refactoring, replacement, or reprogramming to truly take advantage of the cloud; but that effort will result in better resiliency, performance, elasticity, and long-term supportability. This chapter also describes cloud native applications and introduces you to a style of continuous application development and delivery.

Chapter 5: Billing and Procurement

Although planning and deployment of the cloud are foremost concerns of many IT executives, first-generation cloud adopters discovered significant challenges in the way organizations handled procurement and chargeback of cloud services that often surprised senior business managers. Whether consuming a public cloud offering or managing your own private cloud, you will need to adapt traditional procurement, ordering, and billing processes to this new style of IT. This chapter analyzes what these early-adopter customers and cloud providers learned, providing an extensive set of best practices so that you can better prepare your organization for the transition to the cloud.

Chapter 6: Cloud Security

I will compare traditional datacenter and IT security with the unique threats to and vulnerabilities of a cloud environment. Recommendations for mitigating cloud-centric security threats are discussed as well as security trends and future threat predictions. I also provide an introduction to the numerous security accreditation and industry standards published by government and international organizations. In Chapter 6, I convert the knowledge gleaned from these experiences into best practices for security governance, precertification in an automation cloud environment, and continuous monitoring.

Chapter 7: Cloud Management

One of the most important components of cloud computing is a robust cloud management system. Many organizations have learned the hard way that building or buying a cloud management platform must be done early and with careful evaluation and planning. Delaying the automation and orchestration of cloud ordering, billing, provisioning, and operational tools has proven to be extremely difficult to add later — the cloud management platform is actually one of the first things that you need to determine because it provides the foundation and sometimes the architecture of the cloud environment. In this chapter, I provide more experience-based education, example software architectures, evaluation criteria, and best practices in selecting or building your own cloud management platform.

Chapter 8: Hybrid and Cloud Brokering

Throughout this book, I cover numerous cloud deployment models such as public and private, but hybrid clouds and cloud brokering is increasing in popularity and will be a dominant aspect in the next generation of cloud computing. In this chapter, I detail and analyze hybrid clouds and cloud management platforms as well as the newer term, cloud broker, and its role. The technologies and concepts behind hybrid cloud and cloud brokering did not exist at the inception of cloud computing. I discuss the definition, purpose, and roles of a cloud broker and the differences between hybrid cloud and brokering.

Chapter 9: Industry Trends and Future Cloud Computing

In this concluding chapter, I discuss trends in the cloud computing industry and the key technologies for managing and deploying future clouds. Both cloud providers and organizations operating their own clouds need to understand the critical technologies and challenges that will be the core of modern cloud services: hybrid cloud management, service brokering, self-service control panels, and application transformation.

How to Read This Book

Each chapter in this book provides an analysis of knowledge acquired by industry-leading cloud providers and early-adopter enterprise customers. The chapters are organized by topics such as planning and architecture, deployment, finance and procurement, security, cloud management, and hybrid/brokering. At the end of each chapter, a summary of recommended best practices is provided to help you incorporate all of this amassed experience into your cloud transition. Finally, the last chapter provides an analysis of industry trends and how the industry is expected to evolve over the next few years.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is designed for business and IT executives. I focus on real-world best practices and guidance for planning, deploying, migrating, and managing IT in a cloud computing environment. I provide the knowledge and guidance necessary for executives to make decisions on how best to adopt cloud services and transform from traditionally managed datacenter services to a service-oriented cloud environment. Primary focus is placed on the following:

§ Real-world lessons learned and how to apply them to your organization’s adoption and transformation from internal enterprise IT to cloud.

§ Converting lessons learned into best practices in key areas such as operations, security, billing, deployment, application transformation, cloud management systems, and brokering.

§ Providing an understanding of hybrid cloud computing and the future of datacenter modernization.

§ Defining cloud brokering and Anything as a Service (XaaS) aggregation and arbitration across multiple cloud providers.

§ Projecting the future of cloud computing: we’ll review the challenges of the early years of cloud computing and pinpoint where organizations need to focus for the next-generation clouds.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

TIP

This element signifies an industry trend for enterprise clouds and is labeled as such.

NOTE

This element signifies a key take-away from the text and is labeled as such.