Top 10 Cloud Trends for 2010 cont.

6)    It will be important to define SLAs to effectively measure IT performance
The cloud will fundamentally change how IT services are offered,  both internally and externally.  For emerging cloud service providers, offering the right-sized SLA will be critical to winning business and market share with potential customers.  For internal cloud deployments,  IT departments will need to create the right SLA and the appropriate visibility associated with the SLA so that the business units and IT can determine the most efficient use of resources.

7)    More internal enterprise IT departments will be measured against the service levels, costs, and provisioning speeds that are offered in comparison by public cloud providers
Many IT organisations are recreating themselves as internal “services providers” in the effort to standardise offerings and reduce costs, yet still meet the requirements of the business. By implementing “service catalogs,” meaning a finite set of configurations with associated service levels, costs, and delivery times, IT organisations are able to reduce their procurement and management costs. The limited set of resources available in a catalog enables standardisation which in turn creates a more predictable cost model and increases time to market.

8)    Cloud architectures will be driven by standardisation (Ethernet), virtualisation (servers, storage), and efficiency (asset, operations, environmental)
Standardisation is critical to any service offering because it gives both the provider and the consumer a set of repeatable, measurable resources. Without standardisation, every offering would be custom which would not only increase up front deployment costs and on-going management costs, but also make it difficult to measure the effectiveness of each offering as there would be no baseline. Additionally, by standardising on lower cost network technologies such as Ethernet and a virtualised server and storage infrastructure, cloud architectures will drive efficiencies up – allowing service providers to drive their costs down and focus on value added services to differentiate and drive their own revenue.

9)    Companies will trend toward shared, but self-hosted infrastructure behind virtualised servers (whether public or private) and co-existence of silo’d application stacks
The move toward cloud architectures will not happen overnight. Most companies have a number of critical legacy applications in traditional silo’d architectures that they will not change for any number of reasons including the introduction of too much risk, politics, organisational inertia, etc. Shared, virtualised infrastructures will become the defacto choice for new application rollouts, but enterprise organisations will continue to maintain a hybrid environment for years to come – witness the number of IT organisations investing in and maintaining mainframe systems even decades after their projected lifespan.

10)      Platform as a Service (PaaS) will become a major focus in 2010 thanks to the launch of Asure
The potential for Cloud Computing extends beyond hypervisor-centric Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resource-sharing.  Successful Software as a Service (SaaS) Cloud offerings today include powerful underlying PaaS engines such as Force.com, Google Apps, and Intuit QuickBase Online. These PaaS engines offer the necessary customisation of otherwise rigid SaaS workflows and reports. The advent of Microsoft’s Asure, coupled with a huge and loyal developer base will accelerate adoption of next-gen Cloud-centric applications. VMware’s purchase of SpringSource also confirms and reinforces this trend.

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