Cloud functionality comes about by deploying a set of smart and compatible virtualization, storage, security, and infrastructure automation technologies. Working together, they implement six foundational delivery principles:
1. Secure separation ensures the physical or logical separation of basic services such as servers and storage in use by customers, or “tenants.”
2. Service assurance automates provisioning of services and enables reliable performance to tunable service-level agreements.
3. Service provider in control supports the management of the cloud’s operations, including integration of provisioning, support, billing, and reporting systems.
4. Tenant in control supports the customer’s management of on-demand services, access to support, and transparency into utilization and billing.
5. Security and compliance employs identity and access management, encryption and data loss prevention, enterprise key management, and other security methods to protect the tenants’ cloud environments.
6. Data protection employs backup, recovery, replication, and data redundancy methods to ensure the tenants’ business continuity.
The first four principles enable multi-tenancy, the flexible yet secure sharing of technology resources in a cloud. The last two focus directly on the protection of the data and applications hosted there for customers.
Cloud configuration is an overlapping three-phase process. First, gain the efficiency and often dramatic cost savings of virtualizing technology resources, from servers and storage to the applications, user interfaces, and other business services being hosted. Second, maintain control through automation of access and security and the overall operation and management of the virtualized environment. Third, provide customers with choice by provisioning a variety of business services, many of them offered in partnership with third parties.
The effort of cloud configuration depends, of course, on where the company is today. All of the following are steps toward successfully implementing a cloud:
• Consolidating servers, storage, networks, and other technology resources
• Virtualizing technology resources, including information and applications
• Automating technology resource and security management
• Organizing and provisioning IT offerings as business services
• Structuring and managing IT as a shared services organization
• Building standard interfaces with compatible service providers
• Making effective use of selected public cloud services
Cloud computing is a natural extension of all these improvement initiatives, as well as the architecture for integrating them. Cloud is the means of provisioning a comprehensive range of technology-based services with much the same efficiency and discipline that is demonstrated in provisioning a variety of network services.
