CLOUD COMPUTING

Make the Move to Cloud for the Right Reason

Salvatore Salamone | Date: 01-26-12 | Comments

A smart cloud infrastructure automates many IT tasks, such as virtual machine creation and deployment, which needed to be manually performed in the past. This makes automation the key reason why companies should move to the cloud.

Tough economic conditions are forcing companies to look for ways to rein in spending. At the same time, they must be more responsive to emerging opportunities and deliver more and better services to constituents, business partners and customers.

Faced with the prospect of having to do more with less, IT departments are eyeing the benefits of moving to a virtualization and private clouds. This is because virtualization and cloud technology offer many similar benefits including costs savings, more efficient use of resources and the ability to more easily consolidate and move workloads.

However, the true differentiator with cloud is automation. Automation is so important, it should be the No. 1 reason any company moves to a cloud infrastructure.

The reason: A smart cloud infrastructure would automate many tasks that IT has needed to manually perform before new services could be available in the past. Such tasks would include building new virtual machine images and deploying these images.

Fortunately, there are tools that can help a company automate these processes on a cloud infrastructure. For example, IBM offers an Image Construction and Composition Tool that uses a script or set of scripts to perform the necessary tasks needed to bundle an operating system, application, networking resources and other software elements into a virtual machine image.

There are comparable tools to help with deploying the created images. In fact, there are two types of tools that help with deploying images. The first class of tool simply automates tasks that were done manually before. Tools in this category include the Tivoli Service Automation Manager or IBM Workload Deployer.

The second type of tool speeds up deployment by allowing an IT manager to deploy hundreds of images in minutes. An example of this is IBM SmartCloud Provisioning.

Some clouds allow companies to take automation to a higher level by enabling self-service features. Self-service allows authorized users to provision their own IT services through an online catalog. Users select a service, such as setting up a Web server, and software activates an automated provisioning workflow that deploys the service without IT�s involvement. In this process, the system enforces policies based on the user's profile and the type of service requested. Self-service accelerates the delivery of IT services and cuts the cost of that delivery.

Automating image creation and deployment and the deployment of IT services reduces the need for staff to manage routine tasks manually. This allows IT managers responsible for private clouds to focus on objectives such as delivering new applications and helping to meet business goals.