Delivering IT-as-a-Service - In-house clouds

Enterprise IT is playing catch up. Cloud service providers are rapidly innovating and delivering new products at a speed that even the largest enterprises would currently struggle to match in-house. This has led to a surge in rogue IT, where employees looking to obtain services are buying in what they need instead of asking the IT department to provide it. Enterprise IT has to catch up or become obsolete.

Research from ESG has shown that 93 percent of enterprises are currently using or planning to use cloud services. But while many businesses are turning to the cloud as a cost saving exercise, the research showed that businesses adopting cloud technology soon discovered additional benefits in reduced complexity, improved productivity and more strategic use of resources.

It is these additional benefits that makes the cloud such an appealing proposition. A focused cost-reduction approach might frequently be the first driver for cloud adoption but, as businesses and cloud providers get more sophisticated, the business case for the cloud becomes more apparent. Being able to intelligently provision IT services on an on-demand basis grants businesses a flexible infrastructure that is never too big or too small, but can scale up and down according to requirements. For a large number of small and medium sized businesses, these outsourced cloud services can save on both capital and operational expenditure while providing everything that they need. For large enterprises though, there are benefits to doing it yourself.

Businesses of a certain size have compelling reasons to own and manage their own datacentres, whether that’s due to the complex needs of their IT infrastructures or the confidentiality of data stored. However, legacy approaches to IT aren’t fit for modern or future-looking enterprise data centres - enterprises need highly flexible, scalable and predictable services, whether their IT is provided internally or externally. Enterprises need these Next-Generation Data Centres (NGDC) capabilities within their data center to keep pace.

One of the biggest elements holding back the NGDC is the lack of predictable performance management or Quality of Service (QoS). It’s no good having a software-defined network and virtualized compute processes throughout a datacentre if their performance and provisioning characteristics are stunted by legacy storage systems that require manual intervention every time something needs changing. Long overlooked, storage is fast catching up with networking and virtualised computing technology. When combined with powerful APIs and a simple management interface, you can start to see how enterprises might begin to catch up to the cloud service providers.

In-house enterprise class cloud services might not be for everyone. There’s an argument to be made for smaller businesses to outsource their infrastructure to cloud service providers that can deliver the agility and guaranteed quality of service that they demand. But large enterprises looking to completely own their infrastructure and compete with cloud giants need to consider how to best provision their own cloud services.

Ultimately, the NGDC finally unlocks IT-as-a-Service for enterprises, allowing them to offer flexible and scalable solutions to the IT needs of employees without the need for lengthy procurement processes that drive staff into the arms of external cloud services. If enterprise IT wants to compete with the public cloud, the next step has to be the inclusion of Next Generation Data Centre technologies that drive scale, automation, and resource predictability into their infrastructure.