Is the Cloud for Everything?

Recently, Indu Kodukula, SunGard EVP and CTO, was interviewed by Smart Business Philadelphia.  Here are a few of his remarks.  – CM

The #1 reason companies want to use the cloud for their ap­plications is to align their spending with busi­ness value.  Companies don’t know up-front what business return they would receive from a capital investment in enterprise IT.  Without the cloud, they have to make the invest­ment anyway and hope it is profitable.

Using the cloud makes a fundamental difference, because you only pay for the compute resources you use or the data you store.  You don’t have hardware to buy or install and, in a man­aged environment, you don’t need internal re­sources to manage your IT.  The service provider takes responsibility for maintaining the software, servers and applications.

As a result, companies utilizing the cloud for enterprise IT can make investments that are automatically in line with the business value.  Then, they can invest more capital into infrastructure and re­sources as the business becomes more successful.

Companies typically walk through several points when making the deci­sion to use the cloud.  First, the moment something moves outside your fire­wall, you don’t own it anymore.  So you have to decide what to keep in-house and what to move to the cloud.  Second, you must consider performance and availability of data in the cloud.  In the cloud, multisite availability is used for applications that (1) can tolerate only about four hours of downtime a year, (2) need geographic redundancy, or (3) are respon­sible for keeping the business up and running

How can businesses get started?

The first step toward moving applications to the cloud is to do a virtualization assess­ment.  Then, determine which applications to virtualize.  Next, take the virtualized applications and decide what to keep in house and what to move outside your firewall.

Look for a cloud service provider that will guide you through the process, helping you understand and decide which applications should stay in house—either because they are not ready to be virtualized or they are too tied into business—and which applications can be moved safely.  The goal is to create a roadmap for moving applications to the cloud data center.

Which applications are good fits for the cloud?

If you have an application that supports your business and has such strong growth that it will need 10 times more resources next year than it does today, the elasticity the cloud offers is a great option.  If the applica­tion also uses modern technology, which is easier to virtualize, that combination makes it compelling to move that application to cloud.  Obviously, the business argument for moving older technology, like ERP, to the cloud is much less strong.

Is your company taking steps to determine how it can benefit from the cost savings of an enterprise cloud?

Download SunGard’s white paper, The Real Value of Cloud Computing.