As more and more organizations consider moving services such as storage, email, collaboration and applications to the cloud, they have to select a suitable deployment model. The three most common cloud deployment models are private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud. With each of these deployment models, organizations need to select the right mix of service model, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Most of our client engagements have been in the private cloud space, where most clients are focused on deploying services that deliver business agility and competitiveness. We have harvested a set of best practices for identifying service offerings that deliver the most business value with minimal effort. For clients with sunk costs in existing data center facilities, there are considerations to be made on how the private cloud impacts the existing data center, as well as assessing the merits of an internal shared-service center.
Organizations seeking to benefit from public clouds need to analyze their application landscape and select the applications best suited to a public cloud environment. Shadow IT is the term used to describe line of business organizations that bypass their IT department and get their applications from the cloud via software-as-service (SaaS) for a monthly pay-per-user-per-month subscription pricing model. Effective cloud governance can be used to mitigate this risk.
Anyone following the cloud space closely would not have missed the excitement around hybrid cloud. Is hybrid cloud really the future? Selecting the right cloud deployment or service mix requires an understanding of the level of flexibility needed to customize, manage and monitor applications. Hybrid cloud deployments make the case of cloud brokerage services more compelling, where capabilities are put in place to enable to deployment of services to the right cloud platform based on a set predefined conditions, governance or compliance constraints.
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Dr Navti Founded and recently launched cloudclinique.com, a cloud best practice platform for consultants. CloudClinique enables busy consultants to acquire cloud certification best practices from a database of over 6700 concepts.
Dr Navti is the Africa Cloud Ambassador for the Cloud Credential Council, and a founding member and Director of the Africa 2.0 Foundation UK. He During his 13 years at IBM, he led the European private cloud technical sales business and the company’s Africa expansion strategy and marketing. He coordinated IBM’s $1bn Africa strategy for Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Angola.
