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I was having a chat with a rather skeptical colleague about cloud computing, it’s always interesting to see what people are thinking and talking about in the cloud space, his views were basically:

“Cloud, that’s just a rebrand of the cost center, instead of being Windows server or Architecture, I’ll be the Windows cloud or the Architecture cloud, complete nonsense and a great way of making money…”

Viewpoints that I can see are set to raise a few eyebrows amongst many of the vendors we’ve spoken to at bladewatch, at that point he asked me what I thought and this point I apologize for what could be seen as a rather long answer. But before we begin, let me say that I support cloud, but cloud for the business, not the IT and let me begin.

In the large enterprise let us take martinsbank inc, based in the US with branches throughout the US, with offices in London, Paris and Tokyo, there will be a range of teams with a range of standards, procedures, purchase agreements and rules. New York say might be the head office, so New York will dictate to London, to Paris and Tokyo, the further geographically you are from head office, in effect the more freedom you have. “You’re using driver pack version 8.25 right?” asks New York when speaking to Tokyo, “we are”, but no one’s going to fly over and check, very few are going to discuss technicalities and there’s always the that’s on the top of our list of priorities, we’re getting around to it.

With this in mind this is how I see cloud working from an IT perspective, we change IT towards a component and serviced based model in which each region might have an area of excellence, an environment where we can reduce duplication where necessary, centralize the core and have regional teams which are component parts of their central teams. So if we take a step back from complicated speak towards real life. At the moment, Martinsbank has:

• Four Windows/Unix, Networks/Storage, IT purchasing, IT Service Delivery, IT Helpdesk and application support teams
• All will have different ways of doing things, different procedures, different processes and standards – just try it ask for two servers to be built, one in New York and one in Tokyo, they’ll be different but the same, oh New York upgrade the firmware and install Tivoli, but Tokyo use Arcserve and don’t “do that firmware stuff”
• Each region might have it’s own variant of application and sets of infrastructure, so we have 12 SMS servers, three per region, and more for each of the branches in the US
• A user moving from one region to the other becomes a world ending experience, they’re different domains, they might use different email/file and print services which aren’t compatible
• The billing is done on a regional basis in a monopolistic style, yes you could take your DL380 and move it to Paris to save on hosting, but we both no you wont so £500 for hosting your server please
• The whole IT platform is billed from the ground up, and is in nature responsive not customer driven and centralized – by that I mean, there’s often a lack of consistency and dialogue between IT regions and teams let alone commercially, which can affect responsiveness and your cost base – Windows 2008 wow, but we need it adapted for four regions, so we’ll have a Windows design team.
• What we need is an IT cloud with regional representatives. A scenario in which we establish the core standards and deploy/use IT like we would our documentation or branding standards. If we’re going to take IT to the next level, both in terms of operational responsiveness, of dynamic computing and in cost, we need to re-brand using cloud and re-structure to do so.

If we’ve got all our best storage guys in London, why can’t London be the storage cloud with a few good people in each region to do the operational support, the on site stuff, the onsite representation and branding but have a strategic vehicle for delivery from London with an infrastructure to match? London does storage and printing, Paris does Application development and support, New York does the Windows and Unix builds for each region and Tokyo can do the middleware and database clouds. So each region has a core area of excellence, a core cloud which it then ‘sells’ on or provides to each business unit or region, you buy your Wintel capacity from New York (or wherever is cheapest) but the design, the branding and the standards follow throughout the enterprise?

So if I log a call that TYKS0923 is down, a call goes to regional support and if they can’t fix it, global support, or anyone who has access can? Where we move from compartmental markets where I sell you hardware or services, to a service delivery based IT business for your business. You want grid, not a problem, our grid guys are in Tokyo, but Mike here runs the grid in the UK and can onboard and represent you, and support the grid cloud.

We need to step away from thinking about cloud in the traditional sense and work out how it would/could work in our business. So rather than have four teams for Wintel, can we not have one which does follow the sun support, delivery and design? Can we not have one team which spans the globe, spans the business and works as a team, so that if New York is down, fine London are still in the office, I’ll call them.

If we take this to the fullest extent, could we not have a follow the sun support team, application and virtual infrastructure/data center where we abstract the applications from the infrastructure and move the workload, the business around the business need, power cut in New York, not an issue, run of our cloud in Tokyo whilst we’re offline.

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