Windows Azure Platform Dec 2009
Introduction
As an introduction to our discussion of cloud services, let’s consider a situation that’s typical in today’s
medium to large enterprises. Assume a business unit has an immediate need to deploy and maintain an
analytics application that it has built internally. The application will provide the business users with
valuable business insight that will make the company much more competitive in the marketplace. The
business unit has the budget but not the time to implement the solution, and this deployment needs to
happen in the next three months.
The IT hosting team members understand the requirement, but to deploy an application with IT
resources requires coordination among hardware, software, operations, and support teams. Perhaps
ordering hardware and preparing the enterprise operating system build itself takes two months. After
that, IT has to go through its standard testing process and operations procedures to make sure all the
support needs are identified. So, the earliest application delivery date would be in six months.
The business owner escalates the urgency of the issue but cannot get past the process boundaries of
the enterprise. Ultimately, the business owner establishes an independent IT department funded by the
business and delivers the application in three months. Even though the application is delivered, it
doesn’t have the enterprise support and operations quality.
Now, the CEO and the CTO evaluate the situation at the enterprise level and come to the conclusion
that there are too many application instances running redundantly across the enterprise and costing the
enterprise millions of dollars in resource and maintenance costs. Therefore, they decide to create a
mandate that all the applications need to be migrated to the IT application-hosting infrastructure.
Eventually, the business unit ends up creating an exception for its situation and continues running its
own IT department, thus costing the overall enterprise on redundant resources.
I see these scenarios on a daily basis, and I don’t see a clear solution to the problem unless the entire
process and structure in which these organizations operate is revamped, or technology like cloud
computing takes off and enterprises embrace it wholeheartedly.
How will cloud computing help in this area? To understand, let’s go back to the original business
requirement: the business owner has an immediate need to deploy and maintain an analytics
application, and the time frame is within three months. The biggest hurdles IT has in deploying this
application are not in the application itself but in the dependencies and the process involved in
provisioning the infrastructure required to deploy and maintain it. If the cloud computing dream is
realized, it will eliminate the need for the application hosting team to be dependent on most of the
hardware team requirements, because abstraction of hardware is one of the main tenets of cloud
computing, and this abstraction is provided by cloud service providers’ data centers. If the servers’, load
balancers’, routers’, and switches’ dependencies are eliminated, the application hosting team could
focus solely on deploying the application in the cloud service of its choice, with business approval. In
this case, the overall IT agility will improve and better align with the business goals of the enterprise.
