cloud privada: más que solo virtualización

A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By NetApp

Private Cloud – It’s More Than Just Virtualisation Maximise Your Private Cloud Benefits By Including All Core Functionality

July 2012

Forrester Consulting

Private Cloud – It’s More Than Just Virtualisation

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Table Of Contents

Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................................................... 2

Level-Setting On Current Private Cloud Market Trends ..................................................................................................... 2

Best practices: Get the most out of your private cloud ......................................................................................................... 6

Key Takeaways: Maximise Your Private Cloud By Including All Core Functionality ...................................................... 12

Appendix A: Survey Methodology And Demographics ..................................................................................................... 13

Appendix B: Supplemental Material ................................................................................................................................... 14

Appendix C: Endnotes ........................................................................................................................................................ 14

© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgement at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com. [1-JXUJ9D]

About Forrester Consulting Forrester Consulting provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders succeed in their organisations. Ranging in scope from a short strategy session to custom projects, Forrester’s Consulting services connect you directly with research analysts who apply expert insight to your specific business challenges. For more information, visit www.forrester.com/consulting.

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Executive Summary

Cloud will be part of your organisation’s future, regardless of your company size, your current distribution of workloads across various deployment types, or your current position on the viability of cloud services. Although the risk of leading a potentially unsuccessful cloud initiative may seem too great, the risk of pushing back and not advancing your organisation to embrace the cloud is even greater. IT teams that aren’t developing cloud environments and cloud skillsets today may soon find themselves outdated and of less value to the organisation. Now is the time to start making that transformation to ensure longer-term success for your company and your IT organisation. The challenges are determining how to incorporate cloud into strategic plans and managing risk while ramping up experience on the team. Looking at typical enterprise cloud road maps, Forrester finds that an internally based private cloud is a popular approach, but many struggle with setting up this new environment in a way that maximises benefits and positions these organisations for the customer-focused IT future.

In March 2012, NetApp commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a survey of 265 enterprise IT decision-makers who self-identified as having private cloud deployments. In this study, Forrester asked about the functionality of their environment, the barriers and risks associated with the move to private cloud, how they justified the investment, top benefits experienced, and the effect of this on the business/IT relationship. This report reveals the findings of this study, focusing on two core topics to help enterprises navigate the private cloud world to a successful future:

• Level-setting on current private cloud market trends. Forrester sees a gap between perceived private cloud adoption and usage and actual adoption rates. Many organisations struggle to identify where cloud goes above and beyond virtualisation and what to expect in terms of barriers and benefits.

• Best practices: Get the most out of your private cloud. Based on the NetApp commissioned study and Forrester’s own research, we have identified three key best practices used by the most successful enterprise cloud teams: 1) They partner with the business from the start; 2) they think like a service provider; and 3) they don’t reinvent the wheel. Follow these three principles on your own cloud journey.

Level-Setting On Current Private Cloud Market Trends

If you’ve attended any IT conferences in the past two years, you’re most likely to have heard any number of stories from CIOs about their private cloud efforts and the benefits they’ve experienced. You may even feel behind or overwhelmed by the fast pace of adoption if you haven’t finalised your cloud strategy or started deployment. But in our experience, you’re not behind the curve yet. Forrester interviewed some of these self-proclaimed private cloud adopters and found upon examination that few of these environments actually provide a fully functional private cloud. It’s common for enterprises to enhance an existing virtual environment with some level of improved management or automation. And this isn’t limited to just those that have chosen to build their own custom cloud solution. Many are using commercially available solutions that include all of the functionality required to deploy a private cloud, but they have elected not to enable some of the private cloud functionality or are restricting complete automation. Forrester defines cloud computing as:

A standardised IT capability (services, software or infrastructure) delivered in a pay-per-use, self-service way.



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Few enterprises incorporate all these components. Furthermore, claims of improved cost savings more often than not include benefits experienced through server virtualisation or consolidation and are not an isolated view of what to expect when moving from a mature virtual environment to a private cloud. What’s the reality? Private cloud does offer enterprises significant value, but typically not through hard cost savings. The value comes primarily from agility and optimising your most valuable asset – your workforce. To better understand the current private-cloud state, Forrester surveyed 265 enterprise IT decision-makers who self-identified as having private-cloud deployments. This survey highlighted five key trends that Forrester sees in the private cloud space today:

• Missing functionality is common among today’s private cloud adopters. Forrester surveyed self-identified private cloud owners about how this environment goes above and beyond a traditional virtual environment. We found that many of these environments fell short of a full-feature private cloud: Of those surveyed, 56% tracked use of cloud resources by account or user, 45% had a self-service portal, 50% had automated the provisioning process, and only 39% had a chargeback system in place – all key private cloud components (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Many Adopters Are Missing Key Capabilities But Plan For Future Implementation

Base: 265 IT decision-makers reporting current use of private cloud

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of NetApp, March 2012

• Pre-integrated solutions got closer to cloud. Today there are many different ways to create an internal private cloud. Most organisations look to cloud experts to help create their cloud solution in varying degrees. Forrester found that 43% use an external service provider to build their cloud environment, 14% use a full pre-integrated package solution, and another 13% use a software-only solution on top of existing resources. Only 31% built their cloud solution from scratch (see Figure 2). Forrester found that those using a packaged solution (either software only or software/hardware) got the closest to a true cloud environment.1

20%

26%

25%

32%

19%

19%

25%

24%

21%

31%

26%

22%

17%

10%

11%

9%

13%

8%

10%

9%

Chargeback to business user based on actual virtual machine usage in a period

Self-service portal for end users such as developers to deploy, manage and remove virtual machines

Policy-based automation for deployment and management of the private cloud environment

Track use of cloud resources by account or user

Expanding/upgrading Implemented but no plans on expandingPlanning to implement within the next 12 months Planning to implement in more than 12 monthsInterested but no plans

“Please indicate the server virtualisation operations tasks you are implementing in your private cloud environment today.”



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Figure 2 Almost One-Third Of Deployments Are Built By Internal IT



• Almost half are looking to private cloud for cost reduction. . . Forty-nine per cent said reduced cost is a key reason they invested in private cloud (see Figure 3). Many roll up the benefits of consolidation and server virtualisation into private cloud savings rather than seeing these as different deployments. In fact, when asked what was used to justify a private cloud deployment, 61% said they were using expected savings gained through virtualisation and consolidation to justify the investment.

• . . . but the top benefit experienced thus far is faster resource access for development and testing. Despite the focus on cost reduction for both justifying investment and measuring success, the greatest actual benefit experienced thus far is greater agility for test and development staff. Forrester found that 84% of respondents experienced substantial benefits from increased access to resources for test and development (see Figure 4).

• Integration with existing systems is the biggest private cloud challenge. Forrester found that 40% believed that integration with existing systems was one of the top three challenges of moving to private cloud. This is a challenge that is not limited to (or more substantial for) out-of-the-box software solutions. Forrester spoke with a few early adopters that explicitly built their own solution in an attempt to lessen integration challenges that they associated with pre-packaged software solutions. In this survey, we found that those using an out-of-the-box software solution did not report any greater challenge with integration than those that built their own internal solution.2 Other top challenges included application performance (30%), infrastructure availability (24%), and pricing model and governance (24%) (see Figure 5).

13%

14%

20%

23%

31%

Cloud-in-a-box – software only on top of existing hardware

Cloud-in-a-box – infrastructure and software solution purchased as a pre-integrated package

Cloud built by an external service provider within our data centre but self-managed

Cloud built and managed by an external third-party service provider but within our data centre

Cloud built by internal IT

“Which best describes your private cloud environment?”

Built by IT

Service provider/consulting

Pre-packaged



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Figure 3 Many Are Justifying Cloud Investment With Cost Reduction



Figure 4 Agility Is The Top Benefit Experienced By Users



“Why did you invest in or build a private cloud environment?” (Select all that apply)

10%

21%

31%

32%

33%

43%

44%

44%

46%

49%

To keep developers from circumventing internal IT and deploying applications to the public cloud

To provide an alternative to the public cloud

To keep up with competitors within our industry

CIO or other executives tasked IT with creating a cloud strategy or specifically a private cloud

To empower users with self-service access to IT

To accelerate access to resources for test and development

To reduce time spent provisioning and decommissioning resources

To take virtualisation maturity to the next level

To improve management and optimisation of resources

To reduce costs

“What degree of benefit have you actually experienced thus far [from your private cloud deployment]?”(Rate on a scale of 1-5, where 1 = Limited benefit, 3 = Significant benefits that were expected,

and 5 = Substantial benefits above and beyond our expectations)

11%

9%

9%

9%

15%

14%

9%

15%

20%

25%

29%

29%

28%

32%

38%

34%

43%

31%

35%

28%

35%

31%

31%

35%

15%

20%

19%

21%

19%

18%

16%

12%

9%

10%

6%

7%

2%

3%

4%

2%

Reduced time spent provisioning and decommissioning resources

Reduced unauthorised use of public clouds

Get new business capabilities to market faster

Competitive advantage in our industry

Greater IT team efficiency

Reduced costs

Improved management of resources

Accelerate access to resources for test and development

5 4 3 2 1



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Figure 5 Top Challenge Experienced Was Integration With Existing Systems



Best practices: Get the most out of your private cloud

Building a private cloud isn’t easy. Those that approach private cloud like any other enterprise IT deployment typically struggle with maintaining the environment, differentiating it from other internal environments, and justifying the investment. Forrester has identified three key best practices that lead to greater private cloud success:

• Team with the business from the start. Instead of just delivering this new set of capabilities to the business, engage with the business early to ensure that these capabilities meet the business's needs and that users are likely to use them rather than circumventing IT for their own preferences.

• Think like a service provider. When it comes to private cloud, you are the service provider, so act and think like one and not like a traditional enterprise IT shop when it comes to cloud strategy and meeting business needs. Don’t stop at virtualisation – incorporate all of the key components required for a complete private cloud rather than settle for lower returns and an unsuccessful attempt at meeting agile business needs internally. It’s all too common to see virtualised environments painted as cloud that leave out core components because IT does not see these as key features, doesn’t trust the end users with automated permission-based access, or won’t reconsider legacy policies and protocols.

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Instead of building a solution from scratch and re-architecting your entire environment, enlist help from an array of external resources, whether it be full consulting services to help scope, design and build the environment, or a software-only solution on top of existing resources to deliver a pervasive portal with standard features and functionality that your end users will be looking for.

“What have been your top three greatest challenges in your private cloud deployment thus far?”

3%

4%

6%

5%

5%

6%

5%

6%

4%

8%

12%

9%

9%

19%

3%

4%

7%

6%

9%

7%

7%

8%

7%

7%

6%

9%

9%

11%

3%

5%

4%

7%

5%

7%

9%

7%

10%

7%

6%

6%

12%

10%

Connecting to public IaaS environment

Getting users to use this instead of a public cloud environment

Training users on new user interface (UI)

Getting users to turn off applications, freeing up resources for others

Automating the provisioning of storage

Software licensing

Automating the provisioning of network

Getting enough applications into the cloud to justify its existence

Monitoring and metering of services

Automating the provisioning of VMs

Pricing model and governance

Infrastructure availability

Application performance in cloud environments

Integrating with our existing systems

Ranked 1 Ranked 2 Ranked 3



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Best Practice No. 1: Team With The Business From The Start It's most likely that you’ve identified users within your organisation who push the boundaries of every corporate policy by bringing in new mobile devices and using various unauthorised cloud capabilities. These users go by various names: shadow IT users, rogue IT workers or simply empowered users whose managers value results more than process. This is just the beginning. Business users no longer rely on IT-provided tools and equipment, given the abundance of tools/services focused on user experience at little to no cost. More and more users will start joining these ranks – and that’s a good thing. It’s these empowered users who look to get their job done better and faster, delivering higher value to the business. The problem? IT isn’t involved, and these users don’t understand the security risks and implications of these tools and won’t change their practices if it means restricting the agility or functionality of these services. For IT, this means helping users do this safely without holding them back, marking the beginning of the consumerisation of IT and a significant change in the way IT functions and delivers its services. This frames how you must approach private cloud.

It’s all about meeting the needs of these business users. IT commonly makes the mistake of building an environment based on what it thinks the business wants and then expects the business to use it once the environment is complete. Often, these environments end up unused and empty. Rather than trying to predict the interface, experience and functionality that your users want, work with them directly from the beginning and design/select a solution that fits their actual needs/wants. Those much more engaged with the business experienced a greater reduction in unauthorised public cloud use. In our study, 48% of those more engaged with the business experienced significant benefits beyond expectations compared with the 16% that didn’t engage with the business more than usual. In the long term, it improves the relationship between IT and the business, making this future engagement easier.

But this approach isn’t the typical approach today. Many enterprises build an environment for IT (without any business engagement) with two priorities: 1) Stamp out public cloud use, and 2) benefit from the significant savings that are typically associated with cloud services. The first is dependent on meeting customer needs and providing incentives to change behaviour – a new concept for most infrastructure and operations professionals today. Unfortunately, the latter priority is a far stretch. In fact, hard cost savings can be very limited given the necessity to still plan for peak and economies of scale. With private cloud, you have less opportunity to combine a variety of workloads on a shared infrastructure than a service provider that supports multiple industries and time zones, making it difficult to maximise resource utilisation while maintaining the same uptime. Although savings are possible, your initial deployment is unlikely to deliver significant hard savings over and above those of a consolidated, virtualised environment. The real benefits are business enablement through agile resources, improved management of IT resources, and reduction in IT time spent maintaining ongoing operations.

Forty-nine per cent of enterprises we surveyed invested in private cloud with hopes of reducing costs. Unless you’re wrapping virtualisation and consolidation savings or reduced workforce into your private cloud figures, the hard cost savings aren’t going to be significant. Get the most out of private cloud by approaching from the right mindset – design or build this solution for and with the end user to take full advantage of the business enablement benefits, and be realistic about the potential hard cost savings:

• Start private cloud planning with the business. Get the business involved today. Regardless of whether you’ve started your planning, strategy development, vendor selection or actual deployment already, begin this conversation as soon as possible. Ideally you’ll look to inventory existing cloud use, gain insight into key customer experience preferences, and identify priorities while taking note of the additional services or features that need to be applied on the back end and abstracted from the experience of the user.



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• Design a rollout cycle that reflects business needs and wants. As is common with most application rollouts, it can’t be done all at once. If you’re just starting along the path of greater engagement with the business, the business is going to want to see key features and functions from the start or it will lose faith in the system quickly. Design your rollout to prioritise the core functionality the business seeks early on, while enhancing its features long-term.

• Ensure a smoother transition to your solution. Start by asking users what they're currently using and get a feel for what that user experience and functionality looks like. Use this as a benchmark if you’re developing your own solution. If you’re looking at pre-built solutions, investigate whether it's possible to use the same solution along with the typical mix of best-of-breed solutions and existing vendor partnerships. If not, make sure that you include the end users in the selection process so that they get to demo the product and provide feedback that will influence the final selection. This is a key part of the process; if users don’t like their user experience, they won’t use it.

• Align metrics to business enablement. Forrester found that 47% of respondents used operational cost reduction as a metric for private cloud success, whereas only 29% tracked time-to-provision as a metric. Not only does this set false expectations but it also designs the environment around IT concerns rather than serving the business. When Forrester surveyed developers and other business users, we consistently found that speed-to-market and agility were top priorities. Ensure that this is reflected in the metrics for measuring success if minimising circumvention is a priority. For example, some of the more successful private cloud adopters today use business enablement measurements, such as time-to-provision as key metrics for benchmarking their cloud environments.

Best Practice No. 2: Think Like A Service Provider If you’ve built a private cloud, you’re a service provider. And more importantly, the move towards IT consumerisation requires that you start acting like one in order to better serve your customers (the business). But it isn’t an easy change. IT's goals are frequently focused on uptime and maintaining the status quo, and organisational challenges restrict what you can do differently. At the same time, the business pressures IT to start doing things differently by threatening circumvention, making it a priority to get a successful cloud up and running quickly. Where do you start? The same place that successful vendors start – shaping the product to meet the customers’ needs and wants and working backwards from there while understanding the capabilities and user experience offered by the competition. Although it seems logical to compare this new internal environment with other internal deployment types, that’s not actually the competition in the customer’s eyes. The alternative option that promises agile resources at low costs through a self-service portal is public cloud. To get cloud right, you must create an environment as similar to public cloud as possible to incentivise your customers to use this solution instead of alternatives.

Start off on the right foot by getting to a fully functional private cloud that includes all core capabilities, rather than simply applying a cloud label to a virtualised environment. It’s all too common for enterprises to rename existing environments and/or pick and choose certain private cloud capabilities while self-identifying as having private cloud. The pressure to get to cloud and provide a public cloud alternative makes this approach very tempting. Many justify this move by claiming that the business doesn't require these capabilities or cite internal legacy limitations and policies that prevent them from treating cloud differently. Either way, it doesn’t solve the problem that leaving out core components does affect the customer and that the alternative option, public cloud, will be more appealing. Forrester split survey respondents into true private cloud deployments and those missing core capabilities to better understand the differences in success reported by each group.3 Forrester found that those with true private cloud implementations experienced seven key benefits (see Figure 6).



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Figure 6 Benefits Of Building A Full-Featured Private Cloud Solution



Much more business engagement. Those with full cloud deployments were twice as likely to experience much more engagement between the business and IT after cloud implementation – with 28% of respondents with true private cloud environments reporting much more engagement with the business, versus the 14% of those with missing capabilities.

Success at getting new business capabilities to market faster. Eighty-one per cent of full cloud deployments reported that they were able to get new business capabilities to market faster, compared with the 68% of those that were missing core components.

Greater IT team efficiency. Eighty-seven per cent of full cloud deployments reported greater IT team efficiency post-cloud deployment, whereas only 74% report the same if missing core components.

Competitive advantage in its industry. Seventy-three per cent of full private cloud deployments reported that cloud gave them a competitive advantage in their industry, compared with the 64% that claimed this of non-full deployments.

Reduced costs. Eighty-three per cent of full cloud deployments reduced costs deployment, whereas 74% of those missing components reported the same.

Reduced unauthorised use of public cloud. Dissuading shadow IT users is a common driver for implementing private cloud deployments. Those with full deployments reported a 71% success rate at reducing this, compared with the 63% that reported this same benefit despite missing key cloud components.

Reduced time spent provisioning and decommissioning resources. Seventy-nine per cent of full cloud deployments reported reduced time spent provisioning and decommissioning resources, compared with the 71% with missing components that reported this.



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Get the most out of your private cloud deployment by building a true private cloud environment that is as much like public cloud as possible, and then measure its success compared with public cloud rather than other internal environments. Key features include:

• Real self-service access. Providing self-service access of resources is one of the basic requirements of cloud, and yet 49% of the respondents we surveyed don’t create or enable these features. And those who do only grant this self-service access to the cloud administration team or a small group of users rather than to those who actually require the resources. These business users typically follow standard enterprise IT protocol by submitting a ticket that is then fulfilled by IT. Not providing self-service access adds time to the process, providing little incentive for users to use your environment rather than a public cloud.

• Standardised and automated processes and provisioning. Another key cloud feature is full standardisation and automation, but only 50% of self-identified enterprise private clouds actually have this implemented today. And even those that claim implementation often don’t have a fully automated provisioning process. Typically, networking, security checks, permissions and approvals are all still manual processes. This missed step translates into slowed provisioning time – attenuating a potential 15-minute time frame to hours or days. Although this seems minute compared with other internal deployments, this is dramatically slower than provisioning in a public cloud.

• Incentivised decommissioning. Chargeback is the most effective way to incentivise users to utilise IT resources efficiently. But given existing policies, billing systems and other operational challenges, chargeback is out of reach for most enterprises. In fact, the reported 39% with chargeback implementations and the 21% planning to adopt within the next year is unusually high for enterprises. In Forrester’s Q3 2011 hardware survey, only 14% of respondents had chargeback or plans to implement within the next year.4 If chargeback is out of reach for your organisation, use other ways to put cloud resources in business terms. Some alternative options include: showback (showing prices associated with services but not charging the user for them), allocation-based resources, soft expiry dates (continuous warnings at deadlines), and hard expiry dates (deletion at deadline). The closer you can get to chargeback and/or showback models, the more efficiency you’ll experience.

• A pricing model comparable with the public cloud model. If you’re able to take the chargeback route, it’s tempting to start building out a complicated pricing structure that accurately reflects use and total spending in order to ensure you’re meeting ROI for these resources. Realistically, it will be almost impossible to figure out a model that accurately measures power use, short-term use of the resources (rather than continued use throughout its life), and total man-hours spent on this for a certain increment of time. But with private cloud, it’s all about the expectations that have been set by the public cloud. Scrap the complicated models, and pattern your approach on pricing models that have been proven to work in the public cloud. At the end of the day, the business user will be comparing your services with public cloud options and will make a decision accordingly.



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Best Practice No. 3: Don’t Reinvent The Wheel Building a private cloud can be time- and resource-intensive – but it doesn’t have to be. Today, there are various solutions available that can help enterprises get to private cloud faster, with fewer resources, and with greater results than possible alone. Case in point: Forrester found that 31% of enterprises surveyed built their private cloud themselves, a process that requires significant programming hours from a team of developers who are likely to be new to cloud services and required capabilities. The 43% who used an external service provider to build their solution were far more likely to have a self-service portal and to have actually reduced unauthorised use of public cloud services above expectations.5 Likewise, the 27% using a pre-integrated solution (either software-only or software/hardware) were far more likely to have completely automated provisioning and a self-service portal and were more successful at connecting with the business.6 The resulting environments are stronger and more in-line with long-term IT goals, but even more importantly, getting assistance reserves your most valuable asset, your IT staff, for mission and/or business focused tasks. These are some common ways to leverage existing cloud expertise:

• Software-only solutions. Multiple vendors offer software-only solutions that sit on top of existing resources (i.e. hardware, hypervisor management tools, and automation capabilities) to help manage and control the cloud environment. These solutions typically have some level of hardware agnosticism but still require some integration with existing solutions to get up and running. Out-of-the-box, it includes a web-based user interface for self-service provisioning of resources with role-based permissions, giving cloud administrators the ability to assign different user rights and set capacity limits.

• Pre-integrated hardware/software solutions. Commonly referred to as “cloud-in-a-box” solutions, these hardware/software packages are pre-integrated and optimised for private cloud environments. If you’re an organisation looking to invest in significant infrastructure upgrades specifically for a private cloud, consider using these solution types rather than piecing together a solution yourself.

• Consulting services to build and/or manage. When it comes to building a private cloud environment, there are challenges along the way even if you’re using a software or software/hardware solution. Integration and management may require expertise that you don’t have on your staff. When working with consulting firms, enterprises can experience a higher success rate while benefiting from expertise that they don’t have to hire long term.

• Consulting services focused on strategy and process. Most enterprises struggle with organisation structure and strategy rather than figuring out infrastructure components or a new technology. Several consulting agencies specifically focus on helping organisations develop a solid cloud strategy that considers organisational structure and process changes that are required for deploying and managing a private cloud environment.

• Training programmes and certifications. Beyond consulting services, software and hardware, your team can gain real value from training programmes and certification programmes. Many IT teams leverage a mix of real-time experience, public cloud experimentation and training programmes to ramp up cloud skills sufficiently in order to support and/or build a private cloud environment. There are various certification programmes available through vendors, vendor sponsorship and/or university courses that will get your cloud team off to the right start. This is an important investment to save the organisation substantial man-hours while providing valuable takeaway skills for your cloud team.



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KEY TAKEAWAYS: MAXIMISE YOUR PRIVATE CLOUD BY INCLUDING ALL CORE FUNCTIONALITY

You’ve got time to create a good strategy – so get to full functionality. What you hear about private cloud adoption at conferences is often not a full view of what enterprises are actually doing today – in fact, real private clouds are few and far between. If you’re looking to take advantage of the cloud for agility or are trying to provide an alternative to the public cloud, we’ve found that those who implemented all core capabilities were far more successful. Instead of rushing into a private cloud investment, make sure you’re taking the right steps and getting it right the first time and setting the right expectations. As you start this journey, keep these three best practices in mind:

1. At the end of the day. . . it’s all about your customer. If there’s one thing to take away from this report, it's that the business is going to be in control. They’ve transitioned from accepting what was delivered to seeking better options and maximising their time and productivity. The new role of IT is less about keeping everything up and running and more about delivering a better, simplified user experience to the end user. This means utilising automation and outsourcing to reduce this existing workload so that you can focus on tasks that are more critical to the business and be closer to the revenue generators. Cloud is a great opportunity to start this journey, and its success ties heavily into your ability to do this – so start the conversation today.

2. Remember, you’re the service provider. Many admins responsible for deploying private clouds come from traditional enterprise IT heritage and act as caretakers – they support the needs of the business with a primary goal of protecting the business from itself with rules, restrictions and set tools that meet IT guidelines. But this strategy no longer works. The business has already started to circumvent these rules, and for the first time, IT must “compete for customers”. If reducing unauthorised use of public cloud or enabling the business with agile infrastructure is the goal, you’ll need to start acting like a cloud provider and adjust to the way the business wants to consume IT services. This means incentivising your customers to use a private cloud solution rather than the public cloud and constantly comparing your solution with this alternative.

3. But that doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel. Just because you’re now a service provider, it doesn’t mean that you have to build a custom solution from the ground up. There are lots of tools, services, programmes, certifications and integrators with cloud experience that can help your IT team get to cloud faster so that you can focus on the more difficult organisational and strategic portions of this implementation.



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Appendix A: Survey Methodology And Demographics

In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 265 organisations with 500 or more employees in the US (105), Canada (27), Great Britain (36), Germany (35), France (35) and Australia (27), to evaluate current use of virtualisation and private cloud. Survey participants included decision-makers with responsibility/influence on cloud decisions in their organisation (CIO, VP infrastructure, cloud architect, infrastructure architect, and VP of IT) who reported current use of private cloud. Questions provided to the participants asked about the functionality of their environment, and the barriers and risks associated with the move to private cloud, how they justified the investment, top benefits experienced, and the effect of this on the business/IT relationship. The study was conducted in March 2012.

Figure A1 Industry Breakdown Of Respondents

Base: 265 IT decision-makers


Figure A2 Level Of Experience Using Private Cloud



“Which of the following most closely describes your industry?”

6%

4%

4%

7%

10%

11%

15%

18%

24%

Other, please specify

Media, entertainment and leisure

Transport and logistics

Retail and wholesale trade

Public sector (government, etc.)

Utilities and telecommunications

Business/professional services

Manufacturing

Financial services and insurance

“What is your firm’s level of experience with private cloud?”

16%

18%

32%

33%

Using private cloud for both development and production purposes for less than 6 months

Using private cloud but use for test and development purposes ONLY

Using private cloud for both development and production for more than 12 months

Using private cloud for both development and production purposes for between 6 and 12 months



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Figure A3 Company Size And Geographical Breakdown Of Respondents



Appendix B: Supplemental Material

Related Forrester Research “Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011,” Forrester Research, Inc., 17 May 2011

“Companies Building Private Clouds Focus On Infrastructure But Not Operations,” Forrester Research, Inc., 23 November 2010

“You’re Not Ready For Internal Cloud,” Forrester Research, Inc., 26 July 2010

Appendix C: Endnotes

1 Forrester investigated whether solutions with pre-built solutions or IT-built cloud solutions reported higher adoption of key cloud capabilities. Fifty-nine per cent of pre-built solutions had completely automated provisioning and processes compared with the 47% of those IT-built cloud solutions claiming complement automation. Similarly, 53% of pre-built solutions reported self-service access for business users compared with the 39% of IT-built solutions. In terms of chargeback, 45% of pre-built had already adopted chargeback versus the 36% of IT-built solutions.

2 Forrester asked respondents about their top three problems with the cloud today and compared differences between solution types adopted. We found that across the board, integration was the top problem regardless of solution type, with 41% of those with pre-built solutions, 37% of custom solutions built by service providers or consultants, and 42% of solutions that were built by IT.

“Approximately how many people work for your company worldwide, including all branches and locations

(not including seasonal or temporary employees)?”

11%

11%

19%

29%

31%

500 to 999

20,000 to 50,000

50,000 or more

5,000 to 19,999

1,000 to 4,999

“In which country is your company headquartered?”

10%

10%

13%

13%

14%

40%

Canada

Australia

Germany

France

United Kingdom

United States



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3 For this cut, Forrester split respondents into those that incorporated the main functions necessary to achieve a private cloud. Those with a “full functionality” responded that they had implemented the following server virtualisation management capabilities: track use of cloud resources by account user, policy-based automation for deployment and management of private cloud environment, and self-service portal for end users such as developers to deploy, manage and remove virtual machines. Those that had not implemented all of the components were classified as missing core functions.

4 Only 14% of the 804 North American and European IT decision-makers that were using x86 server virtualisation (from a variety of enterprises across industries polled in our Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2011) said that they had implemented chargeback. Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2011, Forrester Research, Inc.

5 Forrester reviewed the actual benefits experienced by adopters of various solution types and found that those that used a pre-packaged solution reported greater-than-expected benefits of reduction in unauthorised cloud usage. Forty-seven per cent of those using an external service provider or consultant to build this environment similarly experienced higher-than-expected reduction in unauthorised public cloud use. Only 21% of those that built their own cloud reported this.

6 Forrester found that those using a pre-integrated solution got the closest to a true cloud environment. This was evident in multiple crosstabs completed. Some examples are as follows: 1) A higher percentage of pre-integrated solutions (59%) implemented automation than those built internally (47%); 2) a higher percentage of pre-integrated solutions (53%) implemented a self-service portal than those built internally (39%); 3) a higher percentage of pre-integrated solutions (45%) implemented chargeback than those built internally (36%); 4) those using a pre-integrated solution (44%) reported that they invested in private cloud partially for empowerment of users compared with those using an external service provider to build the solution (29%) and those built internally by IT (31%); 5) those using a pre-integrated solution (44%) reported higher-than-expected benefits in reduced unauthorised usage of public cloud (reported 4 or 5) versus the 37% of those using a solution built by an external service provider and the 21% of those that built this solution themselves.