While the debate over competing cloud architectures - public, private or hybrid - continues to rage, consensus seems to have been reached in terms of defining the benefits of each option.
It is vital that the DIY cloud implementation manager is not oblivious to the difficulties.
Martin May is regional director of Enterasys Networks.
Public clouds, for example, display upfront cost advantages as data centre resources are delivered to the user 'as a service', and the problems relating to costly hardware updates and upgrades are shifted from the shoulders of the end-user to third-party service providers.
Private clouds, on the other hand, give organisations an ability to deploy easily managed clouds using existing infrastructures, based on new-generation data centre virtualisation and automation technologies.
A key benefit of a private cloud is its ability to pool and dynamically allocate IT resources across any number of business units, allowing services to be deployed quickly and scaled to meet growing needs. The use of these resources can be tracked effectively, and if necessary, invoiced to individual business units within the company.
Hybrid clouds, comprising at least one private cloud and one or more public clouds, are seen by many industry watchers as the ultimate solution because organisations are able to use the public cloud for data storage and archiving, but maintain mission-critical and sensitive applications in-house, on a private cloud, securely behind the corporate firewall.
Hammer and nails
The advantages of a DIY cloud are similar to the private cloud, and include the fact that resources are accessed only by users within the organisation and that access to data can be tightly controlled. These benefits obviate the risks associated with public access and - for South African users - limit the performance issues experienced with public clouds, mainly due to Internet bandwidth constraints.
However, deploying a DIY cloud demands the ability to manage a range of ICT assets, implement virtualisation technologies across a number of platforms, automate provisioning, monitor service usage and reporting, and establish a single service desk.
If an organisation does not have access to all the technologies required, it will have to find the means to acquire them and the knowledge to execute them. It is vital that the DIY cloud implementation manager is not oblivious to the difficulties. For example, there will be delays, costs may escalate, and a degree of risk will have to be factored into the project from the outset.
Home improvements
Nevertheless, in common with almost any DIY home renovation, the task may appear daunting but will become easier as progress is made with the initiative.
Coming to the aid of the DIYer is a new generation of cloud appliances, or 'cloud kits', that help to mitigate some of the challenges. Current offerings are evolving and maturing, and it won't be long before implementing a private cloud will be as easy as painting by numbers.
A key component of today's more advanced cloud kits is an appliance-based security, information and event 'manager'. This is a device that goes well beyond traditional security information, event administrators and network behavioural analysis products to meet strict threat management, log management and compliance reporting objectives.
Today, such cloud management appliances are able to collect, combine and prioritise network activity data, security events, vulnerability data and external threat data into a single management dashboard. And they are able to track logging and trend information while generating a range of reports for network security and optimisation purposes.
For cloud DIYers, it's important to ensure the cloud appliance selected is able to work with existing computing infrastructures. It must allow scalability by facilitating the addition of servers or blades and include some form of workload metering to support a 'pay-per-use' business model, so as to justify budget expenditure.
The solution must be able to accommodate the organisation's existing policies, processes and resources, and it must be able to respond to changing business needs and scale as needed to support an expanding workload over time.
Finally, to realise the greatest benefit from a DIY private cloud, it must be able to extend the overall cloud reach to where the next generation of services can be created to leverage the organisation's unique cloud value.
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