The managed cloud is no longer only a place for provisioning rapid capacity for application development initiatives and application testing, says Ryan Skipp, ICT solutions sales and portfolio management at T-Systems SA.
According to Skipp, managed cloud is now capable of providing core business application support at production level, and enables businesses to move forward more quickly and flexibly.
He notes there are two factors contributing to this change: cloud technology is maturing and standards and services are evolving to enable interoperability and reliability; and companies are beginning to trust cloud services more and understand them. Enterprises are starting to demand the capabilities that cloud services are expected to deliver, such as rapid provisioning and scaling.
Managed cloud providers have to ensure they are ready to deliver on these demands, according to cost, quality, and time expectations, Skipp explains.
Managed service providers (MSPs) should react to this change by building solutions that are aligned to global standards, which will ensure interoperability and ease of use, he says. MSPs should develop common 'use cases' to guide consumers in using cloud services - or leverage open ones that are globally available, such as the Open Data Centre Alliance.
"Service providers should integrate standard open application programming interfaces to enable businesses to have the necessary levels of control and access to services. Ensure that standard network, security, data protection services are available, and that the necessary auditing capabilities are enabled to support the achievement of common compliance requirements. Create a transition and transformation capability to help business adopt cloud services with more ease, including analysis tools, migration tools, and project methodologies," says Skipp.
He explains that businesses can ensure they pick the right partner by searching for the integrated use of the open standards, avoiding lock-in to one provider.
"Cloud makes it easier to select specialists for each capability, a 'horses for courses' approach at commercial, service, and technology levels," he adds.
According to Skipp, companies are moving into converged infrastructure because it is no longer cost-effective to carry and maintain spare or unused capacity or to dedicate infrastructure to certain services.
"By converging infrastructure, business can ease interoperability of the business-enabling applications, reduce specialist support costs, reduce management and development costs, increase economy of scale, and share spare capacity for 'bursting' at seasonal peaks, or between fixed length projects. This enables more cost-effective operations, faster service delivery, and shorter project time," says Skipp.
"The benefits include increased economy of scale, increased flexibility to allocate resources where needed, increased speed to evolve projects, and re-using existing service components and resources."
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