The building of a cloud within an enterprise is rewarded with greater flexibility, greater data security and lower costs. Working towards these objectives, strategies bringing immediate benefit for the company at every single step have proven themselves.
A universal Enterprise Cloud encompasses all the workloads that occur in the company. However, a corresponding transformation of the IT can take years, as it affects many aspects of the organisation of a company, existing roles, processes, policies, and services. To avoid getting bogged down in entangled interdependencies, a step-by-step procedure is advisable: each step in this procedure should define an intermediate goal that already brings demonstrable benefits to the company.
Standardisation should be the first step. In the process, the manufacturers, service providers, hardware and software components are reduced to the smallest level possible. Server, storage and software are bundled into easy-to-manage packages. The result is a simplified and swifter installation, lower costs, and a lower risk of data loss.
The second step is to consolidate the existing workloads into a unified infrastructure. However, here one must not make the mistake of relocating each task to its own virtual machine, as there will then remain the high costs for managing multiple operating system instances. Companies should rather consolidate the workloads on a shared-use system. This reduces the administrative burden and thus the costs.
Step three is the provision of services. It is important in particular to prepare as many automated services as possible and to create a portal through which users can obtain the needed resources themselves. This allows companies to respond faster to changes and to remain flexible.
The process concludes with the creation of an enterprise cloud: a unified architecture for all the workloads of the company. That architecture offers comprehensive management for the entire infrastructure, no matter whether it is made available via a public, private, or hybrid cloud. Here it is possible to select among several models for the provision of services to allow the enterprise cloud to meet various SLAs and business requirements. The infrastructure is also always available during maintenance phases, while a QoS-controlled load balancing ensures that the SLAs are always complied with. Data protection is ensured by security policies that assess whether the data is business-critical. Particularly sensitive workloads can, moreover, be logically and physically isolated. (Source: Oracle/rf)