THE CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT ECOSYSTEM

Your level of responsibility for managing the delivery and operation of cloud services in cloud computing depends on your role in the cloud ecosystem. Because the hybrid cloud encompasses so many different services from so many different places, cloud management needs lots of attention. Secure, reliable, interoperable, and cost-effective cloud services require an underlying infrastructure that is highly tuned, well monitored, and well managed.

You might be a consumer or provider of cloud services or an organization that brings a variety of services together (such as a broker of cloud services). In hybrid cloud environments, the roles and responsibilities for management are complicated.

An organization consuming Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from different vendors may need to play multiple roles, including both cloud consumer and cloud provider. Responsibilities for managing and securing these cloud services will overlap and often be shared across different participants.

With so many different players in the hybrid cloud environment, one thing is certain: At the end of the day, organizations are responsible for delivering the right service level for their customers. The primary goal of a well-managed environment is to ensure that end-user experiences are maintained and satisfy expectations.

It is beneficial to understand the three constituents who are responsible for hybrid cloud management:

CLOUD PROVIDERS CONTROL PERFORMANCE

A cloud provider can be any organization that provides a service to cloud consumers. Some cloud providers may focus on a single cloud model, such as IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, or BPaaS. Other cloud providers may provide an integrated platform that includes many of these services for a company. Still other cloud providers may be the IT department itself that becomes a cloud provider for its employees and customers.

Cloud providers have responsibility for the architecture of the cloud and for providing cloud resources and services to cloud consumers. These organizations are responsible for monitoring the cloud infrastructure to ensure that service levels for uptime, speed of delivery, and other performance characteristics are maintained.

In order to bring the right level of management to cloud environments, a cloud provider needs to understand and anticipate the requirements of its customers, provide the right level of security and governance, optimize operating costs, and ensure that cloud services are available to users. Cloud providers also assume the responsibility of quickly finding the root cause of any problems that interfere with the quality of service delivery to maintain compliance with service-level agreements.

CLOUD CONSUMERS FOCUS ON THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Cloud consumers are the individuals and organizations that use, manage, and pay for services delivered by a cloud service provider. A cloud consumer may be an individual sales manager using the services of a SaaS application, an IT development team consuming PaaS services, or an IT system that provides automated management — such as the provisioning of services based on business policies. In hybrid enterprise environments, there may be many different cloud consumers using services from lots of cloud providers.

The cloud consumer can’t be a passive receiver of cloud services. Rather, the cloud consumer must be able to monitor the services the organization uses to make sure that these services deliver as promised. As an important first step to maintaining the right level of oversight, IT needs to begin to recognize that it is a cloud provider to its internal and external customers as well as a cloud consumer. It needs sufficient insight into the performance of each of these services to understand how they individually and collectively impact the overall performance of the business.

CLOUD BROKERS INTEGRATE AND PROVIDE MANAGEMENT LAYER

Cloud management responsibilities may increase exponentially as use of cloud services expands. As both the quantity and type of cloud services used across your organization increase, it becomes challenging to maintain a consistent level of visibility and control.

A cloud service broker is a vendor or a business unit within a company that provides oversight and management for a variety of cloud providers. The broker can stand between an organization and its cloud services, managing the use, performance, integration, and delivery of such resources.

Using a cloud broker can help organizations gain more control over which cloud services are being used and who is using them. It is so easy to set up a cloud service with a credit card payment or a simple user license for a SaaS application that many IT organizations have no idea how many cloud services are in use across the company. This practice of having too many uncontrolled cloud services can present significant security and governance risks to the company.

One option for cloud broker services is to create a single environment or portal as a central control point for internal users of cloud services. This allows an individual to securely sign on in order to access services they are authorized to use. The advantages of this process from a management perspective are significant. It gives IT more centralized control over which cloud services are being used in the organization and who uses them.

The cloud broker can also consolidate many of the business services. For example, business units may independently begin using cloud services like Amazon web services without the knowledge of the IT organization. Therefore, the company may be spending more money than necessary and may lose control of security and governance.

BUILDING YOUR HYBRID CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT PLAN

An important requirement for hybrid cloud service management is putting a plan in place, which involves understanding what cloud services you are introducing into your company and how they need to interact with your data center assets. Now, you have to make the determination about which services you need to control because they could impact the business and how you can effectively manage the combination of those resources.

ESTABLISHING OBJECTIVES

The first priority is to determine what is most important to the consumers of cloud services whom you need to support. You need to ask, “What do I really want to achieve?” Remember that your service management plan is based on the service strategy and needs to support changing business conditions and customer expectations.

You need to specify what services your business offers and what the company needs to achieve your vision. When you know what your objectives are, you can assess your current service management capability around those particular goals. Then, you can find the gaps in your service management capability and develop a plan to deal with those gaps. It’s important to evaluate what you have if you expect to be able to locate and close the gaps and achieve your strategy.

GETTING STARTED WITH A CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT PLAN

Here are a few questions to get you started as you develop your service management strategy for the hybrid cloud:


Do you have a consistent way to manage assets across your public and private cloud environments as well as your internal environment?

Do you have a process for change and configuration that ensures that all members of the organization have reliable access to the cloud service configuration information they need to perform their responsibilities?

Can you ensure that business services created and maintained by one division are made available across other areas of your organization?

Have you developed a service catalog to help identify and govern the use of cloud services?

Can you monitor and measure the effect of your strategy on demands for security, storage, and hardware?

These questions should provide you with an understanding of the issues that you have to plan for with cloud management. You should begin by understanding the consumer or customer for your services. Therefore, cloud management’s objective is to provide a consistent and predictable level of service across all of the IT services you provide to consumers. If you wait until services are delivered to figure out service levels and other management issues, you’ve waited too long. If you start with the outcomes rather than how each individual component operates, you will be on your way to understanding how to plan for cloud management.

Keep in mind that how you manage cloud services will depend on what type of service provider you are. For example, service providers of public cloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) will approach cloud service management very differently from an internal service provider of a private cloud. The cloud inside IT will invariably have to interact with public cloud services. However, no matter what type of service provider you might be, you have to make sure that there are consistent processes that ensure that changes in everything from configurations to code are managed consistently.

The cloud provider also has to make sure that it handles performance of the specific service being delivered as well as security, backup, data storage, scalability, speed of processing — just to name a few. This means that the IT organization has to understand the underlying services including what purpose they serve for the consumers within the organization and what the expectations are for performance, security, and scalability. At the end of the day, IT management needs to be armed with a holistic understanding of the elements of the cloud services used by the organization and the level of service required.

HOW BPAAS WORKS IN THE REAL WORLD OF CLOUD COMPUTING

If you've decided to use BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) in a hybrid cloud model as a delivery platform for services, you need to understand how to mesh services together based on the processes you want to execute.

As shown in the following figure, a SaaS (Software as a Service) software, PaaS (Platform as a Service) environments, and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). For example, there may be CRM and social media applications.

Linking services together based on process.
BPaaS services allow you to experiment with new business processes because they are not based on the programming of individual business initiatives. For example, a packaged BPaaS offering that handles business travel processing or order-to-cash processes may be available, as well as services for processing processing claims to managing clinical data For drug trials.

THE BENEFITS OF CLOUD-BASED BPAAS

Like other cloud-based services, BPaaS frees the business and the IT department from having to worry about the services that support the various processes. You do not have to manage or even know about the underlying middleware, networking, or database. Offerings are created so that security is an element of the solution, not an afterthought.

The process services offered by ADP are probably the best-known BPaaS services. ADP helps companies manage their payroll and the accounting and legal aspects related to that process. A company using ADP does not have to be concerned that its payment information will be intermixed with information from other companies. ADP can implement payroll services based on its customer's specific business process.

WHAT BPAAS COMPANIES LOOK LIKE

It's worth describing some of the businesses that deliver massively scaled cloud applications and business processes. Most of the companies listed here have to cover uncharted business territories when they developed their service. For this reason, the services they offer are not traditionally to be thought of as business services - but that's really what they are.

Here's a list of companies in this field and the business processes they deliver:

EBay: Provides an electronic auction service

PayPal: Provides an Internet payment capability as a service

Skype: Owned by Microsoft, Skype provides Voice over IP (VoIP) phone calls as a service, most of which are free

Google: Provides an Internet search capability as a service

This service is free when you have access to the Internet. Google also provides an Internet e-mail service, Gmail. Google has quite a few other services, including maps, news aggregation, Google Apps, and so on.

YouTube: Provides video self-publishing as a service and was acquired by Google

Yahoo !: Like Google, Yahoo! Provide an Internet search service and e-mail service

MailChimp and Constant Contact: Provide services for sending out online newsletters and marketing campaigns

Craigslist: Offers small ads as a service

WordPress: Hosts blogs as a service

LinkedIn: Offers business contacts and networking as a service

Facebook and Twitter: Provide social networking services that have a huge reach across the globe

These companies are designed to support a specific type of workload. Because their data centers are optimized to support these specialized workloads, they are able to easily support millions of users so efficiently that it's very hard to compete with them.

LOOKING AT WEB-BASED BUSINESS SERVICES

You might be inclined to think that web-based businesses are a company that you are outsourced.

Be aware that many of these companies start out without a well-defined revenue stream, and some of them have yet to demonstrate a viable business model for their activities. This is currently the case, for example, with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, all of which exist in the case of investors (or Google in the case of YouTube) that they will eventually find a profitable way of operating.

Most of the businesses are in the very lowest cost of infrastructure. Quite a few Internet auction houses existed before eBay's market, but none have made much of an impact.

THE ARCHITECTURAL COMPONENTS OF A CLOUD PROVIDER MODEL

How do all the components of a cloud provider model fit together from an architectural perspective? The following diagram depicts the various cloud services and how they relate to each other based on the three constituents: cloud consumers, cloud service providers, and cloud brokers. This diagram is from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Diagram depicting cloud service providers and how they relate.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology cloud architecture.
On the left side of the diagram, the cloud service consumer includes all those consumers bringing a group of services together for internal and external users; and the business management that needs to have these services available as part of business strategy implementation.

Within this category are the applications, middleware, infrastructure, and services that are built based on on-premises computing models. In addition, this model depicts the role of the cloud auditor. This organization provides the oversight either by an internal or an external group that makes sure that the consumer group meets its obligations.

Cloud service providers (see the center of the diagram) represent all the models of cloud services. A cloud service provider might be a commercial company or a corporation that decides to become its own cloud service operator. Cloud providers may provide the underlying physical and virtualized resources needed to run various cloud services. They also may create the actual applications and business services that operate in these environments.

These various cloud models don’t exist in isolation — they’re all related to each other. In addition, there’s an entire ecosystem of partners that support various vendors with offerings. The cloud service provider provides a unified architecture to support and manage these services consistently. Managing these services is a major requirement for any cloud service provider. These management platforms have to both provide support for the operation of the various services and manage the way they perform to support business requirements.

The cloud provider has to support all of the important cloud delivery models, including Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), which isn’t depicted in the diagram. In addition to supporting the physical and virtual environment, it is important to remember that all of these cloud models and the supporting environment have to be linked together in the form of service orchestration. Without service orchestration, each service would become an independent silo.

Clearly, all the components in the cloud provider model must be managed. There have to be services to support the business, to manage configurations, and to provision the right resources on demand. Management services must also support interoperability and service portability.

WHAT IS HYBRID CLOUD COMPUTING?

Cloud computing has evolved in recent years. The new world of the hybrid cloud is an environment that employs both private and public cloud services. Companies are realizing that they need many different types of cloud services in order to meet a variety of customer needs.

The growing importance of hybrid cloud environments is transforming the entire computing industry as well as the way businesses are able to leverage technology to innovate. Economics and speed are the two greatest issues driving this market change.

There are two primary deployment models of clouds: public and private. Most organizations will use a combination of private computing resources (data centers and private clouds) and public services, where some of the services existing in these environments touch each other — this is the hybrid cloud environment.

THE PUBLIC CLOUD

The public cloud is a set of hardware, networking, storage, services, applications, and interfaces owned and operated by a third party for use by other companies or individuals. These commercial providers create a highly scalable data center that hides the details of the underlying infrastructure from the consumer.

Public clouds are viable because they typically manage relatively repetitive or straightforward workloads. For example, electronic mail is a very simple application. Therefore, a cloud provider can optimize the environment so that it is best suited to support a large number of customers, even if they save many messages.

Public cloud providers offering storage or computing services optimize their computing hardware and software to support these specific types of workloads. In contrast, the typical data center supports so many different applications and so many different workloads that it cannot be optimized easily.

THE PRIVATE CLOUD

A private cloud is a set of hardware, networking, storage, services, applications, and interfaces owned and operated by an organization for the use of its employees, partners, and customers. A private cloud can be created and managed by a third party for the exclusive use of one enterprise.

The private cloud is a highly controlled environment not open for public consumption. Thus, a private cloud sits behind a firewall. The private cloud is highly automated with a focus on governance, security, and compliance.

Automation replaces more manual processes of managing IT services to support customers. In this way, business rules and processes can be implemented inside software so that the environment becomes more predictable and manageable.

THE HYBRID CLOUD

A hybrid cloud is a combination of a private cloud combined with the use of public cloud services where one or several touch points exist between the environments. The goal is to combine services and data from a variety of cloud models to create a unified, automated, and well-managed computing environment.

Combining public services with private clouds and the data center as a hybrid is the new definition of corporate computing. Not all companies that use some public and some private cloud services have a hybrid cloud. Rather, a hybrid cloud is an environment where the private and public services are used together to create value.

A cloud is hybrid

• If a company uses a public development platform that sends data to a private cloud or a data center–based application.
• When a company leverages a number of SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and moves data between private or data center resources.
• When a business process is designed as a service so that it can connect with environments as though they were a single environment.

A cloud is not hybrid

• If a few developers in a company use a public cloud service to prototype a new application that is completely disconnected from the private cloud or the data center.
• If a company is using a SaaS application for a project but there is no movement of data from that application into the company’s data center.