Is owning your own infrastructure dead?

A friend of mine, who is really into motorcycling, was telling me about a trip he took in Northern Africa. The interesting thing about this trip is that it was 2 weeks long and it involved camping. That is a lot of gear to try and balance on a motorcycle, as well as a lot of planning to make sure you didn’t forget anything. On this particular trip though a company provided what I am calling CaaS or Camping-as-a-Service, which included transporting all your gear, your meals and guides to the routes that you would be taking each day. They would drive ahead on a more direct route to the daily destination in trucks, unload everything, set up the campsite and make the meals for you. All you had to do was show up with your motorcycle and enjoy your drive through the scenic countryside roads. In IT today, companies are starting to provide a lot of their products as a service to create an annuity base of revenue, rather than as a one off purchase, to make life easier for the end user, but like in this example, does it?

We no longer look at infrastructure in the same way that we did 15, 10, or even 5 years ago. When you talk to management or your prospects about expanding the hardware footprint, they ask questions like “What about public/private cloud, managed services, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)? Do we really need to buy more servers to put in our datacentres which we have to manage ourselves? With all the current and newly expanding public and private cloud services out there, as well as Colocation or Managed service offerings, is there still need in today’s world to buy your own infrastructure? It is all commoditising as many vendors are now in a race to the bottom for the lowest price to secure users on their platform.

Some IT professionals argue against cloud because of security, geographic location, or data integrity. When discussing security, it is not, 'can you make your datacentre as secure as some of these outsourced options?', but 'Can you afford, with your current budget, to make your datacentre as secure both digitally and physically as these outsourced options?' I think that very few companies can continue to afford to maintain the highest levels of security in their own datacentres, or want/need too. The same can be said surrounding any concern about the cloud really, and with the largest of the outsourcing companies, with years of success and stats and uptime to show off to those concerned, companies can find not only savings but great managed service offerings.

Yet this is creating a new kind of problem for IT staff. You are being asked for reports not only showing what is running, but how it is performing, and what cloud or outsourcing provider would give the best price for running your current infrastructure and new projects, on their offerings. For many to achieve this today it means that there is a lot of work to be done. Hours spent going through each portal to collate data and pull information manually into a final report, while working out in spreadsheets the pricing for all the different options. Going forward you now need to compare for each new project that surfaces, as well as being able to report on it every month/quarter/year depending on what management wants. Along comes Cloud Service Brokers (CSB) to offer companies a solution internally or externally to manage this information. In a recent research paper Gartner conducted a study that said:

“Cloud Adoption is growing six times faster than overall IT spending, and 85% of organisations surveyed by Gartner expect to use cloud service brokerage (CSB) by 2017”

Do you think brokerage services will be enough for an organisation's needs, and requirements? The IT organisation is typically being asked to not only manage existing infrastructure, solutions and applications but also provide the solutions that can make it less expensive, easier, safer and more productive for companies to extend their existing business into the cloud whilst providing advice and guidance to the business on its strategies and future needs.

This is a tall order since techies and business don’t generally speak the same language. As a result CIOs and CTOs are turning to CSBs to help them with this transformation. Today most CSBs are typically no more than an aggregator for the different vendors out there. While the billing and the monitoring can be done through their portal, any changes or additions to your VMs, push you to the vendor’s, most times confusing and/or technical, control panel in which you are charged for by the CSBs. How many portals and how much business acumen do you need to be successful in today’s increasingly complex Cloud Services world? Particularly when they span multiple, cloud vendors and applications, and include on premises, classic data centre and private cloud services.

To help achieve this, a new breed of CSBs are emerging, that aggregate but also specialise in integration and customization as well. They are able to offer specific capabilities to directly control these cloud services from a ‘single pane of glass’ portal customized for specific organisation’s business and technical needs.

Now for the shameless business plug :) We at Cube52 do not think it has to be this difficult, which is why we have developed a new product called Cube52 P3. Cube52 have designed the customer experience to be easy to use and comprehensive for any user. This is done by overlaying our software onto your entire VM estate, and through plug-ins it will not only give you reports, maintain your VMs, and act as a CSB by giving you costs of what other services you are interested in are currently charging, but also enables you fully control and manage your VMs within a ‘single pane of glass’ control panel. This can be configured with almost any vendor or custom application that has an open API to access.

I am currently inviting companies to join our private preview of our CSP portal to help shape it into the service that they want to get their company behind. Companies that join now will be part of our Partner Advisor Community (PAC) and will continue to be involved with how we are developing and changing our products. Spots are limited per region, so please get in touch.

If you are interested in learning more please visit our website or get in touch with me directly at [email protected] and good luck in this new virtual world.