 "TechEd 2013: To Cloud Or Not To Cloud - The Microsoft Way")
Every organisation these days understands the value of the cloud. But understanding the value of a technology and figuring out how to use it to your own benefit are two different things.
Given the current circumstances, CIOs are under pressure to deploy complex cloud environments and services. This, in turn, ends up putting a lot of pressure on the technology wing of an enterprise and is quite costly in terms of time and resources.
Today most enterprises look at IT as a cost centre, and in lieu of this perspective, it becomes an imperative to optimise on implementation, and management of this infrastructure.
With the evolution of the cloud as a crucial aspect of infrastructure, we are now also seeing the evolution of tools and technologies that can ease the journey into the cloud. This is crucial for CIOs from a cost and time perspective. We know how hard they work to manage teams and balance resources with their requirements.
Microsoft as a company has taken a serious stance on the cloud, and has built it into every single aspect of their ‘Re-imagined’ product line. It has really tried to make it easier for developers to build and for CIOs to manage.
CIOs do have a few top of mind concerns when building out cloud environments. They need to make sure that engineering and the IT organisation collaborate well; they need to invest in applications that give the company a competitive advantage; they have to be a trusted advisor to the business. And while managing all this, they always are looking for a way to go to market faster.
In addition to this, CIOs today are seeing that datacentre administrators are under tremendous pressure to go beyond their job role to manage extremely complex environments. Their growth curves also get impacted considering they end up losing out on time managing a growing number of virtual machines and are not able to optimise datacentre processes to impact business positively.
It is tools like Microsoft’s System Center that allow professionals to connect all the dots to build their private cloud using standardised modules and services literally selectable with an intuitive and friendly interface. It allows access to the entire datacentre resource pool using this interface, and literally wizardifies the process thus reducing time spent and complexity. Microsoft makes standardised configurations, protocols and modules to make the deployment process easier.
Earlier, administrators would add physical and virtual resources by switching between excel sheets and multiple system managers. Now tools allow them to have everything in one dashboard. The entire templating and classification based toolset allows administrators to make a variety of definitions to use as components in the cloud architecture. The time and resource benefits of this are extremely compelling.
It’s features like IP address management and pooling, application diagnostics, real-time monitoring, service monitoring that help build really solid enterprise apps that can have great productivity improvements in the organisation.
From a CIO perspective, these things go a long way in terms of establishing metrics to tracking ROI, something that was quite a misnomer when the cloud had just emerged.
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