UPDATED 14:24 EDT / NOVEMBER 03 2011

NEWS

Picking the Low Hanging Fruit and Considering SaaS in a Larger Context

Obviously the place to start with any cloud migration is with the “low hanging fruit”. And you should start with one or two services as early as possible to gain experience with SaaS.

This is true regardless of the size of the company or of your overall strategy. Even if that strategy is to virtualize, build an internal private cloud and keep most applications in house, the experience will be valuable in developing an understanding of what IT services look like, how they are packaged and delivered, and what issues are important to your users.

Ideally these first services should be non-critical to the business but offer the potential for widespread use in the organization, including inside IT. They should be services that users already understand and can compare to common experience, which provides a basis that can help the enterprise understand the benefits and drawbacks of public cloud services. And they should be productivity services that can be used in production environments.

Fortunately Microsoft has provided the perfect laboratory with Office 360, its SaaS version of Office. Every company using Windows should add it, not as a replacement but as an adjunct to Office on the desktop. Office 360 gives users the perfect opportunity to try out SaaS and see its advantages, for instance the ability to collaborate across distances and time zones and to access the service on tablets and smartphones, in a highly secure environment and without having to make a full commitment to a Web-based service. One disadvantage that users will discover is that Web access may not be available at all times in all locations. Over time users will find the SaaS service useful for some documents but keep others local only, or they may create and edit their documents locally to get the faster performance and then post those that need to be shared on the SaaS service.

Of course Google Docs and Google Apps offer similar opportunities, but many large companies are suspicious of Google’s security guarantees. Personally my experience using Google Docs daily on client work for two years indicates that these concerns are baseless. Specifically, I am referring to the widespread suspicion that Google searches documents as part of its focused advertising program. If that were true, I would be seeing a lot of ads for printing presses and associated supplies. On that basis I believe Google Apps should be on the short list for initial SaaS forays. However that may be a hard sell in some companies.

Beyond that, companies should focus first on non-critical applications with tier 2 or lower QoS requirements. Other candidates for early conversion to SaaS or internal private cloud service status over a virtualized environment would include applications that see large cyclical demand changes either over a month, quarter, or year. Applications that require specialized skill sets that your organization cannot maintain in-house are also obvious early candidates for outsourcing to the public cloud, as are applications that have low demand that makes them comparatively expensive to maintain inhouse. Even the largest enterprises have these applications and should consider replacing them with SaaS in part to control costs and in part to simplify the internal environment and allow the IT staff to focus on their core business services.

Highly integrated services that draw data from two or more mainstream applications, on the other hand, are clear candidates for the internal private cloud. SaaS vendors are forming operating partnerships to provide data-level integration between their services, but these should be approached carefully and thoroughly tested before they are trusted to replace internal services. Companies following a public cloud strategy, however, should consider moving the software behind these services to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendor platform as an alternative to building and maintaining a virtualized internal cloud.

Another important consideration when choosing which services to move to the public cloud is the CAPEX/OPEX tradeoff. In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, with capital very scarce, leveraging public cloud services to replace CAPEX with OPEX became one of their main attractions. But that was a special, short-term financial environment, and as that eases companies are finding that sometimes a CAPEX investment in internal IT hardware can yield financial advantages over an all-OPEX strategy.

Services Angle

Overall no one strategy provides a right answer for all situations. Large entities whose core systems achieve high utilization of very large servers on their own, for instance, may find little financial or other advantage in virtualizing those systems at all, and companies using IaaS to run their proprietary software, including online game and other consumer services, have found that above a threshold demand level they are better off bringing their systems back inhouse from the IaaS provider. Thus for large enterprises in particular, the right strategy is often a hybrid of public and virtualized internal clouds, and a few unvirtualized “monster” services that by themselves achieve maximum utilization of their resources.


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