z/VSE: 45 Years of Progress - z/VM - IBM

zEnterprise:
The
World’s
Best
Private
Cloud
Platform?
By Vince Re
Cloud computing represents a disruptive
paradigm shift that will
eventually shake most IT organizations
to their roots. New platforms,
new applications, and a new generation
of tech-savvy business users will put
enormous pressure on IT, requiring
them to weave together the best of traditional
IT with the best of what’s available
in the cloud to deliver business
value to their organizations.
There’s a striking parallel between
IT’s transition to cloud computing and
manufacturing organizations migrating
from a factory model to a supply chain
model. In the past, manufacturers typically
ran closed, standalone factories—
raw materials in, finished products out.
Now, successful manufacturers leverage
a global supply chain, selecting components
from a variety of sources according
to cost, availability, and quality requirements.
The base components remain
important, but the organization ultimately
creates value by building products
using a diverse mix of sources, both
internal and external. Systematic supply
chain management techniques improve
agility and quality while reducing cost,
translating into competitive advantage.
Today, most IT organizations also
work according to a factory model—
assembling, deploying and managing
most IT services in their own data centers.
In contrast, cloud computing is a
fresh new approach—one that’s much
more about running a dynamic IT supply
chain. The transition from IT as
factory to IT as supply chain represents
a new, different way to think about IT’s
role; it promises substantially increased
efficiency and agility, just as manufacturers
found with supply chains.
Although the journey to cloud computing
might sound a long way off, business
users are already making the first
moves toward building an IT supply
chain—sometimes even outside of the IT
department’s control. Sophisticated business
users understand there are alternatives
beyond the IT factory, and they’re
increasingly selecting cloud-based solutions
rather than traditional ones. Modern
cloud applications usually offer adequate
capabilities, even though IT might express
concern about certain issues such as security.
They’re often priced so low as to skip
past traditional corporate procurement
processes. And, being cloud-based, there’s
also an important sense of instant gratification
where the user can be up and running
almost instantly. These alternatives
lead some business users to envision a
future where the complexity and cost of
running a large data center becomes
someone else’s problem. In this way, they
hope to reap drastic benefits in agility,
quality, and cost.
New and emerging organizations are
also responsible for accelerating the trend
toward cloud computing. Today, few
start-ups build an internal data center.
Rather, they turn to cloud email, financial
and human resource applications,
relying on non-traditional partners such
as so-called Managed Service Providers
(MSPs). Over time, the increased agility
and lower cost of cloud approaches
become the weapons emerging organizations
wield against more established
competitors. Today’s organizations must
adapt, or risk increasing threats from a
new, formidable breed of competitor.
Faced with these realities, IT organizations
frequently respond by attempting to
act more cloud-like, promising internal
business users the same flexibility and
cost advantages found in the cloud on
their internal systems. Larger organizations
often have adequate scale to compete
against many external cloud
providers. IT also understands that
although cloud services are often extremely
attractive from a cost or agility perspective,
they’re often suspect in terms of
quality of service, security, and risk. These
factors create an opportunity for various
internal, or private cloud initiatives.
Cloud computing also fosters a tendency
toward a sober rationalization of
IT capabilities vs. business value. Cloud
computing offers many new possibilities,
enabling IT to choose the right
quality of service for the job. For example,
not all services require “five nines”
availability; sometimes “good enough” is
truly good enough. This thinking permits
the organization to mix and match,
using potentially more costly internal
capacity for the most critical services,
while adopting cloud for less important
applications. Unlike prior generations of
outsourcing, cloud is infinitely flexible
this way; you only outsource selected
services where there’s some gain to be
had, not the whole operation.
The availability of new and good
enough cloud capabilities, combined
with pressure both from inside and outside
IT, creates a sense of urgency to
discover an optimum balance of internal
and cloud services. Doing so allows IT
to address the organization’s needs, while
simultaneously seeking out cost-efficiency,
agility, and quality advantages. In
effect, CIOs are balancing the oftenconflicting
needs of the organization by
juggling suppliers—becoming supply
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