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White Paper Excerpt

Challenge
Private and public clouds evolve the way IT services are delivered to the business. The promise of increased efficiency and agility of enterprise-class applications and services is intriguing, but enterprise customers are struggling with how cloud services can safely add realistic business value. The use of external cloud services challenge security and compliance, as well as service level management, which can involve multiple domains of control. Technology lock-in is an additional concern as various vendors deliver very different cloud computing offerings (and there are others of which you should be aware). The reality is that external cloud services are still working toward enterprise maturity.

Opportunity
Pairing key cloud computing user scenarios with innovative IT management solutions will allow you to deliver agile and optimized IT services to employees and customers. You can decrease the time to develop and introduce new services, and meet the SLAs of current services during demand fluctuations. IT operations become simpler, capitalizing on resources that are managed in a highly efficient manner and delivered as part of an overall IT supply chain. You can continue to have seamless operational, performance, and security management of applications and services irrespective of where they are located and who manages them individually. In addition, IT can shift its focus towards innovation.

Benefits
Intelligently embracing the cloud computing model will pave the way for you, as VPs and Directors of IT, to transform your infrastructure into an elastic business-responsive engine. By adopting this model internally as a first step, all of the benefits of cloud computing can be harnessed without concern. By further leveraging external cloud computing services, CAPEX spending shifts, in a reduced amount, to OPEX while management of the underlying physical resources shifts to service providers without sacrificing service quality. Cloud computing also supports Green IT goals through optimized resource consumption. In addition, you can better align business services with IT and business goals to enhance flexible business navigation through economic peaks and troughs.

Tagged as

cloud bursting, cloud computing, disaster recovery, iaas, paas, saas, sla, soa