A Clear and Certain Path to Cloud Migration Many businesses have begun to leverage the cloud—whether private, public, or hybrid implementations—to increase IT agility, accelerate time to market, reduce operating expenses, and significantly improve their disaster recovery capabilities. The right balance of cloud capabilities can also free IT staff to focus on revenue-generating projects. But first they need to determine: • What cloud implementation is right for them, and why? • Which applications are best suited for the internal data center, and which ones make sense for the public cloud? • In the case of public clouds, will the hosting service provider meet their regulatory compliance requirements? • What will the relative costs be? • And which things don’t need changing? Without the right analytical resources and specialized experience, these questions (and many more) may be nearly impossible to answer with confidence. IT service provider Pomeroy, in partnership with Intel, believes that every successful cloud implementation begins with a data-driven assessment of a company’s true IT environment—how it uses technology in its business, new ways it can achieve maximum utilization of its own data center assets, and the conditions when expanding to a public cloud makes good sense. “We have the capability to measure all that, so we can identify all the factors that are in play,” explains Stephen Vandegriff, Pomeroy’s cloud practice director. “The first thing we do is get under the hood with a client, see which applications they have, what the load is between those applications, and their relationships with the servers.” Pomeroy evaluates a representative sample of the client’s critical applications to determine whether they can be rewritten to use cloud capabilities. “We answer more than 180 questions per application,” he says, adding, “While all traditional client server applications will benefit from cloud capabilities, this gives us a high-confidence output for which applications are most appropriate.”
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Pomeroy’s cloud assessment helps accelerate cloud adoption by identifying: Application profiles Many clients find it difficult to pinpoint exactly which locations, servers, and databases an application touches. They also have difficulty quantifying what the traffic (payload) is between the application ecosystems. Pomeroy begins by creating a true picture of the client’s IT infrastructure and, in the process, often discovers inefficiencies, under-utilized resources, and even outright equipment failures. Once Pomeroy gains an understanding of a company’s IT relationships and dynamics—the flow of data between applications and servers—it begins the next phase of its cloud-readiness assessment: identifying the base workloads that are stable or sensitive enough to warrant a private cloud, and the dynamic workloads that might make a public cloud the more prudent choice. Cloud-ready workloads Clients often struggle to identify which applications belong in the private cloud and which ones might be rewritten to use public cloud capabilities. Pomeroy provides a solid rationale for a migration cadence for applications and choosing a “best fit” cloud model for their business (e.g., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). In planning a cloud migration strategy, it is crucial that clients evaluate all the options available to them and fully understand each model’s benefits, risks, and features. In doing so, clients can produce a “playbook” that defines how their private and public cloud choices can be fully utilized to deliver the most tangible value. Appropriate public cloud service providers As a rule, Pomeroy advocates optimizing the existing resources of the private cloud first, to make the best use of what clients already have. But when the use of a public cloud is warranted, the complexity of cloud concepts can often leave clients with more questions than answers. They can’t easily compare “at-a-glance” provider costs, service level agreements, and other factors. What’s more, fewer than two-thirds of IaaS providers publish prices—an indicator of how difficult assessing options can be.
Vandegriff describes public cloud pricing as something akin to “a black art.” For example, a single cloud-hosting service provider’s offerings were found to have nearly 60,000 price combinations. “Now, extrapolate that over five or six providers with varying SLAs, technology support, regulatory compliance, etc.,” he says, adding, “Is it Google, is it Amazon, a private cloud? Who’s the best fit? A client could spend an inordinate amount of time to weed through it all, but, actually, it’s something we can solve very quickly.” To that end, Pomeroy conducts at-a-glance reviews for clients to determine the best public cloud provider, or combination of providers, given each unique situation. The prevalence of “Shadow IT” Shadow IT is the use of non-vetted third-party services such as Dropbox*, Skype*, and many others. Pomeroy performs a thorough audit of applications and services running on client infrastructures, or that are contracted through outside entities, such as cloud service providers, or subscription-based applications, to identify any rogue applications in play. Pomeroy provides an insightful Shadow IT report to clients, who are often unaware of the existence of the shadow apps. Protecting data One of the biggest challenges clients face in fully embracing a public cloud involves risk and security—the hazards of entrusting encryption and data sovereignty to another party, and the threat of sensitive data being compromised. For workloads that are deemed appropriate for the public cloud, Pomeroy evaluates recommended service providers for security compliance capabilities and certifications from Intel® Security (formerly McAfee) and other industry-leading security product providers. In addition, Pomeroy works closely with Intel to help clients migrate securely to the public cloud.
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Cloud decisions based on data-driven knowledge What Pomeroy delivers to clients is a refined, actionable report that details their network and traffic between systems, dissects and stratifies the cloud service provider space, and identifies the optimum balance of private and public cloud resources to meet their requirements most costeffectively. Significantly, Pomeroy also identifies systems that are working just fine as-is; no change required. A cloud assessment provides empirical data points to make informed decisions around expanding private cloud capabilities or migrating some workloads to the public cloud—and to help chart any number of migration paths—from simple implementations to comprehensive enterprise programs. “Now they understand the pricing, the regulatory compliance, the technology, and the services,” explains Vandegriff. “With our assessment capabilities, we are able to mimic their load without even making a guess, so we can say your costs will be exactly ‘X’ because we drew the data from your network. Clients now receive more value than they ever imagined, by simply leveraging a couple of products and some intelligence in the analysis of it.” Armed with this data, clients are better positioned to move from assessment into design and migration mode. Paired with the right cloud platform design, Pomeroy’s cloud assessment provides an equitable, prescriptive, and costeffective roadmap to the cloud—whether private, public, or hybrid. “If you tried to figure it out for yourself, on top of all the other issues that you deal with on a daily basis, you’d have to put together a team with knowledge of the space and the providers,” says Vandegriff.
About the author Stephen Vandegriff is Pomeroy’s practice director for cloud, data center, and enterprise networking, responsible for development and delivery of program services, market strategies, sales enablement initiatives, and quality solutions within these critical practices. Prior to joining Pomeroy, he was executive vice president of DPSciences, a Midwest technology integrator. About Pomeroy Pomeroy provides high-quality IT infrastructure services from its locations throughout the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Western Europe. Its portfolio of managed services includes: End User Services, including service desk, hardware and software support, asset management, print management, and enterprise mobility; Network Services, including network monitoring and management, network operations and optimization, communications and collaboration, and telecom expense management; and Data Center Services, including data center operations and optimization, server, storage, virtualization, and cloud hosting services. Pomeroy’s Staffing Services include technical experts for staff augmentation, contract staffing, and permanent placement. Pomeroy’s procurement and logistics services provide rapid hardware and software procurement, staging, configuration, and deployment, as well as depot/ repair and asset disposition and end-of-life services. A recognized leader in the End User Services markets, Pomeroy’s ITIL-certified professionals employ a process-centric approach to working with clients—either remotely or on premise—to assess, plan, design, build, test, implement, manage, and ultimately optimize each client’s IT infrastructure, leading to the creation of tangible business value and return on their IT investments.
“At the end of the day, an assessment like this is a low-cost, high-value proposition.”
More information about Pomeroy and its cloud services is available at www.pomeroy.com.
Copyright © 2015, Pomeroy. Copyright © 2015, Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
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