To the cloud we go. At Nemertes Research, we just completed our 2011 enterprise IT benchmark study, and we find very high interest in private clouds. In fact, 35 percent of the 240 organizations participating in the benchmark will have a private cloud within the next two years.

Nevertheless, as businesses embark on the road to virtualization and cloud environments, an unexpected speed bump is appearing: the issue of self-provisioning.

When analysts talk about private clouds, we assume everyone is on the same page: A cloud is a metered, multitenant, accessible, elastic and self-provisioned service offering. Right? Well, maybe. Most enterprise IT professionals agree with these characteristics, though many say they have a private cloud even without some of these fundamentals. The factor that they most resist is automated self-provisioning.

Despite the fact that most respondents with private clouds indicate they will eventually offer self-provisioning, some pushback remains. Why? The biggest reason expressed by nearly half (48.5%) of organizations is sprawl — or the self-provisioning of virtual machines and storage that never spin down, even long after they are no longer in use.

Sprawling Concerns

The positive side of sprawl is that it demonstrates the ease with which system operators can allocate servers and storage in seconds with just a few mouse clicks. It’s also the bane of many a virtual infrastructure because it eats storage and CPU resources and ties up network resources; basically dead weight. “Our challenge is managing waste and service sprawl. It's tough enough when you have a highly skilled team managing it today,” says the CIO of a small publishing organization. But he fears that moving to a self-service portal environment "will make sprawl management really tough. Blowing through 200 terabytes in the first week would be a problem.”

What it comes down to for many operations staff is balancing full automation with human involvement to better manage sprawl and retain good processes. It occurs to me that the arguments against cloud provisioning could be just another example — like social media and consumer technologies — of IT having trouble giving up control of business services. Perhaps there are some similarities, but I believe that cloud self-provisioning concerns can be easily addressed with better collaboration and governance.

System operators who want to remain in the workflow aren’t only protecting their egos; the reality is that IT is ultimately responsible for the infrastructure, which IT’s customers — both development teams and business units — are provisioning. Some IT professionals are very concerned about unnecessary self-provisioned systems that may boost costs and waste resources (more justification for charge-back, however). For others, it’s simpler: “dealing with insufficient competence on staff outside of IT,” says the CTO of a state government organization . And, for still others it is the legitimate concern of losing touch with the customer.

Governance, Processes Needed

What’s really critical, therefore, are proper policies and procedures for managing the costs associated with self-provisioning. In organizations where business units have development teams, there’s already a process for requesting compute and associated storage resources. There’s no reason that once self-provisioning is implemented, governance should go missing. “We want to do it more generally, but we have to have rational constraints, some kind of background business processes,” says the CTO of a large higher education institution about self-provisioning options.

Ultimately, it’s important to separate the technology of self-provisioning from the process of self-provisioning. Self-service portals, tools and service catalogs are available today. Needed now are processes and procedures that deal with self-provisioning to make it effective, efficient and flexible enough for both IT and the business units to meet customer needs. That’s when the speed bump will no longer prevent a smooth ride to the cloud.

Share you experiences with me and your peers. Add a comment.

What’s on the horizon in terms of useful new networking technologies? A lot, according to a panel of IT vendors at an Interop session Oct. 21 entitled, “Breakthrough Networking Technologies.”

Panelists at the New York conference discussed emerging technologies that can help organizations as they move further into virtualization and cloud computing environments.

Here are a few of the examples mentioned, and the potential benefits:

Network virtualization. This is the process of combining hardware and software network resources and functionality into one, software-based entity. Among the possible benefits are increased agility, improved network efficiency and reduced capital and operational budget expenditures.

Application awareness. This is a way to use deep packet inspection to examine the payload on enterprise networks via signature detection and other  methods. It can help address issues such as increased bottlenecks in network traffic.

Route analytics. This emerging network monitoring technology was developed to analyze the routing protocols and structures in meshed IP networks. It involves passively examining the Layer 3 routing protocol exchanges between routers for network mapping, monitoring and diagnostics. It can help organizations reduce complexity and improve management of networks.

By Robin Bloor

It’s difficult for a CIO today not to be considering a cloud-related strategy. Over the past three years, these hosted services have acquired marketing sparkle and every IT vendor worth its socks has developed offerings.

For large enterprises, two things have become clear: First, Google, Yahoo and other Web-based businesses with very large data centers have demonstrated economies of scale by pointing thousands of servers at a single application. Second, and more important, Amazon has established a thriving and fast-growing business by providing storage and virtual machines on an hourly rental basis.

These two developments have proven that cloud computing has legs, although it is still evolving today. The critical question for the CIO, however, is what to say when the CEO asks, “What are we doing about cloud computing?”

My answer is that the primary motivation for moving systems into the cloud is to reduce costs: staff costs, establishment costs, energy costs and hardware costs. The cloud will not significantly improve the key business processes of your organization, though it will help you develop applications more quickly.

Currently, the major infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) options deliver only Intel-based resources running Windows or Linux. And sadly, only about half of all data center applications run on these operating systems. Even with the best intentions, you won’t be moving the other 50 percent to the cloud anytime soon. And some of the Windows or Linux applications aren’t really candidates for IaaS in any case. Anyone using Microsoft Exchange in-house, for example, might move to a hosted service. Call it cloud computing if you like, but in truth that’s business as usual.

Hosted e-mail systems existed long before cloud computing, as did hosted Web sites and other software-as-a-service alternatives to data center applications.

Low-Hanging Fruit
My advice to large organizations, then, is to begin with the low-hanging fruit. But, as for other applications, prove that you can run them in a private cloud first before you turn to an Internet-hosted cloud model. Management will be the key: resource management, application management, performance management, service management and recovery management. A good rule of thumb: If you can’t make it work in your own data center, it’s not going to work in the cloud.

Consider software development in all its aspects. Many companies already supplement this activity with cloud resources because development software is portable and there are obvious benefits. For example, developers no longer have to negotiate with data center staff to get extra resources. It can take days or weeks for a data center to make an extra server available, but in the cloud, you can get one in minutes, pay for it by the hour, and scrap it when it’s no longer needed.

When you look at operational systems, however, you run into more complexity. It’s true that some stand-alone systems can evaporate into the cloud with few consequences, but only if your cloud service provides a management interface and is secure. Most applications are not stand-alone; they have dependencies, and dependencies are not cloud-friendly because they don’t port very well.

The Role of Virtualization
Virtualization, therefore, is the litmus test and should precede any broad adoption of cloud computing. You may also call this server consolidation, or server virtualization. Some view it as creating a private, or internal, cloud.

Yet, virtualization has its own complexities. Anecdotal feedback from large sites that have pursued virtualization projects suggests that diminishing returns nearly always set in once software development and stand-alone systems have been virtualized. Eventually, a point is met where the payoff falls below zero, as management costs escalate and managing the set of virtualized resources becomes increasingly difficult.

All of this must be considered before implementing cloud computing.

[Robin Bloor is President and Chief Analyst, The Bloor Group, and founder, Bloor Research. He is also co-author of the books, Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies, Service Management for Dummies, and Cloud Computing for Dummies. Read his blog here.]

Robin is also a member of Smart Enterprise Exchange and will reply to your comments here.