Adaptivity at Cloud Expo

Here are the 11 key components that enable IT organizations to operationalize an enterprise cloud:

1. ECONOMIC MODEL

Define the business and IT linkage of demand and supply. Orient the analysis and model creations around the interactive dynamics of consumption of IT resources by the business and the fulfillment behavior of processing by IT. This needs to be correlated with the value-chain function and the corresponding products or services, differentiated by business type (liquidity, risk transference, advice), business importance (margin, labor, flow) and cost to transact.

2. DEMAND MAPPING

In natural language terms, define and capture the “day in the life of the business” — what it expects and where there are problems. Be sure to understand sensitivities to cost, bottlenecks and timing constraints — in particular, the quality attributes and operational requirements of the business in terms of calendar events, demographics and competitive benchmarks across the straight-throughprocessing (STP) value chain.

3. CONSUMPTION MANAGEMENT

Instrument and capture objective factual data on which users, accessing which applications, consume which server, network, application and storage resources and for how long. In particular, ensure that end-to-end delivery is correlated against consumption measures of latency, availability, throughput, data aggregation and persistence, disk swapping, memory volatility and coherence, compute time, event size, and I/O time.

4. BUSINESS POLICY AND IT SECURITY ENFORCEMENT

Ensure comprehensive, real-time business and security policy enforcement in bare-metal-speed time frames. The ability to implement point-of policy enforcement and administration that serves both business agility requirements with guaranteed, nonrepudiated transactions and secure data delivery creates a competitive advantage and significant efficiencies compared to traditional, regulatory-driven entitlement strategies.

5. DYNAMIC RUN-TIME ORCHESTRATION MANAGEMENT

Run-time control and execution enforcement means ensuring that the right work gets done at the right time with the right resources. Business operates dynamically in real time; your infrastructure needs to, as well. Think of infrastructure as a composition of service delivery units that can be consumed in a variable manner: on-demand consumption and on-demand reconfiguration.

6. CUSTOMIZABLE INFRASTRUCTURE FOOTPRINTS

As it executes across the digital supply chain, the trade life cycle experiences fluctuating volumes, frequency and workload types. Firms have to tailor the infrastructure service footprint to an ensemble of components and capabilities that can ensure optimal service delivery and efficiency for variable processing requirements in areas, including commerce, knowledge management and business operations.

7. UNIFIED FABRIC This eliminates the design limitations of relevant systems that are not connected in a way that provides the best performance and least amount of infrastructure. The unified fabric combines integrated infrastructure service footprints that encapsulate compute, memory, disk, I/O, storage and various processing appliances into a single footprint while incorporating quality of service, content acceleration, switching, routing and load balancing as needed. This drives speed, scale and cost efficiencies.

8. VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT

Enable policy- and event-driven, bare-metal provisioning of infrastructure services that supplement dynamic peak transaction loads and near real-time provisioning of additional capacity on demand.

9. IMPLEMENT VIRTUAL RESOURCES

Once run-time management, resource management and instrumentation are in place, only then do you implement “everything virtual.” This is a critical lesson that traps most organizations where they start — bottom-up — without the ability to manage and ensure business alignment.

10. PRODUCT AND PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

Coalescing business and technical priorities in continuous capability adoption will ensure sustainment and differentiation of your business through IT.

11. SERVICE AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Dynamic models of operation require processes and procedures of service,