AN INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD COMPUTING

A Stratospheric eBook

by Hilton Rosenfeld

http://stratospheric.com.au

Copyright (c) 2013 by Stratospheric Pty Limited

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owners trademark. The information in this book is distributed on an as is basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

Hilton Rosenfeld Chief Executive Officer Stratospheric hilton@stratospheric.com .au +61 488 267 388 www.stratospheric.com .au

Ordering Information: Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above. Printed in Australia First Edition 14 13 12 11 10 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 4 W HY CLOUD ....................................................................................................... 5 W HAT BENEFITS W ILL CLOUD PROVIDE ............................................................... 7 W HAT IS CLOUD ................................................................................................. 9 THE STRATOSPHERIC 5 FEATURES OF CLOUD .......................................................................................... 10 THE FOUR PRIM ARY CLOUD M ODELS ................................................................ 14 PUBLIC CLOUD ..................................................................................................................................... 14 PRIVATE CLOUD ................................................................................................................................... 15 HYBRID CLOUD .................................................................................................................................... 15 COMMUNITY CLOUD.............................................................................................................................. 15 CLOUD SERVICE MODELS ................................................................................. 17 PHYSICAL HARDWARE ........................................................................................................................... 17 VIRTUALIZATION.................................................................................................................................... 18 INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS) ................................................................................................... 18 PLATFORM AS A SERVICE (PAAS) ........................................................................................................... 18 SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS) ........................................................................................................... 19 CLIENT LAYER ...................................................................................................................................... 20 W HAT RISKS DOES CLOUD ENTAIL .................................................................... 21 MAINTAINING AVAILABILITY AND BUSINESS FUNCTIONALITY ...................................................................... 22 PROTECTING DATA FROM UNAUTHORISED ACCESS BY A THIRD PARTY ........................................................ 22 PROTECTING DATA FROM UNAUTHORISED ACCESS BY THE VENDORS CUSTOMERS ..................................... 22 SAMPLE CLOUD SCENARIOS ............................................................................. 24 CLOUD ENABLE YOUR DATACENTER ........................................................................................................ 24 PRIVATE INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE ................................................................................................ 24 CLOUD BASED SERVICE MANAGEMENT ................................................................................................... 24 DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING CLOUD ...................................................................................................... 25 APPLICATION TRANSFORMATION............................................................................................................. 26 SOURCE PUBLIC CLOUD SERVICES - (NO OPS CLOUD) ............................................................................. 26 BUILD, OPERATE, AND HOST SERVICE PROVIDER CLOUD ........................................................................... 26 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 28 WHAT DID WE COVER ............................................................................................................................ 28 POINTS FOR CONSIDERATION ................................................................................................................. 28 W HERE TO NEXT .............................................................................................. 30

Introduction
Its no secret that everyone is talking about Cloud and its not just tech firms, and its not just CIOs or IT managers. More often than not key decision makers at all levels are taking a long hard look at how they can leverage the benefits of Cloud for their organisations. Some are talking about Cloud because of the potential of what Cloud can deliver, others talk about Cloud because everyone else is. Then there are those of us talking about Cloud because we understand what Cloud is and how your business can benefit from it. So what is this Cloud thing, why use it, what benefits can and will it provide, what risks does Cloud entail if you do or dont adopt or leverage it in some form? The purpose of this eBook is to share with you the Stratospheric understanding of Cloud, from both the conceptual and business perspectives. We will answer the questions posed above, and detail the types of Cloud technologies and how they will benefit your business. Cloud is the latest technology wave to break across the IT landscape. As with previous waves like mobile phones, virtualisation and automation, this new wave will follow the Rogers Adoption Curve that shows the rate of adoption for new technologies.

DIAGRAM: ROGERS ADOPTION CURVE

The question your organisation must ask itself is Where do you want to sit on the adoption curve, i.e. do you want to be a leader in the early adopters space, or a follower in the early or late majority or the mass market? Too many organisations let their legacy IT policies guide their Cloud adoption policy only to find their competitors have left them behind. Technology leaders are firmly grounded in the Early Adopters phase of each new wave of technology. Thats where Stratospheric is with Cloud and all that surrounds Cloud from strategy, planning, design, through to implementation and day to day operations and management. We are at the forefront of this technology wave, and were helping organisations of all shapes and sizes take advantage of Cloud to put them ahead of their competitors.

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

Why Cloud
In a sentence, Cloud can transform how your business consumes and manages IT Business Services, empowering you to operate Faster, Better, and Smarter. Businesses today expect more from IT. This expectation is much higher than ever as workers become aware of what is possible today just in the Cloud consumer market. Business users want the same capabilities in their workplace.

50% of business leaders say that their IT department is unable to respond to rapidly meet changes in demand.
SOURCE: HP INTERNAL RESEARCH

A six week time frame to spin up a single virtual server with the quagmire of change requests, firewall policies, approvals, funding requests, business cases et al when compared to a five minute process with a credit card on a public Cloud provider was to the average developer a no brainer. The consumption model for technology has changed so profoundly because of Cloud; businesses now expect to consume services, not technologies. For business, the challenge now is how to become more agile, cost effective, and responsive in their capability to satisfy this demand, while at the same time ensuring the highest levels of quality, security, and oversight. Businesses which are not able to make this transition are rapidly being left behind by their competitors who have already been able to achieve these outcomes to support their users. For IT, the challenge now is how to quickly develop the capability to satisfy an ever increasing demand for highly distributed applications, services and resources, while maintaining quality and oversight.

71% of CIOs would increase IT investment if it meant better time to market.

SOURCE: HP INTERNAL RESEARCH

Manual approaches and siloed management tools don't offer the flexibility and compliance required to meet this complexity. Cloud is designed to provide solutions to these challenges.

Why be FASTER, BETTER, SMARTER?

Demand for IT Business Services is growing exponentially. Not only in number, but also in variety. The ability to deliver on this growth is sometimes called Agility. Users are bypassing their organisations IT in favour of public Cloud Services, creating a high risk shadow IT. This is primarily due to in-house IT not being Agile enough to satisfy users.

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

Users are fed up with the slow response from their own internal IT organisations when they knew very well that Cloud Services would give them instant delivery of platforms for their use.

... Developers are bypassing IT and putting applications onto public Clouds at a rate 5x greater than IT thinks
SOURCE: ENTERPRISE & SMB SOFTWARE SURVEY, NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE, Q4 2008

Businesses now expect to consume services, not technologies. Traditionally, IT has been occupied with maintaining not only the Business Service software, but all layers of the compute environment underpinning this service. This has carried with it an immense burden of skills and cost. A world of new business opportunities is made possible by any organization that becomes involved with providing Cloud Services.

Just how much Faster and Better and Smarter do you need to be? Listed below are some sample statistics for social media sites. The only way these web scale volumes can be achieved is through the adoption of technology architectures made possible with Cloud. Every 60 seconds there are: 6,944,444 Facebook messages 347,222 tweets 3,472 Pinterest pins 38,194 Instagram Photos posted 23,148 apps downloaded 400,710 ads requested 208,333 minutes of Angry Birds played
SOURCE: www.jeffbullas.com

Australian Public Cloud market to hit $3.2 billion this year: Gartner predicts growth in excess of 23% for Cloud Services
SOURCE: GARTNER HTTP://WWW.COMPUTERWORLD.COM.AU/ARTICLE/455597/AUSTRALIAN_PUBLIC_CLOUD_MARKET_HIT_3_2_BILLION_YEAR_GAR
TNER

It may appear overly subtle to look at Cloud purely from a delivery versus consumer perspective, but IT departments who focus only on the delivery aspects will miss the boat altogether.

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

What Benefits will Cloud Provide

Cloud Services have brought about and enabled a paradigm shift to those businesses which adopt them. Some of these key enablers and benefits are: Cloud Services change how technology is consumed. They allow your business to make use of complex software platforms, without needing any expertise in managing or administering these platforms. The Cloud Service Provider will maintain the solution, which you consume through the network. Cloud Services remove current inhibitors & unleash power of innovation, allowing your business to pursue new business opportunities, such as trialling new ideas to reach and interact with customers over the Internet; Reducing upfront costs of capital expenditure of computer equipment and related expenses such as a physical data centre and support staff, while reducing the associated financial risk to the business by replacing upfront costs with reasonably predictable operational expenditure, and only paying for the amount of computing processing and data storage that is actually used;

By 2016, the analyst firm predicts that public cloud spending in Australia will reach US$5.2 billion
SOURCE: GARTNER HTTP://WWW.COMPUTERWORLD.COM.AU/ARTICLE/455597/AUSTRALIAN_PUBLIC_CLOUD_MARKET_HIT_3_2_BILLION_YEAR_GAR
TNER

Potentially reducing ongoing costs due to the use of infrastructure and technical specialists that are typically shared among many customers to achieve economies of scale Potentially improving business continuity and the availability of computing infrastructure, where the infrastructure can rapidly and flexibly scale to meet peaks and troughs in usage demand, and with the computing infrastructure typically located in multiple physical locations for improved disaster recovery; and, Potentially reducing carbon footprint due to the more efficient use of computer hardware requiring less electricity and less air conditioning. Cloud Services are delivered using smart automation. This changes the delivery times for new services from weeks, to minutes. Cloud Services allow your business to embrace a Bring Your Own Device or a Mobile Strategy. This is because the requirement for every PC being the same in order to run complex fat clients disappears with Cloud Services. Software Cloud Services are generally consumed through a web browser.

Cloud Services deliver a reduction in the cost of running IT. The table below shows the cost of IT as a percentage of revenue for various business verticals. Both Average and Best in Class figures are shown. How would the bottom line in your business benefit from becoming best in class rather than being average?

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

Cost of IT vs Revenue Financial Telecom High Tech M anufacturing Retail

Average (%) 6.30 5.25 4.00 2.00 2.00

Best in Class (%) 2.80 3.25 1.75 1.15 0.50

SOURCE: HP TECH AT WORK - CLOUD - DELIVER THE OUTCOMES HTTP://H20427.WWW2.HP.COM/CAMPAIGN/TECHATWORK/AU/EN/TAW11POST/PDF/3.%20CLOUD%20%20DELIVER%20THE%20OUTCOMES.PDF

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

What is Cloud
Ask five business leaders what their definition of Cloud is, and youll get five different answers. Some refer to Cloud as simple automated provisioning, while others define Cloud as Managed Services with a self-service portal. Cloud Computing is defined by the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) as:

A model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction

Ultimately what this means is that businesses just want easy access to rapid deployment of services. They want the right technology-enabled services that help them get their job done, and that help broaden their horizons into new opportunities. Many view Cloud simply as a new technology for service delivery. There are far more possibilities with Cloud. Equally important perspectives are what Cloud Services are and how they are consumed. The future will comprise a hybrid mix of services sourced both internal and externally. Others may source from any public Cloud Services that your business provides. This leads to questions such as: are your services ready to run, self-sourced, available anywhere, subscription-based, or pay as you go. IT has seen its role as the delivery and management of Technology based capabilities. IT is typically organized around the various technology domains, taking in new work via project requests and moving it through a plan-build-run lifecycle. This delivery-oriented, technology-centric approach to IT has inherent latency built into the model, which has, in turn, created an ever-increasing tension between itself and the business it serves. The enabler for businesses to that challenge is Cloud, as it enables business users to source services that meet their needs quickly, at the right price, supported by the appropriate service level, and without the help of an IT organization. Cloud has ushered in innovations and breakthroughs at a pace not seen before. Cloud has introduced new threats in existing markets for companies and opened new markets for others. We have witnessed Cloud become more of a business revolution than a technology evolution. At Stratospheric we believe that for a service to be a true Cloud Service, it should embody the Stratospheric Five Features of Cloud. These do not define types of Cloud Services, or the technologies of Cloud, but more importantly what Cloud Services should embody.

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

The Stratospheric 5 Features of Cloud

Stratospheric defines Cloud Services as having 5 primary features: Cloud Services are consumed via user Self Service Cloud Services employ Autom ated Delivery Cloud Services are billed on a Pay Per Use or Consumption basis Cloud Services are Elastic in nature Cloud Services are Network Accessible

Self Service
We live in a world of instant gratification, consumers of IT Business Services are no longer willing to be held to ransom by slow legacy IT procurement processes forced upon them. One way to improve user satisfaction, is to give the user more control.

Consumers want instant gratification on service requests

SOURCE: STRATOSPHERIC

Tools like Self Service catalogues give users the ability to request services from a pre-approved, online, app store style services catalogue, and to self-manage subscriptions and requests, without human interaction or delays between supplier and consumer. In effect, this shifts the GO button from IT departments to the consumer who desires or requires the service. Both the user and IT benefit from this. A well-known success story we use to demonstrate the success of just such a platform is that of the Google apps platform and the Apple iTunes platform. When you want to create a new Gmail account, you dont have to talk to anyone from Google, you simply self-serve using the Google apps portal. Its the same story with iTunes apps, movies & music. The catalogue is usually part of a web portal, which offers the user: A catalogue of available services A history of subscribed services and their status A list of current services and available management functions for each Role Based Access in order to allow each user to have their portal customised Financial reporting, statistics and data related to the cost of current services

Automated Delivery
Automation is nothing new. Administrators have been automating systems management using scripts for many years. Run-book automation has been used for almost a decade. A run-book is akin to a detailed step by step checklist, or an end to end process. Modern automation and orchestration platforms take this to the next level by incorporating out of the box support for many Cloud Service APIs, operating systems and applications. More Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L 10

advanced features would include drag-and-drop graphical development with zero coding, ROI reporting in terms of labor effort saved, and self-documentation of automated processes. Businesses of all sizes are increasingly turning to automation to reduce labor costs, improve service quality, and accelerate technology efficiency. Automation is no longer just the domain of the early adopters. Businesses around the world and in a wide variety of industries are reaping benefits that range from improved quality to reduced risk to improved efficiencies across routine tasks such as server patching, provisioning, and application release management and compliance management. Automation has the advantages of speed and accuracy. Automation is capable of provisioning all aspects of IT services. Administrators create any automated workflows needed, which in effect acts as a solution to the problem of tribal knowledge. Here is a screenshot from our preferred automation platform at Stratospheric. This is actually taken from the process development environment. Each icon is both a visual marker for the task, and a widget that holds the code for executing the task.

DIAGRAM: AUTOMATION PROCESS DIAGRAM

Many aspects of Cloud Services depend on automation. We have already talked about Instant gratification and speed of delivery. Automation allows the volume of service requests to grow without having to employ more delivery staff. Automation ensures that processes are followed exactly as designed, every time. For these reasons, automated delivery for Cloud Services makes all the difference. IT benefits from knowing that services are being provisioned according to processes that they have designed. This delivers a high level of governance. Users benefit through instant gratification of their requests. The business benefits through customer satisfaction. When a request is made in the self-service catalogue, automation is triggered to provision the service. Any further management requests are also triggers to automation. An important aspect of a well-managed Cloud Service, is that it has an automated lifecycle. The lifecycle of a service includes reservation, provisioning, in service modifications, de-provisioning, and de-allocating. Each of these lifecycle stages of the business service should be automated.

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DIAGRAM: SERVICE LIFECYCLE

In our Google email and app example, unless we imagine there being a room full of cheap labor fulfilling requests for Google email or app services, fulfilment is actually carried out using automation. Manual delivery simply would not scale, either in speed or cost, is fraught with latency and errors, and is dependent on the skill set of each administrator.

Pay per use

As Cloud Services are considered subscriptions, we are able to charge for them in a pay-per-use model. This is sometimes referred to as a utility model. Simply put, while you are using any given service you are paying, and when you stop using the service, you stop paying. This is analogous to household use of utilities such as electricity, gas or water.

... Why do we have to pay $10k/year for a server instance and wait 2 weeks for delivery when we could use a public Cloud Resource and have it straight away and pay 9c per hour? ...
SOURCE: HP TECH AT WORK - CLOUD - DELIVER THE OUTCOMES HTTP://H20427.WWW2.HP.COM/CAMPAIGN/TECHATWORK/AU/EN/TAW11POST/PDF/3.%20CLOUD%20%20DELIVER%20THE%20OUTCOMES.PDF

In our Google email example, you pay for each mailbox that you create & subscribe to. This may be 50 mailboxes one day, and 40 the next, which saves you paying for 10 unused mailboxes. Another example might be a Business Service whose demand for resources follows the working day - maximum use between 10am and 4pm with little to no use after hours. Such a service would benefit by allocating extra resources during working hours, and paying for these resources only for the 6 hours per day during which they are used.

Elastic
Anticipating the demand for business services or how the services will be used can be difficult. Cloud Services are able to scale up and scale down. As a result of automation being involved in the provisioning of Cloud Services, we are able to quickly provision additional resources on demand, or conversely to de-provision either due to a consumer request or reduced demand.

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

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When combined with effective service monitoring, a Cloud Service is actually able to automatically scale up or down in response to demand. In our Google email example, mailboxes are dynamically allocated and de-allocated as required, through a simple to use consumer friendly web portal, without delay. Another example we use is that of a Business Service whose demand for resources follows the working day, or follow the sun as its often referred to - with usage between 10am and 4pm, peaking at 10am and 1pm, with little to no use after hours. Such a service would benefit from being elastic, adding and removing resources automatically as demand rises and falls.

Network Accessible
Of course a Cloud service is no use to anyone unless it is accessible to users. Access is provided using the most common of all network protocols - World Wide Web. In other words, the Cloud web-portal should be a web site accessed using a normal internet browser. As another example of the five Stratospheric key features to Cloud, consider a developer that requires a sandbox server. Before Cloud, she would have to submit a Request for Service via the service desk. This request would then need approval for the capital expenditure on a new server, physical or virtual. The request would then pass to IT, where server, storage, network, security and more teams would be involved. IT would then finally build the server and install an OS. Total time to deliver this server, with all the inherent latency of the process, has proven to be on average around two to six weeks. Compare the process above to using a Cloud Infrastructure as a Service offering. The developer would login to a catalogue of available server offerings, select the appropriate offering and possibly select any add ons. The server will be ready for use within minutes. Let's not forget the financial model. In the scenario before Cloud, the new server would be a Capital Expense. In a Cloud scenario, the developer is subscribing to a service, so the expense is an Operating Expense, as a subscription. When the developer is finished with the server, the subscription can be cancelled and payment stops.

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Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

The Four Primary Cloud Models

While the term Cloud refers in general to the delivery of services on demand over a computer network, the USA National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) defines four different Cloud deployment models; Community Cloud Public Cloud Private Cloud Hybrid Cloud

DIAGRAM X: SHOWS THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PUBLIC, PRIVATE, COMMUNITY AND HYBRID CLOUD.

Public Cloud
Public Cloud involves an organisation using a vendors Cloud infrastructure which is shared via the Internet with many other organisations and other members of the public. This model has maximum potential cost efficiencies due to economies of scale. However, this model has a variety of inherent security risks that need to be considered. This is the deployment model that most commonly described as Cloud. In this model, all of the physical resources are owned and operated by a third party Cloud provider.

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

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Private Cloud
Private Cloud involves an organisations exclusive use of Cloud infrastructure and services located at the organisations premises or off site, and managed by the organisation or a vendor. Compared to the public Cloud model, the private Cloud model has reduced potential cost efficiencies If the private Cloud is properly implemented and operated, it has reduced potential security concerns. A well architected private Cloud properly managed by a vendor provides many of the benefits of a public Cloud, but with increased control over security. A managed private Cloud may enable enterprise customers to more easily negotiate suitable contracts with the vendor, instead of being forced to accept the generic contracts designed for the consumer mass market that are offered by some public Cloud vendors. Instead of using a dedicated infrastructure for each user, a private Cloud allows an organization to virtualize its infrastructure and offer infrastructure provisioning and application deployment as a service, reducing service delivery time from months to minutes. Private Clouds are often used to deliver infrastructure and applications services for test, development and production environments.

Hybrid Cloud
Enterprises use hybrid Clouds to deliver a broad catalog of services across private and public Cloud environments with a single user experience. This unified approach results in a simplified provisioning experience, a streamlined ordering process, and a reduction in overall IT management costs. Hybrid Cloud involves a combination of Cloud models. An example is using commodity resources from a public Cloud such as web servers to display non-sensitive data, which interacts with sensitive data stored or processed in a private Cloud. A company may use internal resources in a private Cloud maintain total control over its proprietary data. It can then use a public Cloud storage provider for backing up less sensitive information. At the same time, it might share computing resources with other organizations that have similar needs. By combining the advantages of the other models, the hybrid model offers organizations the most flexibility.

Community Cloud
Community Cloud involves a private Cloud that is shared by several organisations with similar security requirements and a need to store or process data of similar sensitivity. 15 Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

This model attempts to obtain most of the security benefits of a private Cloud, and most of the economic benefits of a public Cloud. One example community Cloud is the sharing of a private Cloud by several agencies of the same government.

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

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Cloud Service Models

To understand what Cloud is, you need to understand the service layers that comprise Cloud. Each layer of the Cloud model exists conceptually on the foundation of the previous layers. ! Software as a Service ! Platform as a Service ! Infrastructure as a Service ! Virtualisation ! Physical Hardware The Cloud model is made up of three core different foundation service models which are used to specify what is being provisioned, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Additionally, there are three further layers in the Cloud model which are not provided as user services. The Hardware Layer and the Virtualization Layer are owned and operated by the Cloud Services provider, while the Client Layer is supplied by the end user.

DIAGRAM X: SHOWS THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TYPES OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE.

Physical hardware
Underpinning all Cloud platforms is the hardware layer, sometimes referred to as the server layer. The hardware layer represents the physical server hardware which provides actual resources that make up the Cloud, the CPUs, Memory, Storage & Network. By definition and design Cloud users do not specify the hardware used to provide services, this is the least important layer of the Cloud, and is usually built on low cost commodity off the shelf hardware (COTS) rather than top end brand name systems. Often, hardware resources are inexpensive and not fault tolerant. Redundancy is achieved simply by utilizing multiple hardware platforms while fault tolerance is provided at other layers so that any hardware failure is not noticed by the users. Cloud offers redundancy by design.

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Virtualization
Often referred to as the infrastructure layer, the virtualization layer is the result of various hypervisors such as VMware, Hyper-V, Xen and KVM, and operating systems which are installed as virtual machines on top of one or more hypervisors. Much of the scalability and flexibility of the Cloud model is derived by the inherent ability of virtual machines to be created and deleted at will and or on demand.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The infrastructure layer builds on the virtualization layer by offering the virtual machines as a service to users. Instead of purchasing servers or even hosted services, IaaS customers can create and remove virtual machines and network them together at will. Clients are billed for infrastructure services based on what resources are consumed. This eliminates the need to procure and operate physical servers, data storage systems, or networking resources. Examples of leading IaaS services providers include the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, HP Cloud, IBM SoftLayer Cloud Services and Rackspace Cloud compute and storage services.

Advantages of IaaS
When an organization purchases IaaS from a provider there are many advantages. There is no need for them to purchase hardware, operating system licenses, or networking equipment. Their entire data center is outsourced and nearly all of the operation and maintenance requirements are built into the cost of the service. Organizations also look to achieve cost savings through massive efficiencies of scale. Additionally, they stand to gain flexibility, scalability and reliability that would be impossible if they were to provide their own infrastructure since additional virtual machines are created on demand and removed just as easily.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

The platform layer rests on the infrastructure layers virtual machines. At this layer customers do not manage their virtual machines, they merely create applications within an existing API, framework, or programing language. There is no need to manage an operating system, let alone the underlying hardware and virtualization layers. Clients merely create their own programs which are hosted by the platform services they are paying for.

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This is accomplished by presenting clients with a program language or an Application Programing Interface (API) rather than one or more virtual machines. With PaaS, the development tools themselves are hosted in the Cloud and are accessed via a web browser. The result is that fewer technical resources are required in order to develop and deploy Cloud hosted applications. At the same time, PaaS clients still retain greater opportunities to customize their applications than permitted by customers of Software as a Service (SaaS). Example PaaS vendor services include Google App Engine, Force.com, Amazon Web Services Elastic Beanstalk, and the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.

Advantages of PaaS
Unlike traditional software development efforts, PaaS clients do not need a staff to install, optimize, or maintain either the hardware or the virtual machine environments. They can choose the type of platform that best suits their needs and immediately begin creating applications that can be hosted on the Cloud as soon as they are complete. With simplified development tools, a developer in the PaaS environment does not need the extensive skill set that a traditional web based application developer requires. Like other Cloud Services, developing and deploying applications utilizing the PaaS model requires little or no up-front investment. Billing is performed on a pay as you go basis.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Services at the software level consist of complete applications that do not require development. Such applications can be email, customer relationship management, accounting, and other office productivity applications. Enterprise services can be billed monthly or by usage, while software as service offered directly to consumers, such as email, is often provided for free. Today, many people use freely available web based email and productivity software without even realizing they are SaaS customers. Even the voicemail service provided by your phone company is essentially a SaaS alternative to owning and operating a conventional answering machine. While Infrastructure as a Service offers core services in the form of virtual machines, and Platform as a Service provides an interface for programming applications, SaaS takes the concept a step further by delivering complete applications. End users own and operate their client interface devices as the final service level. These devices can be small footprint software installations, web browsers, or mobile devices. As is the case with voicemail, even a telephone can act as the client layer for Software as a Service. Example SaaS vendor services include Salesforce.com Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Google Docs and Google Gmail. Microsoft Office 365 consists of Microsoft Office Web Apps, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Lync.

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Advantages of SaaS
As with other Cloud models, with SaaS there is no requirement for hardware acquisition, installation, or maintenance. SaaS clients do not need to utilize any systems administration or development resources either. While SaaS clients may be able select various software options, its defining characteristic is that software development is not needed before an application is deployed to end users. Most services are sold with a monthly or annual fee per user such that the costs are less than enterprise application licensing. SaaS clients value the instant scalability of SaaS as well as the ease of collaboration common to Cloud hosted applications.

Client Layer
While this layer is not a Cloud service, it is an essential part of the model. The client layer acts as the user interface to which Cloud Services are delivered. Client layer hardware can include personal computers, web browsers, mobile devices, and even telephones. One of the beauties of the Cloud model is the simplicity with which they are presented to the end users.

Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

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What Risks does Cloud Entail

There is a lot of talk about risk in Cloud Services. It is important to understand that any new technology has risk. Until the technology matures, and the risks are ironed out, there will be naysayers who, for reasons of their own, decry new technology as uncertain and unsafe. Of course as use of new technology increases, the risks are identified and mitigated. Organizations need to consider elements of risk and ensure they dont outweigh the benefits of Cloud Services. If you are going to turn critical data or infrastructure over to a Cloud Service Provider, you need to make sure that the information is secure.

A big risk topic, is legal. Especially, about how do you get your data back? Transitioning from one cloud provider to another, for example.
HTTP://WWW.FINANCE.GOV.AU/FILES/2012/02/CLOUD-LEGAL-BETTER-PRACTICE-GUIDE-FINAL.DOC HTTP://WWW.SCOTTANDSCOTTLLP.COM/MAIN/UPLOADEDFILES/RESOURCES/ARTICLES/SCOTTCHAPTER.PDF

Compliance requirements, set by organizations or by an industry or government body, may prohibit the use of Cloud Services. You will need to gauge the security risks and requirements and these may vary by service.

The Risks of Cloud from a survey of CIOs

75% say Cloud data SECURITY is a major concern 60% concerned about VENDOR LOCK IN 60% worried about Cloud PERFORMANCE AND AVAILABILITY 45% concerned about integrating internal and external services

SOURCE: IDC, ENTERPRISE PANEL SURVEY, NOVEMBER 2010

A risk management process must be used to balance the benefits of Cloud with the security risks associated with your business handing over control to a Cloud Vendor. A risk assessment should consider whether your business is willing to trust your reputation, business continuity, and data management to a 3rd party vendor that may transmit, store and process your data in ways or means which do not fit with your corporate policies or industry governance requirements. For example Payment Card Infrastructure (PCI) for your eftPOS. The contract between a vendor and their customer must address mitigations to governance and security risks, and cover who has access to the customers data and the security measures used to protect the customers data. Vendors responses to important security considerations must be captured in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or other contract, otherwise the customer only has vendor promises and marketing claims that can be hard to verify and may be unenforceable. Here are some of the more common mission critical risks to consider. 21 Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L

Maintaining Availability and Business Functionality

Business criticality of data or functionality Vendors business continuity and disaster recovery plan Your data backup plan Your business continuity and disaster recovery plan Your network connectivity to the Cloud Vendors guarantee of availability Impact of outages SLA inclusion of scheduled outages SLA compensation Data integrity and availability Data restoration Scalability Changing vendor / Vendor Lock-in

Protecting Data from Unauthorised Access by a Third Party

Choice of Cloud deployment model Sensitivity of my data Legislative obligations Countries with access to my data Data encryption technologies Media sanitisation Vendors remote monitoring and management Your monitoring and management Data ownership Gateway technologies Gateway certification Email content filtering Policies and processes supporting the vendors IT security posture Technologies supporting the vendors IT security posture Auditing the vendors IT security posture User authentication Centralised control of data Vendors physical security posture Software and hardware procurement.

Protecting Data from Unauthorised Access by the Vendors Customers

Customer segregation Weakening my security posture Dedicated servers Media sanitisation

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Protecting Data from Unauthorised Access by Rogue Vendor Employees

Data encryption key management Vetting of vendors employees Auditing vendors employees Visitors to data centre Physical tampering by vendors employees Vendors subcontractors

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Sample Cloud Scenarios

Cloud Enable your Datacenter
This is excellent if you want your own dedicated, virtual environments. You can Self-service provision through the use of service offerings that provide standard IT configurations. Templates can include detailed server, storage, and network requirements for simple or complex infrastructure needs. IDC has found that it is possible to achieve 96 percent ROI over five years on such a solution. These gains are achieved while improving cash flow and accelerating time to market for new service offerings.

Private Infrastructure as a Service

In this case the actual physical resources would be hosted in your own datacenter. You would also need to select a hypervisor for virtualisation.

DIAGRAM X: SHOWS USERS SUBSCRIBING TO PRIVATE INFRASTRUCTURE THROUGH A SELF-SERVICE CATALOGUE.

Cloud based Service Management

Consider an alternative to your current Service Management processes. By Cloud enabling these services, you could move to a more efficient, self-service model. For example,, the help desk would benefit here. Users could self-serve request changes and Cloud would automate the fulfillment of these requests. Common examples are mounting shared drives, moves/add/changes to email, and password resets.

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DIAGRAM X: SHOWS USERS SUBSCRIBING TO PRIVATE SOFTWARE THROUGH A SELF-SERVICE CATALOGUE.

Development and Testing Cloud

Developers and testers can benefit from Cloud Services too. A common scenario for developers is the need for a sandbox environment. Rather than having your developers source public Cloud servers, provide your own private Infrastructure as a service offerings. Testers require the deployment of applications for testing purposes. Sometimes this can involve different operating systems, databases, application versions and data. Cloud would allow the tester to self-service provision a complete end to end environment which would be ready in minutes. The benefit is a great increase in the test cycle rate. Both would be far more efficient if Cloud enabled. And both could be source in a private, public or hybrid model.

DIAGRAM X: SHOWS DEVELOPERS SUBSCRIBING TO HYBRID INFRASTRUCTURE THROUGH A SELF-SERVICE CATALOGUE.

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Application Transformation
Amongst the benefits we have covered, are the ways in which as a service offerings can benefit applications, from the Infrastructure, the Platform and all the way through to a Cloud Sourced Application as a Service. Many options exist as you transform your existing apps and deploy new apps. Existing apps could be migrated to PaaS offerings. This would alleviate the need to maintain everything except the application itself. Legacy apps can be redeveloped to be Cloud enabled. Or even better, they can be replaced with SaaS offerings. Existing apps can be integrated with Cloud offerings to provide greater functionality in an easier to maintain method. This becomes similar to SOA models whereby little services are sourced independently and combined within the app itself.

Source Public Cloud Services - (No Ops Cloud)

One company we like to talk about is Freelance.com. Freelancer.com is the world's largest freelancing, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing marketplace for small business. They have over 10 million users, and have no physical infrastructure of their own! Instead of a datacenter, they use Cloud Services to host everything. This is a No Ops Cloud. Not every business is ready to go No Ops, but there are places to start. Moving your storage to the Cloud for backup and archive is a great start.

DIAGRAM X: SHOWS USERS SUBSCRIBING TO PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE THROUGH A SELF-SERVICE CATALOGUE.

Build, operate, and host Service Provider Cloud

If you are a service provider, then consider adding the letters CSP to your titles. CSP stands for Cloud Service Provider. Become the provider of Cloud for your customers. You can own your own resources, acquiring the Hardware and Software, integrating and aggregating your service offerings for others to consume. Copyright 2014 Stratospheric P/L 26

Or you could white label and resell public Cloud Services to your customers.

DIAGRAM X: SHOWS CUSTOMERS SUBSCRIBING TO YOUR HYBRID SERVICES THROUGH A SELF-SERVICE CATALOGUE.

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Conclusion
Everywhere you turn these days, someone is talking about Cloud, and with good reason. The Cloud represents a paradigm shift in computing - one that enables highly scalable applications and services to be delivered on demand - making your life and work faster, better and simpler.

What did we cover

By now you should have a good understanding of Cloud. Although we have not delved into the technical depths of how Cloud Services are delivered, it is more important at this stage to understand the business benefits of Cloud. This eBook will empower you to articulate what Cloud is. An easy way to remember is by the numbers.

FIVE - Stratospheric Features of Cloud

Self-Service Automated Delivery Pay Per Use Elastic Network Accessible

FOUR - Primary Cloud Models

Community Cloud Public Cloud Private Cloud Hybrid Cloud

THREE - Cloud Service Models

Infrastructure as a Service Platform as a Service Software as a Service

Points for Consideration

When the time comes for you to embark on your journey to Cloud Services, there are many points that should be considered. Stratospherics business goals are to make our customers operate Faster, Better and Smarter. We break down many of the points to be considered by using these business goals.

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As part of any consulting or strategic engagement, Stratospheric will use these points as a guideline of what to consider in order for you to enjoy a smooth transition. Put simply, we will work with you to ensure we understand at least all of the points below in relation to your business.

Operate Faster
Open & Accessible Push button deployment Instant access Faster time to market Cloud Service Lifecycle Management Catalogues Multi-platform ( VMware / OpenStack / XenServer ) Windows / Linux

Operate Better
Governance Policies Compliance Security Controls Service Level Agreements Private Cloud Hybrid Cloud Public Cloud

Operate Smarter
Measure Reporting Alerting Response Analyse Continuous improvement Planning & Capacity Cost Management

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Where to next
After you have decided on the role you want Cloud to play in your organization, Stratospheric can support you in your efforts to create actionable next steps and execute them. Whether you decide to build a detailed roadmap or start your implementation right away for testing your first private Cloud Service, we can help. No matter where you are on your path to Cloud, it is important to set a strategy of where you want to go. You may be virtualised, but not yet automated. You may be virtualised and automated, but not yet empowered with Cloud Services. Stratospheric will work with you to answer a lot of your questions, including: Which Cloud products are right for me? What's the best option: Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud? How do I manage my Cloud? What about all the investments in operations we've made over the last few years?

Our enterprise-grade Cloud management will help your IT departments increase agility, simplify operations and enhance business across your hybrid Cloud. In addition can give you an understanding of: Why a flexible architecture matters to you How to simplify your day-to-day operations How to stage your applications, platform and infrastructure service seamlessly for hybrid Cloud Importance of advanced operations management tools, such as end-to-end performance management and Cloud security

Lets continue the conversation

We would like very much to hear from you today, to learn how we can help you with your Cloud strategy, existing or new projects. To contact Stratospheric, email us at the email address below and visit our website to learn more about us. Email: Website: info@stratospheric.com.au http://www.stratospheric.com.au

Please ensure you provide your full name, company name, and your preferred contact phone numbers (i.e. desk & mobile) to ensure we are able to contact you. We look forward to learning more about your plans for Cloud and how Stratospheric can help you realize your desired outcomes.

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