Remember the story of Sniff and Scurry and Hem and Haw? These four characters lived in a maze which represented their "environment" and their task was to search for cheese (representing happiness and success).
Now fast forward to the year 2016. We live in a different maze now surrounded by physical servers and super-fast storage and our task is to search for a different kind of cheese (representing the happiness of our end-users).
Our old cheese was found in freezing cold server rooms with biometric scanners and blood-thirsty guard dogs by the door. Nobody really knew what was happening behind those doors, did they? But here in the year 2016, we see new and much more different types of cheeses available. They come in a variety of flavors that you've surely heard about.
Cheese #1 - Saas
This cheese is called Software as a Service. It represents cloud application services that use the internet to deliver applications managed by a third-party vendor. Their interface is accessed on the clients' side. Many such applications are run directly from a web browser without any downloads or special installations required.
Reasons to want this cheese: You can streamline your maintenance or support schedules - everything is managed by the third party vendor.
Examples of this cheese: email, CRM, Google Apps, or Salesforce.
How to think outside the cheese platter: One law firm developed a custom application and distributed that in a Saas model for additional revenue.
Cheese #2 - Paas
This cheese is called Platform as a Service. It represents cloud platform services used for applications while providing cloud components to software. It gives you a framework to customize your applications.
Reasons to want this cheese: It makes development and testing of your applications fast and simple. Your applications are on cloud nine (pun intended) because they enjoy scalability, high-availability, and more. All you do is manage your applications.
Examples of this cheese: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Force.com, Google App Engine, Apache Stratos.
How to think outside the cheese platter: Use a combination of internal organization infrastructure and third-party hosted infrastructure.
Cheese #3 - IaaS
This cheese is called Infrastructure as a Service.
Reasons to want this cheese: IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service is a self-service model for accessing, monitoring, and managing remote datacenter infrastructures, such as virtual hardware, storage, networking and firewalls, or load balancers. You avoid purchasing hardware directly, because you are purchasing 3rd-party infrastructure based on consumption levels (think of how you pay for electricity or utilities in your home right now).
YOU manage: applications, data, operating systems, any middleware software.
THEY manage: all virtualization, servers, hard drives, storage, and networking. Some providers offer databases and other services
Examples of this cheese: Amazon EC2 and S3, Windows Azure, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine.
How to think outside the cheese platter: You control what platform you want. If you want SQL Server 2014 SP2 instead of SQL Server 2012 SP1, then you make that decision. Don't settle for old platforms that came with your hardware.
New Rules for a New Maze
1. Don't casually mention "cloud computing" without distinguishing exactly what services your organization will need. For example, do you want a "public cloud" or a "private cloud". What's your favorite flavor of the month?
2. Always ask yourself "Which type of person will benefit most from which type of service?"
a. If you're a developer, you probably think about PaaS in your sleep. Why? Because they can just focus on developing applications and leave the management to a service provider.
b. If you're a consumer, you probably think about SaaS. Why? Because you want to enjoy simple services like email and social networking, or even company billing services.
c. If you work with high-performance computing (HPC), you probably think about IaaS. Why? Because you can purchase infrastructure based on consumption levels.
Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept it....(this cheese will self-destruct in 3...2....1....)
You wake up in your new maze, a top tier AmLaw 200 national defense law firm. The Managing Practice Partner begins his Monday morning meeting with the following words:
"Good morning, as you know we have ten huge practice groups all hosted and managed internally by our outstanding IT staff. However, one practice group has grown by 200% over 12 months with data volumes that is getting harder to manage. One database now has 30 million documents alone and is approaching 4.5 TB in size. We need to make a decision whether to outsource this one practice group to a third party for legal hosting services and management".
You are tasked with choosing the proper type of cheese. Which do you select? Would you consider outsourcing all ten practice groups, or just the practice group that is growing by leaps and bounds? What factors would be involved in your decision? If you would like to discuss this scenario in a virtual roundtable, please let us know. We can discuss all these options over wine and cheese.