Karthik's ConfigMgr & Intune Blogsite

2.       Business Benefits Offered By Cloud Computing

Once these cloud driven transformations become mainstream, enterprise IT will experience breakthrough business benefits, many of which Microsoft has been advocating as part of its multi-year “Dynamic IT” vision:

·         Increased business agility – Applications and services can be delivered to market in an extremely agile manner with the end-user & developer empowerment that cloud computing unleashes.

·         Costs/Operational Efficiencies – Cloud apps/services will be significantly cheaper and efficient, be it capital expenses (e.g. hardware/datacenter) or operational expenses (e.g. service management).

·         IT Maturity – Standardization will lead to much greater levels of IT maturity thus transforming the relationship between IT and the business from that of service provider to trusted advisor. 

Microsoft’s Approach To Help Enterprises Realize Cloud Computing Benefits: Microsoft has been providing industry level thought leadership to all of the above (based on running our cloud services out of our data centers) and is investing in product capabilities so you can derive these benefits within your data centers in the future.  

3.      Private Cloud

  There has been a lot of recent excitement around the potential benefits enterprise IT can derive by implementing a private cloud (or internal cloud) within their firewall. To better understand this aspiration, let’s look at some characteristics of Microsoft’s cloud services (e.g. Windows Azure) that we operate out of our data centers:

·         Standardization – Homogeneous infrastructures with vertical integration across server, network, storage and OS. This is achieved by implementing a shared pool of virtualized hardware pools with centralized administrative control over apps/workload additions.

·         Service Focused – It’s all about delivering the application or service that the business demands and not the component services (e.g. infrastructure).

·         Automation - Significant levels of automation, based on cloud principled philosophies like resiliency, scalability and elasticity.

·         “Lights out” Operations – Scale through the app design and abstraction from infrastructure.

·         Utilization based charge back 

Microsoft customers can begin their journey to the private cloud today(28/01/11) by deploying the Microsoft products and technologies they know and trust. We have recently made Opalis and Service Manager available as part of System Center to help customers build deeper orchestration and IT process automation for their private cloud environments. As mentioned in earlier sections, Microsoft is fully committed to deliver richer private cloud capabilities mentioned above as part of the Windows Server and System Center roadmaps.

Presently, Microsoft is enabling customers build the foundation for a private cloud infrastructure using the Windows Server and System Center family of products with the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit (availability currently scheduled for June 2010). This will allow you to further leverage your existing investments in the Microsoft infrastructure platform while maturing your IT capabilities to consume advanced cloud capabilities in the future.

The Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit is a free, partner-extensible solution that will enable datacenters to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage resources to enable Infrastructure as a Service. Whether you’re an enterprise customer, a systems integrator, or an independent software vendor, the toolkit will help you create agile, virtualized IT infrastructures and enable business agility, reduced management complexity and operational efficiencies.

Some key Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit capabilities:

·         Automation and Guidance - To assess, plan and design your private cloud foundation infrastructure

·         Customer/business unit on-boarding -  Automated workflows to onboard LOBs to your virtualized shared resource pool

·         Dynamic provisioning engine – To rapidly provision virtualized infrastructure in conjunction with System Center and Hyper-V

·         Self-Service portal – To empower consumers of IT request infrastructure for their apps/services.

·         All the above principles will remain true whether it’s your assets or if you’re working with a service provider (e.g. a Microsoft hosting partner) or deploying to Microsoft’s datacenters (e.g. Windows Azure).

 

Only Microsoft has the developer tools, management, server and cloud assets to achieve the above described consistency between private and public cloud solutions.