Business Transformation in Action

ebizQ has announced its second annual Cloud QCamp, a virtual event scheduled on April 7th.

We will be bringing together leading industry experts and practitioners explored the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) in supporting cloud-computing initiatives. The conference will help enterprises cut through the hype and focus on issues surrounding cloud computing, covering Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). This year's QCamp will also focus on development of Private Clouds in Enterprises.

I will lead a session on "The Economics of Cloud Computing."  The economics of cloud computing can look enormously attractive, especially when weighing the costs of storage or processing at a few cents per instance or gigabyte, versus the tens of thousands of dollars in up-front investments required for on-site solutions. Cloud providers can deliver economies of scale not available to individual enterprises. But over the long run, do these huge savings hold up or collapse for enterprises? What about the costs associated with integration, configuration, data deduplication, and monitoring? Also, do enterprises need to look beyond cost and consider other potential benefits of cloud computing, such as the ability to focus resources on the business, versus IT maintenance? What about costs related to loss of control and customization? Or potential loss of competitive advantage that may be inherent in on-site, customized systems? This session will examine the economic pros and cons of on-demand versus on-site computing, and where these approaches may or may not work.

This session will cover the following:

• Making the business case for cloud
• When does it make economic and business sense to migrate an application to a cloud provider?
• Potential hidden costs associated with cloud computing
• Chargebacks and other revenue models for internal cloud service providers
• Determining return on investment for cloud implementations

We will also lead a session on "Can the Cloud be Governed?" Cloud solutions offer a lot of compelling solutions for users all across the enterprise, and it's relatively easy to begin subscribing to services - maybe too easy. Organizations need to be concerned about how cloud adoption fits into their enterprise architecture. In addition, many technologists and managers may be looking at deploying cloud applications and services to users within their own organizations, as well as partners and suppliers. In this session, we will explore the framework to help oversee cloud service deployments and consumption, along with the rules and policies to help guide these efforts.

This session will cover the following:

• Lessons in service governance from the SOA experience
• Creating a cloud governance model
• Creating a service directory
• How to determine if cloud fits into your application strategy
• Should you monitor service adoption from outside service providers?
• Managing and securing data in cloud environments

Another session will address the question of "What is Virtualization and Cloud Computing, and How Interconnected Are They?"  Today many CIO's and IT managers are trying to connect virtualization and cloud computing. Many enterprises are familiar with virtualization from the mainframe era and know it is focused on resource management and how you can run multiple instances of OS in one single box. However, many are still confused where cloud fits in.  This session will show how by using cloud, you can expose those virtual machines, storage and network bandwidth in your data center as a service that can be turned on and off as requirements change. The challenges ahead for cloud computing and virtualization will also be discussed in this session.   

Phil Wainewright will lead a session on "Platform as a Service: How to Avoid Lock-In." Cloud development and deployment platforms can short-cut the time and cost required to build and deliver new applications. But the trade-off is having to work within the constraints and parameters of your chosen platform, with limited or no freedom to move to another provider at any time during the application lifecycle. This session will examine the many, often unseen ways that cloud platforms lock their customers in, discuss the prospects for emerging interoperability and migration standards, and explore what strategies are open to enterprises today to minimize the risks of cloud platform lock-in. The reality of cloud computing for most enterprises over the next few years will be a hybrid environment, where cloud infrastructure and applications co-exist with on-premise IT assets.

In this session, learn how enterprises are tackling migration, governance and integration of applications across cloud and on-premise:

• Which applications benefit most from moving to the cloud?
• What is the best way to manage migration of applications and data to the cloud?
• How do you ensure security, governance and control of cloud-based applications?
• How to integrate data and processes between cloud and on-premise?
• What metrics should you use to measure and compare ROI and TCO?

Dave Linthicum will discuss "Best Practices in Moving Data to the Clouds." While many considering cloud computing as the savior of their data strategy, considering the elasticity of the clouds and new data-as-a-service providers such as Amazon's RDF. There is a process that most enterprises should following when looking to leveraging database-as-a-service. This includes understanding your own data requirements, selecting the right cloud computing candidate, and then planning for the migration and operations. However, there are a huge number of issues and obstacles that cloud be considered, fortunately best practices are emerging.

In this presentation we'll take you through the process of moving data to cloud computing providers, including:

• Understanding your own data requirements "as is"
• Defining the new data model using cloud computing "to be"
• Selecting the right data-as-a-service provider
• Migrating data to the clouds

Dave Linthicum will also provide "Best Practices in Moving Processes to the Clouds." Business processes are core to enterprise information systems, and relocating some or all of those processes to cloud computing providers can be a bit tricking. Things that need to be considered include the nature of the business processes, ownership, and the number of source systems that the business processes connect with. In this presentation we take the mystery out of understanding the nature of each business process, and their potential relocation to a cloud computing platform by taking you through a step-by-step process for understanding your own processes and business issues, and then identifying processes that are good candidate to run on cloud computing providers, as well as the right providers to host those processes.

Items discussed, include:

• Understanding your existing business processes "as is"
• Mapping some, or all of those processes to cloud computing providers "to be"
• Selecting the right cloud computing provider for your processes
• Extending your existing processes to the clouds

Dave Linthicum will be also be discussing "Best Practices in Moving Services to the Clouds." Once you have a good understanding of the problem domain, we can identify systems and services that are good candidates for relocation into cloud platforms, and which ones that can stay on-premise. The idea is that we will relocate the systems to find a more cost-effective way to process the same applications and services, but never give up the ability to leverage these systems and services. Services are typically location and platform independent. This means that, no matter where the services exist, on-premise or cloud-based, they are accessible as if they where local. In many architectural systems we would create new services as part of the services model. This presentation looks at methods to extend a SOA to cloud computing, if that approach does indeed make sense. Thus we'll limit our discussion to identifying existing services, documenting those services, and relocating those services if cost justified. Keep in mind that you could be building new services as part of this process.

Thus, at a high level, the process is:

• Understand the existing "as is" architecture.
• Identify the existing services within the architecture.
• Document and list those services within a directory.
• Define the "to be," including the use of cloud computing.
• Relocating services.