The Cloud's Unlimited Possibilities

Written by Lauren C. States

Major business and market trends are spurring the growth of cloud computing within government and industry, even as the definition of this newly emerging information technology concept is still evolving. For the military, cloud computing promises to deliver the benefits of networkcentric warfare while also providing a robust and agile compute infrastructure capable of supporting a surge in processing during times of increased operations tempo.

Cloud computing’s promise of a new service-delivery model is compelling entire industries to rethink their IT, and even their business models. Cloud computing offers a standard, simplified and centralized platform for on-demand use, characterized by self-service, rapid provisioning, elasticity and scale.

From the providers’ perspective, cloud computing is an approach to sharing IT infrastructure in which large pools of secure computer systems are linked together to provide IT services. These services, described as infrastructure, platform or software “as a service,” will enable the further development of network-centric applications.

Through the cloud computing model of IT services, the military can better manage the unpredictability and dynamic nature of IT support to warfighter operations. Enterprise data centers will operate like the Internet, providing extreme scale and fast access to users engaged in network-centric operations, with no discernable drop in performance.

Working on hundreds of cloud computing engagements over the past two years, IBM has learned that workload characteristics, regardless of industry or public sector, provide the best insight into what business and IT services can be initially implemented. Workloads, such as collaboration, application development and testing, desktop and storage services, will move faster to cloud computing, presenting rapid return on investment and productivity gains. Complex transactional systems will be more challenging to host as shared standardized services.

Applications and services across several lines of business in the Department of Defense are provided in a cloud delivery model today. From the Global Combat Support System to Defense Knowledge Online, users do not necessarily know the underlying IT, or care if the computing environment is on their installation or on the other side of the world. As new services and applications come into operation, the application owners can choose among multiple platforms for service delivery.

The migration to more pervasive cloud computing in DoD will occur along multiple paths in parallel streams. As in the engagements we’ve worked on, the application development and testing environments at DoD are strong candidates for migration. Most commercial enterprises devote 30 percent to 50 percent of their technology infrastructure to development and test, but typically 90 percent of it remains idle.

Safely enabling developers to serve themselves can dramatically reduce IT labor costs, reduce provision cycle times and significantly improve quality. Application service centers, such as Army Communications- Electronics Life Cycle Management Command’s Software Engineering Center, are prime candidates for these services.

STRATEGY FOR THE JOURNEY

To begin the cloud journey, you must first create a cloud computing strategy to set priorities and establish a governance model. Next, you assess your environment and determine opportunities for consolidation and migration of workloads to cloud computing. The first place to look will be those applications and services that are built on industry standard interfaces and have a high degree of repetitive tasks. Some infrastructure software and applications can be determined redundant, and your governance model should establish criteria for collapsing these capabilities.

New workloads will emerge during the migration to cloud, as high volume analytics are easily delivered in this highly virtualized environment. At DoD, this will play a key role in the detailed analysis required in applications, ranging from cyber-defense threat determination to facial pattern recognition. As defense organizations become more familiar with developing and deploying applications in this manner, they will create a broader, more highly interoperable infrastructure that enables mission and business transformation.

Defense network operations will go through an equally transformational experience as cloud computing becomes more pervasive. The Global Information Grid is already a high-speed, meshed virtual network. The next stage will include pooled compute resources and a move toward the concept of ensembles, or collections of compute resources consisting of the platform, middleware and application layer.

The management requirements of these systems will require a similar maturation from the domain level stovepipes of today to the business- and mission-aligned enterprise service management system of tomorrow. This will require a high degree of interoperability and collaboration among the global defense NETOPS community. In today’s challenging economic environment, government and industry are looking to cloud computing for ways to cut costs and reduce their impact on the environment, yet be able to quickly and massively scale when the OPTEMPO demands it. Initial results from cloud providers are promising. Some clients have reduced IT labor cost by 50 percent in configuration, operations, management and monitoring of application development environments, while capital utilization improved by 75 percent. Provisioning cycle times were reduced from weeks to hours or even minutes. And as desktop services virtualize, end user IT support costs have been reduced by more than 40 percent.

Here are a few questions to consider as your organization gets started with cloud computing:

• What advantage could you gain in achieving your mission by using cloud computing?

• What innovative internal and external services could you deliver at higher quality, lower cost and faster with a cloud model?

• What unique restrictions will your organization place on cloud computing and on the handling of data, either in transit or at rest?

• What policies, practices or legislation might be in effect that would support or inhibit the adoption of cloud computing?

• What are the security requirements of your organization? What do you need to provide a trusted environment?

• What government software applications, and what different kinds of users, might lend themselves more readily to a cloudbased approach?

Chances are good that these questions will bring on the realization that your organization needs to change at a time when you need to do more with less. With the spike in computing power at your disposal, and the emergence of cloud computing, there are unlimited possibilities to deliver services in new and innovative ways. The core of this transformation is a service management system that provides visibility into what’s going on, the ability to control the environment, and automation capability to enable unlimited application and service availability.

Take all of these elements together and you’ll see that we have an opportunity to use IT in ways that weren’t imaginable just a few years ago. Cloud computing adds a powerful, new delivery model to your arsenal, reducing costs and enabling the military to rapidly respond to the needs of the warfighter. ✯
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Lauren C. States is vice president of the IBM Software Group.  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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