Cloud services

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15 May 2014

Integrated automation
“As development organisations look to scale-up they are considering the use of hybrid cloud as a way of extending their platform without the costs of operating production class IT for development and QA”
Triangle : Eoin Byrne, application virtualisation architect
Many enterprises are investigating hybrid cloud for hosting development and QA systems. The combination of private clouds coupled with the introduction of Agile methods in recent years has led to a view of these systems as mostly disposable. As a result preferences are moving towards application deployments which are quick to create, have a short usage cycle and can be destroyed with little risk. This approach borrows from the DevOps style of automated orchestration where configurations are version controlled and automated deployment is preferred for all phases of the delivery process.Automation works well with hybrid cloud platforms as the orchestration can be considered as a set of layers for configuration delivery corresponding to the infrastructure, middleware and the application. This permits changing any of the orchestration layers without affecting how the application behaves at runtime. As development organisations look to scale-up they are considering the use of hybrid cloud as a way of extending their platform without the costs of operating production class IT for development and QA.We are seeing plenty of interest in integrated automation tooling such as VMware vCloud Suite which takes this layered approach and which has the capability to provision and monitor entire application environments across Hybrid cloud platforms. Coupling this suite with the benefits of the DevOps approach means any enterprise can leverage automation to create development & test application instances as needed. The suite can leverage existing automation processes for cloud provisioning and system configuration and will also work with non-VMware virtualisation. 
Agility and accessibility
“For enterprise customers the traditional challenges remain around security, compliance and migration, although the service providers have been quick to address these concerns”
Asystec : Kevin Stanford
Use of cloud services is already prevalent throughout industry in Ireland and, as a solutions provider, Asystec is seeing a marked increase in willingness to adopt a cloud strategy.Existing adoption lies in areas such as e-mail, SharePoint, back-ups, endpoint security etc. In Ireland with smaller companies, and especially start-ups, it makes perfect sense to begin this way.For enterprise customers the traditional challenges remain around security, compliance and migration, although the service providers have been quick to address these concerns. The conversations we tend to have now are more about performance, scale and pricing.Private cloud is beginning to give way to hybrid cloud as companies look to take advantage of the elasticity and time to deployment it brings. The agility and accessibility of the hybrid cloud model is something that excites our customers as it enables them to scale out the provision of services when required.The announcement by VMware this year of its vCloud Hybrid Service in Ireland is going to be key to our business. vCHS is positioned as an elastic extension to a client’s datacentre and is sold on a monthly basis, allowing customers to expand or shrink their resources as demand dictates.So what can we expect to see this year? Irish companies want to move CapEx costs such as DR sites and desktop refreshes to OpEx so how about DR as a service? VDI as a service? Check out VMware Horizon 6 release which delivers Desktops and Applications as a Service.

Asystec has its own cloud hosted ‘analytics-as-a-service’ offering that we are providing for customers in the Big Data analytics space. It is a web based collaborative environment for customers to work on their Big Data use cases.

 

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