As cloud is an evolution of many trends organisations should start by assessing how cloud can best support the organisation IT strategy – whether that is consolidation, reducing redundancy, uncoupling workload from physical infrastructure or automation.

If used correctly, cloud computing can allow an organisation to differentiate itself and gain competitive advantage. In order to benefit from cloud computing it is essential to choose a cloud that fit.

• Public cloud – this is where you share infrastructure and don’t know who else is on the same server/network as you
• Private cloud – you own the server/network and control what resides on it
• Hybrid cloud – where you own some parts of the network and share some parts – all in a controlled way

Many Australian and New Zealand businesses are concerned about who they share the cloud with and how this will impact security. Therefore the most interest Sun is currently seeing is with private clouds and the ability to control who and what is on the cloud.

Once cloud becomes more than a concept businesses will be able to confidently move to a hybrid model to enable them to utilise a mix of private and public clouds.

By using a hybrid cloud, organisations can manage peaks and troughs in business by essentially outsourcing non mission critical information to the public cloud while keeping sensitive information in the private cloud.

No matter which cloud is right for your organisation an important step is to develop the policies and processes that will surround the cloud. How employees interact with the cloud, who has access and how regulatory constraints will restrict a business need to be evaluated.

Where to start

How does an organisation go about moving its business to the cloud once it has assessed its IT strategy?

Businesses first need to analyse the data they hold, move storage of the data into the network and assess what regulatory, security and privacy controls need to be in place to ensure access is adequately controlled.

Not every business is a good candidate for cloud computing and organisations need to evaluate business processes to establish what can and can’t be moved to the cloud.

Suitable for the cloud:

• Time based
• Very parallel (i.e. batch)
• Spiky traffic
• Capital intensive (especially startup)
• Speculative
• Low utilisation
• Less deployment costs
• High bandwidth costs / high real estate

Not suitable for the cloud:

• High data loads levels
• All block level disk access
• Unsupported / high license costs ISV
• Well optimised / stable apps
• Vertically scaled apps
• Secure data / audited data

Introducing Sun’s Cloud and the benefits to you

In order to help businesses achieve cloud computing we announced the building of Sun’s Cloud in March 2009. Sun’s Cloud will deliver commercial network services to the entire free software community.

The Sun Cloud will be built on Open Source platforms – from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish.

We currently have more than 4,000 developers hard at work on these enabling elements and a 20 year history of network scale software innovation. Sun’s Cloud will deliver what all organisations need to step into the cloud.

By building the cloud on Open Source, Sun is able to deliver radically reduced costs by avoiding proprietary storage and networking products.

Sun’s Cloud will be open which means that developers can freely build on top of the cloud services to deliver mass market products without the fear of lock-in from the emerging proprietary cloud vendors.

For many organisations the public cloud isn’t suitable due to security concerns, regulatory or business constraints.

In order to allow organisations to make the most of both a public and private cloud, Sun’s Cloud can also be deployed behind a corporate firewall.