How public sector IT organizations can tap into the power of the cloud 20 June, 2010 By Ben Newton, technical director, Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, BMC Software, and Herb VanHook, vice president of strategy, Office of the CTO, BMC Software

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Cloud computing enables your IT organization to focus on the best and most cost-effective way to deliver services. It allows your internal customers to focus on what matters most: their core business requirements, such as a new public information portal or an online forum to publicize requests for proposals. Rather than providing IT with details about how many servers with so much CPU and RAM are needed, your internal customers can leverage the cloud to request capacity to perform specific services. And IT can offer services from a dynamic resource pool. As resource needs fluctuate, you have the flexibility to choose the best solution with the available resources. It's a win-win for everyone.

Why Leverage the Cloud?

For public sector organizations, there are benefits to pursuing a cloud initiative, through private, community, or public cloud services. Though the private cloud is the most obvious option for government organization, the community cloud model has become an especially powerful idea for the public sector. Multiple agencies with similar concerns and requirements can create an environment that serves overlapping agency needs. This is especially relevant in the current climate of lower budgets and information-sharing requirements at both the federal and state levels. The community cloud provides many benefits of public cloud services without the security concerns. This model stands or falls based on the power of dynamic resource allocation. As the size of the community grows, the economies of scale are more and more compelling. With the right networks in place, the community cloud provides a pool of location-independent resources that can be leveraged equally, as needed, by the participating organizations (e.g. the Defense Information Systems Agency's Rapid Access Computing Environment).

Public cloud services can be used to provide overflow capacity or a fully hosted environment (e.g., the U.S. General Services Administration's USA.gov Web site) for those government services with less-stringent security requirements. For example, a government agency might anticipate much higher usage of a service during a short period of time (e.g., tax season, natural disasters), and with the proper integrations in place, Internet traffic could easily be load-balanced between the public and private cloud to quickly increase capacity, all without incurring any long-term costs.

Getting Started

For a successful cloud initiative, you first need a fully virtualized infrastructure that allows for the simple and efficient movement of resources to achieve the best possible utilization of available capacity. This means that it is important to take advantage of virtualization at the compute/server layer, across all key heterogeneous platforms, as well as at the network and storage layers, if possible. And you need real-time, intelligent performance management to clearly define how the service is performing from the customer's point of view, as well as capacity management to optimize cloud resources by identifying the customer's current and future capacity requirements.

How Much Is a Service Worth?

Pricing is a necessity for public cloud services, but is just as important in a private or community cloud. Service delivery costs should be communicated to your internal customers so that everyone is aware of the relative costs of one service option versus another.

Service request management and service level management are central to effective pricing. Like a menu in a restaurant, prices should be clearly attached to the available services in the service catalog. In addition, the service levels provided for each option should be clearly communicated to the customer. The result is that the customers get what they really want for a price they can afford, and the provider clearly understands what is important to the customer.

Once pricing has been established, it is a small step to consider more finely tuned pricing models. The flexibility inherent in virtualization for using computing resources more efficiently also lends itself to the idea of customers paying only for what they use, as opposed to paying a fixed price. This approach is beneficial to both parties. Customers can be confident that their costs are tied directly to the value they receive, and you can more easily squeeze every drop of capacity from available systems, while also passing on the true costs of delivery.

So how can you achieve this kind of flexible pricing? It can be as simple as charging the customers per virtual machine operating under their service, or based on comprehensive business modeling. The essential element of business modeling of cloud-service pricing is to have visibility into all of the performance, usage, and configuration data across the infrastructure. This data can then be subjected to demand modeling, cost modeling, consumption reporting, planned versus actual, and so on. These analyses can then be fed into the services pricing to provide constant feedback based on usage and capacity.

Automation: The Key to Managing the Cloud

Automation is critical to effectively managing and leveraging the cloud. By using automation to tie together processes across silos, you can balance the agility and control needed to succeed in your cloud initiatives. The automated processes necessary to build and manage your cloud services can be divided into two parts: the processes that deliver the service and the processes that provide feedback to assure that the delivered service meets the standards required by the provider and the requester.

For example, in delivering services, request management accepts the service request from the end user, the request is translated into a request for change (RFC) in change management, and then that change is executed in the cloud by configuration automation. For feedback, compliance management helps to ensure that the resources provided meet all applicable security standards. Availability management guarantees that service level agreements (SLAs) are met and that the service desk resolves any incidents. Capacity management helps IT meet future SLAs by adding or removing resources as needed. These processes all leverage the configuration management system (CMS) or configuration management database (CMDB) as the record of the current state of the architecture. By consolidating the integration layer, particularly through a single point of reference in the CMDB, the complexity of the architecture is significantly reduced, providing greater stability and lower cost of ownership.

BSM Solutions for Cloud Computing: The Best Way to Manage the Cloud

As you continue to explore the benefits that cloud computing can bring to your public sector IT organization, make sure you don't just get caught up in the excitement of a new technology. By defining, automating, managing, measuring, and governing your efforts, your chances of success in the cloud skyrocket.

Business Service Management (BSM) for virtualization and cloud computing provides the best platform for doing just that. Through proven technology, this approach unifies the management of traditional (physical), virtual, hybrid, private, and public cloud-based resources, so you can first build and then manage your entire cloud environment from a single, unified platform. In so doing, BSM for virtualization and cloud computing gives public sector IT organizations like yours the solutions you need to adopt cloud computing -- with less risk and lower costs.

For more information, visit www.bmc.com/cloud.

Ben Newton is the technical director for Department of Defense and Intelligence Community at BMC Software, where he manages technical requirements for BMC's defense and intelligence community customers. Newton came to BMC with the acquisition of BladeLogic, Inc., where he was a senior application engineer. For the last nine years, he has specialized in the various aspects of data center automation, particularly application release and compliance automation. Before joining BladeLogic, he worked as a systems architect for EDS and Northrop Grumman, where he was the lead architect for the design of the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) Disaster Recovery project. He graduated in 2000 from Cornell University with a master's degree in computer science.

Herb VanHook is vice president of strategy in the Office of the CTO at BMC Software, with particular focus on the technology impacts and opportunities presented by cloud computing models. He has worked in strategic, corporate development, and business planning functions since joining BMC in 2005. Previously, he held several executive positions at industry analyst firm META Group (now Gartner, Inc.), including executive vice president and research director, and last serving as META's interim president and chief operating officer. VanHook has more than 30 years of experience in information technology  across operations, development, support, and management -- including positions at IBM, Computer Associates, and Legent Corporation.