“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or...| By James Carlini | Article Rating: |
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| February 22, 2012 10:35 AM EST | Reads: |
1,723 |
When it comes to procurement, any technology or service should be evaluated with a good set of criteria. Executive decisions should not be weighted solely on a single selection criterion such as price. This applies to any cloud computing service as well.
The twelve criteria listed below (see Chart 1) forces executives to take a broader review of the many elements of the total cloud computing service, and not just price. Each criteria starts with an R, F, or P which makes it easy to remember the total framework for the Yardstick for Technology Procurement (RFP).
Chart 1: Yardstick for Technology Procurement (RFP)
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RELIABILITY |
At what percentage of reliability is the service? 99.9% 99.99? 99.995? How is this measured? What costs are associated with increasing reliability? (Cost/Benefit Analysis) |
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REDUNDANCY |
Can the system survive a major disaster or is there a single point-of-failure? Does the vendor have a system that can handle mission-critical applications or is that better left off the cloud? |
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REDUCED OPERATING COSTS |
Every system is going to proclaim they save operating expenses. Is there a significant difference between vendors' products? |
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FLEXIBILITY |
How flexible is the basic platform to accommodate changes and/or additions to the initial applications? |
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FUNCTIONALITY |
What does the cloud provide as to capabilities? Are these functionalities easily adaptable to changes in the business? |
|
FAMILIARITY |
Every system is sold as "user-friendly" so that is not a good criterion to use. Familiarity is a better term to understand how the average user navigates into the cloud and is comfortable with utilizing the applications. |
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PERFORMANCE |
Most systems are talking about performance in areas of scalability, elasticity, and other criteria, are there any unique performance capabilities tied to one vendor or vendors? |
|
PRICING |
Price is still a consideration in any purchase, but now is only a part of the evaluation criteria instead of being 95% of the decision. |
|
PERSONNEL |
Which people will the user still need to have on premise? A liaison person? A systems administrator? An SLA administrator? Any other resources? |
|
RESOURCES |
Are all resources off-site or are there requirements that might include on-site physical resources? What are they? |
|
REALITIES |
What can be done with the cloud and what cannot be done? This sounds like a simple question yet many do not seek the answer to this and immediately look at the cloud as a "universal solution" to all their computing issues. |
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RISKS |
What are the risks in going to a third party instead of keeping an application in-house? What about Intellectual Property or proprietary applications being put into the hands of a third party? |
Source: James Carlini
There are many other questions to ask under each of the R, F, and P categories. This opens up discussions as to what's internally important to your enterprise and not what was important to the organization down the street that just installed a cloud application in their environment.
If you go through the review process using this twelve-step assessment tool, your selection will be much more well defined and "price" will still be a factor, but not the only factor in your decision.
Be Selective
Some say computing will become a utility, I disagree. Many organizations have proprietary applications that are so intertwined with their core business, they cannot pull them out and give them to a third party to operate. An example is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and their trading platform. Would they really want to give their electronic trading platform, a mission-critical application that is part of their strategic competitive advantage out to a third party to manage?
If an application within your enterprise qualifies as a candidate for cloud computing, you should ensure the right service is selected by using all the criteria that has been mentioned and not just price.
This yardstick's focus on selection criteria has been used for clients throughout the years as well as integrated into the Executive Masters courses I taught at Northwestern University.
• • •
Copyright 2012 - James Carlini
Published February 22, 2012 Reads 1,723
Copyright © 2012 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By James Carlini
James Carlini, MBA, a certified Infrastructure Consultant, keynote speaker and former award-winning Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University, has advised on mission-critical networks. Clients include the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, GLOBEX, and City of Chicago’s 911 Center. An expert witness in civil and federal courts on network infrastructure, he has worked with AT&T, Sprint and others.
Follow daily Carlini-isms at www.twitter.com/JAMESCARLINI
“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
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As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. ...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to rea...
Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
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