ViFX Cloud Consulting Services

Leveraging a Virtualised Infrastructure On-Premise or Off-Premise to Maximize Capex and Opex, Business Flexibility & Agility

List of detailed Cloud Services (click to expand)

Cloud Strategy, Assessment, & Business Case Development

Cloud Reference Architecture

Cloud Service Catalogue Development

Cloud Application & Data Migration

Cloud Security Assessment & Implementation Services

Your Journey to Cloud

Pragmatic Path to the Cloud

Ultimately, the most efficient infrastructure for rapid delivery of cost-effective, elastic, secure IT services is the Cloud. Cloud infrastructure allows IT organisations to refocus their efforts from unproductive infrastructure management tasks, freeing up budget and productive resources to focus on innovation, delivering products and services to the market faster and at lower costs, while providing better support to the business.

In response to this, Public, Private, & Hybrid Cloud models have emerged, providing compelling benefits for cost savings and business agility. Virtualisation technology provides the foundation for the Cloud by abstracting all the details of the underlying physical infrastructure. Standardized, Virtualised, Cloud-based infrastructure can now be rapidly deployed in an “on demand” model, tailored to the specific needs of any given computing task.

However, as with Virtualisation itself, moving to a Cloud-based computing model requires a number of decisions to be made related to people, processes, technology, applications, and data. Where applications and data will reside, how they will be provisioned, monitored, managed, and secured, who will pay for them, and governance issues will all require rethinking. Engaging external Public Cloud providers for the first time may be a daunting task.

To succeed and prosper in your Cloud Strategy requires an experienced and capable partner whose competencies span all the Business, Financial, and Technical considerations involved in moving to the Cloud. That partner is ViFX.

IT as a Service is the transformation of IT to a more business-centric approach, focusing on outcomes such as operational efficiency, competitiveness and rapid response. This means IT shifts from producing IT services to optimizing production and consumption of those services in ways consistent with business requirements. This changes the role of IT from a cost center to a center of strategic value.

Virtualisation accelerates the transition to cloud computing. To begin enabling improved service delivery, organisations should follow these steps:

• First, begin with virtualisation and leverage legacy investments. Since virtualisation is the foundation for cloud computing and IT as a Service, the first task for any organisation transitioning to the cloud is to virtualise the majority of its environment, including business-critical applications. This allows IT staff to guarantee service levels more easily and economically.
• The second step is to turn the IT department into an agile and user-friendly internal service provider. This requires exposing IT services to internal users through Web-based portals as a fully automated, catalog-based service. Whenever internal users need IT services, they should be able to get them quickly and easily. In addition, IT staff must offer a new level of automation to minimize cost and ensure control and compliance. VMware offers new cloud infrastructure and management solutions designed specifically for dynamic environments. They enable policy-driven automation and deliver IT management as an intrinsic part of the system. Using them, organisations can achieve the efficiency, control and compliance needed to move from cost center to service provider.
• Third, deploy a private cloud. A private cloud built on VMware technology enables an IT department to transform into an efficient, agile and user-friendly internal service provider. IT staff can build and deploy a private cloud today that yields improved IT efficiency and agility while enhancing security and choice. At the same time, deploying a private cloud on the VMware platform provides a practical path to the highly scalable, high-performance public clouds being built by recognized service providers leveraging the VMware platform.
  By adopting the leading platform chosen by the largest number of enterprises and service providers, organisations have the choice to place any of their workloads in the optimal location. At the same time, they fully retain the ability to move workloads between or across private and public cloud infrastructure—benefiting from a hybrid private-public cloud approach.

We hope that ViFX can assist and partner with you as you embark on your journey to a ITaas or Cloud compute model.

Cloud 101 for CXO

ViFX has put together this section for C-Level Executive wanting to understand the basics of Cloud Computing (and Virtualisation)

The economics of Cloud Computing are simply too compelling to ignore!

First and foremost, virtualisation is the trigger technology that enables any Cloud Computing model. So an executive summary snapshot on virtualisation:

Virtualisation technology is now widely viewed as being the most transformative development ever in enterprise computing. While not a new concept, Virtualisation as applied to modern IT infrastructure – Servers, Storage, Networks, Desktops, and Applications – will dominate the next decade of Enterprise Computing.

The compelling benefits of Virtualised infrastructure include lower Capital and Operating costs, improved IT Asset Utilisation, simplified IT Resource Management, increased IT Flexibility and Business Agility, and many more. Order-of-magnitude scale benefits for improving Server & Storage utilisation rates, system availability, service provisioning, etc. are now possible.

As more and more organisations adopt Virtualisation, it is increasingly seen as a key enabler of sustainable business growth and strategic differentiation. Thus, it is critical that you have a strategy for how your organisation will adopt Virtualisation technology and how it will support your overall business strategy.

What can be Virtualised?

• Virtually all elements of today’s IT infrastructure, including Servers, Storage, Networks, Desktops, and Applications, can be virtualised to enjoy Business, Financial, & Technical Benefits of Virtualisation. For example: Server Virtualisation enables dramatic Capital Expense savings (on the order of 50% or more) by increasing Server utilisation rates, reducing or eliminating new Server acquisition costs, and reducing Power, Space, and Cooling needs.
• Storage Virtualisation allows organisations to better leverage their significant existing storage investments across all of their Servers and Applications, and reduce future storage capacity requirements
• Desktop Virtualisation provides an alternative to traditional desktop deployment by centralizing desktop management tasks, improving desktop security, and securing valuable corporate data within your firewalls, while enabling users to access their desktops from anywhere, anytime, on any device
• Application Virtualisation enables multiple generations of corporate applications written for earlier versions of OS, middleware, and web standards to run on modern platforms with no recoding or porting required, side-by-side with current versions

Now let's get into Cloud Computing ...

Beyond these immediate benefits, Virtualisation is the enabling technology creating entirely new models for cost-efficient delivery of IT services.

For example, forward thinking IT organisations are already leveraging Virtualisation technologies to shift to a new model of IT service delivery: IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS). Rather than managing all requests for IT services in a bespoke way, with ITaaS users now request and consume services from a standard “menu” provided by IT, promoting efficiency and standardisation of IT services while lowering costs and enabling user self-service.

Virtualisation enables Cloud Computing – a new computing paradigm where virtualised IT resources are deployed within the corporate firewall (Private Cloud), or by an external service provider (Virtual Private or Public Cloud), leveraging standard platform, management, and security infrastructure to deliver applications, data, & IT services more cost effectively and securely.

With Cloud Computing, organisations choose from among many suppliers of IT Services, with the flexibility to utilize either internal resources or external service providers as their needs dictate. For example, Tier 1 applications could be deployed internally and managed directly by IT staff, whereas Tier 2, Tier 3, Disaster Recovery, Backup, and other services could be purchased from external Public Cloud providers.

IT infrastructures have become too complex and brittle. Today, 70% of IT investment is focused on maintenance, leaving little time to support strategic business projects. With users demanding faster response times and management demanding lower costs, IT needs a better strategy. Cloud computing is a new approach that reduces IT complexity by leveraging the efficient pooling of on-demand, self-managed virtual infrastructure, consumed as a service. Cloud computing is central to that better strategy.

CFOs, controllers and treasurers around the world are watching with great interest as this major business transformation takes place. Cloud computing, ITaaS and Software-as-a-Service are changing the very manner in which many companies do business.

Cloud computing is, in essence, taking part or whole of a company's server infrastructure, the kind usually found inside a closet or dedicated room or entire building, and moving it. Moving it off the premises, off the balance sheet and onto someone else's site and books to be built, configured and managed by that party. They buy it, you rent it. You rent it by the megahertz, gigabyte or bits per second. Which means, of course, you don't have to staff your server room with the proverbial "IT guys" because you no longer own and manage the servers (or any of that other expensive gear). Someone else does. They hire the professionals--typically more people with more expertise than you could justify in your IT budget--and you rent their services. And since everything is consumed as needed, you have access to support staff whose sole focus is delivering and supporting the infrastructure that they rent to you. You improve your uptime and establish a direct correlation between IT spending and IT utilisation while reducing capital and operating costs dramatically.

SaaS, on the other hand, involves taking existing on-premise, CD-based software like Quickbooks and completely reworking its innards to live on the Internet. Once done, it can be placed on someone else's server infrastructure in the cloud, where it can be rented on a periodic basis and accessed anywhere in the world at any time through an Internet browser. If 50 people need to use the accounting system, then 50 seats are rented. If the need grows to 500 users, or shrinks to 5, the number of seats rented grows or shrinks accordingly. And so do costs. For the user, this transition means no more upfront licensing or server infrastructure costs and can result in far lower customisation and integration expense since true SaaS systems are designed from the ground up to be universally accessible, secure and user-configurable. That is, no more hordes of IT folks caring and feeding for those already expensive systems.

All in all, cloud computing and SaaS mean fewer IT folks on staff, and those who remain will be more strategic in nature. This is a tremendous shift since it's estimated that more than 60% of IT spending comes in the form of administration and support. To put that in perspective, if your IT costs are $5 million per year, you're spending $3 million of that just to keep the lights on. More than that, adopting SaaS-based applications moves expenses typically associated with technology adoption from the capital expenditures column (paid for up front, whether utilized or not) over to operational expenditures, which are paid if and when you use them. Bottom line: Adopting SaaS-based applications affords a company the opportunity to avoid many of the IT costs associated with traditional applications even as it gains direct access to world-class business applications and IT expertise.

Results of a survey of CFOs, Controllers, and other financial professionals regarding the use and understanding of Cloud computing and 'software as a service,': Overall, the responses indicate the economics of cloud computing are encouraging small- and mid-sized companies to adopt the new technologies quickly, while bigger companies are either waiting on the sidelines or adopting the technologies on a divisional or business unit level to 'try them out.'

Three important inferences:

• Cloud Computing and SaaS will be critical to companies over the next few years, and CFOs feel like they are already "behind the curve" and need to be educated,
• Cloud Computing and SaaS reduce IT CapEx and OPEX and create a direct link between IT consumption and cost, and
• Cloud Computing and SaaS have delivered to many firms higher ROI, increased collaboration, and greater confidence in systems and their business value

About Cloud Computing?

IT infrastructures have become too complex and brittle. Today, 70% of IT investment is focused on maintenance, leaving little time to support strategic business projects. With users demanding faster response times and management demanding lower costs, IT needs a better strategy. Cloud computing is a new approach that reduces IT complexity by leveraging the efficient pooling of on-demand, self-managed virtual infrastructure, consumed as a service. Cloud computing is central to that better strategy.

Organisations are turning to cloud computing to improve IT efficiency and business agility. With cloud computing, you can enable more flexible service delivery and automate core IT processes, including both user and application provisioning and systems management. VMware virtualisation solutions accelerate an organisation’s transition to the cloud, by abstracting complexity and creating an elastic pool of compute, storage and networking resources.

How Cloud Is Transforming IT

IT organisations must respond to increasing demands from business stakeholders. Virtually every decision business makes involves IT, and in business where first movers gain competitive advantage, IT responsiveness and agility matter. Yet many IT organisations struggle to meet business needs in a timely way because their applications and services run on infrastructures that are too costly to manage and challenging to change.

Today’s IT organisations, faced with decreasing resources and increasing business needs, are looking to cloud computing to provide a more efficient, flexible and cost-effective model for delivering IT to business: IT as a Service.

While cloud computing provides the approach, VMware delivers a pragmatic path and customer-proven solutions that allow organisations to preserve existing technology investments, while achieving the goal of enabling IT as a Service.

The Promise of Cloud Computing

The most effective transition to a cloud computing approach enables organisations to yield the following benefits:

• Efficiency Through Utilisation and Automation
  In addition to the known cost savings, cloud computing and the VMware approach deliver lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimising unnecessary IT infrastructure investments, providing efficient management and maintenance tools, and preventing technology lock-in. They help IT to adopt a more cost-effective, self-managed, dynamically optimized environment for the most efficient delivery of IT services. They provide additional flexibility by developing and deploying applications that can run in the datacenter or at a cloud service provider. With this cloud computing approach, organisations move toward an infrastructure that uses policy-driven management and automation to monitor itself, self-optimising for load and demand on the applications, based on usage.
• Agility with Control
  The VMware cloud computing approach also dramatically simplifies IT services provisioning and deployment, so IT organisations can respond more quickly to business needs. At the same time, it allows IT staff to implement policies consistent with business and governance requirements, providing the control IT needs to minimize business and regulatory risk. An effective cloud strategy also means ensuring security and eliminating the need to constantly reconfigure static security infrastructure for this dynamic computing environment. Cloud computing allows IT organisations to maintain full control over the availability, reliability, scalability, security and service level agreements (SLAs) for all workloads.
• Freedom of Choice
  With the VMware cloud computing approach, organisations gain the flexibility to retain existing operating system and application stacks, yet deploy them internally or externally with any VMware vCloud service provider. IT staff can continue to support traditional systems, while removing many of the headaches associated with them—system porting, security patches and more. They can also gain more predictable performance. Cloud computing delivers more freedom to users without sacrificing IT staff control. End users can consume IT services from traditional applications, onsite cloud applications and external service provider offerings, and have rapid access to their data anytime, anywhere. Meanwhile, VMware end-user computing solutions provide freedom to manage access to applications and services by policies across platforms and devices. Learn more about the promise of cloud computing>>

VMware’s Approach

Virtualisation is the essential catalyst for enabling the transition to cloud computing. VMware, the global leader in virtualisation and cloud infrastructure, builds on virtualisation to deliver cloud infrastructure and management solutions, cloud application platform solutions and end-user computing solutions that significantly reduce IT complexity.

VMware’s leadership has brought together a broad range of more than 25,000 technology and service partners. VMware is also the industry-leading vendor of core cloud infrastructure to the broadest set of cloud service providers—more than 2,600 vCloud service providers. In addition, VMware is working closely with leading cloud providers such as Bluelock, Colt, SingTel, Terremark and Verizon to deliver new VMware vCloud Datacenter Services. VMware vCloud Datacenter Services are a new breed of enterprise-class hybrid cloud services, offering agility coupled with the security, interoperability and control that enterprises demand. VMware vCloud Datacenter Services are built on a VMware developed architecture and certified by us to be compatible and secure, in contrast to commodity public cloud services.

VMware enables organisations to energize their business, while saving energy— financial, human and the Earth’s. Its customer-proven solutions provide organisations with all of the capabilities necessary to achieve the benefits of cloud computing.

Security

Virtualisation is indispensable for transitioning legacy applications to new cloud infrastructures and a critical security enabler in a cloud environment. VMware provides the foundation for the next generation of cloud security to address the challenges of securing applications and data in the cloud. VMware solutions offer unique introspection capabilities that help to identify hard-to-detect problems and enable comprehensive security controls. These capabilities result in better performance, reduced complexity and more comprehensive security protection.

With VMware solutions, organisations can be assured security policies can be rapidly implemented and monitored for IT compliance while maintaining the relevant levels of control and visibility into ownership domains. They can make security agile, so IT staff can leverage dynamic capabilities, such as live migration, and ensure that the security policies follow the IT service seamlessly. They can also deliver a single, cost-effective framework for the comprehensive protection of cloud deployments.

Automation and Management

Instead of spending valuable time managing physical infrastructure or applications, VMware solutions enable organisations to focus on innovation and delivering value to the business. Once all hardware resources are pooled into virtual building blocks and service-levels are defined with associated applications, organisations can deploy an automation plan based upon business rules and application needs. Cloud automation and cloud management drive the ultimate efficiency in IT, mapping plans and policies to the business and defining them within the service delivery mechanism (applications and services delivered according to service-levels) of the cloud.

Automation and management rules applied to the cloud infrastructure effectively lead to a zero-touch infrastructure, where IT is available as a service. IT organisations also can better manage risk with an approach to cloud computing that retains the security, control and compliance that the business demands.

Interoperability and Openness

In addition to serving as a secure foundation for cloud computing, VMware solutions ensure application portability between internal datacenters and external hosting and service provider clouds from VMware vCloud partners. This enables applications to run with little or no modification internally or externally. Beyond infrastructure, VMware offers a cloud application platform that allows developers to create portable cloud applications that further enhance an organisation’s ability to respond to change. Today, more than 2 million developers worldwide rely on VMware cloud application platform solutions to create rich applications that are portable, dynamic, scalable and optimized for cloud-scale deployment, including deployment on popular public cloud offerings such as VMforce and Google App Engine. IT staff can extend this agility to end users by leveraging VMware solutions to dynamically provision and manage cloud-ready IT services securely across any device.

VMware solutions ensure application mobility and portability between clouds within a common management and security model. They are based on open standards, including the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF), which has been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard. They also extend to a large ecosystem of service providers.

Self-Service for the Cloud

At the application or service layer, cloud computing offers a new service consumption approach that applies standardisation and automation to enable rapid service provisioning. By standardising processes, increasing automation and delivering IT as a Service, VMware solutions help drive additional savings beyond virtualisation, while significantly reducing the amount of maintenance required per IT administrator.

Instead of waiting for manual IT procurement and provisioning processes, lines of business are able to consume services exactly when they need them. With new VMware products, IT organisations can now deliver standardized IT services on shared infrastructure through a Web-based catalog. By standardising these service offerings, organisations can simplify many IT management tasks—from troubleshooting and patching to change management—and eliminate much of the administrative maintenance that burdens an IT team today. They can also automate provisioning through policy-based workflows that empower validated users to deploy preconfigured services with the click of a button. Meanwhile, IT retains control over policies and billing that govern service usage.

Pooling & Dynamic Resource Allocation

The private cloud changes an IT organisation’s approach to resource management from discrete hardware to virtualised pools of shared resources, including servers, storage and networking. By virtualising all IT resources, IT staff sees increased resource utilisation rates and dynamic distribution of resources toward high-priority applications.

These shared resource pools are abstracted into logical building blocks that consist of storage, network and server units, effectively creating virtual data centers. Based on business demands, these resource containers can be constructed to provide specific service-levels or meet particular business needs, or they can be divided by logical business units or functions (for instance, sales, finance or R&D). By standardising on a set of well-defined offerings, organisations can evolve toward a policy-driven approach to computing.

Cloud Computing in the Region.

A VMware-sponsored survey of seven thousand businesses and IT executives in Asia Pacific shows Cloud computing mindshare and adoption have soared over the last eighteen months.

VMware Survey

VMware has announced recent findings from its survey which shows that the proportion of Asia Pacific enterprises viewing cloud computing as relevant to their businesses doubled to 83% over the last eighteen months. According to the survey, 76% in India want to virtualize and adopt cloud computing in the coming eighteen months, which is the highest percentage as compared to other Cloud positive countries in the region like Japan and Australia. India scored higher than both Singapore and Malaysia in current Cloud understanding levels.

The September survey of 6,953 respondents, conducted by Springboard Research, sponsored by VMware also indicated that Cloud adoption has accelerated across seven Asia Pacific markets over the last eighteen months, particularly among larger firms.

At present, 59% of regional firms are either using or planning cloud computing initiatives compared to 45% six months ago and 22% in 2009. India and China lead the region in terms of adoption plans, with 43% and 39% of organisations respectively planning to implement cloud computing. Organisations in Japan and Australia lead in cloud adoption, with 36% and 31% respectively already running a Cloud-related initiative.

India had 693 respondents across various sectors. Highest adoption is anticipated from the IT/ITES infrastructure and manufacturing sectors. The survey revealed that India’s understanding of virtualisation and cloud computing has risen dramatically over the last couple of months and VMware has a 50% perceived mindshare with regards to cloud computing in India.

Dynamic provisioning, capacity on demand, automated management, pay-per-use model, and applications that can scale on demand were considered by the Indian audience to be the essential building blocks for Cloud computing.

Cloud associated with IT as a service

The highest proportion of organisations in Japan (86%), Singapore (84%) and Thailand (74%) associate cloud computing primarily with IT as a service, while in Australia, Malaysia and India, most firms (80%, 78% and 75% respectively) associate cloud mainly with applications-on-demand. In China, 80% of respondents look to cloud for on-demand provision of storage and network.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, Associate Research Manager, Software Springboard Research, said, “For most survey respondents in Asia Pacific, IT as a service is the biggest theme of the day.”

Most organisations (60%) want to adopt Cloud for scalability-on-demand to meet business needs, followed by drivers such as reduced hardware infrastructure costs and simplified resource or server provisioning.

According to T. Srinivasan, Managing Director, VMware, India & SAARC, CEOs are making decisions in tandem with the CIOs and Cloud computing is aligned to business decisions as it ultimately links to savings. The ability for enterprises to obtain a common Cloud infrastructure platform, as well as a common management model and application services that bridge private and public clouds to deliver interoperable clouds allowing data and application portability, will be critical.

Expense reduction is the immediate incentive for adopting Cloud computing for 57% of Asia Pacific firms. Only 37%, many of which are large firms with more than 10,000 employees, adopted or planned to adopt cloud as a long-term strategic investment. 66% considered scalability on demand to meet business needs while 67% considered reduced hardware infrastructure and 43% considered simplified resource or server provisioning as some of the key factors that drive Cloud adoption. 83% said that they expect cloud investments to reduce hardware spending while 74% would like reduction in their software expenditures.

Hybrid clouds on the rise

Companies wanting to deploy both public and private clouds were represented by 38% of respondents, while 37% said they will only consider a private cloud. Preference for private cloud is more prevalent in banking and government sectors, with public cloud continuing to meet with the greatest resistance. Preference for hybrid cloud is higher in ASEAN, at more than four percentage points above the Asia Pacific average. In fact, even Japan – the most Cloud-positive country in the survey – suggested that 15% of organisations want to use public clouds. The mindset in India is changing and private cloud is slowly overtaking public cloud.

Storage (58%) represents the region’s number one workload for private Clouds, with Japan (62%) and China (61%) most likely to deploy storage in a private Cloud. Cloud-based enterprise applications are the second most identified category across Asia Pacific at 49%.

In terms of deployment plans, 93% of respondents said their upcoming Cloud deployments will revolve around Web conferencing, IM, collaboration and email.

Andrew Dutton, SVP and GM, VMware Asia Pacific Japan, said: “It is clear that industry has great interest in the hybrid cloud model. The ability for enterprises to obtain a common cloud infrastructure platform, as well as a common management model and application services that bridge private and public clouds to deliver interoperable clouds allowing data and application portability, will be critical.”

Integration with existing systems has caught up with traditional security concerns as a barrier to Cloud adoption, with 46% of respondents identifying them as obstructions.

In emerging markets, the key factor holding back Cloud adoption is lack of understanding among enterprises, according to 44% of respondents in China, 40% in Malaysia and 40 % in Thailand, compared with a regional average of 36%.

These results strongly suggest that use of standards-based cloud solutions and education remain as significant cloud adoption drivers across Asia Pacific.

Virtualisation seen as the foundation of cloud computing

Organisations across Asia Pacific (59%) consistently cited virtualisation infrastructure as a primary building block for cloud computing. Awareness about virtualisation is widespread in India, with 94% of the respondents either leveraging or planning to adopt virtualisation technology.

Explaining the link between the two technologies, Dutton said: “Virtualisation lets organisations decouple critical business applications and information from underlying physical hardware, and in turn, provides a fast and cost effective way to the cloud. More and more Asia Pacific organisations are realizing this and are moving to unlock more value from their virtualisation investments.”

Virtualisation adoption in Asia Pacific is highest in Australia (87%) and Japan (82%). Among verticals, virtualisation adoption is highest in insurance (82%) and banking/financial services (76%).

Thailand (67%), Singapore (65%) and Malaysia (65%) all lag Australia and Japan in current adoption, while virtualisation penetration stands at about 30 % across ASEAN.

Most Asia Pacific firms use virtualisation for servers and data centers, with many organisations focused on leveraging virtualisation to drive business continuity/disaster recovery initiatives. In India, server virtualisation has grown in importance, compared to last year.

The biggest growth opportunity for virtualisation in Asia Pacific is in the end-user computing space, although most organisations rank desktop virtualisation as low in their list of priorities.

However, significant advantages can be gained from a new approach to end-user computing that virtualizes the desktop by de-coupling the operating system, user persona and applications, thereby enabling great flexibility in delivering applications and data to end-users when and where they need them and regardless of access device. There is more focus in India on desktop virtualisation at 68% when compared to China and Japan.

“By enabling large-scale end-user self-service, desktop virtualisation is really the final piece of the puzzle in making the modern enterprise flexible, scalable and ultimately responsive to business needs,” said Dutton.