When over 2000 people attended the Amazon Summit in Auckland recently, it was a clear sign that cloud-based services are now mature and garnering ever-increasing acceptance. Thousands more are attending Amazon’s partner roadshow around the country this month.
As if to cement our market’s acceptance of cloud services, Microsoft recently awarded Datacom its “Cloud Services provider of the Year Award” for its Zespri IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) project running over Microsoft’s own Azure Cloud platform.
For Datacom this was a big ‘thumbs up’ from Microsoft. It also confirmed that cloud services in New Zealand will, for a number of valid business reasons, often be a hybrid combination of local and international services. In this case the hybrid was a combination of cloud services from Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and Datacom’s own Enterprise Cloud service running out of its Kapua and Orbit data centres.
So while hybrid cloud flexes its muscles across New Zealand and around the world, life is never simple. The issue that has been taxing my mind for the past few months has not been the architectural or the transition requirements for moving to a hybrid cloud model. My preoccupation has more been with understanding, describing and delivering the Service Management that follows transition to the cloud.
The question is ‘How does a company or its provider measure, monitor, manage and optimise an environment where some or all of the components are delivered from behind a firewall, potentially thousands of miles away?’
I am currently visiting CIO’s around the country, seeking their opinions, experience and ideas on this topic. It has been very interesting to note that so far every person I have spoken to has vigorously entered into the challenge. To me that is a sign that CIO’s, Service Managers and service providers are all engaged in this thought process, are seeking answers for themselves.
I will report back on my findings in a series of posts over the next few weeks. In the meantime my email address is [email protected] and my mobile number is 0275 749 141. If you have any thoughts, questions or comments on this topic I would love to hear from you.
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Read the next blogs in this series:
Cloud Service Management Part Two