***This is the last of a four-part series on Cloud Computing for xchangemag.com.***
Industry folks say we’re likely to see a rapidly expanding market along the lines of what IDC predicts. The research firm says the market for cloud services will triple in the next five years. But professional services and management for cloud initiatives are necessary parts of making the cloud trend live up to the hype, especially when you consider that security breaches, poor customer experiences and a lack of education effectively could stake any promise for cloud services right through the heart. In fact, concerns over security, data portability and reliability already are causing reluctance among enterprise customers.
Accordingly, IBM Corp. is leveraging its expertise in professional services to support the growth of the technology. IBM Global Services and IBM Global Technology Services are targeting enterprises with cost modeling (the vendor estimates cloud computing can save enterprises up to 60 percent on power and 80 percent on floor space), design/implementation services on the data center side, plus cloud security services.
In the past, each application in the data center required a unique dedicated server. However, for large enterprises this has become an unwieldy, complex and tough-to-maintain infrastructure that makes any transition to a cloud approach difficult.
Working under the assumption that organizations will employ both public and private clouds to achieve business goals, IBM is positioning itself to help customers re-construct their IT environments to take advantage of both private and public cloud computing, and manage it in an integrated fashion.
Some of the practices Big Blue is ramping up include: modeling to improve operational efficiency, overall carbon posture and return on investment; project management to help clients plan, configure and test the servers; storage and support technologies necessary to take advantage of cloud computing; and a company-wide project to create a comprehensive security architecture for cloud computing environments.
This last effort is aimed at re-architecting and re-designing technologies and processes, and to ensure that going forward, security is built into the cloud strategy, not added as an afterthought.
The project focuses on developing trusted virtual domains, authentication, isolation management, policy and integrity management and access control technologies designed specifically for cloud computing.
