Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/611691
26 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com a dditionally, operational costs—particularly capital expenditures—fall because of cloud computing's utility- style billing, which is based on real use. is approach makes it much less risky for organizations to experiment with new services. Unsuccessful services that see little utilization will generate low bills. On the other hand, if service usage is high, the costs will be justified by the fact that the service is successful, end users are receiving the intended value and, in the case of external services, significant new revenues are generated. And because cloud strengths are well suited to many kinds of services, clouds can also create many different forms of new value. e five examples that follow illustrate how cloud computing has helped organizations accomplish more—more quickly and less expensively—throughout 2015. 1. Data Center BaCkuP in a ClouD What if organizations could cost- effectively back up an entire data center— or enough of it to restore critical business functions in the event of an unexpected disaster? is concept, all but impossible only a few years ago, is now standard operating procedure with many organizations using cloud computing at the close of 2015. In a cloud, virtual servers are created and pro- visioned on demand by business policies. is means that new virtual servers can be created to replicate any or all produc- tion servers already in routine use by an organization for its essential internal and external services. In a cloud, it can happen in very little time. Today, organizations can use cloud platforms to duplicate some or all data center capabilities in at least two different ways: (1) ey can create policies in a third-party cloud that will in turn generate new virtual servers when needed, then populate them with the appropriate so- ware stack and data required to operate or restore services. (2) For an even faster response to a disaster (or outage of any kind), they can create the virtual servers themselves in advance, and leave them up and run- ning at all times—a "hot" backup site, complete with all the necessary soware pre-provisioned, meaning only the latest data need be moved before services are fully restored. e business implications of both of these scenarios are enormously significant. Business continuity, for instance, improves considerably because the organization no longer relies on a single service-delivery infrastructure—it's no longer "putting all its IT eggs in one basket." Should services fail and then involve a long assessment and remediation process, the organization can temporarily fail over to the alternate infrastructure in a cloud. is capabil- ity can dramatically reduce the negative business impact that might otherwise have occurred until resolution of the problems in the primary data center. And for both of these scenarios, the ongoing costs of the cloud-hosted backup site are surprisingly low. at's because the vast majority of the time, the organization's utilization of the backup site is minimal or nonexistent, and cloud billing is based on that utilization. As disaster recovery becomes a growing priority for businesses, cloud backup has given them the tools to quickly, easily and affordably prepare for whatever may come. Especially for small and midsize organizations with small IT budgets, cloud computing surpasses every other option by eliminating the costs and management complexity associated with traditional backup solutions, which re- quire a redundant hardware and soware infrastructure. Cloud computing enables organizations to simplify the process and significantly reduce capital expenditures. 2. DynaMiC Provisioning of storage anD file rePliCation in the ClouD As IT leaders have seen throughout the year, big data keeps getting bigger, presenting challenges in data storage, such as service provisioning and file hosting. As data volumes, the number of data repositories and the variety of end points used to access data continue to escalate, IT leaders are increasingly looking for a new approach capable of dealing with this de- mand for storage capacity, as well as other problems. Storage provisioning for new projects in particular can be difficult, since it must occur quickly to support business goals, yet it's oen difficult to establish just how much storage will be required. Cloud storage is steadily becoming the answer, because in a cloud, logical resources such as storage are allocated dy- namically, in real time and in proportion to business demand levels. is situation all but spells the end of the provisioning challenge in the coming year. New ser- vices that don't need much storage won't receive it; on the other hand, new services that require more storage than expected will receive as much as they need. e organization can thus move forward with business projects, confident that storage costs will always align with actual business requirements and that service availability will never be threatened by too little stor- age. Even better, the organization won't be responsible for purchasing, deploying, integrating or managing the storage in- frastructure; that job belongs to the cloud provider. Organizations are seeing many additional benefits to cloud-based storage and file hosting. For instance, business resilience increases, since files are being protected (duplicated) in a new way. Convenience also improves, as workers can access cloud-hosted files anytime, anywhere, using any standard browser running on any browser-capable device. In addition, energy costs fall compared with continually hosting such files in house on disk arrays owned by the organization— yet cloud-based files will be as continually available as if they were hosted on disk. 3. Migration of ProDuCtion level aPPs to a ClouD Just as clouds fluidly allocate storage in proportion to demand, so too can they allocate all logical resources: process- ing power, memory and even network bandwidth. In the past year we've seen many organizations start moving some produc- tion applications to the cloud—oen those characterized by particularly dynamic demand levels—to benefit the most from cloud computing. Such a migration process is relatively straightforward. Once a cloud provider is selected, new virtual