The Threat Cloud Computing Providers Pose to Corporate IT

17.10.2011
People underestimate how much cloud providers present a challenge to IT as it's practiced today in most organizations. A couple of news stories brought home this point. They illustrate the existential threat that cloud computing and its practices present to corporate IT groups.

The first item that came across my desk was a about AOL and how it has built a completely unmanned data center. The writer noted that he came to AOL relatively recently and was tasked with streamlining its data centers. He says, "It was during this process that I came to realize that our particular legacy challenge, while at 'Internet' scale, was more closely related to the challenges of most corporate or government environments than the biggest Internet players."

The writer continues to say that, despite its early "King of the Internet" position, AOL's collection of hundreds of bespoke, inconsistently configured and implemented systems made it very similar to most enterprise environments: manually administered, high cost and difficult to change.

The piece then goes on to describe how AOL restructured its entire infrastructure, and more importantly, its supporting tools and processes, to create a lights-out, completely automated deployment environment. No one needs to enter the data center to provision machines, configure networks, run cables, etc.

The writer describes how a key piece of the automation systems is a CMDB (configuration management database), which allows quick, dynamic provisioning of resources. How quick and dynamic? Virtual machines in eight seconds. Injection of application and middleware software packages in another eight seconds. Reconfiguration to move into production? Sixty seconds.

AOL's story, stripped to its basics, is that of an organization applying today's cloud-inspired IT management best practices to achieve highly scalable, extremely cost-efficient computing environments.