One of the underlying findings of a recent survey Vanson Bourne conducted on behalf of hosted service provider, Claranet, is that while a small majority of businesses now have at least some operations running in the Cloud a majority of those businesses are, in the view of Claranet Marketing Director, Martin Saunders, still in practice operating at the web services stage.
This suggests that the Cloud still carries a measure of mistrust. So while 55% are now using a Cloud service of some description, the services that are most popular are email, web applications and online marketing. Well under 50% are using the Cloud for backup and Disaster Recovery, while a shade fewer are using it for ecommerce activities. Perhaps the most telling indicator is that some 15% only of the businesses have entrusted the Cloud with hosting any accounting or financial applications.
In addition there are few signs that users are looking to exploit the Cloud and develop new opportunities or approaches to business problems, as Saunders acknowledged.
It transpires that most customers have wanted to use the Cloud to build a better – but broadly similar – infrastructure to one they could build themselves, with Dell servers for compute power, Cisco for networking and VMware for virtualization. They then focus on seeking the best Service Level Agreement they can get on important factors like service availability.
The networking component is proving to be of particular importance to many users, according to Saunders, because they want to build virtual private networks that end up looking like extensions to their own infrastructure.
To meet this need, Claranet launched its Virtual Data Centre towards the end of last year. This has been developed to meet the needs of companies looking to migrate their internal IT infrastructure to the Cloud. The new service addresses the key proposition of Cloud deployments: the ability to control costs, scalability and speed of implementation.
This, of course, places migration of existing virtualized applications high on the list of priorities, which in turn puts the choice of supported hypervisors as a major decision for Claranet. The company already supports VMware, as the dominant provider, but is now moving to add hypervisor agnosticism to its capabilities. So it will be supporting the upcoming new version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V.
With up to six European datacentre nodes, Claranet sees itself as well placed to service the data sovereignty needs of most European customers. It also states that in most cases its Cloud service is more secure than most users’ on-premise installations. Each customer application is built on its own VLAN network, and Saunders claims that configuring the VLANs is both quick and easy. This approach also makes application migration easier as each one is then able to keep its existing network addresses.
Migration to the Virtual Data Centre is via a self-service portal, which enables end-users to manage both dedicated and shared Cloud platforms from a ‘single-pane-of-glass’. Users are therefore able to merge existing Cloud servers into logical applications and template them for deployment via a simple drag-and-drop interface. In addition, the Cloud portal delivers server and resource provisioning ‘on-the-fly’, as well as an ability to migrate from an existing virtual server platform into the Claranet Virtual Data Centre.
