Enterprise Class Cloud™
So what is an Enterprise Cloud anyway? Just another Public Cloud with a marketing spin? Absolutely not.
Public Clouds are designed to commoditize infrastructure and offer it via the Internet as a service, thus emphasizing attributes such as cost, scale and consumerization as key tenets. An Enterprise Cloud is designed to meet or exceed the security, performance and business continuity SLAs of the infrastructure it would be replacing, but adds Cloud attributes such as on demand self provisioning, elasticity, and metered billing.
So what are the key incremental attributes of an Enterprise Cloud when compared to a Public Cloud?
1. Restricted Access: By design, Enterprise Clouds cannot be connected to via any means other than a trusted network. It is similar to the compliance practice made popular by the banking industry called “Know Your Customer”. Applications and Data residing in an Enterprise Cloud can only belong to a business entity which has been screened and vetted as legitimate. No individual credit card signups allowed.
2. Performance SLAs: Applications require physical resources to process the data and interact with other workloads across the corporate landscape. When resources cannot be accessed due to contention it typically has a very negative impact on the end user experience. This is especially true of I/O resources and usually rears its ugly head within high transaction volume database services. Enterprise Clouds must ensure quality of service such that critical workloads are never compromised due to the requirements of those pre-determined to be of lower priority.
3. Complex Network Routing: Once a network is trusted into the core of an Enterprise Cloud, the client should be able to manage their own routers, albeit physical or virtual. Enterprise customers require extensive domain management within and across nodes of an Enterprise Cloud. This allows for a “virtual” extension of the trusted network all the way to the virtual machines and storage shares assigned to the client.
4. Compliance: Business applications are typically subject to regulations, be it driven by statutory, industry or corporate governance requirements. If data has to be kept physically separated, then logical sharing of data across pools will not comply. If jurisdictional requirements are enforced, then policies would need to restrict movement of data across geographies. Even more fundamentally, compliance and certifications must match up to corporate requirements.
5. Resource Pooling: CIOs and IT Directors typically serve multiple masters. Within an organization business leaders have individual budgets for funding either new initiatives or ongoing activities. To properly account for the allocation of costs across departments an Enterprise Cloud needs to be able to group workloads by both functional and physical pools. This should be independent of virtual machines, as budgets are set in the aggregate, not by the machine.
6. Business Continuity: Corporations are obligated to consider the implications of recovering from a disaster. Enterprise Cloud providers must provide the ability to ensure data is being safely backed up, and if a disaster is declared at a particular site the application services can be restored in a safe, predictable and timely manner. This is especially true for applications not architected for the Internet. The Cloud must compensate, making dumb applications smarter.
With these points in mind, if you are an Enterprise looking for the optimal cloud solution, a public cloud is not likely your best answer. A private cloud may prove too expensive and a hybrid can be as confusing as the name itself implies. Virtustream and the xStream Enterprise Cloud platform are focused delivering cloud solutions engineered and optimized for the Enterprise. It’s our business. We can help you with your Enterprise Class Cloud™.
For more information on Virtustream’s Solutions, please contact info@virtustream.com
