In-House Cloud : Get Started

In-House Cloud, which means building an IT cloud within own company, offers the benefits of a cloud infrastructure. However, some aspects needs to be considered. Many SMEs do not want IT systems to be outsourced to any external data center.

Cloud computing is booming – even in the middle class. According to the latest market research data, more than 60 percent of the surveyed SMEs will use Cloud Computing in the next twelve months in their businesses. Especially the flexible usage and billing of IT resources, world-wide access to data and applications and the easy scalability of the systems seem to convince more and more CEOs from the transition into the IT cloud. But despite all the potential benefits remains at many companies have an ambivalent feeling when it comes to put sensitive data into the wrong hands. Against this background, try some medium-sized to kill two birds with one stone by making their own internal systems cloud-capable. In this way, they want to take advantage of IT cloud, but at the same time retain the full autonomy and sovereignty over their data, here from the story of In-House Cloud starts.

In-House Cloud and Private Cloud Computing

If you want to switch to a cloud infrastructure you should define a company-specific cloud strategy in advance. We must mention at least four articles in this context :

1. Comprehensive Cloud Security Strategy
2. Stepwise Strategies for Adapting Private Cloud
3. Strategic Requirements for Including Cloud computing for Small Businesses
4. Strategies for Outsourcing in Public Cloud

Among other things, it is important to consider what applications will run on cloud. To include standard business applications that are frequently requested and must be highly scalable will be meaningful rather than in the cloud applications that are used only occasionally or by few employees.
Also clarify, whether support is needed when migrating to the cloud. Because especially in the SME’s own IT specialists often do not have the necessary know-how to build a virtualized cloud environment on own infratruture and operate.

In such a case it may be useful to get a consulting partner in the boat. This should have extensive experience with corporate cloud structures and bring expertise especially in the SME sector. In addition to these substantive aspects of those responsible but should also make sure that a consulting partner fits culturally and from its size to own company. This is especially true when a long-term cooperation is planned – for example, if a company does not operate its cloud infrastructure itself later, but would like to have remote access via remote control by the consulting partner.

This part is equally applicable to In-House Cloud.

In-House Cloud : First Consolidate then Virtualize

The basic requirement for a flexible distribution and use of resources in the Cloud is a broad virtualization of IT systems. This means that a server’s resources no longer exclusively claimed by an application, but can be shared by multiple applications.
Companies thus benefit in several ways :

1. Expensive hardware resources can utilize efficiently
2. It reduces the costs of procurement and administration.
3. In addition, new systems and applications, for example, a test environment or a virtual Windows desktop can be provided more quickly.
4. Enables a virtualization instance of computing and storage resources

Thee existing IT landscape but must be standardized and consolidated first of all as far as possible. That is alone is often an extensive and sometimes complex task. In many medium-sized companies the IT landscape has grown over the years and therefore consists of a mix of hardware and software solutions.

Tools help in Virtualization

When it comes to virtualizing the systems, companies can now rely on many supporting tools. Especially in the storage area many intelligent technologies have been established in recent years.
One is the vFiler technology from NetApp. Here, the storage infrastructure is divided into several independent units called vFiler, which can be assigned to individual applications, internal departments or customers.
Advantage: If a virtualized filer needs to be serviced, the data can be moved transparently to other storage units, without affecting the operation has to be interrupted.
In addition to the standardization and virtualization, the hardware is often a bottleneck in the transition to a private cloud. If applications are no longer provided in a decentralized but centrally, companies have no choice but usually need to extend or completely renew their server infrastructure.

Network Connectivity

The topics of network connectivity and Internet access should not underestimated in SMEs during the transition into cloud. Because regardless of whether one or multiple cloud services is/are used over the public Internet, a private corporate network relates – the bandwidth must be adequately dimensioned.

But what if the company is in a region that is not completely equipped with fast internet connections? Here are some technologies to get out of existing network bottlenecks and they can maximum transmission speed. This includes, among other things, the process Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).

For the companies which have multiple locations and this over wide area networks (WAN) , there are mechanisms and tools that increase the transmission speed of the network effectively. So-called WAN accelerators compress data streams and provide an intelligent caching. They used data from store locally, so they do not need to be retransmitted at each call.

Disaster Recovery and Other Points

Disaster Recovery and choice of a private cloud in your own company is basically a two way street. We have discussed both the topics throughout various articles on this website, it will be prudent to perform a search on this website to find the solution for your need.