When two people fall in love, their friends and family say they are walking “in the clouds.” 
In recent years, a new cloud has situated itself above Wisconsin permanently and the technology industry is falling in love. So are the businesses learning about and implementing cloud computing. Let’s take a walk…

There’s room for all
With any technological advance, there are many facets involved. The same goes for cloud computing. It’s not a one-size-fits-all concept. Actually, that’s its biggest selling point: individuality.

“No matter where you are in the world, you can have access to the finest technology available,” says Bryan Bechtoldt, chief technology officer for Core BTS, an IT solutions company headquartered in Madison. “There are many forms of cloud computing. It can be for a specific group inside your organization, for a specific purpose or in some cases, a complete solution for running your IT segment. First look at your own needs and let those lead you to what’s a best/practical fit.”

James Wetzel, senior network administrator for the National FFA Organization explains that the organization’s data center was physically out of space a year ago. (The Wisconsin State FFA alone boasts more than 250 chapters and has been active since 1929.) A lot of people around the country depend on the National FFA’s resources. Supporting the more than 50 servers and all necessary network equipment and infrastructure was consuming several staff member’s full-time attention. “We were faced with making some tough decisions,” Wetzel says.
First, the group could have pursued a traditional remodeling job. Knock down drywall and expand. This would have meant construction, electrical, cooling, the whole deal, not including the major interruption to daily operations a project like that causes.

Then, they took a walk in the cloud. Core BTS introduced this nationwide non-profit to a virtualization option.

In the Cloud
“A ‘cloud’ is a collection of shared computing resources,” explains Tim Ferguson, director of Global Infrastructure at Bemis Co. in Neenah.

There are public clouds and private clouds. In a public model, the virtual data center is outside a company’s firewall. Resources are owned and managed by a third party. This provider “sells computing resources to businesses based on application requirements: type, number of users, size of infrastructure required, etc.,” explains Ferguson.

A private cloud, on the other hand, has the same computing capabilities, but the resources are owned, managed and installed by the user. The center is inside a company’s firewall, or is a private space within the cloud provider’s data center.

A hybrid cloud is a blend of the private and public.

Then, there are various models of cloud computing:

• 
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This is where storage and computing resources are available for developers to build and run data solutions. 

• 
Platform as a Service (PaaS): Developers can build and execute applications on existing infrastructure set up in the cloud.

• 
Software as a Service (SaaS): A business can just connect and use the software. No installation, management or extra hardware is needed.
 
“Clients come to us to make sense of this new IT paradigm,” says Bechtoldt. “Simply stated, we are a matchmaker. We match a business’ needs to the right suite of cloud offerings. We then help with the pricing and sourcing, migration of data assets into the cloud and then the ongoing monitoring of the solutions provided to them from the cloud.”

Why the Cloud?
A company’s infrastructure technology always needs a way to increase capacity or add capabilities without investing in new infrastructure, training or licensing additional software. Cloud computing offers a pay-as-you-use service that extends the traditional IT capabilities, over the Internet.

For a small- to medium-sized business, IT infrastructure can be an overwhelming cost issue. In traditional data centers, many times “applications that are running on a dedicated server are idle 90 percent of the time, consuming very little resources,” explains Wetzel. “Those resources sit there and burn electricity and drive heat into your data center with no subsequent value to the business.”

The National FFA’s power consumption in its data center has dropped by 30 percent and cooling requirements have been cut by 40 percent. “We’re not even done consolidating everything yet,” he notes.
Ferguson echoes the same sentiment for Bemis. “Private cloud/virtualized infrastructure has helped us reduce the operational expenses related to our computing infrastructure,” he says. “This includes reductions in data center power/cooling costs and hardware maintenance.”

The other benefit to Wetzel’s organization has been the reduction in staff time needed to manage the servers. Since no one had been familiar with cloud computing before, there was a small learning curve, Wetzel explains. Core BTS helped them through the process to consolidate production systems as well as development and testing.

When using cloud computing, the developers can immediately address any user problems or function errors and each user doesn’t have to wait his or her turn for the application to be fixed. The issues and solutions are universal in the respective cloud.

This ease in operations also lends employees access to the system wherever they may be. For example, a traveling salesperson can update a database at any time, and the company will be informed immediately.

Ferguson says that capacity planning is critical. “It’s important to have processor, memory and storage resources available so as workloads change, the environment can be quickly reconfigured,” he explains.

Two-thirds of the business applications at Bemis now are operating in a private cloud environment, including both packaged and in-house developed applications. 

It’s all in the vault
Any time a business launches confidential information into cyber space, there are measures that need to be taken to ensure privacy and the utmost security.

“The matter is really one of trust, not of technology,” Bechtoldt says. “The technology has evolved to a point, that if properly managed and deployed, the cloud is as safe, or safer, than traditional premise-based solutions.”

The cloud is no less safe than a personal computer that is connected to a closed corporate network, provided IT specialists maintain the network, and proper security and safety measures are in place. The human aspect is the main factor, as with any data housing.

“Organizations moving to the cloud have to trust their data assets to an outside party,” explains Bechtoldt. “In many cases this data is the most critical asset of the company and giving up the smallest amount of control is frightening. Picking a trusted partner to help make sure you get the right level of security and are assured of the security is key to accessing the power of the cloud for your company.”

And Wetzel agrees. The level of complexity involved in “designing an appropriate cloud solution makes choosing a knowledgeable partner more critical,” he says. “Choose wisely!”

With a little planning and some good advice, a company can make its walk in the cloud a love connection, too. 

Cloud Watch
•  
Payments in the Cloud. Watch for credit card data to be flowing into the cloud as the Payment Card Industry (PCI) opens its gates. Secure transactions will be occurring in many cloud locations, good news for startups and large companies with peak transaction seasons.

•  
Multiple Virtual Machines in a Single Cloud. Customers are adopting multi-virtual machine environments. Old and new will be in the cloud together.

•  
Cloud Monitoring Leaps Forward. One of the weaknesses of cloud computing is the inability to see what an application is doing and how it’s performing. Companies are developing software to monitor just those statistics.

•  
Rise of the Telecoms. First built by Google and Amazon.com, cloud computing has also been highly ranked in the telecom industry. In 2011, there will be a rise in the maneuvering of these groups as cloud suppliers above the others.

•    
Snappy Cloud Application Integration. Another weakness in the cloud is getting one application to work with another, both in the public and hybrid clouds. New companies are looking to bring customers the integration needed to make these connections, effectively and with minimal disruption.

Illustrations by Juliet Darken

By Jen Bradley

Jen Bradley is a freelance writer living in East Troy.

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