The vast majority of my customers are highly virtualized, and quite potentially using Amazon or Azure in a shadow IT kind of approach. Some groups within the organization have deployed workloads into these large public provider spaces. It’s simply due to these groups having the need to gain access to resources and deploy them as rapidly as possible.

Certainly Development and Testing groups have been building systems, and destroying them as testing moves forward toward production. But also, marketing, and other groups may find that the IT team is less than agile in providing these services on a timely basis. Thus, a credit card is swiped, and development occurs. The first indication that these things are taking place is when the bills come.

Often, the best solution is a shared environment in which certain workloads deployed into AWS, Azure or even Softlayer, into peer data centers for a shared, but less public workload provide ideal circumstances for the organization.

Certainly these services are quite valuable to organizations. But, is it secure, or does it potentially expose the company to vulnerabilities of data and/or potentially an entrée into the corporate network? Are there compliance issues? How about the costs? If your organization could provide these services in a way that would satisfy the user community, would that be a more efficient, cost-effective, compliant, and consistent platform?

These are really significant questions. The answers rarely, though, are simple. Today, there are applications, such as Cloudgenera which will analyze the new workload and advise the analyst as to whether any of these issues are significant. It’ll also advise as to current cost models to prove out the costs over time. Having that knowledge prior to deployment could be the difference between agility and vulnerability.

Another issue to be addressed with opening your environment up to a hybrid or public workload is the learning curve of adopting a new paradigm within your IT group. This can be daunting. To address these kinds of shifts in approach, a new world of public ecosystem partners have emerged. These tools, create workload deployment methodologies that bridge the gap between your internal virtual environment, and ease or even facilitate that transition. Tools like Platform9’s create what is essentially a software tool that allows the administrator to decide from within vCenter’s Platform9 panel where to deploy that workload. The deployment of this tool is as simple as downloading an OVF, and deploying it into your vCenter. Platform9 leverages the VMware API’s and the AWS API’s to integrate seamlessly into both worlds. Simple, elegant, and learning curve is minimal.

There are other avenues to be addressed, of course. For example, what about latencies to the community? Are there storage latencies? Network latencies? How about security concerns?

Well, analytics against these workloads as well as those within your virtual environment will no longer be a nice-to-have, but actually a must-have.

Lately, I’ve become particularly enthralled with the sheer level of log detail provided by Splunk. There are many SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) tools out there, but in my experience, no other tool gives the functional use as Splunk does. To be sure, other tools, like SolarWinds provide this level of analytics as well, and do so with aplomb. Splunk, as a data collector is unparalleled, but beyond that, the ability to tailor your dashboards to show you the trends, analytics, and pertinent data against all of that volume of data in a functional at-a-glance method. The tool’s ability to stretch itself to all your workloads, security, thresholds, etc., and to present it in such a way that the monitor panel or dashboard can show you so simply where your issues and anomalies lie.

There is a large OpenSource community of SIEM software as well. Tools such as OSSIM, Snort, OpenVAS and BackTrack are all viable options, but remember, as OpenSource, they rarely provide the robust dashboards that SolarWinds or Splunk do. They will, as OpenSource, cost far less, but may require much more hand-holding, and support will likely be far less functional.

When I was starting out in the pre-sales world, we began talking of the Journey to the Cloud. It became a trope.  We’re still on that journey. The thing is, the ecosystem that surrounds the public cloud is becoming as robust as the ecosystem that exists surrounding standard, on-prem workloads.