What Will Your Role Be in the Cloud-Based Universe?

Everyone seems to be moving to the cloud. This adoption is taking place for many good reasons, and for many companies, it’s taking place in an extremely customized way.

A move to the cloud can take different forms. On one end of the spectrum, you have a physical desktop that has all applications running on a local drive, but all data stored in the cloud. At the other end you have netbooks, such as the Chromebook, that have virtually all applications and data housed in the cloud.

These options are drastically different, and somewhere in the middle is a choice that’s growing in popularity: Systems with a largely virtual environment that provide greatly improved efficiency. These systems require significantly less processing power, but they fall short of a complete transition to a virtual-only environment. Even with apps served from the cloud, data stored in the cloud, and a cloud-based Intranet, predominantly virtual systems typically still need a local, physical OS. They require careful administration and configuration to ensure users have what they need, where they need it.

Overcoming the shortcomings of the public cloud
Despite its potential cost and infrastructure benefits, public cloud-based computing is not the right answer for all companies, because the public cloud has several shortcomings.

Many organizations require tighter security than the cloud offers, even through today’s security-conscious cloud providers. Companies that have strong security compliance requirements need all files to exist in a physical environment and need to have a physical OS on local machines. For other companies, the risks of downtime and productivity loss are unacceptable. With new security breaches being reported in the news every month, and when something as simple as the weather can disrupt public cloud services, it’s time to look at another solution.

“Companies tend to like how a public cloud works, but would much rather house the same technologies and processes internally, ensuring control over cost, data, and resources,” says Window IT Pro’s IT Community Manager Rod Trent in a November 2013 article. “Whatever reason you cite — security, stability, privacy, redundancy, availability, or NSA — the public cloud is proving to be an unviable solution for businesses.”

Private cloud infrastructure is one avenue companies may consider. Combining the benefits of the public cloud and the security of a stand-alone, in-house system, the private cloud gives companies more control over their data and applications, while giving employees the flexibility of using multiple devices and accessing work files from various locations.

Weighing your options
However, moving strictly to the private cloud may not be the best solution, either. “The cloud, today, makes sense in several areas,” Trent says in a separate article. “It’s a given that email, backups (redundancy), and test labs (VMs) make sense. But pushing anything truly important and business-critical solely to the cloud is a fool’s folly. For sure, vendors will use things like privacy, security, redundancy, performance, elasticity, cost savings, automation, SLAs, and other things to sell cloud solutions to business, but they can never shield companies from the inevitable, or the unpredictable.”

Last year, Buck Woody of the Microsoft Developer Network foresaw the same issues: “If data security is paramount, then private cloud may be the right choice for a given workload. If agility or cost is an issue, public cloud may be the right answer for another workload. And in many cases — perhaps most — using both architectures is the right way to split the workload.”

The admin’s role through implementation and beyond
Regardless of your cloud implementation — complete or partial, public or private —there’s no denying that virtual environments are growing, and they still require some level of physical OS. This means that administrators will be supporting images for many device types and in many forms, creating an even greater need for automation tools that allow system administrators to stay ahead of the game.

“There is a new set of tasks that the cloud brings that may sit within the purview of the system administrator,” Woody says. “… Once the application ‘goes live,’ there are a host of billing, controlling, scaling, and other security questions that developers aren’t equipped to handle. Who takes care of those? As companies are finding out, they need to appoint someone to cover these overlapped areas between developers and administrators.”

These tasks generally fall on the admin’s side of the fence. Are you ready? Even as your job is changing and you face new complexities of integrating virtual and physical worlds, image and driver management is still going to be part of your job. As your company finds its place in the virtual world, it’s important to keep your tasks as simple and streamlined as possible. Make sure you have the tools you need to make it happen.

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