Regarding the technical requirements of today's IT, the cloud is always a part of the general IT strategy. It does not depend upon the region in which the company is working in, nor does it depend upon the part of the economy; 99.9 percent of all companies have cloud technology already in their environment.
The good question for a lot of CIOs in general is: "To what extent do we allow cloud services, and what does that mean to our infrastructure?". So, it's a matter of compliance, allowance, and willingness.
The top 10 most important questions for a CIO to prepare for the cloud are as follows:
- Are we allowed to save our data in the cloud?
- What classification of data can be saved in the cloud?
- How flexible are we regarding the cloud?
- Do we have the knowledge to work with cloud technology?
- How does our current IT setup and infrastructure fit into the cloud's requirements?
- Is our current infrastructure already prepared for the cloud?
- Are we already working with a cloud-ready infrastructure?
- Is our internet bandwidth good enough?
- What does the cloud mean to my employees?
- Which technology should we choose?
The definition of the term cloud is not simple, but we need to differentiate between the following:
- Private cloud: This is a highly dynamic IT infrastructure based on a virtualization technology that is flexible and scalable. The resources are saved in a privately owned datacenter either in your company, or a service provider of your choice.
- Public cloud: This is a shared offering of IT infrastructure services that are provided via the internet.
- Hybrid cloud: This is a mixture of a private and public cloud. Depending on the compliance or other security regulations, the services that could be run in a public datacenter are already deployed there, but the services that need to be stored inside the company are running there. The goal is to run these services on the same technology to provide the agility, flexibility, and scalability to move services between public and private datacenters.
In general, there are some big players within the cloud market (for example, Amazon Web Services, Google, Azure, and even Alibaba). If a company is quite Microsoft-minded from the infrastructure point of view, they should have a look at the Microsoft Azure datacenters. Microsoft started in 2008 with their first datacenter, and today, they invest a billion dollars every month in Azure.
As of today, there are about 34 official datacenters around the world that form Microsoft Azure, besides the ones that Microsoft does not talk about (for example, US Government Azure). There are some dedicated datacenters, such as the German Azure cloud, that do not have connectivity to Azure worldwide. Due to compliance requirements, these frontiers need to exist, but the technology of each Azure datacenter is the same although the services offered may vary.
The following map gives an overview of the locations (so-called regions) in Azure as of today and provides an idea of which ones will be coming soon:
When Microsoft started their public cloud, they decided that there must be a private cloud stack too, especially, to prepare their infrastructure to run in Azure sometime in the future.
The first private cloud solution was the System Center suite, with System Center Orchestrator and Service Provider Foundation (SPF) and Service Manager as the self-service portal solution. Later on, Microsoft launched the Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server. Today, Windows Azure Pack is available as a product focused on the private cloud and provides a self-service portal (the well-known old Azure portal, code name red dog frontend), and it uses the System Center suite as its underlying technology:
