Page 113 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE HYBRID CL OUD

Isn’t this just wishful thinking? What about CEOs’ con-
cerns about customer data traveling out to the public cloud,
where the IT managers lose track of it? Don’t spikes in activity
include customer data?
Yes, spikes in workloads often include sensitive data. So an
IT manager needs to analyze what work is appropriate to send

out to the cloud and what is not. He doesn’t need to send the
work that is causing the spike, if the data should stay in house.
Because the virtualized servers are being managed as a pool, if
the operations manager offloads some equivalent to the spike,
he’ll pick up the capacity he needs to continue operating.
This is a fresh subject for computer professionals in enterprise
IT, but they’re already identifying several types of workload

that could be shipped off to the cloud without posing much
of a threat to secure company operations.
The first such type of workload is software testing. Hardly
anyone in her right mind wants to steal unfinished, unproven
software designed for some purpose specific to a single given
company. The testing of the software in cloud environments
would involve intensive use of many servers for short periods
of time, almost a definition of the kind of job that the cloud is
good at. In addition, quality assurance of new software is a

closely related job that could be performed in the cloud.
The staging of new applications, where they’re configured
to run with all the other pieces of software that they depend
on, is a third transferable job. A new human resource man-
agement or new accounting application is first launched in a
staged environment to see if anything goes wrong. If it does,

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