It’s now easier than ever to adopt a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model that addresses not only infrastructure components, but also all of the database and application layers. As HP Discover 2013 breakout sessions by HP customers McKesson (BB1280) and Lloyds Banking Group (BB2682) will reveal, CloudSystem Enterprise is opening up new opportunities for enterprises to take major steps forward in their operations.

By Michael Zuber

HP Cloud Leader, Americas

Christian Verstraete, HP Chief Technologist for Cloud Technologies interviews Nir Yitzak, Chief Information Security Officer for HP Software as a Service regarding the state of security on SaaS, what to ask a SaaS vendor regarding security, and how HP SaaS addresses security issues for its customers.

You have created your cloud infrastructure and you have your service catalog online, but your service catalog is empty because you do not have any services to provision. Traditionally, you would have had to create these services yourself and requiring months of testing to get them production ready. Today you can automate this by using HP Cloud Maps!

Everything in the cloud moves more quickly than traditional IT. With cloud-based provisioning, IT administrators need to operate in real-time, with much higher visibility into the availability of resources and how they are being used. Here is a brief look at three key ways that the new release of HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 addresses the complexity of this dynamic with intelligent resource utilization, greater heterogeneous support and improved financial and asset management.

By Ken Won, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud/Automation Solutions

As the pressures on IT grow, with available resources typically either staying constant, or shrinking, IT organizations have little choice but to become ever more efficient. Increasingly, that means automating whenever and wherever possible. Here is a high-level look at HP’s three-step best practice approach for automation in the next-gen data center and across IT.

by Muneer Mubashir, HP Cloud and Automation product marketing

A new era for Cloud Management is dawning. Discover HP’s solutions for how you can enable business efficiencies, agility and scale by automating end-to-end application delivery as well as building, orchestrating and brokering hybrid cloud services.

by Manoj Raisinghani, Senior Director, HP Software Product Marketing

Written by Saar Gillai, senior vice president and general manager of Converged Cloud for Hewlett Packard

The growth and market acceptance of OpenStack has been a journey.  One that HP has been closely involved with for nearly two years.  Our decision to leverage OpenStack for our cloud platform was not made lightly, and was based on our experience of deploying cloud solutions for several years prior to our OpenStack participation. In fact, we have thousands of customers using our cloud solutions and services, and those numbers are growing quickly. 

Is there really a locked vault where data centre security is impenetrable?  Or, is a move to the innards of a mountain in order?

By Roger Lawrence, Chief Technologist, Strategic Enterprise Services - HP South Pacific

The fireworks on Sydney Harbour were, as ever, spectacular and now it’s time to consider what 2013 holds.  From further integration of SaaS and Iaas to augmented reality with 3D printing thrown in, the next 365 days will be an adventure. 

Virtualization is often confused with being a necessary step towards cloud adoption. While there are similarities in the adoption of virtualization on x86 technology-there is a fundamental difference between how cloud is maturing and how it is being adopted across enterprises, large and small.

Written by Deepak Belani

When it comes to private clouds, the real value lies in the service automation platform – the layer that standardizes and automates tasks associated with deploying and managing cloud applications.  In the white paper, Building a Cloud: Why the Right Service Automation Platform Makes All the Difference, Stratecast presents recommendations to customers for selecting a service automation platform that supports both private and public cloud configurations, with a focus on HP CloudSystem and HP Cloud Service Automation, fueled by HP Cloud Maps technology. 

Written by Deepak Belani

Security concerns such as threat prevention, data protection and policy enforcement are all major barriers to companies wanting to migrate into the cloud. Let me share with you what HP is announced at Discover 2012 Frankfurt, Germany Dec 4-6 that addresses these concerns.

What are their key choice points? 

Azeem Mohamed, Director of Cloud Strategy for HP, explains the key trends their sharing and why HP Converged Cloud provides a portfolio of solutions to help these customers every step of the way in their cloud journey.

Every vendor claims to have a hybrid cloud solution but can they provide a unified cloud experience?

HP does!

Hope you had a chance to read my previous blog “HP hybrid cloud in action! Cloud automation from business demand to production for SAP landscapes”, where I briefly touched on the pain customers feel as they develop, manage and deploy services across private, hosted and public cloud – all without much automation. They are manually moving services between different cloud models, aligning people, organizational teams and consumers. Plus they are facing challenges to modify service requirements as they move between these various deployment platforms.

Organizations across the Globe are adopting Cloud at a staggering rate, consuming various flavors of cloud such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ,Platform-as-a-Service( PaaS ) & Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). As a result, traditional and new breed of applications are moving from in-house hosted datacenters to cloud. Typically Performance testing is considered “luxury item”, a “nice to have” before go-live of application because of various reasons e.g. Project deadline, costs etc. But when applications are moved into cloud, there are additional layer of unknowns that stakeholders should test out before go-live, performance of application being one of them.

Cloud Security is one of the biggest concern when it comes to cloud adoption. In this article we discuss the fundamentals of cloud security and how we can successfuly address the security needs in a comprehensive fashion.

Written by: Jonathan Sharp 

This is the second post summarizing the major lessons of the new eBook, “How to Take Advantage of the Cloud: Your Guide to Achieving Value and Performance,” by HP and Latisys. Previously, we addressed “Cloud basics” using the phrase “how to harness the cloud as part of your IT strategy”.

Over the past couple of weeks, HP has announced several HP CloudSystem enhancements that focus on working with partners - particularly VMware and Microsoft. I also had the opportunity to spend time speaking with a number of customers on the show floor at VMworld last week.

One of the key questions I got was the difference between VMware's cloud management products and HP's CloudSystem. The same question of course applies to comparing Microsoft's cloud management products versus HP's CloudSystem.

Written by: Jonathan Sharp 

Beyond all the hype about the cloud, some companies are achieving great savings, and some aren’t. So what’s the difference? What’s the key to using the cloud to your advantage rather than following the crowds to an overpriced, poor investment?

It's exciting to see customers moving from a virtualized environment towards a hybrid cloud environment.  With HP CloudSystem customers are creating test and development environments, building and managing core applications in the cloud, providing cloud services to others, and creating new lines of business. 

NNIT, a subsidiary of the healthcare supplier Novo Nordisk, a Danish IT service provider has approximately 1,500 employees in five countries.  They were looking to move to a cloud environment to lower operating costs, automate processes and create new value-added services.

This makes some interesting reading if you have time, on a company called Digital Planet. I am always interested to hear about companies like this that are transitioning to the Cloud. We talked about it a lot at HP Discover this year and even had some interesting guest speakers from Latisys and Mckesson Health Care that were there sharing their experiences with Cloud.

Digital Planet who is based in Ireland, has been working with many clients during the past 12 months, moving to a new cloud environment. Leveraging HP’s CloudSystem, they have been able to optimize their business offering; increasing revenue while reducing costs and achieving a 96% ROI over the ten months of operation. It’s an interesting article that is worth a read.

Chris

For more information on HP Converged Cloud visit www.hp.com/go/cloud

Follow me in Twitter @HPCloudSystem

Join the Cloud Advisors discussions on LinkedIn

Written by: Richard Arthur

In previous blogs I discussed factors in market segmentation and feedback from a recent summit concerning public cloud services being launched today. Those can be found here.   In this blog I assume you have some idea of which services you want to launch, now is time to think about your platform for launch. 

Many service providers have tools and portals in place for customer services that they will want to reuse.  However do not underestimate the flexibility requirements of a cloud services platform.   As we have seen time and time again in the Internet – knowing which services you want to launch today does not mean you know which ones you will need to launch (and retire!) in six months.   Flexibility at all levels in a Cloud services platform is critical.    Further, consistency for the end-customer will be critical.   End-customers will view you as a “one-stop shop” for cloud services and they need to have them presented that way.

Finally, an “all-in-one” cloud services platform will reduce risk and investment for each service being launched. 

Define or identify the roles in your organization that will be responsible, accountable, consulted, informed (RACI) for each part of the cloud services platform.

As a business owner, would you open a store without any process to charge back your merchandise? As a user, would you buy a service without knowing the cost upfront? This kind of cost management requirements applies to cloud computing. While cloud computing promises many opportunities for IT cost savings, its diverse and dynamic nature also makes it difficult to reap the expected financial benefits.

Written by: Ken Won, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Service Automation

This week at Discover 2012, HP announced a new version of HP Cloud Service Automation, available as a core element of CloudSystem Enterprise or as a standalone software product, for managing private and hybrid clouds. As a key element in HP’s Converged Cloud strategy, HP Cloud Service Automation is the industry’s most comprehensive, unified solution for brokering and managing application and infrastructure services in private and hybrid clouds, helping IT organizations increase agility and reduce cost, via a self-service portal and highly-automated lifecycle management. 

My 5 year old asked me today, “Why do I have to go to school?  Can’t I work and make money without going to school?”

How do you answer that?  Is it as simple as saying “YES!”, or does it need further explanation?

If you think of it simplistically – the end result is the same – to make money and support yourself.  However, the route to get there, and the quality of life would be different.

I think of cloud in the same way.  You can think of it one step at a time with piecemeal cloud solutions.  Or you can look at the bigger picture and have the end-game in sight so that each decision you make gets you one-step closer on your cloud journey to hybrid delivery. 

Customers are adopting SaaS (Software as a Service) applications at an incredible rate. Is this a threat or an opportunity for the IT organization ? Can IT compete against the brand new, mobile ready solutions from the SaaS market ? Does it make sense for IT to redevelop the capabilities provided by SaaS vendors ?

As the cloud discussion slowly but surely moves to services, one of the key questions CIO's have is whether they need to migrate their existing applications to the cloud. What makes sense and what doesn't? Are existing applications architected in a way they can be migrated to the cloud easily? If yes, what needs to be done? These are some of the points I'm trying to address in this short post. 

I scan the internet quite often to look at what is being said about Cloud. The other day, I ran into a thought-provoking article titled “Cloud has ‘no relevance’ say three-quarters of IT managers.” A report published by risk consultancy Protiviti, who interviewed 100 UK IT managers, state that 74 percent thought that cloud computing had no relevance to their business.

How often did I hear, just virtualize the environment and you have a private cloud. My answer, an absolute NO. Virtualization is one step on the way to cloud, but a virtualized environment is definitely not a cloud, not even a private one. Some people make you believe that, but make sure you understand why it's not the case, and what you actually mis by limiting yourself to virtualization if that is what you are planning to do.