MANAGED SERVICES
IN THE CLOUD
Paul Burns from Neovise is joined by a
great set of industry leaders within the
cloud computing space — Rackspace,
Contegix, and Citrix — giving the best
practices to end users on choosing and
using managed services in the cloud.
Understanding managed services for cloud environments
Paul: Aaron, a lot of people view cloud services as a self-service offering, so I am wondering if you think the idea of providing managed services in a public cloud environment is some kind of an oxymoron?
Aaron: My answer is, really I don’t think so at all. The reason for that actually goes back to a key phrase you just mentioned — self-service offerings. What does that phrase mean? In its most basic form, a public cloud is nothing more than a platform that charges you on a metered usage basis. What kind of tools you use? Are they tools from the provider? Are they your tools? These are all questions that come into play when you are talking about managed services. While you are still charged the Opex (operational expense) for usage, the responsibility of management in managed services is moved over to the service provider. The industry has a more evolved and mature solution or platform that is more turnkey and provides most of the heavy lifting on the back end by the service provider for you. Therefore, your organisation is able to get up and running much faster in that environment typically.
Paul: It sounds like we could easily have a mix of self-service and managed services. Khurram, do you think that managed services for public clouds are different when compared to managed services for a more traditional dedicated hosting environment?
Khurram: I believe that managed services in public cloud actually place much more demand on the staff of the service provider themselves. That is where the biggest difference comes in, and so providing managed services on a dedicated managed hosting environment is much easier because you
are dealing with an isolated environment whereas on public cloud itself, at the end of the day, it has a shared multitenant public platform. Hence, to provide managed services for customers requires the staff or the service provider to have deeper skills to a level where they can get at the root cause very quickly and make sure that the customer services stay up and running, as promised.
Paul: Matthew, do you think managed services align well with the pay as you go and on-demand models that are currently used in public clouds?
Matthew: We believe that it does really well and probably serves better than the current or the previous model, where it had been tied to a machine, a physical or even a virtualised server. The reality was that it was consumed this way because it made sense to the customer of the managed service providers (MSPs) that there were hard caps on the resources. The reality is that managed services are about delivering that offering, that application and that service to the customer and the shared responsibility between the customer and the MSP. Today, providers can offer a pay as you go service for many managed services such as updates, backup and recovery, moni-toring and even deployment scaling, even helping them to push out things like automation for deployment scaling.
Paul: What type of businesses use these managed services?
Aaron: Well, businesses that actually depend on technology for the core delivery of their products. They don’t want the hassle of maintaining an IT infrastructure and within that the systems or even the technical staff, at times — these are businesses where their core function is to focus on
deliv-ering value to their customers as opposed to spending time maintaining their systems. As for scenarios, the way I look at it is that it is all workload based. There might be a department level application that might be better serviced through many service providers. That makes a lot of sense to me. It is not very uncommon to say systems that are important to the business and maybe that, for one reason or another, can’t be provided on-premise,
need to be moved to a public cloud or an MSP solution. That is definitely
something else I am seeing a lot of today.
Matthew: I think Aaron is spot on where he is discussing the focus on the company isn’t solely on the technology it has at its disposal. There is this 95/5% rule, where 5% of the company’s operations are seen to be unique from the other 95%. Everybody has to do pay roll, everybody has to do reviews, nobody wants a whole lot of innovation in your salary every pay slip. That is what they would need to spend their time focused on. For many companies in manufacturing, it is very much about truly honing that manufacturing process and getting something out to market faster than anybody else. IT is part of that 95% and the more we can do that, the better off customers, the MSPs and the IT industry overall, are going to be.
Khurram: Most customers tend to use public cloud for keeping unpredictable peaks in their IT usage. Whilst some customers may want to take their more predictable enterprise level applications on public cloud, we have also experi-enced some customers who have, let’s say an event coming up which is only going to last for about four days or so. They therefore wouldn’t really need a dedicated analytics environment and are quite happy to take that applica-tion of workload in to the public cloud. They get managed services wrapped around this environment to make sure that there is enough monitoring to make sure that it stays up and running. That is one of the main use cases we have experienced at Rackspace.
Paul: It seems there are plenty of situations where businesses would want to use managed services in a cloud environment. I heard cases where organisa-tions have experienced a lack of skills or maybe a shortage of staff. So you should look to a cloud service provider to provide managed services around something that you have less experience on. There may be scenarios where you have some non-differentiated activities that need to get done and so it makes more sense to have an outside party focusing on those whilst you focus on the unique 5% inside your company.
What should people look for in cloud-based managed services?
Paul: Are service level agreements (SLA’s) more robust for managed services environments?
Khurram: I think one of the key principals for an SLA in a public cloud within a managed service context is that those SLAs should be really easy for customers to understand and implement. For customers to get those guarantees, the cost of over architecting their solutions and adding multiple layers pretty much defeats the purpose. SLAs for public cloud itself are really important and the sheer nature of the way the public cloud is architected, where customers are able to, quite smartly, integrate disaster recovery capabilities and higher visibility concentrations within the public cloud, helps them get much more out of those SLAs.
Matthew: The reality, unfortunately, is that it depends upon the provider. It really needs to get down to it being an absolute ‘yes’ and it being absolutely
simplified. Having customers learn new rules, reinventing stuff over and over again, makes the SLAs hard to understand and difficult to implement.
Paul: I am wondering if people think that open source is important or not for managed services customers?
Aaron: I consider it very critical. Actually the ability for the customer or even the service provider to contribute features back. It is a trend that we are seeing more and more. We are talking about more than just providing
feed-back to a software or hardware vendor for potential changes in the features. We have customers whose service providers are actually developing changes into products and actively promoting change within those products. Because the software is open, you can see the strengths and weaknesses, and so you really have a transparent view into the product. I really believe that transpar-ency is the key to success both for public cloud and managed services. Matthew: I think the debate is over whether or not open source is impor-tant or not. If it isn’t then it should be. At the end of the day, the headlining importance is the return on investment, period. This is especially true when customers are buying a service rather than a product. It is important if the service utilises open source or proprietary software as long as it brings ROI. For many customers and cloud service providers like us, the open nature of open source is a huge positive impact on the ROI calculation.
Khurram: I would just reiterate the comments made earlier about open source as absolutely critical to get mass adoption within the cloud industry. One of the inhibitors from our customers is that they have the inability to push forward workloads across clouds and, as Rackspace, the founding member
for OpenStack, we firmly believe in that notion. The more open source imple -mentations of cloud, the better for customers and service providers because
a) it gives them more choice and b) it keeps service providers on their toes as well to make sure that they are constantly innovating. All in all, I think it is a really good thing for the cloud industry.
Paul: I hear a lot of people in larger enterprises say that their longer term strategy is hybrid, so I wonder whether you three tend to agree that many people will have hybrid environments — which would provide a linkage of their on-premise clouds or on-premise traditional environments with public clouds — and if so, how important do you think these hybrid environments are when you also talk about managed services?
Matthew: Today, we are seeing customers that are really pushing the enve-lope on hybrid environment. They are pushing it from private clouds that are in their on-premise data centres or that are with the cloud service providers like us. For them, it has become absolutely critical. The challenge for delivering management on it, at the end of the day, comes back to the same thing that we always have when we are delivering managed services — having very clear
defined lines in the roles of responsibility. We [cloud service providers] need to
do that with our customers so that we are accountable for everything, and that we are working with them to deliver that hybrid environment.
Khurram: Hybrid cloud is the sure fire way to go for both enterprise and SMB customers because it gives them massive flexibility in terms of choosing the right platform and what the right fit is for that application or workload that
they are looking to run. Also, it gives the ability to extend that environment to an on-premise private cloud. I think giving the customers that single pane of glass is truly important for our customers. Giving customers that single pane
of glass and a unified view and management layer across these environments
is truly important for our customers. I would totally agree that giving support and options for hybrid customers is a really good thing.
Aaron: The dilemma is how did we evolve into this hybrid cloud environment
in the first place? A lot of customers really wanted 100% public cloud for
various reasons but they somewhat fell into hybrid cloud over time. That
comes down to workload: maybe the workload didn’t fit necessarily in one
environment or another. Hybrid allows us to have that ‘best of both worlds’ approach. We can put certain workloads and certain pieces of architecture in different places to achieve the best results and the best environment for the workload. Sometimes, it is not even a technical aspect. There could be cultural or compliance reasons within a company; it can even be local or national laws or regulations. There are so many different reasons why you place workloads in various places so the hybrid environment is just more of a natural evolution to the cloud model.
Paul: What other considerations do you think people might have or should have when they are looking for cloud based managed services?
Aaron: This again goes back to the non-technical aspects — compli-ance, alerting, monitoring, reporting and accountability. Most importantly, I would say, more than any of them is transparency; especially if you are in an environment where you have compliancy issues that you need to deal with. That usually means an audit path; if you are in-house, you control the audit path but if you are looking at an MSP, then how do they provide you with the information and how do you know that it is authentic and that you are maintaining compliance? That is one of the biggest features I see in people looking for MSPs.
Khurram: Some of the facts to consider in addition to the ones already mentioned, customers have considerations around security, performance and reliability of the environment and they also start thinking about time to value aspects. What is the cost per unit? Will they get utility billing or a pay as you go model on that? How quickly can they provision those
resources? More often than not, I think there is an inflection point; when the customer reaches that inflection point, running a private cloud makes
much more sense across those considerations I’ve just outlined as opposed to running those works entirely on public cloud or on dedicated servers.
Matthew: The way we see it is that when they are looking for an MSP, the biggest challenge that customers have today is we have got this ambig-uous term ‘managed service’. Let’s ignore the ambigambig-uous term ‘cloud’ but focus on the managed service. There are drastic differences in providers and that has become the biggest challenge for them. Do you want that urgent care doctor? Do you want that primary physician or a concierge doctor? All of them, in many ways, relate back to our industry and they
are all still a doctor, the MSPs. The biggest challenge is trying to figure out
where the customer needs to be and help them understand what they are actually getting. They need to be an active participant in that process so they don’t then raise their hands one day and say “I thought the MSP was going to take care of that.” The MSP probably would have, but they just didn’t opt for that service and they didn’t want that service.
Paul: Do you think we will see greater levels of automation powering managed services?
Matthew: We are going to see it in two factors here. We are going to see it behind the scenes from the cloud service providers through the deployment of cloud and open stack environments, and even the vCloud environments. We are going to see that level of automation behind the scenes. That is going to translate for the end user and buyer into reduced costs and the ability to scale faster as they need to, but for the other factor of this, the end user’s automation, their use of cloud is going to be critical as well. The ability for companies to compete will be helped or hindered by their velocity for their custom systems, for their websites and the development of the deployment cycle. Automation is a huge step to achieve faster velocity than before. Aaron: Velocity is absolutely the number one aspect we are seeing as a crit-ical factor and so Matthew is very much right, but another one to consider also is, again, going back to that compliance aspect. When you are using some of these tools that are out there such as Apache CloudStack or OpenStack, what do you get? Well, you get this ability to manipulate, control and poll hundreds or even thousands of devices at scale, and so the less human interaction, the better. We are simultaneously leaving an audit trail and also potentially removing human error or scalability as a factor. Khurram: The only bit I will add that I think is pertinent to the responses from both Matthew and Aaron is the fact that most of our customers are looking to adopt DevOps within the organisation as a way to fast track their
adop-tion of cloud, but it is not an easy fix. There isn’t the ability for customers to
do that. It is a multi-faceted change that they must consider. On one hand, it is an organisational change; it is the system and processes but at the same time there is also a cultural change within the staff that they are looking to hire.What you should do is is to start small and hire some people who have
Where are cloud-based managed services heading?
DevOps a background as well and vice versa. That means change is less disruptive, which also sets up customers in a much better way to run some of their legacy apps on the public cloud.
Paul: One of the challenges I have seen is in how you get an application over to your cloud environment. We have even talked about DevOps here, but there may also be migration-oriented services that help people onboard their traditional applications and get them into that managed cloud environment where they can take advantage of scale, elasticity and so on. What are your thoughts and where do you think cloud-based managed services are heading in terms of helping people onboard these applications to these clouds?
Aaron: What we are seeing more and more is this idea of a workload or a cloud assessment. Taking your existing environment and your line of
busi-ness apps that you have in your infrastructure today, you figure out which
ones can be moved easily and which ones quite frankly cannot. Not every workload needs to move to a cloud or is technically able to move to a cloud
so you have to gather the information first. There is no silver bullet, everything moves in a certain way. But every application needs to move in a slightly
different way and from there, you can figure out a migration path and how
you are going to integrate it into an MSP environment.
Matthew: This idea that you are going to be able to shift everything to the cloud is a fantasy. There are things that need to stay on-premises — there is no better home for it. When you talk about the services and you talk about the consultants that can help the customers conduct analysis and evalua-tion, really part of this slow staged out movement for the right workloads to the cloud also comes with the cultural change that needs to happen behind the scenes: It is getting rid of that fear and those concerns.
“Hybrid allows us to
have that ‘best of both
worlds’ approach. We can
put certain workloads
and certain pieces of
architecture in different
places to achieve the
best results and the
best environment for
Khurram: I think the cloud is for everyone but not everything. Not every application will run well on cloud. Another popular preconception is that public cloud is cheaper. It isn’t. It depends upon the workload that you are running on the public cloud, hence customers should not really be driven by the low cost of the cloud as a silver bullet for controlling their costs. Having said that, the way to move to a public cloud in terms of migration is to look for an application or enhancements for an existing application to make them more cloud aware and run them as a small group on public cloud, and monitor that performance. If it works well, work on a plan to mainstream that entire application on the public cloud. If it doesn’t work, you should have a contingency plan to make sure you can take it back off of the cloud and run it on a dedicated or more appropriate environment. Not every application will run straight off on the public cloud, which is a really important starting point for customers.
Paul: Do you think that we will see greater levels of infrastructure customisation made available to managed services customers within these multi-tenant public cloud environments?
Aaron: This is really the idea of an elastic and dynamic data centre. Up until
now, we have been assessing a workload and how it fits into a specified set
of parameters at a service provider. We are almost forcing the application to
tell them ‘you have to fit it like this’ and ‘it has to look like this to be a good fit’. What I see happening more and more is the infrastructure itself actually becoming elastic and actually moving to fit different workloads.
Matthew: We are already starting to see this and it is really truly being driven by those customers. We refer back to the previous question where there is this analysis that is occurring on the workload. Even inside that analysis, it is not a one or zero, it is not an either or, or it needs to be on-premises or cloud.
Actually, what we are saying is that it doesn’t really fit well on-premises and
that cloud needs to adapt so we are starting to see a lot of that adaptation and customisation in the cloud.
Khurram: I would just add that we firmly believe that hardware cloud, which
effectively is a public cloud and on-premise — or a hosted private cloud
and a dedicated hosting environment — that is the first step in a building
block towards that infrastructure customisation because it offers customers
immense flexibility in terms of choosing the right environment for the work -load that they have in mind and then having the holistic management view across that entire environment. That really helps customers to plan forward and also look at where their existing applications are performing and
behaving, which informs their decisions in the future. Hybrid cloud is defi -nitely the way to start looking at more futuristic infrastructure customisation.
Paul: In which particular direction(s) do you see the managed services sector heading in the cloud world?
Matthew: I think the big direction that we are going to head is this move-ment away from viewing it as a resource. At the end of the day, where we are viewing it as a dedicated machine, as a cloud instance, as a VM, we’re going to start moving managed services to be about the actual applica-tion service that we’re delivering. Underneath managed services is going to be more automated stuff with regards to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), public and private clouds, and hybrid. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is going to be part of that foundation as well, so MSPs really need to raise their game and look at it as application delivery.
Khurram: In terms of futuristic developments there will be less fragmenta-tion in the industry going forward in a couple of years’ time between the IaaS and the PaaS layer and they will become more as one with each other. The other bet is around the ability for customers to federate across multiple clouds. Again, it goes back to the heart of the OpenStack movement. If there are open source clouds against which customers are able to quote and move their workload, then the ability to connect to public and private
clouds simultaneously gives customers much more drive and flexibility.
Aaron: The way I look at it is that the infrastructure will go away. It will always be there, operated and maintained in some fashion but from a business stand-point, it is really, again, about workloads and the containers of workloads going forward. At that point, all you are doing is analysing that workload and
finding an environment that it fits to. Is that PaaS? Is it Software-as-a-Service?
There are so many options and so many ways to carve up workloads.
“This idea that you are going to
be able to shift everything to the
cloud is a fantasy. There are things
that need to stay on-premise —
there is no better home for it.”
Khurram Ijaz
Head of Cloud Products – International
Rackspace
Khurram is an experienced IT professional with over fifteen years of international experience in enterprise managed services, mobile applications and cloud computing. Khurram combines a strong focus on business strategy and customer insight with a passion for translating technology into business advantage. Khurram has led global and cross-functional teams to product launch and through business transformation programs. His responsibilities have included B2B product management and strategy development and implementation focusing on startups and global IT & telecom companies in Europe, Middle East and Asia. Khurram is currently Head of Cloud Products, International at Rackspace. In this role he is responsible for launching and managing the company’s international public cloud portfolio.
Matthew Porter
CEO
Contegix
Matthew Porter, CEO at Contegix, co-founded the award-winning managed hosting, cloud computing and colocation service provider in Saint Louis, Missouri. Contegix is recognized throughout the industry for delivering reliable hosting with Go Beyond™ support. Before founding Contegix, Porter served as Director of Professional Services for Demand Management Inc. Porter has also held the position of Senior Application Developer for World Wide Technology and senior engineering positions at TelcoBuy.com and IBM Global Services. Porter serves as a board member for Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) Saint Louis where he coaches and mentors early-stage entrepreneurs. Porter also sits on the Advisory Board for a select number of startups, including OffCampusMedia.
Aaron Delp
Sr. Director of Technical Marketing
Citrix
Aaron Delp is the Sr. Director of Technical Marketing for the Citrix CloudPlatform Group. Aaron considers himself a “technical sponge” and is continually looking to learn more about cloud computing. He has spoken at technical events and authored numerous papers on cloud solutions. Prior to Citrix, Aaron led the Cloud Field Enablement team for VCE specialising in management, orchestration, and automation. Other past responsibilities include a top 50 technology value added reseller (VAR), ePlus Technology serving as the Data Center Practice Lead & over ten years at IBM holding various positions supporting business partners, vendors, and distributors to design and deploy data center solutions.
Paul Burns
President and Founder
Neovise
Paul is the President and Founder of Neovise, an IT industry analyst firm focused on cloud computing and IT management. He works closely with executive leaders from vendors and service providers to understand, evaluate and provide input on their solutions. He also spends time with IT organizations and businesses, compiling research data, analyzing needs and providing guidance on IT investments. He earned Computer Science and MBA degrees from Colorado State University and has spent 25 years in the technology industry.
