The Key Questions That IT Managers Should Ask When Evaluating Cloud

Toronto, Canada, January 11, 2010 – Last year Cloud computing captured the attention of decision makers and businesses. Facing pressures to provide better services while reducing costs, the market saw more and more companies begin to examine the value of moving to a Cloud model. Over the past 12 months, uptime software (www.uptimesoftware.com) has studied the market and worked with partners and customers to determine how the Cloud can be best utilized in various environments to reduce IT costs while for driving performance. The company believes that 2010 will become known as a year of Cloud exploration and experimentation.

“At the beginning of 2009, most of the talk around Cloud focused on ‘what is it and how can it help me?’ This year we believe that discussion will focus more on costs and how to best leverage Cloud computing within the business,” said Alex Bewley, Chief Technology Officer of uptime software. “While there are many hurdles to overcome before the Cloud becomes a mainstream component of IT, we believe that all paths to Cloud adoption should begin with exploring possibilities and asking ‘What are the costs/benefits for the business and in what capacity should my organization adopt Cloud over the next one to three years?’”

Asking questions and gaining an understanding of the spectrum’s components is important. There are many options that businesses can use to leverage Cloud technologies to reduce costs; whether it’s ‘dipping a toe’ into the Cloud waters, such as hosting a server in Amazon EC2 or the RackSpace Cloud to deliver a decoupled application or leveraging VMware’s new VBlock to move entire mission critical infrastructures to the Cloud.

The Six Key Questions IT Managers Should Ask About Cloud:

1. What business applications do we have and what are their topologies? What business applications are in the inventory and what can be migrated? How are the applications interrelated? 
2. What is the profile of the application workloads? An added dimension to the Cloud assessment, besides having to understand workload profiles, is identifying proximity of data to the compute aspects of the applications.
3. What systems management tooling passes the P-V-C (physical, virtual, and Cloud) test for monitoring, measure and managing the new IT? Is the entire infrastructure manageable through a single-pane-of-glass dashboard with one solution, including cost effective Server Monitoring, Virtual Server Monitoring, and Cloud Monitoring?
4. Are the applications data or network heavy? Are they highly interdependent? Will tooling integrate with automation solutions to assist in dynamic allocation of resources, or possibly avoid incidents through proactive changes in infrastructure?
5. What about vendor risk assessment? If a vendor does indeed collapse, how quickly can workloads be migrated to a different vendor? Are there any technological ‘gotchas’ like unsupported platforms? This will be a very important hurdle for Cloud to overcome.
6. Where on the IT Spectrum do we fit? The first step in evaluation is to quantify what Cloud computing means to your business. Is it as banal as remote storage used for DR purposes or something as evolved as dynamic compute with secure private/public networking?

About uptime software

Companies of all sizes rely on uptime to deliver IT value effectively. Through innovative and award-winning solutions, and an exceptional client experience, uptime helps IT professionals dramatically reduce downtime, maximize operational efficiency, and prove IT’s value to its customers.

uptime software inc. is a privately held corporation founded in 2001 and headquartered in Toronto, Canada. With over 600 clients in 32 countries, uptime is a premier provider of systems management software for virtual and physical server monitoring, capacity planning, and service and application monitoring for the SMB and Enterprise marketplaces. Visit us online at www.uptimesoftware.com