The document discusses considerations for European businesses adopting cloud computing. It highlights that while cloud adoption has been slower in Europe than other regions, momentum is building as 64% of EU businesses now use some form of cloud. Key drivers of cloud adoption are business agility through rapid scalability, cost management through optimized and visible consumption-based costs, and application portfolio optimization. Various industries like manufacturing, media/entertainment, retail, and healthcare are increasingly embracing cloud. The document outlines initial steps for cloud adoption like assessing application dependencies and adapting IT roles, and addresses security, risk, and control concerns. It stresses the importance of choosing a cloud provider that can ensure security, reliability, performance, and maintain an acceptable level of customer control.
1. YOUR PATH TO CLOUD
Essential considerations for adopting cloud:
A European perspective
1
2. ABOUT THIS PAPER
This paper, commissioned by Verizon and EMC, examines the
current state of cloud usage in Europe, focusing on the factors
that are driving adoption and the key considerations you’ll face
when planning your own cloud initiative.
This work would not have been possible without the contribution
of four European cloud experts: Michiel de van der Schueren,
James Cadwell and Gavan Egan from Verizon, and Ian Massingham
from EMC.
CONTENTS
Cloud gathers momentum in Europe........................................................3
What’s driving cloud?......................................................................................4
The industry view.............................................................................................6
Taking your first steps...................................................................................8
Choosing the right provider..................................................................... 10
Your partners of choice for cloud solutions...................................... 12
Cloud: the key to your competitive edge............................................. 14
2
3. CLOUD GATHERS
MOMENTUM IN EUROPE
Europe has been slower than other regions to embrace the
potential of cloud. Research shows the average company in Latin
America already has 39% of its total applications in the cloud.
US companies average 19% of their applications in the cloud. In
Europe it’s just 12%.1
That’s not to say that cloud adoption in Europe is stalling. The EU public cloud market
is growing three times faster than other IT, and already 64% of EU businesses use
cloud in some form, from initial trial to adoption.2 So the migration wave is well and
truly building momentum.
A 2012 IDC study found there was a sharp rise in private cloud deployments among
European organisations. 20% of respondents reported that they had implemented
private cloud in 2012, compared with 6% in the 2011 survey — a significant jump.3
64%
of EU businesses use
cloud in some form, from
initial trial to adoption.
We expect this acceleration to continue following the launch of the European
Commission’s pan-European cloud strategy4 in 2012. The strategy will help European
enterprises adopt cloud services with greater confidence by harmonising technical
standards, simplifying interoperability and data portability across European borders,
and defining standardised SLAs for cloud contracts in the region.
Increasingly enterprises will be looking to cloud not just for today’s “low-risk”
applications like development and testing environments, content delivery and
commodity services such as email and CRM. Executives are increasingly investigating
how cloud can contribute to mission-critical workloads that produce step changes in
business operations and performance.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘CLOUD’?
In this paper we’re focusing on what cloud means for your business, and the broader considerations
you need to make when planning your strategy, so we won’t be discussing the various types of cloud or
associated infrastructure in technical detail.
We’re following the globally accepted NIST definition of cloud’s characteristics and divisions into
public, private, community and hybrid deployment models, in PaaS, IaaS and SaaS service models.
READ MORE AT
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf
3
4. WHAT’S DRIVING CLOUD?
What’s pushing European enterprises to investigate cloud? Our
experts cite three key benefits.
75x
“Over the next decade,
the number of servers
(virtual and physical)
worldwide will grow by a
factor of 10, the amount
of information managed
by enterprise datacenters
will grow by a factor of 50,
and the number of files
the datacenter will have
to deal with will grow by a
factor of 75, at least.”5
1. BUSINESS AGILITY
Nearly every business activity and process depends on access to IT. And when business
needs change, IT has to respond quickly: whether it’s a sudden spike in ecommerce
traffic demanding extra capacity, new product launches needing the support of
specialised applications and resources, or entry into a new market requiring the IT
systems of an entire office to be set up in a weekend. Whenever the business is left
waiting for IT, opportunities are being missed.
You may have experience of IT taking weeks to deploy a new server or months to
approve deployment of a new application. Often these delays are as much down to
staff shortages as to technical constraints.
The primary benefit of cloud is to help meet business goals for faster innovation
through greater responsiveness to changing needs. With cloud, a new server instance,
additional storage capacity or hundreds of new user accounts are easily provisioned.
There is no need to specify and order hardware, or configure OS and applications on
physical infrastructures to execute a project within defined time frames. At a time
when data storage and processing demands are growing faster than headcount, cloud
enables rapid and easy scalability.
Time previously spent by IT staff on routine administration tasks can instead be
invested in innovation activities. For example, one of our customers freed up six of
its 15-strong IT team by adopting cloud — and could immediately put those people to
work supporting the organisation with strategic business initiatives.
SCALING CAPACITY, NOT WORKLOAD
“In January and February and in June and July there are two big peaks in excess of 100,000 unique
visitors a day per site on our four main websites. That leaves eight months a year when we don’t need
this big capacity at all. And for those four peak months we need to be able to scale quickly and with
sizeable resources… [Verizon] Terremark allows us to add 40 percent of our web server capacity
without problem and in no time.”
IT Manager, travel agency, Benelux.
“[Thanks to cloud], two employees manage all of our IT infrastructure worldwide from the
headquarters. This allows us to be very cost-effective.”
IT & Business Applications Manager, manufacturer, Europe.
4
5. 2. COST MANAGEMENT
Cloud is often held up as an example of a way to cut IT costs, and as Europe is still
experiencing economic uncertainty, cost management is a critical consideration. IDC
found that most European businesses using cloud saved 10–20%. Cloud does not just
represent a simple like-for-like CAPEX vs OPEX saving. Where cloud really excels is in
the ongoing optimisation of cost aligned to consumption, providing an easier way to
manage cash flow and risk.
Even more importantly, cloud gives you complete visibility into the true cost of IT.
Whether it’s the number of users assigned to a SaaS application like Salesforce, or
usable gigabytes and CPU cores in use in IaaS, you get an accurate picture of your
consumption with a clear price per unit. That usage is easy to track and charge back
to particular teams or business initiatives. With cloud, IT can offer billable, crosschargeable resources to the business, business leaders can make more informed
decisions about their IT budget, and IT leaders can demonstrate a tangible contribution
to business results.
“We don’t buy virtual
machines at [Verizon]
Terremark but bundles of
gigahertz of processor
speed, RAM memory and
hard disk space. And we
can also buy ‘bursts,’ e.g.
5 gigahertz of processing
power. We buy them,
allocate them to certain
servers and activate them.
We need not worry about
what is behind it,”
IT & Business Applications
Manager, manufacturer,
Europe.
3. APPLICATION PORTFOLIO OPTIMISATION
After years of growth, mergers and acquisitions, many enterprises find themselves with
a sprawling portfolio of applications that they have to maintain. The IT organisation is
challenged with establishing a complete application inventory — yet it’s acutely aware
of duplicated functionality, poor integration, performance issues and proliferating
licencing costs. This drives the urgency for application portfolio modernisation.
Cloud has become an important tool in
modernisation, promising an application future
that’s more scalable, modular and portable. In the
traditional software world, there’s a spectrum of
ways to access application functionality, from offthe-shelf packages to custom prototyped code.
Similarly, there are different cloud delivery models
that provide migration destinations for applications
at each stage of their lifecycle (see Figure 1).
For example, public cloud is an ideal place to try
out new functionality, by spinning up new test
configurations. Private cloud provides a more
familiar environment, suiting more mature and
mission-critical applications. SaaS is a convenient
way to get hold of commoditised services, such as
email or CRM, without managing it yourself.
COMPETITIVE
APPLICATIONS
COMMODITY
APPLICATIONS
DEPLOY TO SCALE
MANAGE SCALE
Managed hosting
services
Private cloud
INVENT
OFFLOAD
Public cloud
SaaS
MISSION
CRITICAL
NON
MISSION
CRITICAL
Figure 1
5
6. THE INDUSTRY VIEW
Every industry faces demands for flexible computing capacity,
cost-efficient IT and easy access to data, so cloud is relevant for
them all.
MANUFACTURING: DRIVING COLLABORATION ALONG THE VALUE
CHAIN
Whether it’s accessing prototyping and test data during the early stages of product
development, or tracking information on sales and marketing performance once
the product is launched, collaboration with suppliers and distributors is key for any
manufacturer’s success.
Thanks to cloud, data that was previously held in unconnected silos can be easily
accessed. Cloud also makes it cost-effective to increase analytical capacity in
response to variable needs. Manufacturers are increasingly embracing the flexibility
that cloud offers to enhance their production value chains.
The manufacturing sector is already adopting cloud, and the trend is set to
continue. SaaS-based applications represent 22% of all manufacturing and
distribution software installed today, and this is expected to grow to 45% by
2023.6
MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT: SUPPORTING INCREASED STORAGE
DEMANDS
In the media and entertainment sector, new data formats such as HD and 4K have
driven up content volumes. Old content is being digitised and moved off traditional
tape archives. On-demand media services also mean that content needs to be accessed
from a secure location that can deliver high-performance streaming. For an industry
that monetises its content, user experience is crucial.
The computational, storage and performance demands are huge. An increasing number
of companies in this sector are turning to cloud solutions to accelerate their content
delivery networks.
With increasing integration between consumer devices such as smart TVs, settops, games consoles and streaming devices, the demand placed on content
delivery networks is forecast to grow. Real-time entertainment applications are
expected to account for two thirds of total data usage by 2018.7
6
7. RETAIL: APPLYING BIG DATA FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Whether selling through online or offline channels — or both — retailers know that
success starts with understanding the customer inside and out.
The key to retail competitive advantage lies in big data analytics. Retailers are tapping
in to social networks to understand how consumers are interacting with their brands
and their competitors. They are even tracking the movements of customers within
stores to help them improve the effectiveness of displays. Analysing this data will
allow retailers to profile and segment their customers better, improve targeting and
deliver a more personalised shopping experience.
Cloud provides the elasticity to deal with the peaks and troughs in all kinds of retail
systems, whether it’s the Christmas ecommerce sales rush or the extra load caused by
a new store opening.
The variable demand for computing capacity during a typical day means that
retailers only use about 10–15% of the capacity in their data centres. Hosting
applications on a shared infrastructure in a cloud-computing architecture could
produce huge savings.8
HEALTHCARE: IMPROVING CAPACITY AND PERFORMANCE
The healthcare industry has to store and provide access to a significantly higher
volume of electronic patient information than ever before, including data collected via
M2M for remote patient monitoring and from new, data-intensive imaging exams and
image-guided surgical procedures.
Cloud offers healthcare providers a scalable infrastructure capacity to handle this
volume. It also offers the network performance to support data-intensive healthcare
applications and deliver a reliable user experience across geographical regions.
Aggregating patient data in the cloud not only reduces operational costs; it provides
clinicians with easier access to information so they can make better decisions about
patient care.
Even as one of the most compliance-driven industries, healthcare is beginning
to move to cloud-based platforms. The market is set to grow to $5.4 billion by
2017.9
7
8. TAKING YOUR FIRST STEPS
There’s no denying that cloud represents a big shift in the way
you run IT. Before you start using cloud extensively or migrate
application workloads to it, there are several factors that you’ll
need to address.
TECHNOLOGY AND BUSINESS DEPENDENCIES
Your core applications don’t operate in isolation — they can’t be simply ‘lifted and
shifted’ without due care and attention. You need to assess which applications and
workloads are suitable to run in the cloud, and which ones are not portable. There may
be a technical reason or compliance requirement for your data to be held in a particular
location.
There are commercial concerns associated with migrations, too. You might be tied into
support contracts for hardware and software; or you may find that outdated software
licencing models based on a dedicated server setup don’t translate well into multitenant environments.
You’ll also have to consider application performance and the impact of putting
applications in the cloud has on your local and wide-area network links. Will you need
to upgrade equipment or increase bandwidth to handle increased traffic? Do you need
to put in place redundant links or other backups to maintain business continuity in the
event of downtime?
ADAPTING THE ROLE OF THE IT DEPARTMENT
80%
of IT budgets (and staff
time) still go to simply
keeping the lights on
rather than delivering
initiatives that can make a
difference to the bottom
line.10
8
The CIO is increasingly measured on business objectives, such as supporting revenue
growth, improving margins, increasing shareholder value and delivering better
customer service. Yet in a typical enterprise, around 80% of IT budgets (and staff
time) still go to simply keeping the lights on rather than delivering initiatives that can
make a difference to the bottom line10.
A third-party cloud provider can take care of all the routine IT infrastructure delivery,
thereby allowing the IT function to take on new projects. For many CIOs, this shift
in the role of the IT department is an opportunity to show strategic value and play a
larger, more impactful role in the organisation.
IT becomes the function responsible for evaluating and selecting the right service
provider and solution, as well as making insourcing and outsourcing decisions. IT also
plays a key governance role: setting policies, specifying and tracking performance
against SLAs, managing budgets, making contingency plans, defining enterprise
architectures, evaluating contracts, forecasting capacity requirements and more.
9. SECURITY, RISK AND CONTROL
Figure 2 shows the results of an IDC survey into the barriers for European cloud
adoption.2
Security and data protection
30%
Trustworthiness
25%
Data location
24%
Local support
23%
Change control
22%
Ownership of customisation
21%
Evaluation of usefulness
18%
Slow internet connection
18%
Local language
18%
Tax incentives on capital spending
17%
Figure 2
Many of these factors are associated with perceptions of risk and uncertainty: who
is responsible for your data and its integrity? What happens in the event of a security
breach? These issues are complicated by the nature of the European market, where
regulations and legal implementations vary on a country-by-country basis. This
complexity should be simplified by the proposed new EU data protection regulation,
which will come into effect in 2014. It seeks to harmonise regulation throughout the
EU, thereby making it easier for non-European companies to comply.
Aside from regulatory and security issues, there are concerns around relinquishing
control, defining responsibilities and protecting against lock-in. How easy is it to move
your data to another provider, or connect one application to another that is held with a
different provider? Who governs change and upgrades?
9
10. CHOOSING THE RIGHT
PROVIDER
Once the organisation has set policies and performed due
diligence, many of these concerns are directly dependent on
the choice of cloud provider. It’s especially important to make
sure that the provider can give you clear reassurance about the
following factors.
SECURITY, JURISDICTION AND DATA RESIDENCY
Can the provider meet the organisation’s requirements for data residency, security
and compliance? And can they prove that your data assets — including backups — will
not be moved across borders without your authorisation? Look for a provider with
truly global delivery, and one that meets high security standards.
“Because we maintain close ties with all kinds of public bodies, it was
important to substantiate our trust with well-founded data. [Verizon]
Terremark was able to provide this in the form of the required security
certificates.” Manager, marketing software vendor, Netherlands.
RELIABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
When the infrastructure supporting your applications are outside of your direct
control, it’s even more important that the service provider can deliver end to end:
from WAN connections to your global sites to the data centres themselves. Trying
to establish root cause and the impact of downtime when multiple providers are
involved can leave organisations exposed in their core business functions. Look for
providers that own their own wide-area networks, not just peering interconnections,
for improved reliability and end-to-end service management.
“The performance is excellent and the access flexible, too. There is no
way to tell that our SAP platform runs virtually.” IT & Business Applications
Manager, manufacturer, Europe.
10
11. CONTROL AND FLEXIBILITY
Look for a provider that allows you to maintain an acceptable level of control. This
control can come from a choice of flexible delivery models, competitive pricing, and
the ability to manage and configure your services yourself, 24x7.
“[Verizon] Terremark’s data centre concept is phenomenal. The
company has developed extensive expertise in setting up secure IaaS
platforms.” IT Manager, travel agency, Benelux.
SERVICE LEVELS AND SUPPORT
Moving to cloud is a transformation process that requires careful planning and a
thorough assessment of your application workloads and infrastructure needs, today
and in the next three to five years. Look for a provider that can help you assess your
cloud readiness at a strategic level, size and scope the right solution for you, perform
the migration and give you assistance after your solution goes live with onboarding,
change management, and incident response.
“Usually you have no contact with the infrastructure partner after the
system is up and running. But [Verizon] Terremark took the initiative
to stay in close contact with us throughout the entire process
and afterwards. They want to know how we, as an end customer,
experience their solution to offer even better support.” IT & Business
Applications Manager, manufacturer, Europe.
DATA AND APPLICATION PORTABILITY
Cloud providers, like any other organisation, can go out of business, get bought, or
change their strategies — with direct impact on your organisation. Make sure that you
can not only get your data and applications out, but that your provider supports a wide
range of platforms and applications, and helps with interoperability between local and
cloud applications and between multiple cloud providers.
11
12. YOUR PARTNERS OF
CHOICE FOR CLOUD
SOLUTIONS
Verizon and EMC bring together cutting-edge solutions that
support your journey to the cloud. We understand that your
business needs are unique, and we tailor solutions to fit.
CLOUD SECURITY FOR PEACE OF MIND
We work hard to make
sure we’re fully accredited
to provide the highest
levels of security in
the industry. We’re a
PCI DSS 1.2 certified
cloud provider and are
compliant with VISA CISP,
MasterCard SDP and
SSAE 16.
The biggest concerns about cloud are security and compliance. Verizon and EMC
operate to the highest security standards to meet the stringent demands of the most
compliance-focused industries. We ensure that both the technical and organisational
aspects of your cloud solution are secure and offer a wide range of services that you
can draw upon as and when needed.
We maintain the highest competencies in governance, security and compliance to
always stay ahead of changing cyber vunerabilities. Each year we produce our unique
Data Breach Investigations Report, which collates and analyses facts about data
breaches from all over the world. It shows our commitment to understanding security
threats and providing the best response to protect your data, wherever it resides.
MEASURED, RELIABLE PERFORMANCE
Our SLAs guarantee
99.9% uptime for your
cloud platform and
infrastructure, and for
dedicated devices.
Verizon has the scale and coverage to deliver performance that you can rely on. We
have 35 data centres in Europe alone (200 worldwide) offering the choice of shared,
private, dedicated and isolated resources, all backed by competitive SLAs. When you
partner with us you draw upon our global network and pool of resources, including five
IP application smart centres, over 400 cloud experts and more than 3,100 servers.
EMC enables businesses and service providers to transform their operations and
deliver information technology as-a-service. With coverage in 86 countries, cloud
solutions powered by EMC help businesses identify and overcome business challenges
by reducing risk and improving time to value from their information infrastructures.
CONTROLLING YOUR COSTS
Cloud is a cost-effective solution to meet your variable IT demands, but that doesn’t
mean that all suppliers offer the same value for money. Our pricing options allow you to
choose between paying a monthly cost for a dedicated pool of resources, or adopting
a pay-as-you-go model based on your hourly usage of pre-configured virtual machines.
Whichever option you pick, you only pay for services — we handle all equipment,
maintenance and repair costs. And with Verizon, you have the simplicity, accountability
and transparency of a single supplier for all elements of your cloud solution — the data
centre, infrastructure, equipment and network access.
12
13. FULL SERVICE SUPPORT FOR YOUR NEEDS
Operating in 120 countries, Verizon has the global scale to provide all the cloud options
and infrastructure services you want. We’ll deliver a solution to fit your requirements,
based on a thorough evaluation of your application portfolio and operational
dependencies.
We can also offer flexible support options, aligned to the availability of skills in
your organisation. We’re happy to take on the full responsibility for managing your
resources, or can provide you with easy-to-use tools that allow you to manage the
solution directly yourself. Thanks to our 24x7 service desk support, we work towards
predictable SLA response times.
END-TO-END GUIDANCE
We can take you through the whole process of moving to cloud, from planning to
delivery, ongoing management and scale-out. Our cloud services professionals are
Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) accredited and can help you to:
• Define your cloud strategy and build a business case for adoption that draws upon
our best-practice insight and global experience.
• Turn the business case into a roadmap for implementation, so you can maintain
business productivity and remove the risk of unplanned operational disruption.
Our cloud services are
backed by a wealth
of solutions covering
managed security,
disaster recovery
and backup, unified
communications, device
management, networks
and more.
• Evaluate your compute and storage demands to create a tailored solution for your
business.
• Migrate your applications to cloud and manage them on an ongoing basis.
• Maintain the highest standards of data security throughout the infrastructure
lifecycle.
PARTNERSHIPS FOR SUCCESS
Our global ecosystem of technology partners, including EMC, helps us to deliver the
right cloud solution for you. We manage the logistics, so you can focus on running
your core business. We’ll work with our partners to give you a best-of-breed solution,
whether by expanding our network reach across the globe, or providing equipment,
devices and cloud services. We can even take over your existing service contracts
for you so you have fewer suppliers to manage, and we’re flexible enough to meet a
particular preference for a technology provider within your solution.
We offer a range of
assessments to help
you understand which
applications are most
suitable for cloud and
manage the operational
dependencies of
migration, so you stay in
control at all times.
13
14. CLOUD: THE KEY TO YOUR
COMPETITIVE EDGE
Cloud can help you become a leaner, more agile and cost-efficient
organisation: one in which IT is a strategic enabler. As expected,
cloud adoption in Europe is taking off despite potential concerns
around the regulatory environment and data security, and the
maturity of service provision.
With the promise of increased agility and organisational flexibility that can support
business effectiveness, the restructuring of core application portfolios onto new
platforms is the natural next step.
Find out about
Verizon’s dynamic
cloud solutions at:
www.verizonenterprise.
com/cloud/
14
But not all applications are suited to the cloud today — or may not be suited to
specific types of cloud. You’ll need to work with your chosen partners to understand
the implications of migrating business-critical applications. It’s more than just lifting
and shifting — you need support with planning, migrating and then managing those
applications in the cloud.
Working with the right cloud provider will allow you to change your application hosting
environment with minimal disruption to the business. Make sure you are working with
a partner that understands how cloud can help you meet your core business objectives.
15. ABOUT VERIZON ENTERPRISE
SOLUTIONS
Verizon Enterprise Solutions provides intelligent networks, cloud,
mobility, managed security and machine-to-machine (M2M)
solutions to the world’s most successful companies. With industryspecific solutions and a full range of global wholesale offerings,
Verizon Enterprise Solutions helps open new opportunities around
the world for innovation, investment and business transformation.
Visit verizonenterprise.com or the Verizon Enterprise Solutions
News Room to learn more.
ABOUT EMC
EMC is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers
to transform their operations and deliver information technology
as a service (ITaaS). Fundamental to this transformation is cloud
computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC
accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments
to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset —
information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.
REFERENCES
1. http://sites.tcs.com/cloudstudy/tcs-cloud-study-key-findings#.UcryUT54Y29
2. http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/docs/future-cc-2may-gcattaneo-presentation.pdf
3. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23632112
4.http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2208661/ec-launches-cloud-computing-strategy-in-bid-tocreate-25-million-new-jobs
5. http://uk.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-extracting-value-from-chaos-ar.pdf
6. http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/05/06/ten-ways-cloud-computing-isrevolutionizing-manufacturing/
7. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57584535-93/video-streaming-is-on-the-rise-with-netflixdominating/
8. http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/05/sunnier-days-ahead-for-retailers-that-use-cloud-computing/
9. http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/health-care-and-the-cloud-are-finally-comingtogether-212581
10. http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=511BE956-9154-B811-277967456CCF50BB
15