Sponsored by: HP
Mary Johnston Turner Robert P. Mahowald | May 2011 |IDC OPI NION

IDC estimates that by 2012, 85% of net-new enterprise applications
will be specifically designed to be accessed in the cloud.
Cloud computing strategies help IT organizations reduce costs, improve service levels,and increase business agility by dynamically sharing IT resources across multiple applications and workloads. Although many organizations have started their cloud journey by using software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings or implementing self-serve approaches to virtual server provisioning, a small but rapidly growing group of IT organizations are focused on using cloud to optimize more broadly across application development, infrastructure operations, and day-to-day management processes.

A recent global IDC survey, sponsored by HP, examined the experience of this
proactive group of integrated cloud managers. These organizations are actively
integrating and automating application development, provisioning, security, and
management across public and private cloud resources as well as noncloud
application development and datacenter operations teams.

They are seeing many benefits, including faster application provisioning, lower
application development and maintenance costs, improved business agility, higher
service levels, and improved business and IT relationships. Their experiences also
highlight that success depends on cultural transformation as well as integrated and
automated management processes and tools.

An analysis of the experiences of these early adopters identifies five important steps for successful integrated cloud management.

Specifically:
- Define a plan that coordinates the organization’s application modernization
strategy with its cloud infrastructure and SaaS agenda
- Assess current costs and develop benchmarks for application support,
provisioning, and ongoing resource consumption.
- Identify opportunities to reduce costs and speed up service delivery via use of
automation for integrated application and infrastructure provisioning.
- Implement systems to monitor and integrate application performance and realtime
capacity planning analytics with automated provisioning solutions.
- Integrate security strategies and priorities across the application development,
release, and operations life cycle Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham,


IDC recommends that organizations begin the journey toward integrated cloud management by targeting early pilot projects at developer teams and application
environments that can deliver quick payback to validate the business agility benefits
and operational efficiency improvements.

METHODOLOGY
This white paper discusses the results of a recent HP-sponsored IDC survey of IT
decision makers who are actively engaged in designing and implementing their
organization’s cloud strategy. This global Web-based survey examined the current
use of various public and private cloud solutions among 9,410 IT decision makers
located in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia. From that group, 501 IT decision makers
were identified as being the most proactive when it comes to integrating application
development and operations priorities into their overall cloud strategy. To be included in this most proactive group, participants had to be currently taking advantage of one or both of the following application-centric cloud strategies:

- Private cloud management approaches that go beyond infrastructure
provisioning and virtualization to integrate automated application planning,
development, test, release, and/or runtime management processes and tools to
optimize application development, provisioning, and management inside a single
organization’s firewall
- Public, Internet-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud solutions (e.g., Google App Engine or Microsoft Azure Cloud) that can be used to simplify, integrate, and standardize application development, provisioning, and management strategies using resources accessed over the Internet and paid for via a subscription or usage fee.
The experiences of these 501 forward-looking organizations can provide valuable insight for the broader cloud user community as it works to deliver the greatest
business and IT value possible from a rapidly expanding portfolio of traditional and
cloud-based infrastructure and application resources.

SITUATION OVERVIEW
Hybrid Cloud Environments Expected to Dominate for Many Years

IDC’s research consistently finds that most enterprises expect to rely on a mix of
physical, virtual, and cloud-based application and compute resources for many years
and will need to integrate development and operations processes, policies, and
management tools across these diverse environments to meet fast-moving business
requirements, ensure consistent service levels, and hold down IT costs.

Among IT decision makers who are currently using cloud architecture and services,
most participants make use of multiple types of clouds.

Private infrastructure clouds that automate the provisioning and management of
hypervisors, servers, storage, and network infrastructure resources are the most
widely used (59%) cloud approach. They are followed closely by public SaaS options
(54%) such as salesforce.com. Public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions
(16%) such as Amazon EC2, public PaaS solutions (16%) such as Microsoft Azure,
and private integrated application and infrastructure cloud solutions (14%) are used
by smaller numbers of organizations.

IDC expects that the number of organizations that will want to integrate cloud-based
application development and operations with infrastructure cloud solutions will
continue to grow over time. IDC estimates that by 2012, 85% of net-new enterprise
applications will be specifically designed to be accessed in the cloud, even as many
mission-critical applications that were not built for cloud continue to deliver business value. For major enterprises, a complex Web of packaged and composite applications will emerge that have in-house and external components running on hybrid cloud platforms.

As a result, IDC expects that the majority of enterprise organizations, and many smaller organizations, will rely on hybrid environments spanning public, private, and noncloud resources for a number of years due to the unique infrastructure and operational requirements of different applications being used by the organization.

Differing IT philosophies toward sourcing external services as well as security/governance postures unique to a specific business or industry will also drive long-term reliance on hybrid architectures.

Each enterprise will make its own decision on the set of resources, security, and
management strategies it will use depending on its specific business and aplication requirements. However, it is important to note that customers consistently tell IDC that the needs of the applications in terms of performance, security,scalability, and cost dictate the type of cloud or noncloud environment that will be used to support them.

Integrated Application and Infrastructure Management Strategies Emerge as a Critical Cloud Control Point

Applications are where IT is converted to business value, and the effective
development, deployment, operation, and security of applications are IT’s highest
priorities. Making decisions about how to best use cloud solutions requires IT
organizations to have a solid understanding of application performance, security,
costs, and utilization requirements. The cloud decision makers who participated in
this survey have opted to make the integrated management of application development and operations a priority across their cloud environments. They have chosen this strategy due to a number of challenges involving both application development and ongoing operations.

Specifically, they identify the following important application development related drivers:
- Line-of-business (LOB) pressure to reduce application development costs
- The desire to modernize applications to take advantage of cloud infrastructure
architectures.
- The need to rapidly and continually refresh applications.
- The need to more quickly provide access to development and test resources.
- The need to embed security information into static code during development.

With regard to day-to-day management and operations, these decision makers are aiming to reduce business risk, improve application performance, and hold down costs.