A virtual nightmare for traditional outsourcers | Bangkok Post: tech

Asia was a bit slow adopting virtualisation, but is now leading the push to cloud computing. However, the road to transformation is a long one with many questions that need to be asked.

Axel Winter, the regional enterprise architect at Cisco, reflects on the challenges and asks, with the ability to run a data centre in the cloud, where does that leave traditional outsourcers?

Today there is a lot of confusion in the market about the definition of "the cloud". Some data centre managers seem to think that offering standardised services is cloud computing without the virtualisation or scalability.

Winter says one of the key areas for virtualisation now is the desktop. Most have two standard images - one for the desktop and the other for the laptop - but there are a lot of misconceptions about the cost structure.

On one level, there is a lot of redundancy in desktop virtualisation. With standard images, people who do not need functionality get it

For instance, everyone in branches, from analysts to data-entry staff to call-centre operators on virtual desktops, often get full versions of Microsoft Office even though it would never be needed by the call centre.

Planning desktop virtualisation and using thin clients in some cases can slash software licensing costs immensely, Winter says.

The other is the reason that corporations are doing virtual desktops in the first place - security. Desktop virtualisation is part of a larger strategy that allows users to access what they need, when they need it, while maintaining control.

There is already a high cost involved in security and the cost of the actual virtual desktop implementation is offset by lowering the costs of security and risk management.

One example is the way many corporations lock down USB ports via active directory rules to prevent data leakage. This is easily circumvented. Locking down ports based on content is better, but again more expensive in a distributed model and easier once all the desktops run in the data centre.

As part of a strategy to cut out fat apps, desktop virtualisation can help drive down costs significantly and today corporations are realising it and deploying it en masse.

Video conferencing has also taken off in Thailand for internal communications, but not so much for intra-organisational communications.

Bandwidth is still expensive in Thailand compared to many countries.

Winter came to Thailand in 1993 and worked in a series of finance and consultancies before ending up with Cisco.

He remembers calling in experts from Netscape to work on some of Thailand's earliest websites and saw the evolution of corporate IT from mainframe to Unix to client-server to today's virtualised blade-server and virtual desktops.

Legacy systems are still around because of the sheer inertia of corporations.

A bank might have 20,000 or 40,000 employees which would be affected by a migration, so many just stick with what they have and, besides, there are still a lot of very good packages on the IBM AS/400, Winter says.

But the trend towards X86 is inevitable.

Winter says that the war on time-to-market and flexibility by organisations will be fought by IT departments.

Today, there is already a bank that can launch a new credit card product in seven days, from the meeting room go-ahead to design, marketing and issuing the first card.

The war on cost, time-to-market and flexibility cannot be won by IT departments that have an island mentality with a few hundred different platforms. The ones who win will have a strategic view to bring everything together (through virtualisation and blades) and have a flexible, dynamic cloud infrastructure.

Much of the work towards this is being done by an industry forum, the Open Data Centre Alliance, that has users, not IT companies, as members.

Strategic transformation cannot be done by buying 1,000 new servers and throwing the old ones away, Winter says. It is a long journey that involves lots of people and a strong team.

But the biggest question with cloud computing that few have asked involves the relationship with outsourcers. The borders between service providers and users will become more dynamic.

For instance, a database administrator (DBA), can now choose to build internally or buy from a service provider with certain service level agreements for a given price.

Because everything can be done internally by the DBA with almost zero physical infrastructure, because it is built in the cloud, where does this leave traditional outsourcers and the outsourcing industry?

Winter is a personal fan of open source solutions. While the economic argument can be made either way, he says that there is so much that can be learned from open source and peeking under the bonnet to see how things actually work.