F5 Friday: Avoiding the Operational Debt of Cloud

#F5CLP F5 Cloud Licensing Program enables #cloud providers to differentiate and accelerate advanced infrastructure service offerings while reducing operational debt for the enterprise

If you ask three different people why they are adopting cloud it’s likely you’ll get three different reasons. The rationale for adopting cloud – whether private or public – depends entirely on the strategy IT has in place to address the unique combination of operational and business requirements for their organizations.

But one thing seems clear through all these surveys: cloud is here to stay, in one form or another.

Those who are “going private” today may “go hybrid” tomorrow. Those who are “in the cloud” today may reverse direction and decide to, as Alan Leinwand puts it so well, “own the base and rent the spike” by going “hybrid.” What the future seems to hold is hybrid architectures, with use of public and private cloud mixed together to provide the best of both worlds.

This state of possibility certainly leaves both enterprise and service providers alike somewhat on edge. How can service providers entice the enterprise? How do they prove their services are above and beyond the other thousand-or-so offerings out there? How does the enterprise go about choosing an IaaS partner (and have no doubts, enterprises want partners, not providers, when it comes to managing their data and applications)? How do they ensure the operational efficiency gained through their private cloud implementation isn’t lost by disjointed processes imposed by the differences in core application delivery services in public offerings? How do organizations avoid going into operational debt from managing two environments with two different sets of management and solutions?

Architectural consistency is key to the answer, achieved through a fully cloud-enabled application delivery network.

The F5 Cloud Licensing Program

Whether the goal is scalability, security, better performance, availability, consolidation, or reducing costs, F5 enterprise customers have achieved these goals using F5 solutions. The next step is ensuring these same goals can be achieved in a public cloud, whether the implementation is pure public or hybrid cloud.

To do that requires enabling cloud service providers with the ability to offer a complete application delivery network (ADN) in the cloud, with a cost structure appropriate to a utility service model. Given that 43% of respondents in a Cloud Computing Outlook 2011 survey indicated “lack of training” was inhibiting their cloud adoption, being able to offer such services that customers are familiar with is important.

That’s the impetus behind the creation of the F5 Cloud Licensing Program, a new service-provider focused licensing model for the industry’s only complete cloud-enabled ADN. With services encompassing the entire application delivery chain – from security to acceleration to access control – this offering brings to the table the ability to maintain operational consistency from the data center into the cloud, without compromising on the infrastructure services needed by enterprises to take advantage of public cloud models.

• The Conspecific Hybrid Cloud
  Complexity Drives Consolidation
• Cloud Bursting: Gateway Drug for Hybrid Cloud 
• Ecosystems are Always in Flux
• The Pythagorean Theorem of Operational Risk
• At the Intersection of Cloud and Control…
• Cloud Computing and the Truth About SLAs

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