Journey to SAP Quality — Home Trust Builds Center of Excellence with HP Tools

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the steps to build a successful SAP test environment with HP quality assurance tools.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better business results.

This time, we're coming to you from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Home Trust Company in Toronto has created a center of excellence to improve quality assurance for improved ongoing performance of their SAP applications. To learn how they do it, we are delighted to be joined by Cindy Shen, SAP QA Manager at Home Trust. Welcome.

Cindy Shen: Thank you.

Gardner: First, tell us a little bit about Home Trust. You're a large financial services organization.

Shen: We're one of the leading trust companies in Toronto, Canada. There are two main businesses we deal with. The first bucket is mortgages. We deal with a lot of residential mortgages.

Shen

The other bucket is we're a deposit-taking institution. People will deposit their money with us, and they can invest in a registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) (along with other options for their investment), which is equivalent of the US 401(k) plan.

We're also Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC)-compliant. If a customer has money with us and if anything happens with the company, the customer can get back up to a certain amount of money.

We're regulated under the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), and they regulate the Banks and Trust Companies, including us.

Some of the hurdles

Gardner: So obviously it's important for you to have your applications running properly. There's a lot of auditing and a lot of oversight. Tell us what some of the hurdles were, some of the challenges you had as you began to improve your quality-assurance efforts.

Shen: We're primarily an SAP shop. I was an SAP consultant for a couple of years. I've worked in North America, Europe, and Asia. I’ve been through many industries, not just the financial industry. I've touched on consumer packaged goods SAP projects, retail SAP projects, manufacturing SAP projects, and banking SAP projects. I usually deal with global projects, 100 million-plus, and 100-300 people.

What I noticed is that, regardless of the industries or the functional solutions that project has, it's always a common set of QA challenges when it comes to their SAP testing and it’s very complicated. It took me a couple of years to figure the tools, where each tool fits into the whole picture, and how pieces fit together.

For example, some of the common challenges that I'm going to talk about in my session (here at HP Discover) is, first of all, what tools you should be using. The HP ALM, Test Management Tool is, in my opinion, the market leader. That's what pretty much all the Fortune 500 companies, and even smaller companies, are using primarily as their test management tool. But testing SAP is unique.

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What are the additional tools on the SAP side that you need to have in order to integrate back to ALM test suite and have that system record of development plus the system record of testing, all integrated together, and make it flow which makes sense for SAP applications? That’s unique.

Most errors and defects happen in the integration area.

One is toolset and the other one is methodology. If you parachute me into any project, however large or small, complex or simple, local or global, I can guarantee you that the standards are not clear, or there is no standard in place.

For example, how do you properly write a test case to test SAP? You have to go into the granular detail that actually details the action words that you use for different application areas that can enable automation very easily in the future. How do you parameterize?

What’s the appropriate level of parameterization to enable that flexibility for automation? What’s the naming convention for your input parameter and output parameters to make it flow through from the very first test case, all the way to the end, when you test end to end application?

Most errors and defects happen in the integration area. So, how do you make sure your test coverage covers all your key integration points? SAP is very complex. If you change one thing, I can guarantee you that there's something else in some other areas of the application or in the interface that’s going to change without your knowing it, and that’s going to cause problems for you sooner or later.

So, how do you have those standards and methodology consistently enforced through every person who's writing test cases or who's executing testing at the same quality, in the same format, so that you can generate the same reports across all different projects to have the executive oversight and to minimize the duplucate work you have to do on the manual test cases in order to automate in the future.

Testing assets

The other big part is how to maintain such testing assets, so it's repeatable, reusable, and flexible -- and so that you can shorten your project delivery time in the future through automation and a consistent writing test case in manual testing, accelerate new projects coming up, and also improve your quality in terms of post-production support so you can catch critical errors fast.

Those are all very common SAP testing QA themes, challenges, or problems that practitioners like me see in any SAP environment.

Gardner: So when you arrived at Home Trust, and you understood this unique situation, and how important SAP applications are, what did you do to create a center of excellence and an ability to solve these issues?

Shen: I was fortunate to have been the lead on the SAP area for a lot of global projects. I've seen the worst of it. I've also seen a fraction of the clients that actually do it much better than other companies. So, I'm fortunate to know the best practices I want to implement, what will work, and what won't work, what are the critical things you have to get in place in the beginning, and what are the pieces you can wait for down the road.

We had to assess the current status and make sure to come up with a methodology that made sense for Home Trust Company.

Coming from an SAP background, I'm fortunate to have that knowledge. So, from the start, I had a very clear vision as to how I wanted to drive this. First, you need to conduct an analysis of the current state, and what I saw was very common in the industry as well.

When I started, there were only two people in the QA space. It was a brand new group. And there was an overall software development lifecycle (SDLC) methodology in the company. But the company had just gone live with SAP application. So it was basically a great opportunity to set up a methodology, because it was a green field. That was very exciting.

One of the things you have to have is an overarching methodology. Are you using Business Process Testing (BPT), or are you using some other methodology. We also had to comply with, or fit in with, the methodology of SAP which is ASAP, and that’s primarily the industry standard in the SAP space as well. So, we had to assess the current status and make sure to come up with a methodology that made sense for Home Trust Company.

Two, you had to get all the right tools in place. So, Home Trust is very good at getting the industry-leading toolsets. When I joined, they already had HP QC. At that time, it was called QC; now it's ALM. Solution Manager, was part of the SAP solution of the purchase. So, it was free. We just had to configure and implement it.

We also had QTP, which now is called UFT, and we also had LoadRunner. All the right toolsets were already in place. So I didn't have to go through the hassle of procuring all those tools.

Assessing the landscape

When we assessed the landscape of tools, we realized that, like any other company, they were not maximizing the return on investment (ROI) on the toolsets. The toolsets were not leveraged as much, because in a typical SAP environment, the demand of time to market is very high for project delivery and new product introduction.

When you have a new product, you have to configure the system fast, so it’s not too late to bring the product to the market. You have a lot of time pressure. You also have resource constraints, just like any other company. We started with two people, and we didn’t have a dedicated testing team. That was also something we felt we had to resolve.

We had to tackle it from a methodology and a toolset perspective, and we had to tackle it from a personnel perspective, how to properly structure the team and ramp the resource up. We had to tackle it through those three perspectives. Then, after all the strategic things are in place, you figure out your execution pieces.

From a methodology perspective, what are the authoring  standards, what are action words, and what are naming conventions? I can't emphasize this enough, because I see it done so differently on each project. People don’t know the implications  down the road.

It's different from company to company. You have to figure out the minimum effort required, but what makes sense.

How do you properly structure your testing assets in QC that makes sense for SAP? That is a key area. You can't structure at too high of a level. That means that you have a mega scenario of everything in one test case or just a few test cases. If something changes, which I can guarantee you it will, something changes in the application, because you have to redevelop it or modify it for another feature.

If you structure your testing assets at such a high level, you have to rewrite every single asset. You don’t know where it’s changing something somewhere else, because you probably hard-coded everything.

If you put it at a too much of a granular level, maintenance becomes a nightmare. It really has to be at the right level to enable the flexibility and get ready for automation. It also has to be easy to maintain, because maintenance is usually a higher cost than the actual initial creation. So, those are all the standards we are setting up.

What’s your proper defect flow? It's different from company to company. You have to figure out the minimum effort required, but what makes sense. You also have to have the right control in place for this company. You have to figure out naming conventions, the relevant test cases, and all that. That's the methodology part of it.

The toolset is a lot more technical. If you're talking about the HP ALM Suite, what's the standard configuration you need to enable for all your projects? I can guarantee you that every company has concurrent projects going on after post-production.

Even when they're implementing their initial SAP, there are many concurrent streams going on at the same time. How do you make sure its configuration accommodates all the different types of projects? However, with the same set of configuration -- this is a key point -- you cannot, let me repeat, you cannot, have very different configurations for HP ALM  across different projects.

Sharing assets

This will prevent you from sharing the test assets across different projects or prevent you from automating them in the same manner or automating them for the near future and prevent you from delivering projects consistently with consistent quality and with consistent reporting format across the company. It prevents all of those and that would generate nightmares for maintenance and having standards put in place. That’s key. I can't  emphasize that enough.

So from the toolset, how do you design a configuration that fits all? That’s the mandate. The rule of thumb is do not customize. Use out-of-box functionality. Do not code. If you really have to write a query, minimize it.

The good thing about HP ALM is that it's flexible enough to accommodate all the critical requests. If you find you have to write something for it or you have to have a custom field or custom label, you probably should consider changing your process first, because ALM is a pretty mature toolset.

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I've been on very complex global projects in different countries. HP ALM is able to accommodate all the key metrics, all the key deliverables you're looking to deliver. It has the capacity.
When I see other companies that do a lot of customization, it's because their process isn't correct. They're fixing the tool to accommodate for processes that don’t make sense. People really have to have that open mind, and seek out the best practice and expertise in the industry to understand what out of box functionality to configure for HP ALM to manage their SAP projects, instead of weakening the tool to fit how they do SAP projects.

When I see other companies that do a lot of customization, it's because their process isn't correct.

Sometimes, it involves a lot of change management, and for any company, that’s hard. You really have to keep that open mind, stick with the best practice, and think hard about whether your process makes sense or whether you really need to tweak the tool.

Gardner: It's fascinating that in doing due diligence on process, methodology, leveraging the tools, and recognizing the unique characteristics of this particular application set, if you do that correctly, you're going to improve the quality of that particular roll out or application delivery into production, and whatever modifications you need to do over time.

It's also going to set you up to be in a much better position to modernize and be aggressive with those applications, whether it's delivering them out to a mobile tier, for example, or whether there’s different integrations with different data. So when you do this well, there are multiple levels of payback. Right?

Shen: I love this question, because this is really the million-dollar view, or the million dollar understanding, that anybody can take away from this podcast or my session (at HP Discover). This is the million dollar vision that you should seriously consider and understand.

From an SAP and HP ALM perspective and the Center for Excellence, the vision is this (I'm going to go slowly, so you get all the components and all the pieces):

Work closely

SAP and HP work very closely. So your account rep will help you greatly in the toolsets in that area. It starts with Solution Manager from SAP, which should be your system record of development. The best part is when you implement SAP, you use Solution Manager to input all your Business Process Hierarchy (BPH). BPH is your key ingredient in Solution Manager that lays out all the processes in your environment.

Tied with it you should input all the transaction codes (T-codes). The DNA of SAP is T-codes. If you go to any place in SAP, most likely you have to enter a T-code. That will bring you to the right area. When we scope out an SAP project, the key starts with the list of T-codes. The key is to build out that BPH in SAP and associate all the T-codes in different areas.

With that T-code, you actually have all the documentation, functional specification, technical specification, all of the documentation and mapping associated at each level in your BPH along with your T-code. Not only that, you should have all your security IDs and metrics associated with each level at the BPH and T-codes, and all the flows and requirements all tied together, and of course the development, the code.

So, your Solution Manager should be the system record of development. The best practice is to always implement your SAP initial implementation with Solution Manager. So by the time you go live, you've already done all that. That’s the first bucket.

The second bucket is HP Tool Suite. We'll start with HP ALM Test Management Tool. It allows you to input your testing requirements, and they flow through the requirement to a test. If you’re using Business Process Testing (BPT), then you should flow through to the component in BPT, and flow through the test case module. Then, you flow through to the test plan, test lab and flow through to the defects. Everything is well integrated and connected.

Your Solution Manager should be the system record of development.

And then there is something we call an adapter. It’s a Solution Manager and HP ALM adapter. It enables Solution Manager and HP ALM to talk. You have to configure that adapter between Solution Manager and ALM. This is able to bring your hierarchy, your BPH in Solution Manager, and all the related assets, including the T-codes, over to the requirement model in HP ALM.

So if you have your Solution Manager straightened out, whatever you bring over to ALM, that's already your scope. It tells you what T-codes is in scope to test. By the way, in SAP it's often a headache that each T-code can do many, many things, especially if you're heavily customized.

So a T-code is not enough. You have to go down to a granular level of getting the variants. What are the typical scenarios or typical testing variants it has? Then, you can create that variance in the Solution Manager in the BPH. Then, it's going to flow through to the Requirement module in HP ALM and list out all your T-codes' possible variants.

Then, based on that, you start scoping out your testing assets. What are the components, test cases, or whatever you have to write. You put them in a BPT or you put them in your test case model. Then you link the requirement over. So you already have your test coverage. Then, you flow through a test case, flow through your execution in test lab, flow through to defects, and then it all ties back together.

And where does automation come in play? That's the bucket after HP ALM. So, UFT today is still the primary tool people use to automate. In the SAP space, SAP actually has its own. It's called, Test Acceleration and Optimization (TAO). That’s also leveraging UFT. That's the foundation to create a specific SAP automation, but either is fine. If you already have UFT, you really could start today.

Back and forth

So, the automation comes in place. This is very interesting. This is how it goes back and forth. For example, you already transported something to production and you want to check if anything slipped through the cracks? Is all the testing coverage there?

There's something called Solution Document Assistant. From the Solution Manager side, you can actually read from EarlyWatch reports to see what T codes are actually being used in your Production system today. After something is transported over into Prod, you can re-run it again to see what are the net new T-codes in the production system. Then, you can compare that. So there's a process.

Then you can see what are the net new ones from the BPH and flow through that to your HP QC or HP ALM, and see whether we have coverage for that. If not, here’s your scope for net new manual and automated testing.

I have yet to see a company that’s very good with documentation, especially with SAP.

Then, you keep building that regression and you eventually will get a library. That’s how you flow through back and forth. There is also something called Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA). That already comes free with Solution Manager. You just have to configure it.

It allows you to load whatever you want to change in production into the buffer. So, before you actually transfer the code into production, you'll be able to know what area it impacts. It goes into the core level. So, it allows you to do targeted regression as well. We talked about Solution Manager. We talked about ALM. We talked about UFT. Then, there is LoadRunner, the performance center, the load testing, the performance testing, stress testing, etc., and this all goes into the same picture.

The ideal solution is that you can flow through your content in Solution Manager to HP ALM and you can enable automation for all tests together -- and all those performance, stress, whatever, testing -- in one end-to-end flow and you're able to build that regression library. You're able to build that technical testing library. And you're able to build that library and Solution Manager and maintain them at same time.

Gardner: So the technology is really powerful, but it's incumbent on the users to go through those steps of configuring, integrating, creating the diligence of the libraries and then building on that.

I'd like to go up to the business-level discussion. When you go to your boss's boss, can you explain to them what they're going to get as a value for having gone through this? It's one thing to do it because it's the right thing to do and it's got super efficient benefits, but that needs to translate into dollars and cents and business metrics. So what do you tell them you get at that business level when they do this properly?

Business takes notice

Shen: Very good question, because this exercise we did can be applied to any other companies. It's at the level that business really takes notice. One common challenge is that when you on-board somebody, do they have the proper documentation to ramp it up?

I yet have to see a company that’s very good with documentation, especially with SAP, where is that list of scope of all the T-codes that are today in production we use? What are the functional specs? What are the technical specs? Where is the field map? Where are the flows? You have to have that documentation in order to ramp somebody up or what typically ends up happening is that you hire somebody and you have to take other team members for a few weeks to ramp the person up.

Instead of putting them on the project to deliver right away, start writing the code, start configuring SAP, or whatever, they can’t start until few months later. How do you  accelerate that process? You build everything up with Solution Manager, you build everything up in HP ALM, you build everything up in your QTP and UFT and everything.

So this way, the person will come in, they can go to Solution Manager and look at all the T-codes and scope, look at all the updated T-codes, updated business areas, look at updated functional specs, understand what the company’s application does and what's the logic and what's configuration. Then, the person can easily go to HP ALM and figure out, the testing scenarios, how people test, how they use application, and what should be the expected behavior of the application.

Point one is that you can really speed up the hiring process and the knowledge transfer process for your new personnel. A more important application of this is on projects. Whether SAP or not, companies usually use very high-end products, because you have to constantly draw out new applications, new releases, and new features based on market conditions and based on business needs.

Testing is the most labor-intensive and painstaking process and probably one of the most expensive areas in any project delivery.

When a project starts, a very common challenge is the documentation of existing functionality? How can you identify what to build? If you have nothing, I can guarantee you that you'll spend a few weeks of the entire project team trying to figure out current status.

Again, with the library and Solution Manager, the regression testing suite, the automated suite in HP ALM and UFT, and all of that, you can get that on day one. It's going to shorten the project time. It's going to accelerate the project time with good quality.

The other thing is that a project is so important that anything in the project is very necessary. When you actually figure out your status quo, you start building.

Testing is the most labor-intensive and painstaking process and probably one of the most expensive areas in any project delivery. How do you accelerate that? Without existing regression library, documented test scenarios, and even automated existing regression libraries, you have to invent everything from scratch.

By the way, that involves figuring out the scope, the testing scope that involves writing the test case from scratch, building all the parameters, and building all the data. That takes a lot of time. If you already have an existing library, that’s going to shorten your lifecycle a lot.

So all this translates into dollar saving plus better coverage and faster delivery, which is key for business. By the way, when you have all this set in place, you're able to catch a lot more defects before it goes to production. I saw study that said it's about 10 times more expensive if you catch a defect in production. So the earlier you catch it, the better.

Security confidence

Gardner:  Right, of course. It also strikes me that doing this will allow you to have better security confidence, governance risk and compliance benefits, and auditability when that kicks in. In a banking environment, of course, that’s really important.

Shen: Absolutely. The HP ALM tool allows the complete audit trail for the testing aspect of it. Not at this current company, but on other projects, usually an auditor comes in and they ask for access to HP QC. They look at HP ALM, auto test cases, who executed, the recorded results, and defects, that’s what auditors look for.

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Gardner: Cindy, what is it that’s of interest to you here at HP Discover in terms of what comes next in HP's tool, seeing as they're quite important to you? Also, are you looking for anything in the HP-SAP relationship moving forward?

Shen: I love that question. Sometimes, I feel very lonely in this niche field. SAP is a big beast. HP-SAP integration is part of what they do, but it's not what they market. The good thing is that most SAP clients have HP ALM. It's a very necessary toolset for both HP and SAP to continue to evolve and support.

It's a niche market. There are only a handful of people in the world that can do this from end to end properly. HP has many other products. So, you're looking at a small circle of SAP end clients who are using HP toolsets, who need to know how to properly configure and run this efficiently and properly. Sometimes I feel very lonely, overlapping the circle of HP and SAP.

The good thing is that most SAP clients have HP ALM. It's a very necessary toolset for both HP and SAP to continue to evolve and support.

That’s why Discover is very important to me. It feels like a homecoming, just because here I'll actually speak to the project managers and experts on HP ALM sprinter, the integration, and the HP adapter. So I know what the future releases are. I know what's coming down the line, and I know the configuration I might have to change in the future.

The other really good of part, which I'm passionate about, having doing enough projects, is that I've helped clients, and there's always this common set of questions and challenges. It took me a couple of years to figure these out. There are many, many people out there in the same boat as I was years back, and I love to share my experience, expertise, and knowledge with the end clients.

They're the ones managing and creating their end-to-end testing. They're the ones facing all these challenges. I love to share with them what the best practices are, how to structure things correctly, so that you don’t have to suffer down the road. It really takes expertise to make it right. That’s what I love to share.

As far as the ecosystem of HP and SAP. I'd like to see them integrate more tightly. I'd like to see them engage more with the end-user community, so that we can definitely share the lessons and share the experience with end user more.

Also, I know all the vendors in the space. Basically, the vendors in the space are very niche and most of them come from SAP and HP backgrounds. So I keep running into people I know. My vendors keep running to people they know, and it's that community that’s very critical to enable success for the end user and for the business.

Gardner: This has been very interesting and I appreciate your candor and depth of understanding. We've been learning about how Home Trust Company in Toronto has been creating a Center of Excellence and improving on their Application Lifecycle Management across SAP implementations, and how the combination of HP tools and SAP in integration together with proper methodologies can have very substantial paybacks, both technically, security- and compliance-wise and in business and productivity terms.

So a huge thank you to our guest, Cindy Shen, SAP QA Manager at Home Trust Company. Thanks so much.

Shen: Thank you very much. My pleasure.

Gardner: And I'd also like to thank our audience for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions.  Thanks again for listening, and don’t forget to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the steps to build a successful SAP test environment with HP quality assurance tools. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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ITSM Adoption Forces a Streamlined Operations Culture at Desjardins that Paves the Way to Better Cloud Use

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a Canadian cooperative banking organization is using ITSM to put best practices in place and deliver higher IT value to the company.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better business results.

This time, we're coming to you from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Desjardins Group in Montréal is improving their operations in IT through an advanced IT services management (ITSM) approach.

To learn more, we are joined by Trung Quach, ITSM Manager at Desjardins in Québec. Welcome.

Trung Quach: Thank you very much, Dana, for having us.

Gardner: First tell us a little bit about your organization, for those who aren’t familiar. You're in Canada and you have a large network of credit unions.

Quach: It’s more cooperative banking. We are around 50,000 people across Québec, and we've started moving into both Canada and the US.

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Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your IT organization, the size, how many people, how many datacenters? What sort of IT organization do you have?

Quach: We're around 2,500 and counting. We're mainly based in Montréal and Lévis, which is near Québec City. Most of them are in Montréal, but some technical people are in Lévis. 

Gardner: Tell us about your role. What are you doing there as ITSM manager?

The ITIL process

Quach: I joined Desjardins last year in the ITSM leader position. This is more about the process, the ITIL process and everything that's invloved with the tool, as well as to support those overall processes.

Gardner: Tell us why ITSM has become important to you. What were some of the challenges, some of the requirements? What was the environment you were in that required you to adopt better ITSM principles?

Quach

Quach: A couple of years ago, when they merged 10-plus silos of IT into one big group, Desjardins needed to centralize the process, put best practice in place, to be more efficient and competitive -- and to give a higher value to the business.

Gardner: What, in particular, were issues that cropped up as a result of that decentralization? Was this poor performance, too much cost, too many manual processes, all of the above?

Quach: We had a lot of manual processes, and a lot of tools. To be able to measure the performance of a team, you need to use the same process and the same tools, and then measure yourself on it. You need to optimize the way you do it, so that you can provide better IT services.

Gardner: What have been some of the results of your movement toward ITSM? What sort of benefits have you realized as a result?

Quach: We had many of them. Some were financial, but the most important thing, I think, is the services quality and the availability of those services. So one indicator is a reduction in major incidents of 30 percent for the last two years.

Gardner: What is it about your use of ITSM that has led to that significant reduction in incidents? How does that translate?

Quach: We put our new problem management approach to work as well with the problem processes. When we open tickets, we can take care of the incidents in a coordinated way at an enterprise level. So the impact is everywhere. We can now advise the line of businesses, follow up with the incident, and close the incident rapidly. We follow up with any problems, and then we fix the real issues so that they don’t come back.

Gardner: Have you used this to translate back to any applications development, or custom development in your organization? Or is this more on the operations side strictly?

Better support

Quach: We started all of this on the operations side. But then we started last year on the development side, too. They're involved in our process slowly, and that’s going to soon get better, so we can support the full IT lifecycle better.

Gardner: Tell us about HP Discover. What's of interest to you? Have you been looking at what HP has been doing with their tools? What's of most importance to you in terms of what they do with their technology?

Quach: I can tell you how important it is for us. Last year we didn't go to HP Discover. This year, around eight in my team and the architecture team are here. That shows you how important it is.

Now we spread out. A lot of my team members went to explore tools and everything else that HP has to offer -- and HP has a lot of offer. We went to learn about the cloud, as well as big data. It all works together. That’s why it was important for us to come here. ITSM is the main reason we're here, but I want to make sure that everything works together, because the IT processes touch everything.

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Gardner: I've talked to a number of organizations, Trung, and they've mentioned that before they feel comfortable moving into more cloud activities, and before they feel comfortable adopting big data, analytics platforms, they want to make sure they have everything else in order. So ITSM is an important step for them to then go to larger, more complex undertakings. Is that your philosophy as well?

Quach: Yes. There are two ways to do this. You use that technology to force yourself to be disciplined, or you discipline yourself. ITSM is one way to do it. You force yourself to work in a certain manner, a streamlined manner, and then you can go to the cloud. It's easier that way.

Gardner: Then, of course, you also have standardization in culture, in organization, not just technology, but the people and the process, and that can be very powerful.

Quach: If asked me about cloud -- and I have done this with another company -- in a 30-minute interview about cloud, I would use 29 minutes to not talk about technology but about people and processes.

Gardner: How about the future of IT? Any thoughts about or the big picture of where technology is going? Even as we face larger data volumes, perhaps more complexity, and mobile applications, what are your thoughts about how we solve some of those issues in the big picture?

Time to market

Quach: IT more and more is going to have a challenge for meeting the speed demanded for improved time to market. But to do that, you need processes, technology, and of course, people. So the client, the business, is going to ask us to be faster. That’s why we'll need to go in that cloud. But to go in the cloud, we need to master our IT services, and then go in the cloud. If not, it would be like not going to the cloud and not having that agility. We would not be competitive.

Gardner: Looking back, now that you have gone through an ITSM advancement, for those who are just beginning, what are some thoughts that you could share with them?

Quach: In an ITSM project, it's very hard to manage change. I'm talking about the people change, not the change-management technology process. Most of the time, you put that in place and say that everybody has to work with it. If I would redo it, I would bring more people to understand the latest ITSM science and processes, and explain why in five or 10 years, it's going to really help us.

You always have to be close to your clients. Even if they are IT, they are your client or partner.

After that, we'll put in the project, but we'll follow them and train them every year. ITSM is a never-ending story. You always have to be close to your clients. Even if they are IT, they are your client or partners. You need to coach them, to make sure they understand why they're doing this. Sometimes it’s a bit longer to get it right at the beginning, but it’s all worth it at the end.

Gardner: Thanks so much. We’ll have to leave it there. We've been talking about how Desjardins Group in Montréal has been embarking on an ITSM journey and we've been learning how that's helped them improve their quality and reduced incidence of IT problems. So thank you to our guest Trung Quach, ITSM Manager at Desjardins Group.

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Quach: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And thank you, too, to our audience for joining this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a Canadian cooperative banking organization is using ITSM to put best practices in place and deliver higher IT value to the company. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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MIT Media Lab Computing Director Details the Virtues of Cloud Computing for Agility and DR

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how MIT researchers are reaping the benefits of virtualization.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you directly from the VMworld 2014 Conference. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of BriefingsDirect IT strategy discussions.

Gardner

We’re here in San Francisco the week of August 25 to explore the latest developments in hybrid cloud computing, user computing, software-defined data center (SDDC), and virtualization infrastructure management.

Our next innovator case study interview focuses on the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts and how they're exploring the use of cloud and hybrid cloud and enjoying such use benefits as speed, agility and disaster recovery (DR). 

To learn more about how the MIT Media Lab is using cloud computing, we’re joined by Michail Bletsas, research scientist and Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab. Welcome.

Michail Bletsas: Thank you. 

Gardner: Tell us about the MIT Media Lab. How big is the organization? What’s your charter?

Bletsas: The organization is one of the many independent research labs within MIT. MIT is organized in departments, which do the academic teaching, and research labs, which carry out the research.

Bletsas

The Media Lab is a unique place within MIT. We deviate from the normal academic research lab in the sense that a lot of our funding comes from member companies, and it comes in a non-direct fashion. Companies become members of the lab, and then we get the freedom to do whatever we think is best.

We try to explore the future. We try to look at what our digital life will look like 10 years out, or more. We're not an applied research lab in the sense that we're not looking at what's going to happen two or three years from now. We're not looking at short-term future products. We're looking at major changes 15 years out.

I run the group that takes care of the computing infrastructure for the lab and, unlike a normal IT department, we're kind of heavy on computing. We use computers as our medium. The Media Lab is all about human expression, which is the reason for the name and computers are one of the main means of expression right now. We're much heavier than other departments in how many devices you're going to see. We're on a pretty complex network and we run a very dynamic environment.

Major piece

A lot has changed in our environment in recent years. I've been there for almost 20 years. We started with very exotic stuff. These days, you still build exotic stuff, but you're using commodity components. VMware, for us, is a major piece of this strategy because it allows us a more efficient utilization of our resources and allows us to control a little bit the server proliferation that we experienced and that everybody has experienced.

We normally have about 350 people in the lab, distributed among staff, faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students, as well as affiliates from the various member companies. There is usually a one-to-five correspondence between virtual machines (VMs), physical computers, and devices, but there are at least 5 to 10 IPs per person on our network. You can imagine that having a platform that allows us to easily deploy resources in a very dynamic and quick fashion is very important to us.

We run a relatively small operation for the size of the scope of our domain. What's very important to us is to have tools that allow us to perform advanced functions with a relatively short learning curve. We don’t like long learning curves, because we just don’t have the resources and we just do too many things.

You are going to see functionality in our group that is usually only present in groups that are 10 times our size. Each person has to do too many things, and we like to focus on technologies that allow us to perform very advanced functions with little learning. I think we've been pretty successful with that.

We really need to interact with our infrastructure on a much shorter cycle than the average operation.

Gardner: So your requirements are to support those 350 people with dynamic workloads, many devices. What is it that you needed to do in your data center to accommodate that? How have you created a data center that’s responsive, but also protects your property, and that allows you to reduce your security risk?

Bletsas: Unlike most people, we tend to have our resources concentrated close to us. We really need to interact with our infrastructure on a much shorter cycle than the average operation. We've been fortunate enough that we have multiple, small data centers concentrated close to where our researchers are. Having something on the other side of the city, the state, or the country doesn’t really work in an environment that’s as dynamic as we are.

We also have to support a much larger community that consists of our alumni or collaborators. If you look at our user database right now, it’s something in the order of 3,500, as opposed to 350. It’s a very dynamic in that it changes month to month. The important attributes of an environment like this is that we can’t have too many restrictions. We don’t have an approved list of equipment like you see in a normal corporate IT environment.

Our modus operandi is that if you bring it to us, we’ll make it work. If you need to use a specific piece of equipment in your research, we’ll try to figure out how to integrate it into your workflow and into what we have in there. We don’t tell people what to use. We just help them use whatever they bring to us.

In that respect, we need a flexible virtualization platform that doesn’t impose too many restrictions on what operating systems you use or what the configuration of the VMs are. That’s why we find that solutions, like general public cloud, for us are only applicable to a small part of our research. Pretty much every VM that we run is different than the one next to it. 

Flexibility is very important to us. Having a robust platform is very, very important, because you have too many parameters changing and very little control of what's going on. Most importantly, we need a very solid, consistent management interface to that. For us, that’s one of the main benefits of the vSphere VMware environment that we’re on.

Public or hybrid

Gardner: Of course, virtualization sounds like a great fit when you have such dynamic, different, and varied workloads. But what about taking advantage of cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud to some degree, perhaps for disaster recovery (DR) or for backup failover. What's the rationale, even in your unique situation, for using a public or hybrid cloud?

Bletsas: We use hybrid cloud right now that’s three-tiered. MIT has a very large campus. It has extensive digital infrastructure running our operations across the board. We also have facilities that are either all the way across campus or across the river in a large co-location facility in downtown Boston and we take advantage of that for first-level DR.

A solution like the vCloud Air allows us to look at a real disaster scenario, where something really catastrophic happens at the campus, and we use it to keep certain critical databases, including all the access tools around them, in a farther-away location.

It’s a second level for us. We have our own VMware infrastructure and then we can migrate loads to our central organization. They're a much larger organization that takes care of all the administrative computing and general infrastructure at MIT at their own data centers across campus. We can also go a few states away to vCloud Air [and migrate our workloads there in an emergency].

We know that remote events are remote, until they happen, and sometimes they do.

So it’s a very seamless transition using the same tools. The important attribute here is that, if you have an operation that small, 10 people having to deal with such a complex set of resources, you can't do that unless you have a consistent user interface that allows you to migrate those workloads using tools that you already know and you're familiar with.

We couldn’t do it with another solution, because the learning curve would be too hard. We know that remote events are remote, until they happen, and sometimes they do. This gives us, with minimum effort, the ability to deal with that eventuality without having to invest too much in learning a whole set of tools, a whole set of new APIs to be able to migrate.

We use public cloud services also. We use spot instances if we need a high compute load and for very specialized projects. But usually we don’t put persistent loads or critical loads on resources over which we don’t have much control. We like to exert as much control as possible.

Gardner: I'd like to explore a little bit more this three-tiered cloud using common management, common APIs. It sounds like you're essentially taking metadata and configuration data, the things that will be important to spin back up an operation should there be some unfortunate occurrence, and putting that into that public cloud, the vCloud Air public cloud. Perhaps it's DR-as-a-service, but only a slice of DR, not the entire data. Is that correct?

Small set of databases

Bletsas: Yes. Not the entire organization. We run our operations out of a small set of databases that tend to drive a lot of our websites. A lot of our internal systems drive our CRM operation. They drive our events management. And there is a lot of knowledge embedded in those databases.

It's lucky for us, because we're not such a big operation. We're relatively small, so you can include everything, including all the methods and the programs that you need to access and manipulate that data within a small set of VMs. You don’t normally use them out of those VMs, but you can keep them packaged in a way that in a DR scenario, you can easily get access to them.

Fortunately, we've been doing that for a very long time because we started having them as complete containers. As the systems scaled out, we tended to migrate certain functions, but we kept the basic functionality together just in case we have to recover from something.

We are fortunate enough to have a very good, intimate knowledge of our environment. We know where each piece lies. That’s the benefit of running a small organization

In the older days, we didn’t have that multi-tiered cloud in place. All we had was backups in remote data centers. If something happened, you had to go in there and find out some unused hardware that was similar to what you had, restore your backup, etc.

Now, because most of MIT's administrative systems run under VMware virtualization, finding that capacity is a very simple proposition in a data center across campus. With vCloud Air, we can find that capacity in a data center across the state or somewhere else.

Gardner: For organizations that are intrigued by this tiered approach to DR, did you decide which part of those tiers would go in which place? Did you do that manually? Is there a part of the management infrastructure in the VMware suite that allowed you to do that? How did you slice and dice the tiers for this proposition of vCloud Air holding a certain part of the data?

Bletsas: We are fortunate enough to have a very good, intimate knowledge of our environment. We know where each piece lies. That’s the benefit of running a small organization. We occasionally use vSphere’s monitoring infrastructure. Sometimes it reveals to us certain usage patterns that we were not aware of. That’s one of the main benefits that we found there.

We realized that certain databases were used more than we thought. Just looking at those access patterns told us, “Look, maybe you should replicate this." It doesn’t cost much to replicate this across campus and then maybe we should look into pushing it even further out.

It is a combination of having a visibility and nice dashboards that reveal patterns of activity that you might not be aware of even in an environment that's not as large as ours.

Gardner: We’re here at VMworld 2014. There's been quite a bit of news, particularly in the vCloud Air arena. We've talked and heard about betas for ObjectStore and for virtual private cloud. Are these of interest to you now that you’ve done a hybrid cloud using DR-as-a-service? Does anything else intrigues you?

Standard building blocks

Bletsas: We like the move toward standardization of building blocks. That’s a good thing overall, because it allows you to scale out relatively quickly with a minor investment in learning a new system. That’s the most important trend out there for us. As I've said, we're a small operation. We need to standardize as much as possible, while at the same time, expanding the spectrum of services. So how do you do that? It’s not a very clear proposition.

The other thing that is of great interest to us is network virtualization. MIT is in a very peculiar situation compared to the rest of the world, in the sense that we have no shortage of IP addresses. Unlike most corporations where they expose a very small sliver of their systems to the outside world and everything happens on the back-end, our systems are mostly exposed out there to the public internet.

We don’t run very extensive firewalls. We're a knowledge dissemination and distribution organization and we don’t have many things to hide. We operate in a different way than most corporations. That shows also with networking. Our network looks like nothing like what you see in the corporate world. The ability to move whole sets of IPs around our domain, which is rather large and we have full control over, is a very important thing for us.

It allows for much faster DR. We can do DR using the same IPs across the town right now because our domain of control is large enough. That is very powerful because you can do very quick and simple DR without having to reprogram IP, DNS Servers, load balancers, and things like that. That is important.

That is very powerful because you can do very quick and simple DR without having to reprogram IP, DNS Servers, load balancers, and things like that.

The other trend that is also important is storage virtualization and storage tiering and you see that with all the vendors down in the exhibit space. Again, it allows you to match the application profile much easier to what resources you have. For a rather small group like ours, which can't afford to have all of its disk storage and very high-end systems, having a little bit of expensive flash storage, and then a lot of cheap storage, is the way for us to go.

The layers that have been recently added to VMware, both on the network side and the storage side help us achieve that in a very cost-efficient way.

Gardner: The benefits of having a highly virtualized environment -- including the data center, including the end user computing endpoints -- gives you that flexibility of taking workloads and apps from development to test to deployments. So there's a common infrastructure approach there, but also a common infrastructure across cloud, hybrid cloud, and DR.

So it’s sort of a snowball effect. The more virtualization you're adapting, the more dynamic and agile you can be across many more aspects of IT.

Bletsas: For us, experimentation is the most important thing. Spinning out a large number of VMs to do a specific experiment is very valuable and being able to commandeer resources across campus and across data centers is a necessary requirement for something like an environment like this. Flexibility is what we get out of that and agility and speed of operations.

In the older days, you had to go and procure hardware and switch hardware around. Now, we rarely go into our data centers. We used to live in our data centers. We go there from time to time but not as often as we used to do, and that’s very liberating. It’s also very liberating for people like me because it allows me to do my work anywhere.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been discussing the virtues of cloud computing and hybrid cloud computing with the MIT Media Lab. I’d like to thank our guest, Michail Bletsas, research scientist and Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass. Thanks so much.

Bletsas: Thank you.

Gardner: And also a big thank you to our audience for joining this special podcast series coming to you directly from the 2014 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect IT discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how MIT researchers are reaping the benefits of virtualization. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Cloud Services Brokerages Add Needed Elements of Trust and Oversight to Complex Cloud Deals

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

Our discussion today focuses on an essential aspect of helping businesses make the best use of cloud computing.

We're examining the role and value of cloud services brokers with an emphasis on small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), regional businesses, and government, and looking for attaining the best results from a specialist cloud service brokerage role within these different types of organizations.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org

No two businesses have identical needs, and so specialized requirements need to be factored into the use of often commodity-type cloud services. An intermediary brokerage can help companies and government agencies make the best use of commodity and targeted IaaS clouds, and not fall prey to replacing an on-premises integration problem with a cloud complexity problem.

To learn more about the role and value of the specialist cloud services brokerage, we're now joined by our panel, Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio. Welcome, Todd.

Todd D. Lyle: Well hello, Dana. It's a pleasure to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in Northern Virginia. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin L. Jackson: Thank you very much. Looking forward to the discussion.

Gardner: Let’s start with you, Todd. Tell me little bit about why there's a difference between the good part of cloud, which is a commodity set of services, a utility approach to computing -- and the gulf between that and a company's culture of traditional IT acquisition? How do we get regular companies to effectively start using these new cloud services?

Lyle: Through education. That’s our first step. The technology is clearly here, the three of us will agree. It's been here for quite some time now. The beauty of it is that we're able to extract bits and pieces for bundles, much like you get from your cell phone or your cable TV folks. You can pull those together through a cloud services brokerage.

Lyle

So brokerage firms will go out and deal with the cloud services providers like Amazon, Rackspace, Dell, and those types of organizations. They bring the strengths of each of those organizations together and bundle them. Then, the consumer gets that on a monthly basis. It's non-CAPEX, meaning there is no capital expenditure.

You're renting these services. So you can expand and contract as necessary. To liken this to a utility environment, utility organizations that do electric and do power, you flip the switch on or turn the faucet on and off. It’s a metered service.

That's where you're going to get the largest return on your collective investment when you switch from a traditional IT environment on-premises, or even a private cloud, to the public cloud and the utility that this brings.

Government agencies

Gardner: Kevin you're involved more with government agencies. They've been using IT for an awfully long time. How is the adjustment to cloud models for them? Is it easier, is it better, or is it just a different type of approach, and therefore requires only adjustment?

Jackson: Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, I've been focused on providing advanced IT to the federal market and Fortune 500 businesses for quite a while. The advent of cloud computing and cloud services brokerages is a double-edged sword. At once, it provides a much greater agility with respect to the ability to leverage information technology.

Jackson

But, at the same time, it brings a much greater amount of responsibility, because cloud service providers have a broad range of capabilities. That broad range has to be matched against the range of requirements within an enterprise, and that drives a change in the management style of IT professionals.

You're going more from your implementation skills to a management of IT skills. This is a great transition across IT, and is something that cloud services brokerages can really aid. [See Jackson's recent blog on brokerages.]

Gardner: Todd, it sounds as if we're moving this from an implementation and a technology skill set into more of a procurement, governance, contracts, and creating the right service-level agreements (SLAs). These are, I think, new skills for many businesses. How is that coaching aspect of a cloud service’s brokerage coming out in the market? Is that something you are seeing a lot of demand for?

Lyle: It’s customer service, plain and simple. We hear about it all the time, but we also pass it off all the time. You have to be accessible. If you're a 69-year-old business owner and embracing a technology from that demographic, it’s going to be different than if you are 23 years old, different in the approach that you take with that person.

As we all get more tenured, we'll see more adaptability to new technologies in a workplace, but that’s a while out. That's the 35-and-younger crowd. If you go to 35-and-above, it's what Kevin mentioned -- changing the culture, changing the way things are procured within those cultures, and also centralizing command. That’s where the brokerage or the exchange comes into place for this. [See Lyle's video on cloud brokerages.]

Change management is a key aspect of being able to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.

Gardner: One of the things that’s interesting to me is that a lot of companies are now looking at this as not just as a way of switching from one type of IT, say a server under a desk, to another type of IT, a server in a cloud.

It’s forcing companies to reevaluate how they do business and think of themselves as a new process-management function, regardless of where the services reside. This also requires more than just how to write a contract. It's really how to do business transformation.

Does that play into the cloud services brokerage? Do you find yourselves coaching companies on business management?

Jackson: Absolutely. One of the things cloud services is bringing to the forefront is the rapidity of change. We're going from an environment where organizations expect a homogenous IT platform to where hybrid IT is really the norm. Change management is a key aspect of being able to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.

This is also driving business models. The more effective business models today are taking advantage of the parallel and global nature of cloud computing. This requires experience, and cloud services brokerages have the experience of dealing with different providers, different technologies, and different business models. This is where they provide a tremendous amount of value.

Different types of services

Gardner: Todd, this notion of being a change agent also raises the notion that we're not just talking about one type of cloud service. We're talking about software as a service (SaaS), bringing communications applications like e-mail and calendar into a web or mobile environment. We're talking about platform as a service (PaaS), if you're doing development and DevOps. We're talking about even some analytics nowadays, as people try to think about how to use big data and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud.

Tell me a bit more about why being a change agent across these different models -- and not just a cloud implementer or integrator -- raises the value of this cloud service brokerage role?

Lyle: It’s a holistic approach. I've been talking to my team lately about being the Dale Carnegie of the cloud, hence the specialist cloud services brokerage, because it really does come down to personalities.

In a book that I've recently written called Grounding the Cloud, Basics and Brokerages, I talk about the human element. That's the personalities, expectations, and abilities of your workforce, not only your present workforce but your future workforce, which we discussed just a moment ago, as far as demographics were concerned.

It's constant change. Kevin said it, using a different term, but that's the world we live in. Some schools are doing this, where they're adding this to their MBA programs. It is a common set of skills that you must have, and it's managing personalities more than you're managing technology, in my opinion.

It's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these changes so that the companies actually can speed up.

Gardner: Tell me a bit more about this book, Todd, it’s called Grounding the Cloud. When is it available and how can people learn more about it?

Lyle: It’s available now on Amazon, and they can find out more at www.groundingthecloud.org. This is a layman’s introduction to cloud computing, and so it helps business men and women get a better understanding of the cloud -- and how they could best maximize their time and their money, as it associates to their IT needs.

Gardner: Does the book get into this concept of the specialist cloud services brokerage (SCSB), as opposed to just a general brokerage, and getting at what's the difference?

Lyle: That’s an excellent question, Dana. There are a lot of perceptions, you have one as well, of what a cloud services brokerage is. But, at the end of the day -- and we've been talking about this in the entire discussion -- it's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these changes so that the companies actually can speed up.

We discuss it here in the "flyover country," in Ohio. We meet in the book with Cleveland State University. We meet with Allen Black Enterprises, and then even with a small landscaping company to demonstrate how the cloud is being applied from six and seven users, all the way up to 25,000 users. And we're doing it here in the Midwest, where things tend to take a couple of years to change.

User advocate

Gardner: How is a cloud services brokerage different from a systems integrator? It seems there's some commonality. But you are not just a channel, or reseller, you are really as much an advocate for the user.

Lyle: A specialist cloud services brokerage is going to be more like Underwriters Laboratories (UL). It’s going to go out, fielding all the different cloud flavors that are available, pick what they feel is best, and bring it together in a bundle. Then, the SCSB works with the entity to adapt to the culture and the change that's going to have to occur and the education within their particular businesses, as opposed to a very high-level vertical, where some things are just pushed out at an enterprise level.

Jackson: I see this cloud services brokerage and specialist cloud services brokerage as the new-age system integrator, because there are additional capabilities that are offered.

For example, you need a trusted third-party to monitor and report on adherence to SLAs. The provider is not going to do that. That’s a role for your cloud services brokerage. Also you need to maintain viable options for alternative cloud-service providers. The cloud services brokerage will identify your options and give you choices, should you need the change. A specialist cloud services brokerage also helps to ensure portability of your business process and data from one cloud service provider to another.

Management of change is more than a single aspect within the organization. It’s how to adapt with constant change and make sure that your enterprise has options and doesn't get locked into a single vendor.

Lyle: It comes to the point, Kevin, of building for constant change. You're exactly right.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org

Gardner: You raise an interesting point too, Kevin, that one shouldn’t get lulled into thinking that they can just make a move to the cloud, and it will all be done. This is going to be a constant set of moves, a journey, and you're going to want to avail yourself of the cloud services marketplace that’s emerging.

We're seeing prices driven down. We're seeing competition among commodity-level cloud services. I expect we'll see other kinds of market forces at work. You want to be agile and be able to take advantage of that in your total cost of computing.

Jackson: There's a broad range of providers in the marketplace, and that range expands daily. Similarly, there's a large range of requirements within any enterprise of any size. Brokers act as matchmakers, avoiding common mistakes, and also help the organizations, the SMBs in particular, implement best practices in their adoption of this new model.

Gardner: Also, when you have a brokerage as your advocate, they're keeping their eye on the cloud marketplace, so that you can keep your eye on your business and your vertical, too. Therefore, you're going to have somebody to tip you off when things change and they will be on the vanguard for deals. Is that something that comes up in your book, Todd, of the public service brokerage being an educated expert in a field where the business really wants to stick to its knitting?

Primary goal

Lyle: Absolutely. That’s the primary goal, both at a strategic level, when you're deciding what products to use -- the Rackspaces, the Microsofts, the RightSignatures, etc. -- all the way down to the tactical one of the daily operation. When I leave the company, how soon can we lock Todd out? How soon can we lock him down or lock him out? It becomes a security issue at a very granular level. Because it's metered, you turn it off, you turn Todd off, you save his data, and put it someplace else.

That’s a role that, requires command and control and oversight, and that's a responsibility. You're part butler. You're looking out for the day-to-day, the minute issues. Then you get up to a very high level. You're like UL. You're keeping an eye on everything that’s occurring. UL comes to mind because they do things that are tactile and those things that you can't touch, and definitely the cloud is something you can’t touch.

Jackson: Actually, I believe it represents the embracing of a cooperative model of my consumers of this information technology, but embracing with open eyes. This is particularly of interest within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their adversarial attitude toward industry. Cloud services brokerages and specialist cloud services brokerages sit at the same the table with these consumers.

This is particularly of interest within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their adversarial attitude towards industry.

Lyle: Kevin, your point is very well taken. I'll go one step further. We were talking up and down the scales, strategic down to the daily operations. One of the challenges that we have to overcome is the signatories, the senior executives, that make these decisions. They're in a different age group and they're used to doing things a certain way.

That being said, getting legislation to be changed at the federal level, directives being pushed down, will make the difference, because they do know how to take orders. I know I'm speaking frankly, but what's going to have to occur for us to see some significant change within the next five years is being told how the procurement process is going to happen.

You're taking the feather; I'm taking the stick, but it’s going to take both of those to accomplish that task at the federal level.

Gardner: We know that Duncan, LLC is a specialized cloud services brokerage. Kevin, tell us a little bit about the GovCloud Network. What is your organization, and how do you align with cloud brokerages?

Jackson: GovCloud Network is a specialty consultancy that helps organizations modify or change their mission and business processes in order to take advantage of this new style of system integrator.

Earlier, I said that the key to transition in a cloud is adopting and adapting to the parallel nature and a global nature of cloud computing. This requires a second look at your existing business processes and your existing mission processes to do things in different ways. That's what GovCloud Network allows. It helps you redesign your business and mission processes for this constant change and this new model.

Notion of governance

Gardner: I'd like to go back to this notion of governance. It seems to me, Todd, that when you have different parts of your company procuring cloud services, sometimes this is referred to as shadow IT. They're not doing it in concert, through a gatekeeper like a cloud broker. Not only is there a potential redundancy of efforts in labor and work in process, but there is this governance and security risk, because one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.

Let's address this issue about better security from better governance by having a common brokerage gatekeeper, rather than having different aspects of your company out buying and using cloud services independently.

Lyle: We're your trusted adviser. We’re also very much a trusted member of your team when you bring us into the fold. We provide oversight. We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way, but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business resources. You don’t want to leave a window open at night. You certainly don't want to leave your network open.

There's a lot going on in today's world, a lot of transition, the NSA and everything we worry about. It's important to have somebody providing command and control. We don’t sit there and stare at a monitor all day. We use systems that watch this, but we can tell when there's an increase or decrease out of the norm of activities within your organization.

We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way, but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business resources.

It really doesn't matter how big or how small, there are systems that allow us to monitor this and give a heads up. If you're part of a leadership team, you’d be notified that again Todd Lyle has left an open window. But if you don't know that Todd even has the window, then that’s even a bigger concern. That comes down to the leadership again -- how you want to manage your entity.

We all want to feel free to make decisions, but there are too many benefits available to us, transparent benefits, as Kevin put it, to using the cloud and hiding in plain sight, maximizing e-mail at 100,000 plus users. Those are all good things but they require oversight.

It's almost like an aviation model, where you have your ground control and your flight crew. Everybody on that team is providing oversight to the other. Ultimately, you have your control tower that's watching that, and the control tower, both in the air and on the ground, is your cloud services brokerage.

Jackson: It’s important to understand that cloud computing is the industrialization of information technology. You're going from an age where the IT infrastructure is a hand-designed and built work of art to where your IT infrastructure is a highly automated assembly-line platform that requires real-time monitoring and metering. Your specialist cloud services brokerage actually helps you in that transition and operations within this highly automated environment.

Lyle: Well said, Kevin.

Gardner: We've talked about this a little bit in the abstract, and it's made a tremendous amount of sense to me. A powerful way to cement understanding is to show examples and understand what others have gone through.

Todd, you mentioned that you have some examples in your new book. I’d like to hear in more detail about when someone has used a specialized cloud brokerage attuned to their business, their industry, or their vertical. What do they get for it and how has it worked out for them? Can you run us through a use case of where this works well?

Three narratives

Lyle: Okay, in my book, we have three narratives, as I mentioned earlier. I talk about Cleveland State University (CSU) and education because this is what this whole program is about, education. It's not offensive -- it's not business, it's not government, it’s education.

With technology, there are so many options out there today as we’re discussing. It's so exciting, but we have to get "Iris" to change her way of thinking.

A couple of things occurred at CSU, cementing my theory on demographics and change in speaking computing as a first language. CSU switched to Microsoft 365 from onsite Lotus Notes, and for anybody who's been on Lotus Notes, it's always been a challenge to use. To get to 365, some education had to occur, and some heads-up had to occur.

People need to be involved in the process at some point, and others excluded for business reasons, and I don't mean that a bad way. I mentioned Iris, because Iris was a lady who works on the third floor of Rhodes Tower at Cleveland State and was very unhappy about losing her desktop printer.

What we do as a specialist cloud services brokerage is making sure that people are included in the process, being educated, giving access to communication and then being available when the time comes.

They went from 2,100 printers down to 300 with the help of not only Bill Wilson and the IT team, but Xerox. Xerox was able to bring tremendous savings at the granular level, but it took a great deal of education and patience, because Iris wasn't happy about losing her printer. She wanted to know why Bill Wilson wasn’t going to lose his.

It really discusses it at a very personal level, because we can all relate to printers and ancillary equipment and our way of doing business. It discusses again, on the great Lake Erie, how change has occurred and how they were able to address it from a human element perspective, again, Iris.

What we do as a specialist cloud services brokerage is making sure that people are included in the process, being educated, giving access to communication and then being available when the time comes. Make sure you answer that phone for the person who needs someone on the phone and make sure that you have the Wiki available and up to date for the person who is going to reach out to that Wiki.

Gardner: Kevin, any examples from your vantage point on the role of the cloud services brokerage and some concrete ways that it’s helped a specific organization?

Jackson: Absolutely. About three years ago I responded to a requirement from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where they were having issues working with allies with respect to exchange of geospatial information and data. Everyone had their maps and everyone had their own system for distributing and sharing that, but they didn't work together. The NGA wanted to have a more effective and efficient means for exchanging geospatial information.

So they reached out to the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) to see if this industry organization had any good ideas for addressing this mission-critical requirement. I was serving as the head of the cloud-computing working group, and the team came up with an idea of using cloud as an inner-space in order to translate different types and formats of geospatial information and data amongst the participants.

Brokered platform

We did this by use of a brokered cloud platform that came to be known as the Geospatial Community Cloud. The cloud services brokerage acted as an intermediary to allow for a real-time change or identification of capabilities for geospatial interoperability. It's a very successful demonstration.

The Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board also leveraged a cloud services brokerage paradigm when they were required to stand up very quickly to manage their hundreds of billions of dollars during the financial crisis. The CIO there, Shawn Kingsberry, knew that he wouldn't be able to respond to the requirements of monitoring, metering, and managing these large sums of money without an IT infrastructure.

Instead of taking the traditional acquisition process within the Federal Government, which would take years, he instead became a cloud services brokerage for his own agency and adopted multiple cloud services. This also was a very successful implementation. So even the Federal Government can adopt cloud services brokerage and respond in a very quick and efficient and effective manner.

Gardner: Todd, we spoke earlier about how we're moving from implementation to procurement. We've also talked about governance being important, SLAs, and managing a contract across variety of different organizations that are providing cloud type services. It seems to me that we're talking about financial types of relations.

So even the Federal Government can adopt cloud services brokerage and respond in a very quick and efficient and effective manner.

How does the cloud services brokerage help the financial people in a company. Maybe it's an individual who wears many hats, but you could think of them as akin to a chief financial officer, even though that might not be their title?

What is it that we are doing with the cloud services brokerage that is of a special interest and value to the financial people? Is it unified billing or is it one throat to choke? How does that work?

Lyle: Both, and then some. Ultimately it's unified billing and unified management from daily operations. It's helping people understand that we're moving from a capitalized expense, the server, the software, things that are tactile that we are used to touching. We're used to being able to count them and we like to see our stuff.

So it's transitioning and letting go, especially for the people who watch the money. We have a fiduciary responsibility to the organizations that we work for. Part of that is communicating, educating, and helping the CFO-type person understand the transition not only from the CAPEX to the OPEX, because they get that, but also how you're going to correlate it to productivity.

It's letting them know to be patient. It's going to take a couple months for your metering to level up. We have some statistics and we can read into that. It's holding their hand, helping them out. That's a very big deal as far as that's concerned.

Gardner: Let's start to think about how to get started. Obviously, every company is different. They're going to be at a different place in terms of maturity, in their own IT, never mind the transition to cloud types of activities. Would you recommend the book as a starting point? Do you have some other materials or references? How do you help that education process get going. I'm thinking about organizations that are really at the very beginning?

Gateway cloud

Lyle: We've created a gateway cloud in our book, not to confuse the cloud story. Ultimately, we have to take in consideration our economy, the world economy today. We're still very slow to move forward.

There are some activities occurring that are forcing us to make change. Our contracts may be running out. Software like XP is no longer supported. So we may be forced into making a change. That's when it's time to engage a cloud services brokerage or a specialist cloud services brokerage.

Go out and buy the book. It's available on Amazon. It gives you a breakdown, and you can do an assessment of your organization as it currently is and it will help you map your network. Then, it will help you reach out to a cloud services brokerage, if you are so inclined, through points of interest for request for proposal or request for information.

The fun part is, it gives you a recipe using Rackspace, Jungle Disk, and gotomeeting.com, where you get to build a baby cloud. Then, you can go out and play with it.

This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most important part, because you’re going to read it then.

You want to begin with three points: file sharing, remote access, and email. You can be the lighthouse or you can be a dry-cleaners, but every organization needs file sharing, remote access, and email. We open-sourced this recipe or what we call the industrial bundle for small businesses.

It's not daunting. We’ve got some time yet, but I would encourage you to get a handle on where your infrastructure is today, digest that information, go out and play with the gateway cloud that we've created, and reach out to us if you are so inclined.

We’d love for you to use one of our organizations, but ultimately know that there are people out there to help you. This book was written for us, not for the technical person. It is not in geek speak. This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most important part, because you’re going to read it then.

Jackson: I would urge SMBs to take the plunge. Cloud can be scary to some, but there is very little risk and there is much to gain for any SMB. The using, leveraging, taking advantage of the cloud gateway that Todd mentioned is a very good, low risk, and high reward path towards the cloud.

Gardner: I would agree with both of what you all said. The notion of a proof of concept and dipping your toe in. You don't have to buy it all at once, but find an area of your company where you’re going to be forced to make a change anyway and then to your point, Kevin, do it now. Take the plunge earlier rather than later.

Jackson: Before you're forced.

Large changes

Gardner: Before you’re forced, but you want to look at a tactical benefit and where to work toward strategic benefit, but there is going to be some really large changes happening in what these cloud providers can do in a fairly short amount of time.

We're moving from discrete apps into the entire desktop, so a full PC experience as a service. That’s going to be very attractive to people. They're going to need to make some changes to get there. But rather than thinking about services discreetly, more and more of what they're looking for is going to be coming as the entire IT services experience, and more analytics capabilities mixed into that. So I am glad to hear you both explaining how to do it, managed at a proof-of-concept level. But I would say do it sooner rather than later.

I'm afraid we have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on helping businesses make the best use of cloud computing. We've seen how the role and value of a cloud services brokerage brokerage -- with an emphasis across the different types of businesses, whether it's small to medium, regional, government -- makes a tremendous amount of sense.

This is going to help companies and government agencies make the best use of the commodity and targeted-cloud services, but not fall prey to replacing on-premises integration problems with cloud complexity and management problems.

So a huge thank you to our guests, Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio. Thank you, Todd.

Lyle: You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Dana.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org

Gardner: And thanks also to Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in Northern Virginia. Thanks, Kevin.

Jackson: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.

Gardner: And also a huge thank you to our audience for joining. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for being with us, and don't forget to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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