Migrating to Cloud Services

Henry Hughes

A Changing Approach

• “Too many universities operate in an outdated

way. They’ve failed to recognise the savings and

service improvements that could be obtained

through engagement with commercial partners

and the use of shared services…”

Higher Education in the Age of Austerity

Sector Financial Drivers

• Department of Business, Innovation and Skills

– 25% reduction over 4 years

• HE Teaching budget cut by 40% over 4 years.

– £2.9bn (£7.1-£4.2bn)

• FE Teaching budget cut by 25% over 4 years.

– £1.1bn

• Departments merging, funding difficult to access

• Funding Councils changing funding methodologies

2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15

16.7 16.5 15.6 14.7 13.7

Campus Drivers

– Focus on cost reduction and service improvement• Data Centers can use >10% of power for an entire campus

– Carbon Reduction Commitment• Impact organisations with energy usage >6,000MWh and will increase

each year

• Additional carbon-related taxation is likely

– Real estate becoming more valuable for other activities

– Problems provisioning additional power in some areas

What is Cloud Computing?

• Helpful NIST Definition

Characteristics Service Models Deployment Models

On-demand self-serviceBroad network accessResource poolingRapid elasticityMeasured Service

Software as a servicePlatform as a serviceInfrastructure as a service

Private CloudCommunity CloudPublic CloudHybrid Cloud

Government Cloud

“The Government is currently developing proposals for G-Cloud.

This cloud computing infrastructure will enable public bodies to

select and host ICT services from a secure, resilient and cost-

effective shared environment.” – Cabinet Office

Aims –

• Reduction of ICT costs

• Improve government services and agility through use of ICT

• Reduction of carbon footprint due to Government ICT services

• Improve data centre services

• Align with other Government thinking

bespoke

product

commodity

Certainty

Ub

iqu

ity

Innovation

IT Delivered “As a product”

IT Delivered “As a service”

HighLow

High

Low

Cloud?

Dem

and

Improvement

Move to commodisiationerodes value of the old (Schumpeter – creative destruction) accelerating new innovation…

Is it that easy?

• Significant investment in customised in-house systems, means

moving external is not simple

• Total cost of ownership is often not known, elements within with IT,

Estates and Finance functions

• Costing of IT services is a difficult task involving three interacting

variables: people, processes and technology.

• Making reliable estimates of potential cost savings is difficult

• There are concerns over data security and privacy

• There are uncertainties regarding data location and legal risks

• There are uncertainties with regard to changes to security models

Risks in Cloud Computing

• Useful paper “Putting Cloud security in perspective” from Capgemini

Compliance Multi-tenancy Lock-in Availability

Data Protection ActPCI-DSS

Data hosted abroad (US Patriot Act)

Safe HarbourAgreement

Shared storage or compute resource

Provider Security

Flexibility & value balanced against security risk

Difficult for PaaS

Possible route for SaaS

Market needs to develop in this area

Cloud services likely to offer more resilience

What are existing services achieving?

How safe is your data currently?

Service layers

Data centre

Networking & Firewalling

Servers

Virtulisation

Operating system

Infrastructure software

Application software

People

Client device

Interconnecting network

Infr

astr

uct

ure

-aaS

Soft

war

e-aa

S

Pla

tfo

rm-a

aS

Infr

astr

uct

ure

Pla

tfo

rm

Soft

war

e

Organisation

JANET Cloud

Brokerage

• Guiding themes

– Enabling re-use/re-sale of existing provision & capacity

– Identifying new models and opportunities

– Supporting adoption of new technologies & models

– Supporting organisations and keeping autonomy with institutions

– Promoting interoperability, open standards and data formats

– De-risking new models and services (SLA’s, T&Cs, governance)

– Creating an effective competitive market for suppliers

– Enabling new projects, developments, and shared services

Timescales

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May …

Anticipated Service Start

Prove concepts

Identify Pilots

Migrate Prototypes (to service)

Create Prototype Projects (with Commercial Suppliers)

Build Prototypes (with sector organisations)

Create Environment

Build Digital Marketplace

Diligence on existing areas Diligence on new areas

Build Sustainability Model

Deliver wider scale

Seeking Pilot Sites

• Looking for universities / colleges that:– Are looking to develop/move their data centres

– Have already adopted off campus data centre / cloud services

– Are looking to adopt campus data centre / cloud type services

– Are looking to provide campus data centre / cloud services

– Are negotiating with commercial providers on campus data

centre / cloud services

Conclusions

• There are opportunities for significant cost and efficiency

savings to be made

• The risks need to be understood in context of the service

being purchased and need to be set in the context of the

risks to existing services