No one likes to be a guinea pig—least of all CIOs whose
heads are likely to roll, if they over spend even 2 cents beyond
their shoestring budgets. That is perhaps why everybody loves to
talk about cloud computing but very few actually risk their neck to
do something beyond simple virtualization or a subscription or two
to Salesforce.com.
Where adopting cloud computing is concerned however, it is
possible to be a guinea pig, create value for yourself (and not
someone else) and still not get slaughtered in the process.
In your computing environment and computing requirements, think
about what represents an unpredictable, often short-lived demand
for atypical, necessary and important services. These are the low
hanging fruits and best candidates for proving that cloud computing
works.
#1 Performance and Load Testing:
Performance and load testing of new applications or major
releases of refurbished applications, is usually a
resource-intensive process within any organization, consuming time
along with hardware and associated software. Provisioning such
requirements—especially the computing infrastructure—on
demand via a cloud architecture, can save precious resources and
also serve as a useful test of the cloud’s architecture.
Additionally, the fact that performance and load testing is not
a mission-critical process, in a relative sense, implies that an
operational failure can be countenanced. Most firms choose to test
out a private cloud architecture through precisely such a project.
The results have been broadly positive, especially on the cost
front. Given that fact that virtualization enables testing across
diverse applications and platforms, wide-ranging simulations can be
carried out for a fraction of the earlier cost. Performance and
scalability testing done over the cloud also enables more robust
simulations. This is since various scenarios can be constructed
with different parameters of OS, virtualization platforms and
related applications.
#2 Training
Most organizations of any scale usually have integrated training
components that need to be imparted to employees on a regular
basis. Such training programmes, although effective and desirable,
have the limitation of being a huge crunch on existing resources,
especially with limited software licenses. An internal cloud,
properly scaled and loaded with the requisite software, can easily
provide for the necessary requirements in case of trainings.