Why Are Organizations Migrating to Cloud?

Here are five examples where organizations have leveraged cloud technologies

There are varied reasons for organizations to adopt cloud technologies. Here are 5 examples where organizations have leveraged cloud technologies. What is interesting is that each of the examples is very different from each other. The types of organizations are varied – starting from Self-publishing service to US Government to Hospital to Manufacturing organization. The underlying motivation also varies – from cost saving to manageability to disaster recovery.

1) U.S. Government Recovery.gov site move to the cloud – Darryl K. Taft, eWeek.com, 14 May, 2010
The U.S. Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board have moved its Recovery.gov site to a cloud computing infrastructure to Amazon EC2. Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official Website that provides easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste and abuse. “Cloud computing strikes me as a perfect tool to help achieve greater transparency and accountability,” said Earl Devaney, the Board’s Chairman. “Moving to the cloud allows us to provide better service at lower costs.” Expected benefits include savings of about $750,000 during its current budget cycle and significantly more savings, long-term. Direct cost savings to the Recovery Board will be $334,800 for fiscal year 2010 and $420,000 for fiscal year 2011. The move to the cloud also will enable the board’s staff to focus on its core mission of delivering rich content for Recovery.gov users.

2) IT shops roll their own private clouds – Carl Brooks, SearchCloudComputing.com, 28 Apr 2010
Startup VistaPrint looked hard at Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) but found the network costs too high, so it built its own storage and content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure. VistaPrint is a self-publishing service, where users upload documents and images to VistaPrint, which prints and delivers paper goods, pens, calendars and the like. VistaPrint now serves eight million customers a year and has more than a petabyte of customer data at any given time. Jim Sokoloff, VP of technology at VistaPrint, concurred: “Strategically, we work very hard to avoid lock-in.” We started looking very hard at [Amazon] S3 in 2008,” he said, but found that while the base price was great, the bandwidth costs associated with getting their massive pile of data back and forth from S3 to their print facilities was prohibitive. “That was, in fact, the deal breaker for us,” he said.

3) Hospital adopts private cloud – Carl Brooks, SearchCloudComputing.com, 28 Apr 2010
Massachusetts hospital chain Caritas Christi needed a complete IT overhaul after being acquired by a private equity firm, but couldn’t make sense of the IT market for healthcare. Emergency room physician and CIO Todd Rothenhaus said that he realized that he could consolidate onto modern servers and serve his users much more cheaply than if he outsourced each of his IT needs. “We realized that with Moore’s Law, we had the ability to provide the hosting ourselves,” he said. That freed him from worrying about HIPAA regulation and let him proceed at his own pace. He also said that cloud computing vendors were mutable — healthcare was not. He simply can’t consider a position where if he picked a cloud provider that suddenly went away, or changed its terms or services, his hospitals might not be able to function.

4) Virtualization of servers sets different flavor for Godfrey Phillips – Jasmine Desai, SearchDataCenter.in, 13 Apr 2010
The primary reason why Godfrey Phillips India went for server virtualization was not cost saving. Operating in the consumer industry, Godfrey Phillips manufactures tobacco, cigarettes and tea. The company was incorporated in 1936, and is headquartered in New Delhi. According to S R Balasubramaniam, the company’s executive vice president for IT & corporate development, “Server virtualization was very right from various perspectives in our data center tapestry”. Savings on power and cooling was one of the main reasons while the other reason was to deploy patches on production servers. Explains Balasubramaniam: “Before doing patches on a production server, you need to think about it. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don’t. A similar environment is needed, so you build a clone of the production server, deploy the patches, see the result, and then decommission the server. Later, you again go to the production server and deploy it. This becomes very easy when you can deploy servers for such reasons on the fly using server virtualization.”

5) Medical management firm turns to cloud computing – Carl Brooks, SearchCloudComputing.com, 08 Apr 2010
The Schumacher Group has turned to cloud computing to supply much of the IT needed to manage more than 2,000 doctors working in emergency rooms in 20 states. The Lafayette, La., medical practice management firm switched its IT focus to the cloud after hurricanes swept through the Gulf Coast in 2005, narrowly missing its data centers. “We weren’t directly impacted by the storms, but had we been 40 to 50 miles to the west, it would have been a different story. That experience convinced him to distribute as many of his IT operations as he could to mitigate risk and get more functionality with less equipment on the ground.” said Schumacher’s Chief Information Officer Doug Menefee.

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