The cloud will shift focus …

for the Enterprise Architect

The cloud foundation [will/]have simplified the enterprise architecture in such a way that it is not anymore important to in detail handle everything the technology infrastructure aspect area. This will not only simply the architecture but also the business framework, the normal suppliers/vendors of services will be dramatically reduced when the infrastructure becomes a commodity. The super commodification of the infrastructure aspect area we will see parallel behavior in the Information System aspect area through high standardization of interfaces and behavior in-between software leading to a need of more agile enterprise architecture

As in the nature, the eco system is composed by different ”layers” that have different characteristics, but cannot exist without the layer below. The cow needs the grass as well as the rabbit needs it, in the same way the snake eats the rabbit, and the eagle is consuming the snake. The interesting in this analogy is to remember, that even if we are happy to view an eagle flying in the wild or if we enjoy buing our beef in the supermarket we are depending on green grass

In the same way we in the IT industry can abstract away and really do not work with the details of the lower infrastructure layers, but put our emphasis on the higher layers in the eco-system.

 

It is natural to first abstract away the aspect area with least business value

As we suspected, the current business situation shows that we are about to abstract/cover/mist (or put into the cloud) parts of the technology infrastructure aspect area of the business’ IT landscape. There are also other layers that are put into the cloud, platforms, and software.

When will this then occur? Will we have one cloud that hides everything or how will the reality look? It is of course impossible to predict the future, but it is quite certain that we will have more than one cloud, in the same way as we have more than one HW vendor or more than one SW vendor

And as Sherlock Holmes said in The Sign of Four; “I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty.” To honor this wise (fictive, but wise) man we must at least make an effort into guessing what will happen in the future with some logical reasoning behind.

When we talk about cloud we must as always differ between delivery model and content model, sometimes this becomes a bit confusing but it is quite simple.

There will be some different types of clouds that in general is not always talked about, but will be a type of cloud, or a significant attribute to the cloud of choice.

The cloud types that today is common to talk about are Public cloud, Private cloud, Hybrid cloud, and often Government cloud. I believe we need to add what I call Hardware Vendor cloud, and Software Vendor cloud
We will also get a number of industry specific clouds, for example the Telco cloud. Here we must differentiate between the content and the delivery models. The HW, SW and Industry clouds are content descriptions, and the Public, Hybrid, Private and Government clouds are delivery types that can contain content.

SW clouds, and HW clouds are somewhat depending on each other. The Software vendor are in need of securing access to HW to scale his cloud, and the HW cloud vendor needs software that can be run on the HW cloud

Very often the content layers of clouds that is used is the Iaas, PaaS, SaaS, and sometimes the BaaS

Simplified explanation of content layers;

IaaS	Infrastructure as a Service	A content cloud where you buy infrastructure services, like storage compute, maybe security services also belong here
PaaS	Platform as a Service	A platform as a service cloud is where you buy services that allows you to deploy bespoke software and run it in this cloud
SaaS	Software as a Service	Software as a Service is the classic way of offering an application run and operated in the cloud
BaaS	Business as a Service	The newest is BaaS where you get a industry/business specific functionality operated in a more or less specialized cloud environment

 

Different vendors will have different strength, and hence specialize on different cloud content.

When examining the service offerings that different vendors with their current or potential cloud offerings, it is easy to see that there will be need for more than one cloud provider until interfaces between layers have been better standardized. For example; Microsoft builds independent platforms, that any type of code can run on, but they are still dependent on running their platform on specific hardware. This concludes in the fact that there will be a strong dependency between the SW cloud providers, and the HW cloud providers

It is most likely that vendors that complement each other will partner up, and provide joint offerings in different delivery models. You could for example suspect that Microsoft will partner up with HP to deliver their ERP, Microsoft Dynamics AX in the cloud. Microsoft have announced that (or was it rumors?) next version of AX will first be available as a SaaS in the cloud, and secondly available for local deployment. This will fit some enterprises, but not all, some will have regulations or other business benefits that pushes them to chose a different cloud delivery model than Microsoft can offer out of the box. That could be local data requirements that forces the enterprise to have some data locally in a country, and then they “must” go with some kind of distributed cloud delivery that can be used to distribute the installations of Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Who will orchestrate it all?

It is obvious that an enterprise will use several different types of cloud delivery models, as well as buying different types of services from them.
There are needs that not one type of cloud and delivery model can handle to the best price and conditions.

To make it a bit easier we can drop the content dimension and treat that as different kind of service offerings part of a service catalog

Left will be the delivery models and what kind of delivery model the service provider can provide. This leaves a pretty complex landscape with different services delivered from different locations. There will be for example pure distance in between locations, this will introduce latency, and even more if you are running over the internet, where you could have different number of jumps before you reach the final destination. To orchestrate this you will need a well thought through orchestration model, as well as very strong integration discipline. The integration will become very close to B2B integration in-between different clouds, and are in it self a full chapter of theory, not to be covered here.

Delivery models of clouds;

Normally when talking of different types of cloud the discussion is around sourcing models, this means who owns the cloud, and that is of course important from a capital expense point of view, but in the sourcing model naming also implies where the cloud is run from.

Private cloud runs from the enterprise premises, a Public cloud will be run from wherever the cloud provider have their center, and a Hybrid cloud will be something in between.

In this naming you very fast can make an assumption on where your data will be located as well as the level of control you an an enterprise will have over the objects in the cloud. (security)

The security of cloud is today the one big thing that holds back the commercial explosion of the concept. The other thing is location of data. We noticed that in the so called Blackberry data ownership dispute in 2010, the Architecture of the Blackberry ”cloud functionality” and the location of data have affected much of the thoughts behind how to architect the cloud solutions of the future.

Globality and Specialization

With the play of global enterprises we will get the benefit of using different clouds for different parts of the IT landscape. Maybe the ERP system will be run in a specialized cloud, the bespoke systems in a private cloud, the integration engine again in a special cloud, and the different staging environments for testing new functionality before it enters the production environment might be in a public cloud, because it will anyway run old data, that is not security sensitive.

If you are a multi location enterprise you might need multi site cloud delivery. The normal reason is regulations of data, but it can also be due to less latency in the network. One serious question to as the specialized cloud delivery vendor is if they can support multiple locations of data. If this is hard or impossible, the large global cloud vendors like HP do most likely deliver support for the same kind of applications with a choise of distribution of implementation and data.

Time have passed quicker than usually, already now we can see companies that more or less do not need local servers, most will want some kind of local servers but some less critical systems can be run in public clouds with lower SLAs and generally a feeling of less security.

The natural thing for an enterprise is to use cloud services for the less critical services

If we read the business impact – transaction volume diagram, or we can also call it the commodity diagram, over the time dimension we will notice that the cloud services moves, the HW Cloud for example moves from a high business impact down to a less significant position in the lower right quadrant.

We should read this as for the business the availability of the HW cloud is an easier to risk mitigate than for example an ERP Cloud.

The availability of different clouds with different characteristics gives us a new type of Enterprise Architecture as well as a new business partner landscape in-between the Enterprise and the Vendor.

Compare the IT cloud to the utility business, they deliver power, and with a highly standardized interface (two holes in the wall. This is the simple example, but if you are talking to a large enterprise that is very electricity intensive, they will have to write special agreements with the utility vendor, and the delivery can be a bit unique, the same for other special occasions, like a DC that needs to have the possibility to be powered from two independent energy sources/grids

Compare the IT cloud to water from the tap. Also something you pay per usage, and we all consider as something we can easily get from one or another supplier, but we expect the interface at home to be the same.

We are in these cases looking at price / quality / and terms and conditions, because that is the main things that change if you look at different suppliers. When an enterprise have special requirements you get a special solution. If you have the need of extreme water usage you would for example need to build out the normal supply of water to a high capacity supply pipe. The TI (Technology Infrastructure) abstraction of the enterprise architecture will over time become more and more commoditized, and then will the same attributes applied on buying these services.

Commoditization (also called commodification) occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently. As such, goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants have become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and silicon chips.

We will see the same happen with cloud services. The grade of commodification will vary with the placement in the enterprise value chain, and the TI will be abstracted away long before the other aspect areas of the enterprise architecture

Furthermore the business partner landscape will change

In each enterprise abstraction (B,I;IS;TI) there can be one or more suppliers of services.

There are dependencies between the abstraction layer, and when you hand a scope to a supplier you also informally understand that the supplier will not be happy if their scope becomes smaller.

Hence the scope of a supplier is depending on the interconnected layers (above / below) and the delivery in these areas.

When the TI abstraction area is removed from the equation due to commoditization the enterprise partner landscape will dramatically change. A common way will be to make sure the enterprise owns knowledge in the commoditized area, to be able to handle exceptional situations.

We have now noticed that it is not possible to be a strategic partner in the ”removed” abstraction area because the enterprise do not need to interact with the commoditized area.

As well as the way of creating Enterprise Architecture

To notice is that the sole business aspect area that is not in focus of vendor help is the Information aspect area, this shows how important it is and will be to understand exactly how information flows with the business processes, with the help of the information systems.

With the information in the center of the enterprise the knowledge, and behavior of the enterprise architecture will move into a facilitating role in-between business activities and application functionality.

There will be a new focus on new requirements on both speed of creation, the involved parties that creates the architecture as well as on interaction with the business. Business interaction will drive the enterprise architecture, meaning that experience of interaction with business and software functionality understanding will supersede the now out abstracted technology knowledge.

Even the ERPs have been evolved to a grade where it is possible to tread the services/functionality as exchangeable service to gain advantages

The EA will now also become more and more focused on external collaboration

With the shorter business and product cycles in the market, the information system support of the enterprise also needs to keep up the speed.

Most likely this means that instead of building a lot of bespoke functionality we are looking on integration of standard services that quickly can bring new functionality or new information transformation.

The uniqueness of an enterprise will be in how and what services are combined to the full enterprise architecture, in combination with business services, business processes and activities as well as how the organization is designed. This together with the outlined information objects, and the corresponding integrated standard information system services is the new enterprise architecture.

This new architecture will live in a landscape build of different orchestrated clouds that is orchestrated and operated by the provider with the best method and tools to monitor, and with automatization give advantages to the enterprise.

Conclusion;

Change of business partners;

• The HW vendors will own a high transaction volume cloud that will be highly commoditized, and hence they will not be a strategic partner to the enterprise.
• The enterprise will partner with the vendor that provides higher business impact services, note that this will not have to be a cloud provider
• HW vendors will need SaaS services to sell their hardware in the future
• There will be a need for private distributed clouds
• The telecom companies will play a large role in the end to end SLAs of the future

Enterprise Architecture will shift focus;

• A switch of focus will occur, the technology infrastructure abstraction layer will very much disappear, and the architecture of the enterprise will take a big jump into a focus of business services, and how they are realized with information system services.

other things to notice;

• The ISV is depending on a HW vendor to be able to build their cloud
• Security, and location of data will be essential, that means that either small local cloud providers will have a niche or the enterprise will use a global HW cloud provider to handle the enterprise data
• The end to end SLAs need to be provided in a new way, including telecom providers as well as every service provider in their own cloud
• There will be a renewed focus on non functional requirements in-between services
• Monitoring of IT will mean something different for the next generation of enterprises
• New requirements will affect the integration area, cloud integration