It’s easy for startups and small firms to take advantage of the menu of cloud computing services out there, but how does an IT manager at a mid-size or large enterprise get in the game?  There is a ton of hype out there about cloud computing – and nervous IT managers don’t want to risk their reputation or their organizations cash fiddling with systems that can be argued as "unproven." 

While cloud computing won’t solve all your woes, or cut your IT budget to zero, it does offer a nice way to trim the fat and reduce overhead, including energy footprint and physical costs (space, hardware, ping pipe and power, etc).   All this while remaining scalable and flexible; options that heretofore went out the window when the budget axe came through.

But as the saying goes, "No one’s been fired for buying IBM," so let’s look at some low-risk, high-return entry points into the cloud for today’s IT manager.  I’ll outline them below and follow up with more detailed posts later.

1. Communication and Collaboration Services:  Let’s lump in email (Google Apps), phone (outsourced Voip), and project management utilties here.  There is obvious return (no hardware or maintenance costs, increased functionality, spam protection, scalability, etc) – but how can a larger firm use this in a safe, low risk way?  Exploring a progressive migration to these types of services, targeting the temporary and flexible portion of your workforce is a good start.  More on this to come.
2. Lab infrastructure: Can you think of lab related functions in your organization that require physical infrastructure and can be moved to cloud based hosting like Amazon EC2?  This sort of infrastructure is small in comparison to your mainline production and data processing systems, but I am sure occupies at least a few percentage points of your overall IT spend.   By labs, I mean things like:
   • development servers
   • QA and test servers
   • R&D and skunkworks environments
   • Training environments
3. Time-sensitive infrastructure: How much of your datacenter spend is dedicated to overnight reconciliations, true-ups, clearing, and processing? A unique advantage of utility oriented cloud computing solutions (like Amazon EC2), is that they can be turned on and off at will.  Imagine eliminating racks of servers that performed time-based functions and only paying for the time they are in service. I’ll explore the security implications of this later because this is a no-brainer if you can work that side of it out.
4. Web infrastructure: Intranets. Extranets. Public facing websites.  Get them out of your datacenter. If they are already out, get them out of Managed Services (or at least traditional managed services).  With the advent of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 support on Amazon EC2, and SQL Server support, only the most intensive web applications will continue to absolutely need to be in a physical managed environment. 

This is an evolving list, if you have any suggestions or thoughts, please comment! I’ll continue this thread of thought as the cloud computing space quickly progresses.

Related Blogs

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• Ten Key Reasons for Enterprise to Choose Cloud Computing
• Auto-scaling cloud computing and Denial of Service attacks « Wille …

1. Clean your PC up to make sure you have eliminated anything you don’t need. This will ensure that you don’t have a larger virtual disk (the big file that your PC will be stored as) than you need. Here is how I did that:
• I installed FolderSizes, from Key Metric Software: http://www.foldersizes.com/download-folder-sizes/index.htm This allowed me to see where all the “hidden” large items were on my disk. I was able to remove over 10GB of old files and garbage this way. Be sure to eliminate “Temporary Internet Files”, “Temp” directories, etc.
• I ran “Add Remove Programs” and eliminated everything I didn’t need, or what would be easily replicated natively in OS X. For example, I removed iTunes, Picasa, a bunch of utilities, etc.
• I copied all of my music, photos, projects, personal files to an external hard drive. If you have an external hard drive (USB 2.0 preferrably as it will work great between both your PC and your Mac), do the following:
• Plug it in to your PC
• Create a folder called “archive” on it
• Copy your music, photos, personal files, etc. to it
• That’s it – you are done.*
• (* if your external drive is formatted with NTFS it might be a bit tricky to get it to be recognized by your Mac, so try to use a FAT32 drive if you can – I’ll post NTFS instructions later as I had to go through this)

OK, now that your system is nice and clean, you are ready to convert it into a virtual machine.

2. Convert your PC into a virtual machine using VMWare Converter.

• Download VMWare Converter from here: http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/eval.html
• Install and run it.
• Click “Import Machine” on the button bar.
• Start the wizard, choose “Physical Computer” from the source screen. (click next)
• Choose “This Local Machine” (click next)
• Converter will evaluate your machine. You should choose at least your “main volume” (the larger one).
• At this point, to save space on my Mac, I chose to enter a custom size (40GB) to hold my current system (28GB) and have some breathing room. If your PC has 80GB+ of storage, you probably don’t need to have a virtual disk that big. YMMV.
• Click next (twice) and choose “VMware standalone virtual machine” (this is important). Click next again.
• Give your machine a name “MYLAPTOP” or something like that, then choose a location (a USB 2.0 disk is a perfect choice) to save it to. Click next a few more times (no more advance setup required), and start your machine import.
• Wait a few hours.

Whew! That was some experience, metaphorically similar to a religious conversion – you are at the altar but not quite there yet. Now you are ready to import your virtual PC into your Mac and join the dark/light side of the force (depending on your POV).

3. Install VMWare Fusion on your Intel-powered Mac OS X (Tiger) and “enjoy” your PC , exactly the way it was, on your Mac.

• Download VMWare fusion onto your Mac: http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/eval.html
• You may want to review the release notes.
• Install it.
• Copy your virtual machine file from your USB 2.0 drive (see step 2 above), to your Mac. ~/Virtual Machines is a good directory for it (in other words Home -> Virtual Machines — create the directory first)
• Run VMWare fusion.
• Open the machine from your filesystem.
• Off you go!

4. (Optional) Your new VM might behave erratically at first or force you to “Activate Windows”

• If your VM bluescreens, just reboot it. Its normal behavior because you just essentially ripped the soul of your PC out and put it in another shell. It freaks out a bit. You shouldn’t need to reboot more than a few times.
• If Windows asks for Activation, go through the steps. Your product key should be somewhere on your computer. If that doesn’t work, go through the “I’m not connected to the internet, activate by phone” menu and call them and get a new activation code.

If you have problems, leave comments here and I’ll try to answer them. Also you should check out the VMware support forums.

Good luck and happy computing.