Sharing the benefits in a community cloud

Working together: community cloud infrastructures can be shared by several organisations with common concerns

As environmental consequences from datacentres’ growing carbon footprints loom over UK organisations, resellers and managed service providers are offering an alternative architecture for cloud computing -­ the community cloud.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes the community cloud as a cloud infrastructure that is shared by several organisations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns, for example mission, policy, and compliance considerations.

The cloud may be managed by the organisations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Despite outsourcing cloud infrastructure being more technically demanding, due to distributed computing causing latency and security issues, this is becoming the preferred model for the channel, particularly for public sector contracts.

Effective cost savings

David Pratt, chief operating officer at cloud service ThinkGrid, urged resellers to demonstrate to councils the benefits of outsourcing their cloud infrastructures.

He said: “Instead of selling the tin required to build cloud infrastructure, the channel can make far higher margins and recurring revenues streams by offering customers a range of tailored cloud services from experienced providers.

“The shared resources model has been going for a while within local councils and public sector organisations, so it is not surprising to hear how this approach has now been extended to cloud computing. At the end of the day we all want to know that our hard-earned taxes are being stretched as far as possible.”

Pratt said this approach could be powerful if there were hundreds of public sector organisations with the ability to share a vast range of cloud services, instead of just a few.

However, he said: “Building the high-quality cloud computing infrastructure needed to make this happen requires massive investment in terms of expertise, equipment and support.

“Hence what we currently see is a small group of councils building and sharing their own ‘internal’ clouds, painting themselves into a corner with both a limited set of services and the resources needed to support and deliver them.”

Vendor Fujitsu has worked with Cambridgeshire County Council and Northamptonshire County Council for almost 10 years. In 2006 both councils were looking to upgrade their systems, so a shared ERP service was established to allow them to share the delivery of back-office processes and transactional services across a range of key functions.

The underlying infrastructure is owned, hosted and managed by Fujitsu.
Steven Cox, local government business director at Fujitsu, said local government organisations could significantly benefit from the adoption of cloud-based services, such as Infrastructure as a Service and Applications as a Service.

“Where councils can agree a common approach to shared business processes they can benefit from economies of scale and improve their citizen services through the adoption of best practice, leading to efficiency savings,” he said.

Maximising potential

Fujitsu launched its Infrastructure as a Service offering in August and preliminary estimates are that it can help firms make cost savings of up to 40 per cent.

“Fujitsu is looking to work with other local authorities to help them exploit cloud-based shared infrastructure, in order to deliver this level of benefits,” added Cox.

Brian Klingbeil, EMEA managing director of cloud service provider Savvis, said: “It is a more efficient use of IT resources to have interrelated organisations, such as government agencies, local authorities and emergency services, to have a common IT infrastructure across a consistent set of processes.”

Klingbeil said the pain ordinarily felt when collapsing and consolidating traditional, physical datacentres is drastically reduced when the datacentre resources are all completely virtualised.

“While storage is a prime candidate for virtualised IT services, the ultimate goal is finding an enterprise architecture that can virtualise all elements of the datacentre resource stack: server processing, information security, IP networking, application engines and conditional awareness,” he said.

To achieve its full potential cloud computing needs to be more than a data store, according to Klingbeil.

“Councils should be evaluating the best path for moving the majority of their applications onto cloud-based infrastructure,” he said.

Steve Hughes, virtualisation and cloud computing specialist at carrier Colt, said: “There are doubts whether councils should be running their own datacentres with analysts recently commenting on the futility of small scale datacentre builds.

“That said, if these small datacentres already exist, the community cloud, which is an operating method and not a technology, is a good way of maximising resources in the short and medium term.”